SCWG Blog

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in or considering publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2022 Library Publishing Forum! After the success of our Virtual Forums in 2020 and 2021, we are thrilled to offer both in-person and online options this year, with a virtual preconference the week of May 16, 2022, followed by the in-person Library Publishing Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania May 25–26, 2022. We invite proposals for both of these events, and warmly encourage proposals from first-time presenters and representatives of small and emerging publishing programs. Proposals may address any topic of interest to the library publishing community. The proposal deadline is November 15, 2021.

During spring 2016 a survey on institutional repositories (IRs) was sent to the repository managers at 47 Canadian academic libraries. The survey focused on copyright management practices related to the online archiving of peer-reviewed journal literature in Canadian IRs. It received a 38% response rate with 18 responses total. The following briefly summarizes the results of the survey to help inform repository staffing, workflows, best practices, and methods of outreach to faculty at Canadian colleges, polytechnics, and universities.

UBC is fortunate to have a dedicated group of instructors, researchers, technologists, librarians and students who support and advocate for open scholarship on campus. While acknowledging the progress that has already been made, we are always looking for new ways to reach a broader audience, expand awareness of open scholarship and break down silos between different areas of open practice. It is with this in mind that a group of Librarians from both the UBC-Vancouver and Okanagan campuses along with colleagues from the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology came together to develop and deliver The Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE). 

The COPPUL Scholarly Communication Working Group (SCWG) is seeking nominations for 2 -3 new members with a strong interest in scholarly communications to serve on this active team. The term is for two years beginning July 1, 2021.

COPPUL Directors are asked to submit nominations from anyone interested in joining this group, along with a brief statement of interest, to execdir@coppul.ca by Monday, May 31.

More information about the SCWG, including the terms of reference, can be found on the COPPUL website. Please note that these Terms of Reference are under review and may change. 

In 2010, librarians and archivists at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) adopted our first official commitment to making our research publications as openly available as possible. This was just after we had officially launched our institutional repository, eCommons, and we believed that we should model the way for our colleagues in other disciplines at USask. By making a public statement of the importance of open access (OA) to research in general and our commitment to depositing our own papers openly in eCommons or other OA venues we hoped to lead by example.

On Thursday, April 29 COPPUL is hosting its fourth annual Scholarly Communications SkillShare event from 10AM-1PM (Mountain Time).

This year’s event includes six lightning talks, a presentation on open access approaches from CRKN, and an overview of findings from a recent survey on scholarly communications activities taking place across Western Canada.

Due to COVID-19, this year’s event will take place virtually over Zoom.

Registration is now open at no cost to all staff at COPPUL member and affiliate member libraries.

Save the Date: This year’s COPPUL Scholarly Communications SkillShare event will be held online on Thursday, April 29 10AM-1PM (Mountain Standard Time).

Registration will open to COPPUL members and affiliate members at no cost in mid February. The program and additional details will be posted at that time. Follow our blog for updates.

The COPPUL Scholarly Communications Working Group (SCWG) Research Roundup is a new initiative to highlight publications, conference presentations, posters and working papers in the field of scholarly communications authored by Canadian librarians in 2019 and 2020. Submissions will be featured on the COPPUL SCWG blog.

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend. The 2021 Forum will be held online, May 10-14.

No in-person events at your Library this term? No problem!

This year’s Open Access Week theme is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.” In a post announcing the theme, SPARC’s Nick Shockey emphasized that “organizers are encouraged to host discussions and take action around this year’s theme whenever is most suitable during the year and to adapt the theme and activities to their local context.”

To that end, purposeful open access advocacy can take many forms at many points throughout the year. Below are some alternatives to doing typical in-person Open Access Week workshops and speaker events.       

The COPPUL Scholarly Communications Working Group is seeking nominations for a new member with a strong interest in scholarly communications to serve on this active team. The term is for two years beginning July 1, 2020.

COPPUL Directors are asked to submit nominations to execdir@coppul.ca by Monday, June 8 for anyone interested in joining this group along with a brief statement of interest.

Additional information about the SCWG, including the terms of reference, can be found on the COPPUL website at https://coppul.ca/scholarlycommunications.

The University of Alberta Library and the Alberta OER Technology and Infrastructure Working Group are pleased to announce the new Open Education Alberta program.  This no-fee provincial program seeks to eliminate barriers to adopting, adapting and creating open textbooks by providing Alberta post-secondary institutions with easy-to-use online publishing software. The University of Alberta Library will host and maintain the Pressbooks publishing software, and partner institutions will establish workflows and service models that fit their unique community needs. Thank you to Mount Royal University, MacEwan University, University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology for their contributions to the development of this program.

Are you interested in contributing to an international effort to create useful documentation for institutions engaged in library publishing activities like journals, open monographs, and OER?

See this call for new members for the Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board!

From the Library Publishing Coalition blog:

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) invites you to an update and opportunity for dialogue with Coalition Publica, the joint project between Érudit and PKP to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. In addition to speaking on Coalition Publica’s activities and successes to date, presenters will explore the complementary roles of Coalition Publica and academic libraries’ scholarly communication programs in the Canadian OA landscape.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), creators of the widely-used open source journal publishing software, Open Journal Systems, have just released the beta version of a new tool called Open Preprint Systems.  PKP have written a two-part blog post documenting their development of OPS (The Road to Preprints (Part 1): Introducing Open Preprint Systems, and The Road to Preprints (Part 2): SciELO’s Preprint Server) and you can find a description and demo of the software on the PKP website.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Given recent developments in response to COVID-19, we have decided to cancel this year’s in-person SkillShare event that was planned for April 29-30 at Royal Roads University. Instead, we will offer a shortened online version of the program on Thursday, April 30 (9AM-noon Pacific Standard Time).

Visit https://coppulscwg.ca/skillshare to view the revised program and to register.This entry was posted in Events. Bookmark the permalink.

Heading into the 2019-20 fiscal year, the University Library at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) faced an approximate $1.1 million deficit for the acquisitions budget. In the face of this deficit, the decision was made for the University Library not to resubscribe to the big deal journal packages from Wiley and Taylor & Francis (a saving of approximately $1.5 million). This left $400K with which to resubscribe to the most essential journals in those packages.

It was great to see so many Canadian librarians at the 2019 Library Publishing Forum event in Vancouver! The 2020 Forum will be held in Worcester, MA, May 4-6, hosted by the University of Massachusetts Medical School. 

The 2020 Western Canada Scholarly Communications SkillShare event (formerly known as our Regional Training Day) will be taking place at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 29 and all day Thursday, April 30.

Registration will open to COPPUL members in January. The program and additional details will be posted at that time. Watch this space and subscribe to our blog for updates.