 Hi everybody and welcome to the presentation local partnership for the greater good library publishing at the University of Minnesota. My name is Shane accurate I'm the interim director of content services at the University of Minnesota libraries. And I'm joined by my colleague Emma moles the publishing services library librarian in the university libraries. And we are going to talk to you a little bit about the partnership and collaboration and tools that built the open access journal. Open rivers and how that effort really launched and helped launch the publishing services department at the University of Minnesota libraries. Before we get started though I wanted to get some acknowledgements out. It wasn't just Emma and I that that worked on this project was a large team, including john barneson laryngoo tank and came to Korea for the publishing services team. And also Pat not only joined Richard Sennilary Moreberg of the River life project that we'll describe in just a little bit. We also wanted to acknowledge that the University of Minnesota is located on the traditional ancestral and contemporary lands of indigenous people. The entire state is really located on traditional ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe people. And that's important, because we wanted to acknowledge this presentation really is ultimately about Mississippi River, which is an important waterway for both the Ojibwe and the Dakota. Mississippi in fact comes from the Ojibwe words for Great River. The river actually begins in Minnesota, and it flows through the campus of the University of Minnesota as you can see by these, these graphics. In fact the University of Minnesota has a research lab that sits on top of Mississippi River. It's a big part of campus life this river, both for the research that we do on the river and because it's really hard to miss. The path can sometimes walk across the river three to four times a day on the way to meetings or just on a walk. In fact, I think my own record is six times that I crossed the river in one day. Maybe Emma has a higher record. And the river is also a big part of the surrounding community. It's a connection for the university to the community. And like I said, it's just a big part of that. The Institute for Advanced Study is a university wide interdisciplinary research center that is a part of the University of Minnesota. And one of their big goals is to connect the university with the surrounding community. And then bring those the community that the people in the community and the ideas, the research of the university to the community. The Institute for Advanced Studies has a project inside of it called River Life. And River Life is a project that focuses heavily on the Mississippi River. And they do research on the interplay between communities and the water that those communities rely on again especially in Mississippi. They seek to create that new knowledge about rivers and water, and then share that knowledge with the community at large. So in 2015, the River Life project approached the university libraries with the idea to publish an open access online publication, which eventually became the publication the open access journal open rivers. And it was asked to again disseminate the scholarship about rivers and water, and the communities that they impact. And if you want to see the the journal the open access journal, the URL is right there. So let's talk a little bit about how we built the journal and the process we went through. Yeah, great. Thanks Shane. So when a group like Institute for Advanced Study and River Life come to the University of Minnesota libraries with questions about publishing. Now a very established process for how we take on publications we have a call for proposals, we have a proposal that everyone fills out we walk through the different steps, all the proposals are reviewed. We sort of do a little bit of matchmaking to see if our publishing program is really the best fit for it, or oftentimes there's actually another library service that our colleagues at the University of Minnesota run that may be a better fit so think like institutional repository or digital collections like that. But when open rivers started or when what the group that ended up being the editorial board for open rivers came to the libraries in 2015 publishing services was really brand new so a lot of our infrastructure wasn't in place the way that it is now. But a lot of the early conversations with the people that ended up becoming editors of open rivers revolved around we're thinking a lot about what would make this publication successful what are the goals of this publication I think for anyone who has worked. Really on any project with researchers but especially library publishing programs, talking about the publication goals are incredibly important because they really get you started. And that's when open rivers approached us having that conversation about publication goals happened really early on. And part of this was because they needed really clear language to get their project off the ground and we wanted to help them do that. One of those early publication goals described by open rivers was that the goal of the publication would be to engage with decision makers concerning news research stories about the river, especially surrounding the Mississippi River. And I said, and thinking about how scholars faculty students and public community members fit into that. So the focus really was this local Mississippi River but also thinking about what are the broader implications beyond our state and beyond our boundaries. So that itself is a really big goal right I think it kind of goes beyond thinking of what other publications might have. And really embedded into that sense of community and building a community around it. The other goal that was early identified was to provide a gathering split space for interdisciplinary scholarly works and community based ways of knowing. These two elements really describe a lot of what was at the heart of what open rivers wanted to do. They wanted to create a journal, but they also wanted it to be not another academic journal. So you'll notice that one of the goals that is not in here is robust peer review. There's there's nothing that is sort of maybe a little bit more specific of what we think about when we think about academic journals. So we knew open rivers was going to be something that wasn't exactly like traditional journals out there. Next slide. So in thinking about goals I think the next question and those of us in higher ed are well aware of this question which is well how how are we going to measure that how will we know if those goals are met what kind of benchmarking what are we going to do for open rivers it was really a question of asking how will we know when we've arrived how are we going to know that these goals are met what what kind of map are we going to be using to try to navigate through this really complicated world of building a community of creating a space even though the journal is digital. How are we going to know if any of those are if we're meeting any of those goals. So that was what of course one of the partners with open rivers put it best and I can remember pretty clearly that really meeting when we talked about measures of success, or how how we know when we've arrived as Pat said, what would, what would make a successful is if we start getting submissions from people who we've never heard of. I thought that was especially a good point on Pat, Pat's part because anyone who's built a journal knows that really those first few issues you have to recruit a lot of content. It's about gathering voices that you want represented in your journal and having kind of a nice product come out. So Pat said you know the, the, the highest goal that we want to shoot with shoot for especially right at the beginning is getting content from people who we don't know they found our journal and now they're submitting to us. So those publication goals really link directly into measures of success. You know I'll just say real briefly and this is really part of what we are as a library publisher is, we never want our publications to meet our specific measures of success right so we are not looking for bottom line where we do not charge subscription fees we are looking for a business model that bases our success on revenue. So that's out of the picture. We also don't want to be enforcing maybe traditional and fairly antiquated measures of success with journals of thinking of things like citation rates. We don't want our publications to define their own success. So taking those publishing those publication goals and matching them with measures of success is something that we do now with all of our publications and open rivers was a really great example into that. Next slide. So as I've described the publications goals and the measures of success are sort of two elements but when we think about building the publication there's of course a lot more that goes into it so those two pieces the goals and the measures of success are really foundational conversations that happened when we first start off with a publication. We have a lot more questions that that sort of expand on that to get a finished product, but those are two really key elements. So there's a lot of things that kind of go into how to build a publication. And we'll talk a little bit more about the other elements of that which include thinking about users and objectives and experience ideation. Next slide. So thinking about the users this is really, I would say, a way of thinking that we borrowed a lot from the members of our team who have experience in web development and digital projects is to think about who is actually going to be using the site. Not only is the journal producing content, it's also a digital experience that people are having when they come to the site. So one of our early conversations prior to really getting our hands on to building the infrastructure is to talk through with the editors about the different types of users and their objectives. So early in the publication goals that the folks at open rivers were really great about identifying this wide variety of people. So breaking that down to be a little bit more specific into thinking about users. So we had the editorial team walk through sort of steps of identifying each user group and ranking those into who is likely your, your most common user down to maybe your secondary, your tertiary users. So the user one scholars and administrators from off campus that are deciding the Mississippi reverse future so this is really a gigantic one. These are these are people who are decision makers who are thinking about the future of the Mississippi. So the first one is University of Minnesota faculty. This is I think another highlight of how local this journal started you'll notice that that does not say all tenure track faculty it says you have them faculty, encouraging them to share their research off campus so that was the objective of the user group and user three are graduate students and the open rivers folks identified the publication as being an ideal outlet for graduate students to contribute content and that kind of speaks to sort of lowering some of the barriers into publication that open rivers really took on. Yes, thanks Emma. Next thing we'd like to talk to new journals about is the idea of experience ideation. And really it's represented in that question. When users interact with the publication what would you like them to do it helps us prioritize how to set up the site and find out how to contribute to the journal editors. In this case, you know some obvious things come out. They wanted people to be able to read the features the columns the articles, and the pulse which will describe it just a little bit, which is a blog like feature that they wanted to incorporate into the journal as well. There's also learning of having people learn how to submit. They wanted people to be able to see quickly how they can submit and what are the criteria for submission. And as Emma was saying one of the things that Pat had told us is the really a measure for success was you know people that they don't know submitting articles for publication. And that information out there was important. They also wanted information about each author to be readily available and findable. I think that goes to, you know, encouraging authors to submit, and that we would build the site so that the authors would receive credit to be able to find out quickly who who wrote these pieces, and then they wanted people to be able to give feedback in some way on the features and columns that were in the journal. As we started to put all this together, you know, a decision started to come forward that we would use WordPress to put together this journal through this entire discovery process that became more and more clear. So when you talk more about the experience that people they wanted people to have. They wanted, as the second bullet set a blog like feature that they could update outside of regular issues in order to keep readers coming back between the issues. So that was a new wrinkle on a journal that we wanted to build in. They also wanted to be like a journal though they wanted to be able to create sequenced issues but not necessarily volumes. So if you look at the journal, it goes in order, I think they're up to issue 18 now. And they wanted very robust taxonomy, including a lot of content types and subject keyword tagging. And then they wanted people to be able to use that taxonomy to find different articles and features and content types and subject matter, we'll get into that just a little bit too. They also have the idea of including a world map where reader can can select articles based on the area of the world that they might be interested in or to even just see the world map and see where articles have been published about. It was an interesting feature that we were excited to build in. And then obviously there was a desire for a lot of multimedia, including the ability to embed videos and that kind of thing, and social media. So WordPress was the decision. And we started then to think about, okay, what kind of theme and plugins do we need to embed in here to get the functionality that is desired. We decided to use the issue m plugin, which in WordPress allows for the creation of articles when you can assign those articles to specific issues so that was a nice feature. And then also, they decided to use the theme called simple mag, and that was just a really simple, easy to customize a theme that's built around the idea of a magazine. And we use that to create the, the interface that you see on the right there. So one of the plugins that we decided to use, we decided to use something called the content use plugin and that was in order to set up this grid like feature, or, you know, set up grids for the different articles and and that pulse that I was talking about the blog like feature. The articles represented on this page are pulse articles. We also wanted people to be able to again use all of the taxonomy that was developed. And you can see on the right of the different ways that they decided to describe the articles the columns the features and those pulse blog entries by sector by place by and then on you know the explorer the journal page which is what we're on now, you can click on some of these different drop down menus to get access to the different content types and categories. Here's another example here. So really unique and functional way that readers can find articles that might interest them. As I was saying they wanted a world map that would show where articles are being written from and written about. We decided to use a plugin called WQ Google Maps which is extremely powerful plugin, which I think did a really nice job of giving the editors what they wanted. You can hover over any of these dots to find out a little more information and then you click on the more information link in order to get to the article itself. There, as you can see, heavy focus on the Mississippi River which is no surprise. So I think it's a really quick way that a reader can see what's being written about WordPress or some pros and cons around the decision to use WordPress. Obviously it's a very flexible tool, which is a blessing and a curse it's a blessing because you can make it do really what you really want it to be able to do anything is, is possible but you really have to know what you're doing and the curse of that is people start to request more and more and more and you have to maybe sometimes hold editors back from creating maybe a too complex of a site. They can easily include multimedia such as images and videos and it has a really nice way of storing that that information in the back end. It's extensible very extensible with myriad of plugins that can be attached to a particular site as I was demonstrating in previous slides. So that's what we use for editors. I think what do they say WordPress drives about 35% of the web in general so there's a lot of, a lot of prior knowledge about WordPress that that some people have the editor. One of the editors of open rivers was very familiar with how to use WordPress that was big plus. One of the problems though is that it requires regular maintenance and updates and that's very important for security reasons because it's so popular WordPress as a target for hackers. And so it needs to be maintained for very regularly. Also, it's updated regularly so plugins can break functionality can break. So we have to keep on top of that. As I mentioned at the beginning of the acknowledgements we have a dedicated developer that helps maintain this journal, which is a very nice thing to have. It's all been about six years since we started working on open rivers and you know as Shane just nicely covered Shane and I do not work hands on with the actual content or content decisions of open rivers that's what the editorial board does. But we certainly work on the maintenance and we partner with them to help guide additional goals and measures of success. But I did want to reflect a little bit about what these six years have meant for our library service for publishing service was within the U of M libraries. And some of that really mirrors some of the changes that open rivers have have gone under. So we have both open rivers and publishing and publishing services seen a lot of growth within ourselves so publishing services when we started we had open rivers was one of our earlier journals we had a few others that were just getting off the ground, a handful of textbooks. And that's about it as six years later we have over 20 journals, almost 40 textbooks and conference proceedings and digital monograph so we have grown a lot. Open rivers likewise has continued as Shane said to publish issues. They have even expanded the focus of the journal so it started off specifically focused on the Mississippi. In a couple of years the editors thought you know, we're really seeing a lot of interest in the journal that has to do with water but not necessarily the Mississippi river. We're going to expand it so they went under a slight title change their subtitle actually changed to be thinking specifically about the Mississippi to thinking about water place and community in general. I think for any of us who know anything about the Mississippi that makes sense, regardless because the Mississippi of course is connected to so many other waterways. So we've seen a lot of growth. What we've also learned in publishing services is really how to leverage lessons that we learn across each publication to the new publications that we develop. So there are certainly as with any project, things that we did in open rivers in those early years that we would not do again or we would do in a different way. It's really been great to have open rivers as one of our foundational pieces because we learned a lot from that experience, including how many technical barriers and things we would just have to figure out. We also established additional connections across campus. I can't tell you how many consultations or projects have been pushed our way from the folks at IAS or for the folks who work specifically on open rivers it's been wonderful. And the final thing is that we've also had a lot of technology expansion we've changed platforms before we we've come off of some things we've gone into new platforms WordPress has been something that we've stuck with the whole time. And one of the challenging things about open rivers is that everyone sees open rivers on our campus and they say, build me that thing I want open rivers it looks great I want to run something like open rivers. So next slide. Something that we have done is actually build more WordPress based publications. We have a journal from the Association of historians of American arts that runs on WordPress this was another one that it was highly visual it made sense to go on WordPress. It was a long build it took a lot of work and Shane covered sort of all of those pros and cons of WordPress but we couldn't be happier with with how things are working out. Smart politics and constitutional commentary or two other publications that we have on WordPress. We actually now are the publisher of all of the University of Minnesota law journals. This is a this was a pretty big step for us. The law the law school functions very independently they were self publishing each of their journals. They ran on a mix of WordPress and other things we now publish all of their journals on WordPress. So we're, we couldn't be more thankful that open rivers was our sort of learning environment to how to get a publication up on the WordPress. Finally, a few words and a sort of a reflection on partnership. I think for both Shane and I when we talk about partnerships open rivers is definitely one of the first things that we talk about it was it's very much a partnership it started at the very beginning as a partnership and it was very successful. There's lots of things about open rivers that I think are unique to that publication that made it successful. One was that both of us in publishing and in open rivers were very focused in in this highlighting of local research and local experiences. You know it's no secret that one of the reasons why we started library publishing at the University of Minnesota was to serve campus and help identify publications that are on campus or that could be on campus that really highlight the University of Minnesota. So open rivers of course started with that same approach was to have a very local focus. One of the things that has really been has made just a huge difference in the success of the publication is that open rivers also were, they were able to bring people to the to do some of the work. So, as I said earlier, open rivers is a publication people say and they, they say, build me this publication. And that's really hard for us because there are people who work on open rivers, who are paid to work on open rivers that's that's how they're structured it's a job responsibility at the University of Minnesota to work on the publication, and it makes a huge difference to have somebody who's looking out for the platform at all times who we can work directly with when technical things come up when there's maintenance that's needed. It just makes a huge difference that they were able to really contribute labor and time to the publication. The other thing I would say is that, you know that that goes both ways we in publishing are always looking for ways that we can serve the publication better or offer new services. At different times open rivers has kind of thought you know, I think we may end up getting some publications that really need a highly sort of technical peer review so that they need tools built around peer review. We have tools to help accomplish anonymous peer review so we offer those tools forward we've been able to get do eyes for all of the articles within open rivers. That was something that when we started we didn't we did not have the capacity nor the technology to issue do do eyes for every article, we now do. And we're there for any changes that they need to make so I think that's a big thing is that we're we acknowledge that we're both growing and can continue to bring things to the table. The final thing I'll say about open rivers is that it has really been a fantastic journey. We don't meet with the, with the folks from the publication too often I think we meet on an annual basis, and many emails in between but it's really one of the meetings that I, I'm sure I speak for both shame to myself when I say we really look forward to it, and it's, it's that piece of the partnership that has has really made this successful. Um, finally, this is our contact information at the University of Minnesota library is publishing. If you have any questions about any of the things that we've talked about here or partnerships on your own campus that you're looking to make within library publishing, Shane and I are happy to chat with you about that. And another final plug for reading open rivers. I always say this to open rivers that, you know, of all of the publications we publish at the University of Minnesota libraries. Open rivers is the one that every issue I read every article that's in it. Part of it is, it's interesting local history, it's incredibly approachable you don't have to be a subject expert in order to, in order to read each article. It's really a fantastic thing. And they focus a lot on incorporating voices who otherwise are not incorporated into academic journals so check it out we hope you enjoyed this presentation, and thank you.