Library publishing workflows: Three big lessons learned from cohort-based documentation

Abstract

Over the past three decades, library publishing has moved from a niche activity to a regular part of many academic and research libraries’ services to their communities. Communities of practice have also grown up and matured around this work, including the Library Publishing Coalition. While the Library Publishing Forum, library publishing listservs, and other professional spaces are lively and active spaces for discussion, publishing workflows—depictions of all the functions performed by a library publisher as part of its regular operations—are generally undocumented. This makes cross-comparison across publishers difficult, leading to missed opportunities for peer learning and sharing of emerging good practices. It also makes it more challenging for individual publishers to evaluate their processes and identify crucial steps they may be omitting, such as contributing metadata to aggregators (essential for discovery and impact) and depositing content in preservation repositories (necessary for a stable scholarly record).