Issuing Scholarship: Library Involvement and the Realities of Publishing Five Years Into the Game

Abstract

Many libraries are now taking a role as publishers of content to meet the needs of the scholarly publishing community. This is increasingly important because of issues related to collection development, as libraries look to non-profit options to make peer reviewed information available with open access. The McGill University Library has been actively supporting scholarly publishing since 2009 by showcasing the research done by the McGill community to the world via publishing initiatives such as electronic theses and dissertations, open access journals and monographs, and by custom digital projects to disseminate research.

In this presentation we will reflect on our five years of experience publishing the McGill Journal of Education as a model for many of the lessons learned about library publishing. We will start in 2009 with our publishing pilot that included digitization and print publication alongside the electronic publishing options. We will then talk about how we moved exclusively to the Open Journal System to focus our energies on electronic publishing, incorporating digitizing past issues for inclusive open access and the ongoing challenges of supporting open source software as a technological platform.