Counting the Hands (Presentation Slides)

Counting the Hands: Understanding Labor, Compensation, and Ethics in Library Publishing Melissa Chim, Excelsior University, Bailey Lake, Eastern Kentucky University Libraries, Lauren Collister, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Michelle Brailey, University of Alberta, Miranda Phair, Towson University

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC), an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing, surveys members and publishes a Directory which provides a snapshot of recent publishing activities. The LPC established the Staffing Survey Task Force in 2024. The task force wrote and distributed a specific survey with targeted questions to identify effective practices, common challenges, and opportunities for improvement within our community of library publishers. This presentation will discuss the process of creating the survey and our preliminary findings with a strong focus on the labor ethics within staffing publishing programs.

Melissa Chim is the first Scholarly Communications Librarian at Excelsior University where she both created and manages the university’s scholarly publishing platform and institutional repository. She holds an MLIS from St. John’s University and an MA in History from Queen Mary, the University of London, and hold certificates in open education and Creative Commons licensing. She was a SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellow for their 2022-23 cohort, a Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellow for 2024, an ASAPbio Fellow for 2024 and Resident for 2025, and a member of the Fulbright Specialist Roster from 2024-2027.

Michelle Brailey is an open publishing and open education Librarian at the University of Alberta. As the service manager for open education publishing through the University of Alberta Library, Michelle supports institution-wide program development, awareness, and sustainability for open education.

Lauren Collister is Research Engagement Manager, Invest in Open Infrastructure. Lauren is a trained sociolinguist with over a decade of work experience in scholarly communication, academic libraries, and open infrastructure. She conducts research on language and bias in advocacy in open scholarship. Her current work is with the non-profit organization Invest in Open Infrastructure, where she coordinates community engagement with IOI's various research and consultation projects. She also teaches linguistics part-time for the University of Pittsburgh.

Bailey Lake is the Open Strategies Librarian at Eastern Kentucky University Libraries, where she advocates for open education practices and facilitates OER creation in partnership with university OER champions. Bailey works with a variety of publishing platforms and advocates for the creation of niche OER to fill gaps in the literature. She is especially passionate about open pedagogy projects and the impact of renewable assignments on student learning.

Miranda Phair is the Publishing & Open Scholarship Librarian at Towson University, located just outside of Baltimore, Maryland.