CUNY Libraries’ Support for Open Publishing

Libraries have been publishing materials throughout most of their history in the form of print catalogs, bibliographies, and books (Conrad, 2017).  However, the advent of digital publishing technology, along with development of the open access movement, sparked a new era of library-led publishing.  These developments led to founding of Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) in 2014, a membership organization of academic and research libraries with the purpose of providing a community to share best practices and knowledge about library-led publishing (CUNY is currently a member).  The organization defines library publishing as “the set of activities led by academic and research libraries and library consortia to support the creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works” (LPC, n.d.)

While CUNY Libraries do not offer a full suite of publishing services like other LPC members, they support open publishing across the University in other ways.  One way is by providing access to digital publishing platforms that can host a variety of publication types.  An example of this is Digital Commons.  Managed by CUNY’s Office of Library Services (OLS), this platform currently houses two CUNY-based open access scholarly journals, CUNY Law Review and Urban Library Journal, and provides article submission portal for another two.  This platform also hosts CUNY Academic Works, the University’s institutional repository where CUNY authors can publish preprints, reports, working papers, and other types of scholarly outputs.  The repository is centrally managed by OLS with help from librarians across CUNY who serve as coordinators for each campus (I am one of the coordinators for Lehman).

Another digital platform OLS makes available to CUNY authors is Pressbooks, which has been used to publish Open Educational Resources (OER), such as Evaluating OER for Social Justice, edited by Lehman faculty member Jennifer Van Allen and two of her students as part of the New York State-funded CUNY OER Initiative.

Indeed, the OER initiative is another way CUNY Libraries support open publishing.  OLS and campus OER representatives, many of whom are librarians, oversee and facilitate faculty participation in the initiative.  This is the case at Lehman, where library faculty member Stacy Katz is OER point-person and has guided many Lehman faculty in adaptation, creation, and publication of openly licensed pedagogical materials.

A third digital publishing platform available to CUNY authors worth mentioning is Manifold. While managed by CUNY Graduate Center, not Office of Library Services, this platform is also freely available to the CUNY community and has been used for publishing both OER and scholarly journals.  Members of the CUNY community interested in open access publishing should be aware of support and opportunities available through the University and its libraries, and reach out to their librarians if they want to learn more.

Vanessa Arce Senati 

References

Conrad, K. M. (2017). Public libraries as publishers: Critical opportunity. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0020.106

Library Publishing Coalition. (n.d.). About us. https://librarypublishing.org/about/#history