In 2019, the library publishing program at Florida State University (FSU) Libraries partnered with researchers in our College of Education to launch the Journal of Postsecondary Student Success (JPSS), an interdisciplinary journal through which researchers, practitioners, and policymakers come together to find solutions to the most pressing issues facing higher education. The editorial mission of JPSS focuses on fostering equity and success for college and university students of all backgrounds through evidence-based policy and practice and on publishing work that addresses challenges, interventions, innovations, and solutions to address issues. The publishing partnership successfully leverages support from FSU’s Libraries, College of Education, and Provost to manage the editorial and publishing process. In doing so, FSU Libraries have taken on responsibility for a variety of production work—first through in-house staff and subsequently by coordination with an external publishing services vendor. JPSS published its seventh quarterly issue in April 2023, and the project team has since taken time to reflect on the process of publication thus far. This case study will cover the impetus for the launch of the journal, the partnerships that made it possible, the workflows utilized to coordinate the work of the editorial team, the resources needed to sustain the journal, and the impact of the journal to date.
https://journals.flvc.org/jpss/index
Production work such as typesetting and layout editing is time- and resource-intensive, particularly for journals that publish several issues annually. Library publishers should ensure they have adequate funding and a sustainability plan before assuming responsibility for this work.
In cases where library publishers lack dedicated staff who have expertise with typesetting and layout editing, it can be valuable to outsource this work to publishing services vendors rather than attempt to recruit and train part-time staff to perform it, as the latter option can present many challenges related to staff retention and turnover.
Clarifying expectations between partners—especially in terms of timelines, workflows, and responsibilities—is paramount to accomplish at the beginning of the journal launch process. Library publishers should be explicit about the specific contributions they will make and how long the work will take in order to avoid backlogs and miscommunication.
Florida State University (FSU) Libraries provides book- and journal-publishing services through Florida State Open Publishing (FSOP), a small library publishing program supported mainly by our libraries’ Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. We currently have one part-time staff position dedicated to library publishing work and three librarians who also contribute a portion of their time. We typically assign one point person to each of our publishing partners, and that person has primary responsibility for coordinating our support for their publication. At the same time, we also employ a team-based approach to the work, meeting regularly as a group to discuss all of our ongoing projects and variously contributing to each project based on our respective areas of expertise. We use a range of technical infrastructure to support publishing projects, including Open Journal Systems (OJS) for scholarly journals, Manifold for scholarly books, and WordPress and Scalar for works in less conventional formats.
The Journal of Postsecondary Student Success (JPSS) published its first issue in the fall of 2021 after two years of planning and coordination that were heavily disrupted by the pandemic. The journal is co-edited by Dr. Shouping Hu, Director of the Center for Postsecondary Success, and Joe O’Shea, Ph.D., Associate Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at FSU. Hu and O’Shea launched JPSS to provide a peer-reviewed forum where researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can address important issues facing postsecondary student success, in addition to showcasing FSU’s reputation as a leader in research and practice concerning student success interventions. Both editors aspire to make JPSS a top-tier journal in the field of educational research. This aspiration is evident in the journal’s editorial policies, workflows, and ambitious quarterly publication schedule. The journal’s editorial board is composed of (at time of writing) 31 distinguished scholars of higher education, and the editors have provided invited article honoraria for featured articles in each of the first seven issues in an effort to attract contributions from renowned researchers and practitioners in the field. JPSS’s application for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals was approved in October 2022, and Hu and O’Shea have set inclusion in Web of Science indexes as an important five-year goal.
From its inception, JPSS has been a collaboration between FSU’s Center for Postsecondary Success, Provost’s Office, and University Libraries. Hu and O’Shea approached the Libraries with the idea of launching a journal in the fall of 2019 and were interested in obtaining as much support as possible from the Libraries. At the same time, Hu and O’Shea also demonstrated a clear understanding of the amount of work that launching a journal of the intended caliber would entail and a determination to secure the resources needed to make it work. In particular, Hu was willing to invest the time required to form a large editorial board, draw on his extensive network of contacts in the field to ensure a high volume of submissions, and manage all aspects of the peer-review and copyediting workflows in a timely fashion. And, crucially, O’Shea was willing to obtain funding from our Provost’s Office to assist the Libraries in managing all aspects of the production workflows including copyediting articles and typesetting them in PDF and HTML formats, creating a cover design and various marketing materials, and managing print on demand for the first three issues—all duties that go beyond what our office would normally take on when entering into journal publishing partnerships.
The Libraries received an initial budget transfer of $30,000 from our Provost’s Office in early 2020 to support this work, intended to cover costs associated with the first few volumes. Our team agreed to handle payment of invited author honoraria, copyediting, and printing costs using these funds. We were otherwise empowered to decide how best to spend the remaining funds in order to get the production work completed on the proposed quarterly publication schedule. As described in more detail in the next section of this article, we used some of the remaining funding to recruit and pay hourly workers to perform typesetting for the first three issues and subsequently outsourced this work to a vendor. The prevailing costs for each issue ended up being honoraria, copyediting, and then marketing (especially printing costs) for the initial volumes.
As with all of our publishing partnerships, this project began with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that delineated roles, responsibilities, and timelines, and all parties reviewed and agreed to the terms therein. We then provided substantial support with establishing the journal’s policies, aggregating sample policies from the websites of leading journals in the field of educational research and adapting these policies to suit the goals of JPSS in collaboration with the editors. We also created an OJS instance for the journal (hosted by our state academic library services cooperative, Florida Virtual Campus), including selecting a theme and banner image, populating the pages on the OJS site with predetermined content, configuring submission and peer review workflows, and incorporating any requested changes to these aspects of the OJS site based on feedback from the editors. In the summer of 2021, once the editors had attracted enough submissions and completed the peer-review process on the articles in the inaugural issue, we coordinated the copyediting process with a graduate student in our College of Education (who was paid out of the Libraries’ portion of the budget) and then undertook the time-consuming process of typesetting the articles in Adobe InDesign. As the first issue neared completion, we also applied for ISSNs, generated a cover design and a color flyer for use in print and digital marketing efforts, collaborated on a university press release, and obtained a small print run of 100 copies from a printing company. Finally, after a busy summer, the first issue of the journal was published in November 2021.
As of Fall 2023, JPSS has published nine issues, fulfilling its goal of maintaining a quarterly publication schedule without compromising on the quality and quantity of content in each issue. The story of how our publishing team has supported our portion of the work over this period is a complicated one, particularly after the departure of our Visiting Open Publishing Librarian, Laura Miller, who left FSU for another opportunity shortly before the publication of the first issue. Since then, two of the three permanent members of our publishing team have allocated a non-trivial amount of time to the project and explored various strategies for supporting the typesetting process in particular, including recruiting and training hourly workers to create PDF and HTML article galleys using InDesign and HTML editing software, and, most recently, outsourcing this work to a publishing services vendor, Scribe Inc. The challenges we encountered and lessons we learned through employing these different strategies for fulfilling our article production responsibilities are discussed below.
Based on our experiences spinning up this journal, the biggest lesson we learned is that the provisioning of stable and sustainable labor is a challenge that should be worked into any planning and agreements between parties. Clarity in the limits and challenges of provisioning editorial labor from the library publisher side, and the ability to set and manage expectations in this regard is especially important in an institutional context in which staff lines, funding, and personnel often operate on the academic calendar cycle (whether semester or academic year). We experienced this especially poignantly when turnover of student-held positions at the end of each Spring semester and recruitment for Fall did not match well with calendar-based publication schedules. This was exacerbated by the length of time required for our new employees to learn technical skills for OJS and layout skills for InDesign. For us, this led to difficulty in retaining trained personnel across publication cycles when positions were funded on an ad-hoc temporary basis. Our experience ran the gamut from having a 20-hour-per-week graduate student, to a full-time publishing librarian, then back to only having a 20-hour-per-week hourly employee.
Over the course of the time this project took to move from conception to current publication, we have had four part-time employees associated with the editorial labor and one full-time term-limited employee. This has been a massive hurdle to overcome, as each approached the project with different skill sets and levels of expertise. This subsequently required us to reassess what we were able to offer in-house and, ultimately, what we would have to outsource to vendors. When originally approached to partner with the journal team, we were lucky enough to have a dedicated Open Publishing Librarian for a two-year contract. This librarian had InDesign experience and the explicit remit to help with publishing partner projects for the vast majority of their 40-hour FTE. This allowed us to offer a significant level of help with layout services in both HTML and PDF formats for inclusion in OJS, as well as for potential print-on-demand output. Shortly after taking on this project, however, the publishing librarian left our institution for a more stable position and we were unable to hire a replacement for a suitable length of time to complete the limited-term faculty line. We partially compensated by transforming the full-time line into a part-time hourly graduate assistant position, to be recruited from FSU’s ALA-accredited Masters of Science in Information (previously MLIS) program. Though this position was explicitly crafted to be a Library Publishing Assistant, we did not require applicants to have publishing, layout, or editorial experience.
Two different part-time employees contributed to the editorial production tasks during the course of Volume 1, meaning that our original workflow depended on the training and skilling up of these two individuals for the production of issues 1(1) & 1(2) and then again for issue 1(3). Though the quality of the resultant publications remained high, this was a massive burden and stressor to those involved in the project. It was also a good lesson to learn, as it was quickly understood as an unsustainable practice moving forward based on the realities of student schedules that did not line up well with the quarterly publication dates for the journal. As of issue 1(4), the editorial team in the libraries decided to move away from in-house layout editing and offloaded that task to a layout editing vendor, Scribe, Inc. For a per-issue fee that is generally cheaper than the personnel costs of doing this work in-house, we are able to submit the copyedited manuscripts to the vendor and receive fully laid-out proofs in both HTML and PDF format, ready for author approval and eventual publication based on our schedule, without the worry of necessary training and skilling in-house. This process streamlines the in-house labor for the Libraries immensely and drastically simplifies the budgeting, timeline, and other editorial tasks. This workflow is otherwise beneficial since, even though our ~100-page issues may be seen as small tasks by editors used to working on popular press monographs, we can rely on them to be suitably staffed and perform our work to the same standards as any of their other clients.
The revised workflow that began with issue 1(4) has now carried through to issue 2(3)—published in April 2023—and seems to be working well for all parties. There still remain some challenges, such as coordinating communication with authors for proof approval and streamlining the number of rounds of edits passed back and forth between authors, FSU Libraries, and Scribe (each of which introduces about a week’s delay). This, however, is far simpler than in the previous workflow where any change would be handled based on the skill of our part-time editorial staff. Likewise, honing the process between FSU Libraries and Scribe to receive the sorts of stylistic quality desired by the journal editors has taken a few rounds of iteration. As an example, prior to issue 2(3), the PDF issues being produced by the vendor were intended for print and therefore had broken HTML links throughout the final delivered copies. This required last-minute edits by the FSU Libraries editorial team to replace links within all articles within about 24 hours between final delivery and the expected publication deadline. This stemmed from a miscommunication between the FSU editorial team and the vendor as to the purpose of the eventual final product, as early issues were intended to be printed in limited hardcopy runs, and this was written into the initial design brief for the vendor. Printing has since been halted, and merely took a few rounds of clarification between vendor and editorial team to clear up.
The biggest challenge in this process, however, has been ensuring clear and transparent communication between the journal editorial team, the Libraries’ production team, and the vendor. When the partnership was originally established and all editing and production tasks were handled in-house, the timeline for each issue was subject to the speed at which FSU Libraries staff could turn around the edits. As previously mentioned, due to the varying levels of skill with InDesign (and the number of edits requested by article authors), this timeline could vary widely. The one benefit of this system was a transparent reporting structure where FSU Libraries’ team always knew about how much work was left per issue and could report as much back to the journal editorial team when requested. When the workflow transitioned to working with the external vendor, this process became slightly more opaque. So too was there a wrinkle introduced wherein the turnaround time for delivering a draft compiled manuscript of the issue and when the vendor could return final layout proofs was originally proposed in the manner of two or three weeks. This was communicated to the journal editorial team as a “best-case scenario,” and understood by the libraries as supremely unlikely. However, that unlikelihood was not communicated effectively, leading the journal editorial team to be surprised at the 6- to 8-week turnaround for the first issue completed under the vendor process. We believe this is due to a lack of trackable progress after the editorial team submits the copyedited compiled issue manuscript. As we discovered, after manuscript submission and copyediting is completed within OJS, there is a period of editorial radio silence for several weeks while the layout editing and corrections happens. We quickly learned that communicating the various steps along the way, and the status of each issue within this process is paramount to smooth operation. As such, starting with issue 1(2), the FSU Libraries’ editorial team developed a workflow document (inspired by the Library Publishing Workflows project) to highlight the various steps in the process after copyediting, which now also includes expected timelines. First, this workflow was developed with in-house editing outlined, but as of issue 1(4), this was revised to include vendor activity. Since the vendor process started, the Libraries’ team has maintained close communication with the editorial team to clarify that delivering a manuscript starts an 8-week clock to effectively manage all edits and prepare the final proofs for upload and final publication within OJS. The workflow document itself, and the ability to point to various steps along the way (with expected timelines for each step), has helped streamline communication between various parties and is highly recommended.
To further develop transparency in the process, and to make the workflow document timeline the most accurate, the FSU Libraries’ editorial team has recently begun working backward from the journal editorial team’s desired publication window and more clearly setting expectations for when the copyedits and journal lineup is to be completed, rather than responsively working from manuscript completion. This has allowed for a better understanding of responsibilities and procedures from both the editorial and production teams, with a clear understanding of deadlines for submission to the layout vendor that can allow for an 8-week turnaround time. This process was fully implemented as of issue 2(2) and has worked well for subsequent issues so far. This timeline is set in a post-publication editorial meeting that the FSU Libraries’ team calls about a week after the publication of each issue, and includes at least one of the Libraries’ production team leads along with the journal co-editors. In this meeting, we discuss successes and any lingering issues for the production process, a quick budget status update, and any other outstanding topics of discussion before moving on to the production work for the next issue. We also use this meeting to lay out the proposed timeline for the next issue, which clearly sets expectations for all parties.
By using a consistent workflow document that is constantly referenced during the production phase and creating an issue-by-issue timeline based on that workflow document, we have found that the past two issues have progressed smoothly and allowed for plenty of time for authors and the editorial teams to review the proofs for stylistic and content errors, make necessary changes, and prepare the OJS publication systems well within the expected timeline. We have found that approaching this workflow document as a guiding set of steps, constantly revised and tweaked, with full transparency to all stakeholders, a far better process than what our original MOU allowed for. That MOU, in practice, had become more of a restrictive set of theoretical rules, rather than roles in the process. It was far less useful than it was proscriptive, and the formal language setting out sections such as the “whereas” clauses, were too difficult to parse and effectively put into practice. In the future, any new journal project that our team would take on and that takes a similar track as JPSS will still have a traditional MOU, but will also collaboratively craft a workflow document that clearly lays out the roles and responsibilities of each party at each step of the process.
Based on the successful publication of six initial quarterly issues, funding from FSU’s Provost’s Office was renewed for two additional years. During the summer of 2023, we worked on branding strategies to better represent FSU’s investment in JPSS. These strategies included rephrasing some of the language used on the JPSS website to better recognize the contributions of FSU’s Center for Postsecondary Success, as well as continued promotion of the journal at relevant scholarly conferences and meetings. Another strategy we pursued involved refining the graphics used by the journal, with FSU Libraries’ marketing and graphic design personnel designing new logos that more visibly represent the contributions of FSU departments. We intend to re-issue prior journal cover art with these revised graphic markers to highlight these contributions more visibly. We will also continue to refine our working relationship with Scribe in order to ensure that we keep the publication of forthcoming issues on schedule. One way in which we have identified an easy adjustment here is by increasing regularly scheduled communication with the Scribe project manager and building in additional in-house project management tools to better coordinate deadlines and communication workflows both within our team and with publishing partners. Beyond these aspects, our goal to increase the scholarly impact of the journal is moving apace. We will begin to look more closely at criteria for Scopus and Web of Science indexing and other strategies for enhancing reputation and discoverability in the near future, and we have already identified ways of tracking scholarly engagement through methods such as building in ORCiD linking/invite checks for submitting authors and reviewers and exploring Publons reviewer crediting integration. We feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to partner on this publishing project and are excited about what the future holds.