In-class publishing projects: Sustained partnership between the library and an instructor

This presentation describes SFU Library’s support for in-class publishing projects. These projects promote collaboration, knowledge sharing, and responsible content use, and involve making connections within and beyond the library. The presenters, a Digital Scholarship Librarian and a Copyright Specialist, have worked with an English instructor over numerous semesters to incorporate an open access course publication in her undergraduate classes as a major assignment. Course journals (and course books), an example of open pedagogy in practice, are open access publications associated with for-credit academic classes.

We provide an initial workshop to each class covering scholarly publishing, open access, copyright, and Creative Commons (CC) licenses, as well as ongoing support for questions as they arise and for creating and publishing the book or journal itself. We guide the class in thinking through the tensions between the goal of sharing scholarly knowledge widely and the restrictions imposed by copyright in traditional publishing, and the role of CC licenses in easing these tensions. The instructor has continually provided suggestions and requests to guide our approach to supporting this project.

In this talk, we describe the project and our in-class workshop, and share examples of the open course publication assignments. Our goal is to provide a detailed example of an ongoing collaboration with an instructor to continually improve a major class assignment and the library’s support for it. We hope that attendees will gain an understanding of our approach to teaching multiple aspects of scholarly publishing.