Introduction

Institutional repositories provide a necessary venue for the open dissemination of a wide variety of scholarly and creative works. However, repositories do not inherently address one of the core elements in the scholarly communication system – “credentialing” (or “certification”). Although there is ongoing debate as to the most efficient and meaningful method for evaluating scholars’ work, there is a general consensus that the process of peer review, however it may be performed, is essential for improving the quality and integrity of scholarly communications. And while repositories can provide opportunities for open, post-“publication” review of work by all readers, scholarly journals’ formal editorial and blind review processes still provide the most desired imprimatur for scholars seeking tenure, promotion, or funding.

Academic libraries, through their relationships with both faculty authors and publishers, have a unique appreciation for the important role that formal publication plays within the scholarly communication system. At the same time, however, libraries recognize the constraints of the scholarly publishing system; for example, the limited access of much commercially published work, or the difficulty in funding and publishing niche topics or titles. This recognition has led to an increasing number of academic libraries offering their own publishing services to faculty and students in an effort to create more diverse, accessible, and sustainable publishing venues:

Although research libraries have been the most prominent faces of library publishing efforts (see Hahn, 2008), publishing services have begun to develop across a wide range of institutions, including smaller liberal arts colleges – as evidenced by the participants in the 2010 Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success research project (Crow et al., 2012). Publishing services provided by libraries currently range from simple web hosting for journals, to digitizing journal backfiles, to offering a full suite of traditional publishing services (Perry et al., 2011).

While an increasing number of libraries are exploring monographic publishing (Adema and Schmidt, 2010), either by partnering with (or subsuming) university presses or by developing new services, the most common entry point into publishing for libraries is scholarly journals. Libraries’ desire to help reshape the existent journal publishing model – coupled with a publishing environment characterized by a volunteer model for editors, reviewers, and authors and the availability of open-source (or affordable) publishing platforms – make journals a logical opening for libraries interested in providing new services to their institutional communities.

As journal publishing becomes a core service area for libraries, libraries have a responsibility to create publishing venues (i.e., journals) that will meet the needs of the communities they are trying to serve. For the students and faculty who comprise these institutional or disciplinary communities, there are two basic needs that are served through publication:

In order for a library publisher to meet the first need, it must provide publishing venues that adhere to legal and ethical standards and that provide for a meaningful assessment of the work that they publish – in short, the venue needs to be recognized as producing quality scholarship. To meet the second need, a library publisher must demonstrate that it is committed to disseminating and providing access to its authors’ work. This is reflected not only through the access model of each journal, but through long-term preservation strategies, through agreements with aggregators, and through publishing agreements that allow authors to retain the right to share their work as openly as possible.

As both scholars (Bourne, 2010) and librarians imagine the future of scholarly journal publishing, the methods of meeting the twin needs of recognition and distribution are changing. Open or hybrid peer review models and alternative citation metrics raise questions of how the quality and impact of scholarly work should be assessed. Discussions around alternative licensing (e.g., Creative Commons), author rights, and open data all point to new ways to expand access to published works. But regardless of whether library publishers are following traditional practices or experimenting with emerging models, the same legal and ethical considerations must be addressed through appropriate policies and procedures. In fact, for libraries that are experimenting with alternative publishing models, it is especially important to have policies that communicate to authors and readers the library’s commitment to producing (and sharing) strong scholarship (Adema and Schmidt, 2010). Publicly available policies provide a means of transparency with regard to how work is evaluated, what authority should be ascribed to it, and how legal and ethical concerns (like copyright or privacy) are handled by the publisher.

For library scholarly communication programs, journal publishing presents many of the same general legal and ethical issues as does the dissemination of unpublished work through an institutional repository. However, it is likely that the library will be more actively involved in ensuring the quality and legality of articles that are published through journals in the library’s portfolio – and, in most cases the library (or its institution) will be the publisher of record for the journals. As publisher, the responsibilities and potential liabilities extend beyond those present in the library’s role as a distributor of repository content. Because of this, it is as important – if not more so – for library publishing programs to have policies and practices in place that address the same issues discussed with regard to repositories: intellectual property, research ethics, and privacy. Beyond these, however, are other areas that library publishers must consider: publication ethics, editorial and peer review of content, relationships with content aggregators, and relationships with editors and journal sponsors.

This part will first address the ethical and legal landscape of scholarly journal publishing, focusing on the roles and responsibilities of not only the publisher but others integral to the process: authors, editors, and reviewers. A discussion of ethical guidelines from established international bodies will be followed by an examination of intellectual property issues, and the part will conclude with recommendations for policy development for new journals. It should be noted that financial issues will not be discussed (with minor exceptions) under the assumption that most library-published journals are supported by direct or indirect institutional subsidies and are not concerned with author fees, subscription fees, or advertising revenues.

While the focus of this part is on scholarly journal publishing, many of the issues covered in the chapters that comprise this part – particularly author agreements, relationships with editors, and legal and ethical concerns about content – are relevant to monographic publishing as well. Although the workflows and issues for journals and books do differ, library publishers in both areas share a responsibility to provide authors with meaningful venues for sharing their work with others.