So everyone, I'm Sonia Betts, I'm the Head of Library Publishing and Digital Production Services at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. My invisible co-presenter is Doris Foggier, she's a public services librarian, also at the University of Alberta.

She's home in snowy, icy, icy natureland of the north right now. I'm really excited to be talking with you today about Canada's library publishing scene and what that actually looks like within the context of other publishing activities happening in Canada.

So just to give you a little bit of context, like many university libraries across Canada, the University of Alberta manages an active open journal publishing program and I'm sure many of you who are in this room right now are sort of in the same boat as us. We have about 65 open access journals participating in our service at the University of Alberta

and these journals represent a pretty broad range of different kinds of publications. So everything from small student publications to very large international publications with large editorial boards and many decades of publishing experience. OJS has been a foundational element of our service since we launched that in 2007

and I think it's probably fair to say that PKP and OJS have been instrumental in establishing the current Canadian publishing environment. I don't think that's overstating it too much. So I've been working with our publishing program now for about four years, so I'm not that old in the game. I was a web user experience librarian before that.

And this project goes out of many conversations and questions that I've had over that time of me trying to understand what the role of programs like ours is within Canada's broader scholarly journal publishing ecosystem. So we're just one of the many players in this field. And I also feel like there's a perception both from inside libraries and from other stakeholders

that library journal publishing or policy programs are just a small and minor piece of the Canadian journal publishing landscape and what we're doing is not really publishing. Does that sound familiar to anyone else in this room right now? A little bit, yeah. I think we think of ourselves as an alternative option to mainstream publishing.

We're like the other little independent guys that you can go with if big publishers don't meet their needs. But is that really true? So there's been a lot of research conducted around Canada's journal publishing landscape, but very little of that has really exactly detailed library publishing hosting activities. So in 2010 Kathleen Shearer, who now of course is with CORE,

authored a really useful review of emerging models in Canadian academic publishing. And at that time she suggested that library-hosted journals represent a small but growing minority of the academic journals published in Canada. Okay, so jump forward to 2016. A study sponsored by RUT called Shaping a Collaborative Future solicited some feedback

from a number of journals affiliated with RUT. The Canadian Association of Learning Journals and the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences. In that study, no journals affiliated with the library publishing program were explicitly included, although I think the number of journals that responded to that survey probably were affiliated with some library publishing program.

Okay, jump forward another year. In 2017 John Molinsky published an article in the Canadian Journal of Communication called Modelling a cooperative approach to open access scholarly publishing,

a demonstration in the Canadian context. It examined and built on some of the data that was in that RUT study, but also he suggested that in 2015 there were 36 libraries in Canada listing 207 journals. So that started to get to quite a large number of journals. So also in 2017, the final report of the Canadian's Fellowly Publishing Working Group was released.

This was a group of stakeholders brought together by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. I just showed all the acronyms, actually there are so many. So Canadian Association of Research Libraries included Library Consortium, learning journals, university presses, RUT, PKP and others. So this study provides an extensive overview of the Canadian publishing landscape,

including articulating some of those strengths and weaknesses of that current landscape, and also provides a set of guiding principles for scholarly publishing. There is a very brief section in that report, it's less than a page, that outlines the library publishing activities in Canada, acknowledging that library publishing programs are significant players in the scholarly communication landscape,

and it references back to that St. Linsky article, but it also characterizes library publishing programs as often more rudimentary than traditional publishers, and doesn't really provide any clear recommendations when we move them forward, or place them into the context of other different kinds of publishing activities. So I think it's safe to say that the existing research out there does indicate

that library publishing programs are important to the Canadian publishing ecosystem, but Doris and I wanted to further explore the question of how they fit within context. So simply put, how can we stack up against other independent Canadian journal publishers?

I'm just going to warn you that everything we're about to say from this point forward is based on very preliminary data that we've collected. We have lots of very messy, incomplete data, we have lots of unanswered questions that need to be addressed through follow-up and further investigation. So just so we understand, we're all on the same page here. Caution! Preliminary data ahead.

So what did we do? So we're in the midst of a little research project right now that's trying to understand the nature of this field. And step one is for us to create a master list of Canadian scholarly journals. So in the various regions that you all represent, is there like a list of journals published by your country,

a helpful directory that says these are the journals that go on? No, not for Canada either. And that's a little bit unfortunate because it's quite a challenging task. So luckily some colleagues I have who are working on a related project were kind enough to share their preliminary list that they sort of drafted with me as a starting point.

So just a few definitions for you, because this is really difficult to pin down and clarify what actually we're looking for. So we define scholarly as a journal that disseminates original peer-reviewed research. We're excluding student journals from this study. And then the definition of Canadian is just like good luck with that.

Here's what we're going to try and listen to. My working definition is a journal affiliated with a Canadian post-secondary institution. Or the journal is owned by a Canadian not-for-profit organization, so one of those learning societies or associations. Or the journal is published by a Canadian-based publisher,

so not one of the large multinational corporations. So I don't know if that's an appropriate definition. I'm happy to have any of you out there help me refine that, but that's where we're starting from. So the first version of our master list was created by pulling titles from RUT. The Ulrichs Curionicals Directory filtering for Canadian publishers.

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network has a list of open access library publications. And the Directory of Open Access Journals, again limiting for Canadian publishers. So the next step is to work through each title on the list, every single journal that we pull from that list, and try to identify who's the publisher for each title, discard any journals that are ceased,

discard any student journals, and discard any journals that are published by the large multinationals, unless they meet one of those other criteria. Every time we identify a journal published by a new organization, we're doing a browse of that organization's title list, their publisher list, and adding any titles that aren't on our master list, and then identifying which of those journals are being hosted by it.

So you can imagine that's a lot of data crunching and cleanup. It's really slow, but it's also very interesting. If anyone would like to contribute to this work, I would love to crowdsource a little bits of it. So just let me know. We then took that list of publishers, and again this is quite preliminary, we haven't gotten through all of the titles on our list, but we took the list of publishers represented to date,

and completed an initial scan to try to compare publishing services offered by libraries, and not library publishers by looking at their websites and other sources publicly available information. Okay. So now I'm going to take some bets. Oh wait, not yet. So we have to talk about this first.

So defining what is a publisher, I think is even more difficult than defining what is a Canadian journal. Does anyone else struggle with this? It's a really interesting problem, and I want to pause here to address this thing, because it always crops up when we talk about libraries and publishing. The essay, you probably come across it on a regular basis.

Within this domain of work, there's always this underlying question of what publishing actually entails, and whether what libraries are doing in this realm can be called publishing. So, I'm not the first person who has thought this. Jacqueline White-Huffleby, Jeanette Averill, Andrea Kostasen, and Karen Meyer-Klein, I think a few of you may be in this room right now,

published a wonderful article in 2018 called What's in a View? Exploring Identity in the Field of Library Journal Publishing, where they examined some of those factors that weigh into decisions around whether a program calls itself a publisher or a host. And it turns out that it has far less to do if well understood and agreed upon common definitions of what a publisher is

and what a publisher does, and instead seems to be a much more complex and at times very inconsistent construction of how individual libraries' perception of what publishers might do, how their own programs align, how they want to be perceived both internally and externally, and where they might land on some kind of a continuum of how much and how well they do the work of publishing.

So that's pretty complicated. Publishers themselves seem to be a little bit ambiguous too about what the labor of publishing entails. Do any of you regularly read the spell of the kitchen log? Sometimes? So I think I've seen publishers every two years list of how publishers add value

and itemizes a number of things. A few things point to what publishers add or do within the realm of journal publishing. So in 2012, I think the list was 60 things. In 2018, the list was 102 things. But they're very granular sorts of things like make money and come up with a business plan,

which I would argue aren't necessarily unique to publishing. So I asked one of our graduate students to do a little bit of digging to try to find the standard definition of what the role of the publisher is in progressive journal publishing. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised if that's kind of a difficult task. It's probably a privilege asking someone, like, what is it that libraries do anyways?

But she tried. So she dug up a old article by R.G. Dunn and P.T. Shepard from 1991 called Publishers that critical make. They argued that journal publishers provide a production and distribution system that permits the widespread dissemination of recorded research throughout the world without the researcher having to bear the burden of answering individual requests.

In 2010, the Association of American Universities held a scholarly publishing roundtable and drafted some useful principles again. Their scholarly publishing included editorial integrity through peer review, creation of dappable business models, improving accessibility and functionality of publications, archiving of preservation work, and promotion of creative reuse of research.

So if ever a Cambridge handbook was made for something, you'd think this would be it. But the 2013 Cambridge handbook of journal publishing does not provide a hopeful articulation of labour publishing until the very last chapter, when the authors are using about the future of the publisher, and I quote, while for now there are key functions of registration,

certification, dissemination, and preservation, may seem to be as important to remember, the reasons for this may be changing. So publishing then, I think, at least at this early stage of my understanding and trying to define what this work looks like, has very flexible boundaries. The are we or aren't we a publisher conversation

I think actually distracts from the fact that we're actually doing publishing work by any of these kinds of definitions. We may not do everything, and there may be variety in how well and how effectively we accomplish it, but I think that's probably the case for any other publishing entities that are practicing today. So I'm here to say library publishers just own that realm.

It's okay, from my perspective anyways. Alright, so any guesses on how many Canadian journals are currently being published? Shout out to number. Okay, I'll just tell you. So again, this is really,

so we think that there's probably, if you go according to the definition that we used, and again you describe things like student journals, inactive publications, and the journals published by the large multinationals, we think there's about 1,000 active Canadians following the journals being published right now. The number on the list as of Wednesday was 1,010.

So we classified and reviewed nearly three quarters of the titles on that list, so we looked at each of those titles and then added and removed and added and removed, and we still got a big chunk left to go, so about one quarter of them haven't reviewed each individual title. So just keep that in mind again. Question ahead.

A little concerned this is being recorded. So this is where it sort of starts to get interesting. So this is a chart of the number of journals by types of publishers as we've classified them. So so far in Canada, again according to that of the three quarters that we've classified so far,

libraries are publishing 389 of the Spelman journals being published in Canada. Not-for-profit presses, so I included some of the titles published by UCD and the National Resources Council has a press as well, are the next largest number at 202. You'll see it's really interesting, the third largest number of journals

are being published by what I might classify as questionable publishers, and this will really require some additional exploration, but these are publishers that have appeared on blacklists, publishers who may have an OA press, but no journals in the directory of open access journals, publishers whose actual location can't be clearly identified and be shared amongst the local restaurants.

I don't want to say who they are because I think that that's not entirely fair, but we do need to do a little bit more investigation. Next on the list that green bar is university presses with 40 titles, the purple bar is commercial presses, and then I know the independent society self-published journals is only five right now,

but the reason for that is that the big chunk of unclassified journals, that gray bar, we've left the small individual titles to the end. We dealt with all of the known entities first and then I think we're gonna start knocking off the individual publications later. So that gray bar of unclassified titles is gonna distribute probably mostly through the last four or five classifications.

All right, a slightly more interesting way to look at it for me is this. So to view that data a little differently, you'll see that when it comes to what we might think of as the market share that we occupy in Canada, collectively, libraries publish nearly 40% of scholarly journals, and that's by far the largest group.

Again, those unclassified journals will filter through the other five pieces in the chart, but in four months things will be a little bit more clear, but this is really, really interesting to me right now. All pretty interesting are the different kinds of services that libraries are doing to support those

nearly 400 publications. So so far we've identified in our list 32 different libraries publishing journals in Canada. Nine of those libraries didn't have any information about their publishing program, and we have available somewhere that we can find it. For the remaining 23, we reviewed the info on their websites, and then we also, if it was available and they had an entry in the library publishing directory,

we did that information as well. And we tried our best to map out their services to some categories that we define based both on how library and non-library publishers describe sort of the basket of services that they offer to their clients. However, I'll just say that only a few non-library publishers actually describe what they do in any detail,

so comparing libraries to the other publishers is a little bit tricky right now. We really require some follow-up and sort of in-depth exploration through the surveys or conversations. I'm also pretty sure that the publicly available and explicitly mentioned information about what library publishers are doing is not entirely accurate, and then also will require me to follow up

with the people that I know involved in this work, to sort of verify that. So not surprisingly, every one of the 23 library publishers offers up access to publishing management software as one of the foundational elements in their service. And in Canada, that software is almost exclusively OJS. The next most common service is support for new journals to get started in publishing,

followed by training for the editorial team, DOI registrations, support for transfer from another publisher, consultation on policy, ISSN registration, and digital preservation. So you can sort of see through these services offering this library sensibility around relationship development, around education of our community, and then paying attention to things

we feel are part of our domain already. You mentioned this in your talk with it. So things like permanent identifiers, preservation discoveries, work that we do in libraries all the time, so we feel pretty comfortable, I think, offering those services to others. So the least commonly offered services, it turns out that none of us are printing and mailing anything, which does not come as any surprise to me.

And only one of us is actively promoting their XML publishing service. So hopefully that changes after Wednesday's workshop on XML publishing workflows. Most library publishing programs are open access, so the low number around subscription management makes sense to me. And then you'll see that they're sort of low on things like copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, layout, and marketing and promotion are not that high.

I suspect those things are usually seen either as the domain of the editorial team or the domain of that traditional publisher rule. Right now, only three of the 13 non-library publishers we've identified listed any services in their publicly available web info, so I didn't want to chart it out because it's just not a very good amount of data.

But of these three, I'll just say that none list digital preservation, digitization, training for editorial staff, consultation on policy development, or consultation on dissemination of services that they offer. But all of them list support for new journals, transfer from another publisher, publishing management software, marketing and promotion, and ISSN registration service offerings.

All right, so just wrapping up a bit, where are we going next? For this project, our near-term goals are to just finish cleaning and categorizing that master journalist. It would be really great to feel like we have a solid body of data with a predefined definition that we can work with. I'd like to confirm and validate data

about library publishers' activities, and then certainly publishers to document their publishing activities as well. And then I really want to document and share the results of this work widely, because I think the underlying goal of this research is to advocate effectively for and educate about this work that libraries are doing, not just within libraries and universities, but outside,

and especially when it comes to participating in really important national conversations that we're having right now about our whole scholarly publishing infrastructure and ecosystem. I want to know what the gaps are represented with their publishing activities, and to sort of try to understand what kind of collective action we can take together that would strengthen our publishing programs as a whole,

and support the work of scholarly publication in Canada. So really excited to dig in and learn more.