What’s in a Name? Academic Libraries Supporting Journal Publishing Activities

Our research interest is to examine what is signified with the use of the terms “publisher” and “hosting service” in academic libraries. In our two-phase project we will look at the self-identification practices of academic libraries engaged in publishing and hosting activities in Canada and the United States.

While many libraries identify themselves as publishers, others market their efforts as hosting services, despite offering seemingly similar services. We will look more closely at the reason behind this divergence in naming practices by first conducting semi-structured interviews regarding service offerings, divisions of responsibility, funding, terminology, and semantic associations within publishing. We are particularly interested to see if there is any noticeable divergence in categorization between U.S. and Canadian libraries.

After content and interview analysis, phase two will test for the generalizability of key findings with a questionnaire.

Our interview phase begins this spring and we hope to present preliminary results at the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2015 in Vancouver in August.

For more information, you can visit our project website or contact Andrea Kosavic.

Financial support for this project has been received from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and from York University Libraries. We are very grateful for their support as conducting this research will provide an opportunity to better understand journal support initiatives across Canada and the United States.

Jeanette Hatherill is the Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Ottawa. She can be reached at jeanette.hatherill [at] uottawa.ca. Andrea Kosavic is the Digital Initiatives Librarian, York University. She can be reached at akosavic [at] yorku.ca. Karen Meijer-Kline is the Communications and Member Services Officer, Public Knowledge Project. She can be reached at kmeijerk [at] sfu.ca. Jacqueline Whyte Appleby is the Acting Assistant Director, OCUL Scholars Portal. She can be reached at jacqueline [at] scholarsportal.info.