Hilary Faith Hickman | Library Publishing Creates

IU Libraries Publishing

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Publications and Programs / Cost Savings

IU Libraries Publishing

IU Libraries Publishing is a digital-first, diamond open-access publisher of nonfiction books written by IU Bloomington faculty, alumni, and/or centers and institutes. Since its founding in 2023, it has published three books: Through the Looking Glass by Curt Lively, Afterthought by Heather Akou, and Making Indiana University by James Capshew.

IU Libraries Publishing assesses impact through demand for the program, author feedback, and publication usage metrics, including reader/reading counts and geographic reach. Since their first publication in 2024, their three books have been viewed nearly 6,000 times by almost 3,000 readers in nearly 30 countries.

IU Libraries Publishing is a diamond open-access publisher of long-form nonfiction written by IU Bloomington faculty, alumni, and centers. Since its founding in 2023, it has published three books:

Through the Looking Glass by Curt Lively
Afterthought by Heather Akou
Making Indiana University by James Capshew

IU Libraries Publishing assesses impact through program demand, author feedback, and audience metrics. Since its first publication in 2024, the program’s three books have generated over 6,000 views from nearly 3,000 users in over 40 countries.

IU Libraries Publishing is access-first, digital-first, and local-first, and it broadens the scholarly genres that get published. It uses fit-for-purpose production, so its books are free to publish and free to read, avoiding premium production whose costs can narrow access. Without return-on-investment requirements, it can publish conference proceedings, public scholarship, local studies, and experimental projects—scholarly genres often deprioritized in sales-dependent publishing models. As a digital-first publisher, IU Libraries Publishing prioritizes accessibility, incorporates multimedia and interactivity, and shares content and code, which print publishing cannot support directly. It also publishes only its academic community, aligning institutional resources with local scholarly needs.

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Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College’s “Arete” (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Publications and Programs / Cost Savings

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership

Published by PALNI Open Press

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal publishing research, case studies, essays, and posters across disciplines. Named for the Greek concept ἀρετή (Arete), meaning excellence or virtue, it fosters discussion, debate, and theory development in global leadership.

Αρετή provides a global, peer‑reviewed open‑access forum that fills a gap in leadership scholarship by encouraging interdisciplinary theory development, critical discussion, and practical action in global leadership. It brings together diverse voices from academia and practice, and is freely available, which expands reach and fosters inclusive knowledge exchange.

What makes this program special?

Making Arete an open-access journal was an intentional decision rooted in SMWC’s mission. The Global Leadership Institute did not want to impose an article processing charge or pass any cost to authors or readers. By removing financial barriers, Arete ensures that leadership research is freely available to scholars, practitioners, and institutions worldwide, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

Is there anything that you could do through library publishing that you couldn’t if the program was elsewhere?

Transitioning Arete to the PALNI Open Press significantly streamlined the publishing process. PALNI’s Publishing Services Support Team helped with critical tasks such as setting up digital object identifier (DOI) registration, maintaining software updates, and integrating the journal with indexing services like CrossRef and Google Scholar. This support has allowed Arete to expand its reach and credibility.

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Euripides’ Alcestis

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Publications and Programs / Cost Savings

Euripides’ Alcestis: Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Essay

Published by William ＆ Mary Press

Euripides’ Alcestis, a fifth-century Greek tragedy, explores the themes of love, friendship, sacrifice, and the fragility of life. This translation, Euripides’ Alcestis: Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Essay, offers readers a clear and contemporary version of the play, with context-giving notes, along with an overall interpretative essay on the play.

The book has found its home primarily in college classrooms, reaching students at the educational level it was designed for. By serving as a course resource, it’s shaping how the next generation of learners engages with the subject matter.

Traditional publishing has changed, creating fewer opportunities to publish a translation, with notes, essay, and intro, of a single play. A digital version provided presentational formats that print didn’t and made this work available to everyone. The expertise the author had access to by publishing with W&M Libraries’ W&M Press was terrific, and created broader access to their work. The experience of producing a digital version will make you revisit a host of issues about how best to present your information. To all the colleagues who are considering working with the libraries, the author would say, quoting a famous ad, “just do it!”

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Jerry Falwell Library

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Publications and Programs / Cost Savings

Jerry Falwell Library

Liberty University publishes eleven academic journals across several disciplines, featuring student and faculty content. Some journals are led by student editorial teams, and others include faculty and students. The article review process varies, featuring full double blind peer review in some journals and editor review in others.

This journal publishing platform offers author and article metrics, and the company that creates their digital object identifiers also offers journal metrics. These allow them to track engagement across various subject areas and inform potential marketing efforts.

What makes this program special?

This library publishing program is the central location for academic journal content at Liberty University. Though additional content is published by various departments, Liberty Journals provides central standards and a publishing platform for all departments to use.

Is there anything that you could do through library publishing that you couldn’t if the program was elsewhere?

Since the library has relationships built with various departments across campus, publishing through the library allows it to coordinate the efforts with these departments more effectively to encourage best practices.

What are the benefits of publishing this resource through a library?

Some of the benefits to publishing through the library is the central journal publishing platform we provide with uniform editor tools. The platform offers a convenient way to upload content, good search engine optimization, and author metrics.

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MT Open Press

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Publications and Programs / Cost Savings

MT Open Press

The MT Open Press is a publishing imprint of the James E. Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University. It is a hybrid publisher with no author-facing charges. The MT Open Press publishes every book as open access and offers print-on-demand formats for epub, paperback, or hardcover versions. They publish scholarly, creative, and educational works from the MTSU community and region.

MT Open Press has published five books since 2023. Collectively, there have been 17,500 full-text downloads of the OA versions (PDF) and 161 print-on-demand purchases (epub, paperback, or hardcover). Reviewer quotes are used with permission and demonstrate book quality, which helps increase marketability and impacts the reputation of the press and its publishing operations. Anecdotal feedback about their library publishing values (transparency, community, quality, capacity) has impacted how the community responds to our books, program, and process, increasing press inquiries and author submissions. Some of their published books are also used in the classroom and have been the focal point of conference presentations by our authors, which impact their professional development or tenure/promotion portfolios.

While traditional university presses and commercial publishers select what they publish based on the potential market, an open press or library publisher can leverage campus expertise, server space, and open source software to provide access to educational or scholarly content that might not otherwise be available. Other benefits include author support, copyright remaining with the creator, quality review and editorial services at no cost to the author, shorter publishing lifecycle than traditional publishers, persistent identifiers (DOI, ISBN) and Creative Commons licenses to increase access and recognition of the work, attribution and credit printed in each book for paid and volunteer contributors (e.g., reviewers, proofreaders, editors, designers, accessibility testers, administrative services, etc.), and preservation and indexing practices that increase sustainability and discoverability. All editing, design, layout, and marketing are done in-house with feedback from the author, reflecting an intentionally transparent publishing operation. Read more about the MT Open Press’ publishing principles and philosophy here.

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Virginia Tech’s Rights Reversion Service

2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Cultivating the Commons

The Open Education Initiative (OEI) is a project of the Scholarly Communication Department of the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. Rights Reversion services provided by the OEI have resulted in re-publication of four book-length works as open educational resources (OER), some but not all of which were out of print.

Works deemed less-than-profitable to many publishers may still have tremendous value to students and instructors when their content has utility for teaching and learning. These are the types of works we hope to bring back into print, while “opening” up their content with an open license.

Extending impact of existing resources

Since 2016, the University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Office and Open Education Initiative (OEI) have conducted outreach to faculty through a variety of channels. In response to faculty requests, we have worked to enable access to out-of-print works back in print and released under open licenses

Instructors, authors, and estates been delighted to see the works available again. Learners around the world benefit the most from perpetual, free access to works deemed important by subject matter experts. Together, these republished titles have hundreds of thousands of downloads and are used in courses beyond our institution. These works include: Veterinary Epidemiology, Radio Systems Engineering, Revised 1st edition, Construction Contracting, 2nd edition, and Methods of Teaching Agriculture, 3rd edition.

Opportunities for this work within a library

Library-situated programs are ideally situated for the formation of collaborative, learning-centric partnerships with instructional faculty. If one were situated outside of a library, it would be much more difficult to identify areas for high-impact value-added services. Further, rights reversion work relies on existing relationships of trust and access to university resources: legal counsel, digitization services, creative and talented production staff, and user-friendly tools such as Pressbooks. Working together toward the common goal of a rights reversion makes projects like these possible.

The support the OEI offers and methods of supporting this work have evolved over time, including updating CC licensing requirements to allow derivatives, negotiating with estates, and publishers, and using novel partial-rights-reversions with publishers who retain some rights. Workflows for re-production of rights-reverted works have also evolved from scan-and-OCR to layout and design via Pressbooks, matching the standard OER production workflow and enabling production of multiple formats and files ready for print on demand.

Advice for library publishers considering rights-reversion support

Rights reversion projects are among the most rewarding of projects. Publications are already classroom-tested and selected for use. Instructors have known-course material that fits. Students have much-improved and zero-cost access to course materials. And, authors and author-estates are thrilled to have their works or works of their loved ones back in print. Such projects are also well-aligned with institutional goals for student retention, completion, and success. Rights reversion projects are a win for libraries, educational institutions, instructors, and readers alike.

Rights reversion projects still have costs, which makes having a strong case for such projects important. Instructors using out-of-print works are among the best-positioned advocates for a rights reversion to OER project. These instructors will likely be asked to justify the potential impact vs. the publishing effort involved. They may even get involved in contacting authors if they have an existing collegial relationship.

Library publishers involved in overseeing such projects may be happy to know that libraries have leverage with some publishers because of existing business relationships, sometimes making (all or partial) rights-reversion negotiations move more quickly. Instructors with collegial relationships with authors are also valuable.

I hope that many library publishers will see the value in this work and decide to support it. I also hope that instructors will ask for this type of service.

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