Repository-Based Publishing by Libraries

The University of Iowa Libraries has a small e-publishing program as part of our repository and other digital collections. We host a variety of faculty produced scholarship, including videos and image collections, as well as more traditional textual materials. Our working paper and journal collections include a variety of titles, from strongly institutionally affiliated titles to society titles. Setting up this program has been a learning process for us, particularly since we had not previously been a journal publisher. We view e-publishing as part of our commitment to open access scholarship and see this as a way in which we can provide support to faculty, as well as increasing awareness of open access publications. While we prefer to work with fully open access titles, we do support two subscription titles with moving walls for previously print only titles. Our e-publishing program is completely separate from our University Press, a humanities focused, monograph only publisher. The Libraries and the Press have a strong working relationship and we have collaborated in hosting the back content for several monographic series, as well as creating databases out of two of their reference works. This presentation will discuss our program, primarily focusing on e-journals, and share some of our lessons learned.