This posting is sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG and published in cooperation with the ARL Section.

This post features Talea Anderson, a Scholarly Communication Librarian at the Washington State University, USA.

I manage our university’s institutional repository, where we publish unique materials including theses, dissertations, student culminating projects, and datasets. In addition, I have taken a leading role in open education initiatives on campus and have, therefore, assisted in preparing open access textbooks. In general, we have opted to publish these texts in Pressbooks. My role in these projects has been largely advisory given staff constraints. Along with Pressbooks, we use Ex Libris products for most of our publishing work—most notably, Esploro, which we are using as our institutional repository.

I am particularly proud of the impact that we have had in open education at WSU. We received support from our President’s and Provost’s Office to provide Affordable Learning grants to faculty in 2016-2020. These grants were used to create OER in 56 courses, impacting 144,000 students during the initial year of implementation for each class. The Libraries did this work in partnership with our Academic Outreach and Innovation unit, ultimately securing millions of dollars in savings for our students.

I have found many resources helpful while learning about OER publishing in particular. Open Education Network provides workshops and community gatherings to discuss workflows, accessibility, fundraising, and many other connected issues. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provided an Open Education Leadership program that proved especially helpful in allowing me to connect with peers and mentors at other institutions. The Library Publishing Coalition also supported my work and training via their fellowship program, which helped me connect with peers who are focused on accessibility work in publishing. Thanks to those connections, I was able to write my own open access textbook: Accessibility Case Studies for Scholarly Communication Librarians and Practitioners. While compiling this text, I pulled together many of the resources that I found useful while learning about web accessibility in open access publishing.

As for books that changed my life—there are so many but I will call out Frank Arthur’s The Wounded Storyteller, which helped me more clearly understand the differences between medical and social models of disability. I read this book while beginning to think about what I could do as a library professional to widen access to academic resources.