Matt Vaughn is the Open Publishing Librarian with Indiana University Libraries. His primary role is to facilitate IU library’s open access (OA) journal publishing program. The program publishes over 50 open access academic journals, and Vaughn assists the editorial teams through troubleshooting and consultations. He also works with journal staff to identify needs and opportunities to improve and customize IU's publishing platform. In addition, he provides training and guidance on scholarly communication and publishing best practices to IU staff, students, and faculty through workshops and through the development of detailed guides and documentation. He is also a member of the ALI Scholarly Communications Committee.
He is always happy to have an opportunity to train a new journal staff member or to help an editor publish a new issue. And says he is particularly excited about IU Libraries' recent efforts to update their workflows to include more JATS XML publishing. JATS XML has become the standard format for much of academic publishing, and he is hoping to continue to strengthen IU's support for this format.
Vaughn and his department recently onboarded the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews to our publishing program. Published for over 20 years, the JFRR is an important and longstanding resource for scholars interested in learning more about the latest book-length publications in Folklore and related research fields. Over the course of its history, the JFRR staff has published hundreds of book reviews, and he was pleased to have an opportunity to support their continuing work. While most of the journals IU Libraries support publish in PDF, the JFRR has always been published in HTML. With this mind, Vaughn took the opportunity to develop a customized JATS XML publishing workflow for the JFRR team, allowing them to publish their book reviews in a full-text, machine-readable format. This format and approach have the advantage of producing text that is semantically tagged, which facilitates keyword searches and improves discoverability.
He is also proud of the work being done to support IU student publications. The publishing program includes multiple student journals, and he believes the collaborations with the editorial staff of these publications represent some of the most impactful work he does. The publishing process can be intimidating for both undergraduate and graduate students alike, but student publications can be a welcoming environment for them to develop the skills needed to succeed as academic researchers.
Finally, Vaughn believes the librarian’s role in scholarly communication is to support the creation of innovative scholarship and to help insure equitable access to research and information. OA journal publishing can be a particularly effective way to fulfill this role in that it provides students and faculty with a venue to develop and then share their research worldwide with minimal barriers to access.
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