Library Publishing Forum 2020

Stockholm University Press was founded five years ago at Stockholm University Library, and has quickly become a part of an international movement with smaller publising entities closer to academia (Deville et al., 2019). The Press is a ‘scholar-led’ organisation, meaning that all publishing decisions are made by a Publishing Committee. The journals and book series are also managed by the researchers with support from the Press staff. This organisation an integral part of the University Library, where the vision is to provid a more user-driven service model with focus on Open Research. The Press organisation has had to gradually build trust in their services by producing good examples of interesting and widely used publications as well as giving good service to Authors and Editors, and this work is still ongoing.

The services provided by Stockholm University Press is thus under constant enhancement. The Press team worked with some specific projects during 2018 and 2019 to deliver what the users need when they need it to a greater extent. Particular challenges for the management of book projects have been the editorial process with book proposals, peer-review, board recommendations and submission of full manuscript files. In 2018 the team worked with an iterative editing process to improve instructions and communications sent from the system in order to make the system easier to use. The process was informed by common questions and mistakes and our own experiences from trying to nudge reviewers and editors to use the system appropriately. The developments are, furthermore, informed by usage statistics and citation patterns to ensure that the Press delivers content relevant to the readership (Wennström et al., 2019). This presentation aims to describe the challenges and opportunities with a user-oriented process and the outcome of the improvements.