Library Publishing Forum 2021

Poly Publishing is a publishing program that aims to raise visibility and enhance access to Cal Poly scholarship. In working to create an immersive, interactive digital project, this alternative approach to present and disseminate academic scholarship rethinks accessibility and assessment of such work. The system focuses on collaboration, accessible approaches, and recognition of individual’s places within structural systems, using inclusive and equitable practices to adjust scholarly publishing while centering historically underrepresented identities, perspectives, and creativity. Using past projects from the Cal Poly faculty exhibition program as prototypes, the project aims to ensure scholarship will be transformed into digital publications that integrate with current publishing systems on and off campus. By creating a non-traditional pathway for publishing scholarly research, this pilot project plays an active role in strengthening Cal Poly’s scholarly communication system, with a commitment to amplify underrepresented topics and voices.

This presentation will outline the workflow, concepts, and scholarship of the Poly Publishing program. Using an interactive choose-your-own adventure format, each section of the publishing process (content selection, digital development, assessment, and dissemination ideals) will pose a question to allow viewers to follow various paths of how poly publishing will work, leaving room for feedback and further questions. The ideas and models that the system has shaped itself from include autoethnography, open peer review discussion sessions, critical race theory, contextual citation practices, visual annotation practices, establishing common vocabularies, and more, all designed to rethink the systemic inequities that academic publishing holds