Services to Publications

ProgHist : Services to publications:

ProgHist Services to Publications

ProgHist Ltd (publisher of Programming Historian’s journals) is a charity registered in England and Wales and a not-for-profit company. It employs two members of staff (a Publishing Manager and a Publishing Assistant) who provide services to support the four Programming Historian publications.

The services can be broadly described within the following categories:

• Facilitating the production of lessons

• Empowering dissemination and reader discovery 

• Supporting contributors

• Building community

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Facilitating the production of lessons

• Development, documentation, and implementation of best-practice workflows for managing Active Lessons across our editorial workflow using GitHub Projects
• Processing Submission materials and setting up lessons previews to facilitate the editorial and peer review phases
• Coordinating a series of Sustainability + Accessibility actions + checks ahead of publication, including:
  • Copyediting (for original lessons only)
  • Typesetting (for all lessons - both translations and originals)
  • Creation and management of archival hyperlinks using the perma.cc service
  • Supporting and advocating for the production of alt-text for all figures and graphs
  • Ensuring that code blocks and tabular data are provided in raw format rather than screenshots
  • Collating copyright agreements to ensure all authors and translators give their permission for us to publish their work under the open CC-BY licence
  • Assigning each lesson published with a unique DOI (with administrative support from colleagues at the University of Sussex library), to ensure reliable, persistent access to resources
  • Coordinating the maintenance of lesson

Empowering dissemination and reader discovery

• Supplying metadata to aggregation and indexing services including Directory of Open Access Journals, EBSCO, DARIAH Campus (EN only) and Florilège (FR only) so that our resources can be searched and found by readers
• Creating and circulating a range of communications materials across our social media platforms to promote the journals, and share key information with our audiences (currently: Twitter/X, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Patreon blog, as well as our own website blog)
• Publishing a quarterly newsletter named (Bulletin // Boletín // Bulletin // Boletim) to circulate recent publications, research highlights and project news with existing and potential partners, external collaborators and internal colleagues

Supporting contributors

Project Team

• Providing administrative support with the advertisement for and recruitment of new editorial members
• Coordinating orientation training, and provide ongoing support to editorial teams
• Maintaining profiles for our active Project Team also keep a Membership History list on our website, and manage our official Register of Members
• Documenting and promoting members’ research and academic activities related to their work on the project on the Research and Events pages of our website
• Managing organisational communications spaces to support teamwork, with facilities for project-wide, individual team, or 1-to-1 dialogue (currently: Slack, Discord, GitHub Issues, Google Groups email)

Outside collaborators

• Providing guidelines and support for our large community of outside collaborators (authors, translators, reviewers, copyeditors, lesson maintainers)
• Championing the values of open, scholarly communication as outlined in our shared Code of Conduct, and facilitate connections with four independent ombudspersons.

Building Community

• Information pack /
• Template emails / updated quarterly
• Representation of Programming Historian at various external workshops, invited talks, or conferences

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Administrational

Archival

• Create and archive minutes for meetings (of Board of Trustees, Managing Editors, Project Team, and Annual General Meetings)
• Maintain a comprehensive record of project knowledge and ready-made adaptable templates on the GitHub Wiki
• Maintain records of key PH statistics such as number of unique contributors, number of lessons published annually
• Annual Zenodo deposit of our GitHub repository
• UK Web Archive capture our website

Financial

• Dashboard / current IPPs / coordination of annual membership renewals

Infrastructural

• Secure password management