Working with the PALNI Open Press

Visit the PALNI website to learn more about PALNI, its mission, vision, values, and policies regarding respect in the work place and open access.

The PALNI Open Press is committed to digital equity and strives to meet or exceed WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards, a goal that relies on a partnership between the Press and its contributors. While we manage platform maintenance and provide author support to ensure a barrier-free foundation, we expect authors to do their part by submitting content that adheres to these accessibility standards from the outset. This includes providing meaningful alt text for images, using hierarchical heading structures, and ensuring all multimedia is captioned. Through this collaborative effort, we aim to provide a seamless and inclusive experience for all researchers and students. Read more information on digital accessibility.

Contributors publishing with the PALNI Open Press agree to:

1. Make the publication available under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY strongly recommended. Authors retain their copyrights). 
2. Warrant that the submission does not infringe upon the rights of any third party, to the best of their knowledge (including only original, Creative Commons licensed (derivatives authorized), and/or public domain works).
3. Grant PALNI non-exclusive rights required to publish, print, index, abstract, preserve, and migrate their content.  
4. Acknowledge PALNI’s rights to include platform branding on submitted content and to remove content from its platforms.

PALNI Open Press publications are available to view for free online and many are licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons license. Intellectual property rights are managed in accordance with applicable laws. PALNI is the platform provider, and does not claim copyright ownership of content hosted by the PALNI Open Press. Use of the PALNI Open Press or platform logos does not constitute ownership of publications. All materials made openly available must be done so with the consent of the copyright owner or in the public domain.  It is the responsibility of each institution to seek and maintain documentation of ownership and distribution rights for their posted digital content. Any requests to take down submissions will be handled on a case-by-case basis, in consultation with the originating institution as appropriate. All content can be returned to corresponding institutions and deleted from servers upon request and at no cost. 

While not able to provide legal advice, members of the PALNI Publishing Support Team are available to provide copyright education.

Faculty, staff, and students affiliated with a PALNI supported institution may propose an open access publication that supports the teaching and learning objectives of their institution.

See additional requirements for Journal Publishing Eligibility. 

The PALNI Open Press recognizes the potential of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the research process while maintaining that human creativity and accountability remain the foundation of scholarly work. While authors may use AI for assistive purposes (such as grammar and spelling refinement) without disclosure, any substantive use must be clearly disclosed. Use cases requiring disclosure include supplements to the text (data analysis, ancillaries, alt-text, etc.), graphical elements (images, graphs, etc.), and cases pertaining to the primary text (text-to-speech generation, outlines, summaries, etc.). AI disclosure must specify the tool used and its exact role in the work's development (see an example disclosure statement here). AI-generated body text should be limited to less than 5% of the total publication. AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors on any PALNI Open Press publication. Ultimately, authors remain fully accountable for the accuracy, originality, and ethical compliance of their entire submission. We expect authors to make a good faith effort to adhere to this policy, and violating publications are subject to review and/or removal.

The PALNI Open Press recognizes that intellectual freedom is essential to the pursuit of knowledge, innovation, and academic discourse. We value the opportunity to support faculty, staff, and students as contributors to the scholarly record by providing education, consultation, platform hosting, and professional publishing services. Projects are prioritized that clearly articulate their purpose and relevance to the varied teaching and research needs of PALNI’s supported academic communities. All published works remain the intellectual property of their creators, and the findings and viewpoints therein belong solely to the authors.

The PALNI Open Press is committed to disseminating scholarly, creative, and educational content of affiliated PALNI institutions and their academic communities. Apart from the primary objective of hosting and promoting contributor scholarship (depositing content, alerting users/viewers to deposited works), neither PALNI nor its platform services will share contributor or public user information with other third-party entities for commercial purposes. Only aggregated, anonymized data is collected for site usage and analysis.

PALNI and the Publishing Support Team currently provide basic-level services for PALNI community publications, including:

• Initial consultation and project setup
• Introductory education on publishing related topics (Creative Commons, authors’ rights, etc.) 
• Platform hosting and maintenance
• Data backup (nightly server snapshots and weekly off-site backups) 
• Provide and maintain documentation to use the system

Additionally, PALNI’s Publishing Support Team is developing extended services and can currently provide limited support, upon request, in:

• Analytics (reporting views, downloads, and orders)
• Design (basic cover design)
• Discovery (inclusion in Community Catalog, assigning digital object identifiers (DOIs) and ISBNs, MARC cataloging)
• Platform support (troubleshooting, training, workflow help) 
• Print-on-demand
• Marketing (press release development)

At this time, PALNI and the Publishing Support Team do not provide services in the following areas, but these may be developed in the future:

• Accessibility remediation  
• Additional analytics
• Additional design (theme planning and implementation, graphic design, site design, development of figures/charts/graphs)
• Additional discovery (ISSN registration, platform-level metadata creation, search engine optimization, inclusion in institutional repository, indexing in databases and directories)
• Additional marketing (outreach materials and support)
• Archival (backfile conversion and upload, digitization, digital preservation)
• Community (workshops, interest group)
• Editorial (policy design, editorial processes, author agreements, peer review support)
• Production (layout and typesetting, proofreading, copyediting, copyright review, plagiarism detection)

PALNI is comprised of 23 academic institutions adhering to differing missions, research areas, and pursuits in scholarship. The PALNI Open Press is thereby a mechanism to collect, highlight, and promote supported institutions’ varying scholastic and creative output as well as the different media and viewpoints in which such work is expressed. Variety in authors, peer-reviewers, and editorial groups for publications is welcome and encouraged. In addition to facilitating new student and faculty contributions within the field of scholarly publishing, the PALNI Open Press fosters and promotes equal, equitable, and free access to its hosted content by all users throughout the world.