Roles and Responsibilities for Community Publishing

After your group has approved their shared goals, research questions, and audience, turn to implementation. Discuss the roles, platforms, and work products associated with each implementation step. Discuss the tasks associated with each role. Discuss the timelines associated with each role. Ask team members to take on roles, and document these commitments. Not all of these roles will be active at the same time, so some people may fulfill different roles in different parts of the process.

Depending on the nature of your project and its outputs, you will need people to fill roles such as:

Meeting coordinators / project managers (2)

Coordinators lead administrative activities and often maintain working infrastructure. They convene meetings, communicate between meetings, and liaise to any vendors or groups the team is working with. They often provide tech support, adding people to platforms, reminding everyone to use platforms, and providing a wayfinding service for people who are lost about where to go to find what they need. As the agenda holders, they often keep up with action items and timelines, reminding the group of self-imposed deadlines and recapping decisions.

It is helpful to have two co-coordinators who can share the burden of coordinating the project and its participants, or to rotate coordinators every few months. Coordinators who also serve as writers or editors will have less capacity for their secondary roles. Rotating coordinators requires smooth communication and handoffs and is more work than having one person in the role indefinitely, but it provides greater participation opportunities for team members to engage in different activities throughout the project.

The Facilitation and Project Management section expands on coordination and project management.

Research designers (2+)

Research designers should focus on three key areas of work: instrument design, data analysis, and research outreach. Research designers co-create instruments with the group and lead their completion. They lead decisions on data analysis tools and methodologies to adopt. They analyze data solo or coordinate co-analysis of the data with the group, depending on their chosen analysis methods.

They also serve as research outreach coordinators. They develop research outreach messaging that the project outreach coordinator can polish and send. They participate in sharing the research instruments with identified audience members.

The Research section expands on designing and executing research.

Writers (2+)

Writers review relevant literature, analyze (or work with research designers to analyze) collected data, and write the content. Many writers does not necessarily make lighter work, but many writers will enrich your publication with different perspectives.

During the editing process, the Editor(s), project team, and community reviewers suggest edits and make comments. The writers make edits that they consent to, and perform further research as inspired to resolve questions.

The writers can work with the team editor(s) to respond to comments after community review. This additional layer of communication is not required, but sometimes it is helpful to chat through how to communicate, especially if the decision was to not take the suggested revision.

The Write and Edit sections expand on these activities.

Editors (1+)

Editors co-create the shape and voice of the paper with writers. They help at a few points in the community publishing workflow. The first task that editors can do is bring sections authored by different contributors together into one coherent work for an Internal Review.

During internal review, they look for opportunities to expand explanations and add sources. They propose ideas about moving around sections, changing voice, removing or adding sections, and other editing in the name of deeper clarity.

During community review, the team editor(s) can work with the writers to respond to comments. Editors ensure that the comments are addressed. They wrangle writers to make edits, pointing them toward comments they think are important to address. They help determine what research is needed to address deeper questions uncovered by the review process. They may address some comments themselves, too.

Another important role editors can take on is documenting the community reviewers who comment or suggest changes in-line. This is best done before accepting suggested in-line changes and closing out addressed comments. Keep a list of everyone who has contributed to the document for the Acknowledgements.

The Edit section expands on these activities.

Community review lead (1+)

The community review lead creates the community review document, manages version control between different rounds of review, develops outreach messaging, and manages permissions on the document. If the group does not put together a timeline for community review during their planning phase, the community review lead can establish and share a plan and timeline for community review.

Setting up the community review document is more than a quick copy and paste: it involves describing context and potentially pre-filling some comments or questions in the document for reviewers to consider.

While it helps to have one person in charge of version control and permissions, the other communications tasks can be split up among additional team members.

The Community Review section expands on these activities.

Copyeditors (1+)

After the editor has gotten the writers to finish writing, the copyeditor arrives to simplify and polish the writing. They address complicated language and syntax constructions, and they review the work for grammar, typos, and other minute changes.

Copyediting occurs once, after community review edits are complete and before proofreading.

The Copyedit section expands on these activities.

Proofreaders (1+)

Proofreaders ensure that formatting, numbering, and headings are displayed correctly, and they also serve as a second pair of eyes for grammar and typo mistakes.

Proofreaders can be the same people as the editors or copyeditors, but it’s helpful to have someone who has not already been as enmeshed in the details of the publication do at least one of the proofreads.

Proofreading occurs at least twice: Once after community review, as a final step before moving on to layout and design. Then again after layout and design, where new errors are often introduced.

The Proofread section expands on these activities.

Publication Designer (1)

The publication designer moves the publication from a finished text to a publishable draft, usually by designing and implementing consistent formatting, typesetting, and layout styles. They should have either 1) access to design software they can use to stage the publication, or 2) interest and capacity to develop a layout in a markdown editor, Libre Office Writer, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or similar word processing software.

The Design section expands on these activities.

Graphic Designer (1+)

Graphic designers create data visualizations and prepare them to the publication designer’s specifications. They may curate images for a cover page or other graphic illustrations throughout the work. They may create or work with the publication designer to create the cover page.

The Cover Page section expands on graphic design activities.

Accessibility Reviewer (1)

Accessibility reviewers identify and address accessibility issues in research instruments, internal platforms (if needed), and design platforms. They identify and address accessibility issues after layout and design is complete, but before the final proofread has occurred.

The Accessibility Review section expands on these activities.

Repository manager (1)

You will need a repository to deposit your community-led publication. That repository needs to provide you with a digital object identifier (DOI). If the repository is not pre-determined by an institutional host for the project, the repository manager leads the selection of the repository in conversation with the team.

They develop and manage project metadata in the repository, and they ingest the complete publication into the selected repository. The platform administrator should ensure that all authors and co-editors are acknowledged on the publication record or publication page; sometimes this involves requesting that people create accounts or approve being tagged.

Some groups may have institutional support for repository management and do not need to source selection and management labor from the team. Even in these situations, someone on the team should serve as the repository liaison. The repository liaison can work with institutional staff to ensure metadata completeness and any other functionality or settings that are required to accessibly serve the publication to users.

The Deposit section expands on these activities.

Outreach coordinator (1+)

Outreach coordinators send messages developed by research designers and community review leads during the writing and editing process. They plan and execute a multi-channel publication launch as the project nears completion. They own the outreach list, and they coordinate outreach among the team, ensuring that everyone gets an opportunity to communicate about the project (including themselves!).

It’s usually best for the person closest to the work to create a first draft of communications, so research designers and community review leads should write the first draft of their public communications. The outreach coordinator may coach or ask questions to facilitate past a writer’s block. The outreach coordinator can then polish the message.

It is possible to skip assigning a single outreach coordinator, and distribute the role among the team, putting the outreach labor on creators. I like to have a separate role if possible. Outreach coordinators can speed up getting communications out the door. The writing process gets very tiring by the end for writers, with so much analysis, thoughtful editing, and conversation about the topic. Passing the baton to an outreach coordinator after creation can be a well-earned break for writers, research designers, and other creators in your project, and provide for a successful launch.

The Share section expands on outreach tactics.