Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, February 26. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. The candidates are:
- Willa Tavernier, Indiana University, Bloomington
- Alissa Miller, Middle Tennessee State University
- Amanda Hurford, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI)
- Mike Nason, University of New Brunswick
- Kate Shuttleworth, Simon Fraser University
- Justin Gonder, California Digital Library
- Sarah Wipperman, Villanova University
Each candidate has provided a brief biography and an election statement; this year we have also asked candidates to provide a statement on anti-racism.
Willa Tavernier
Bio: As the Open Scholarship Diversity Resident Librarian at Indiana University, Bloomington, I work with the repository and journals program. Our program publishes over 50 journals, and we currently manage two repositories one of which is dedicated to hosting publications subject to the faculty Open Access Policy.
I regularly discuss scholarly publishing issues with faculty in serving on the Bloomington Faculty Council Libraries Committee, and with collection managers as Bloomington Library Faculty Liaison (through June 2021) to our Collection Development Committee.
I manage the campus Open Access Article Publishing Fund, execute open access publishing workflows, conduct data analysis to inform evidence-based workflow adjustments, conduct outreach, and recruit content. I also consult with faculty on research impact generally and for dossier preparation. I also serve on the library’s Diversity Committee sub-group on community partnerships.
My current research interests are community-building in scholarly communication and sustainable models for scholarly publishing.
Candidate statement: What I value most about LPC is the sense of community. I’ve really benefited from this by taking part in the mentorship program, serving on the (then) Directory Task Force, and serving on as well as acting as one of the rotating chairs of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force. These experiences introduced me to the collaborative and supportive work environment within LPC, provided support, and created opportunities to meet others in the field. In addition, serving on the DEI Task Force allowed me to engage deeply with an issue that I had little experience with, learn from others, examine my own privilege, and work toward community-building, equity, and inclusion within LPC, and in my own work.
Whether or not I am elected a Board member, I will continue to advocate for the LPC to anchor our work in our values. I’m interested in continuing to identify ways for LPC to support members’ needs, as well as support members’ in serving all stakeholders within their communities. At the same time, I am keenly interested in ways for the LPC itself to become a more equitable and inclusive organization and to actively seek ways to include a wider, more diverse, range of institutions in our membership. I envision the LPC working to expand opportunities for full participation in our communities at all levels, and I will work with dedication and humility in service of this.
Statement of anti-racist practice: Systemic racism exists and continues to operate to limit and harm the lives of, and create barriers to opportunity for indigenous people, black people, and people of color (BIPOC). The culture of scholarly communication, including library publishing, operates to reproduce these limitations and barriers and to exclude the stories, culture, and imperatives of BIPOC persons. I am conscious of my privilege as a middle-class, highly-educated, cisgender, heterosexual woman which exists alongside my experiences of marginalization within library science. To advance liberation I mentor a (self-described) black queer Ph.D. student, I champion intentional inclusionary student hiring and empathetic hiring processes in my department, and I provide ongoing support to our students and my colleagues in the latter endeavor. I seek ways to expand our department’s services to those that serve underrepresented and minority populations by reaching out to and partnering on projects with IU Bloomington’s Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library and our Area Studies Librarians. My research challenges governance in scholarly communication and advocates for alternatives to commercial publishing. I’ve served for 2 years on the LPC DEI Taskforce, currently working to finalize a Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. I currently serve on two ACRL Residency Interest Group sub-committees (through June 2021)- on assessment, and on residencies. In both sub-committees, we are developing resources to support institutions and residents with the overarching goal of recruiting and retaining a more diverse academic library workforce. I’m committed to listening, learning, and acting intentionally to expand equity and inclusion in the LPC community.
Amanda Hurford
Bio: Amanda Hurford is the Scholarly Communications Director for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI), a library consortium supporting 24 small private institutions. In her role at PALNI, she develops and supports scholarly communications initiatives, raising awareness of topics such as open access publishing and open educational resources. Under Amanda’s direction, the PALNI Press was recently formalized as a collaborative library publishing service available to the PALNI-supported institutions, and the Publishing Services Admin Team was formed to support it.
Amanda directs the PALSave Affordable Learning Program, which includes the publication of open textbooks. She was instrumental in securing a half-million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. to fund PALSave. She also serves as Co-Project Lead for the IMLS-supported Hyku for Consortia grant, a cross-consortial project to scale up an ultra-low cost institutional repository service for academic libraries in PALNI and beyond. In former positions, Amanda spent over a decade managing and growing digital cultural heritage repositories, enjoying the process of making previously undiscoverable content available to the world.
She has held leadership service roles on the Open Education Network Steering Committee, LPC’s Professional Development Committee, Indiana Digital Preservation (InDiPres, a MetaArchive member), Indiana Memory DPLA Service Hub, and Academic Libraries of Indiana. Amanda holds a Master of Library Science with a specialization in Library Technology Management from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Candidate statement: When PALNI joined LPC in 2018, it was incredibly impactful to my growth as a library publisher. What started as a learning experience quickly escalated, and I soon became an active practitioner in the community. I began presenting with knowledgeable colleagues at the Library Publishing Forum, and I joined the Professional Development Committee in 2019. Last year I became Chair of that committee, and it’s been fulfilling to connect library publishers with each other and helpful resources, via initiatives such as the Peer Mentorship Program and Community Calls.
I want to serve on the LPC Board to build on my experience and contribute to this amazing community who puts values in the foreground and works to meet its members’ needs. At PALNI, I’ve experienced community leadership, and I enjoy it very much. To listen to the voices of our community, explore ideas until a scoped need arises, and finally help implement a resulting service has been truly rewarding. I believe this collaborative ethos would translate well in the LPC leadership environment, as well as a few of my other strengths: service documentation, policy review, and landscape scanning.
Serving on the Board, my goal would be to contribute my skills and knowledge however they may benefit the community the most. Specifically, I would like to help ensure the stability and growth of the organization. As LPC’s strategic plan runs through 2023, I would enjoy reviewing current goals and helping to develop the next iteration of the LPC strategic plan.
Statement of anti-racist practice: As the Scholarly Communications Director for PALNI, a major value driving my work is the promotion of equitable access by all to research outputs, learning materials, and opportunities to disseminate scholarship. Equally influential to me are PALNI’s organizational values, which promote equal opportunities and a welcoming, inclusive, and respectful workplace which recognizes and embraces differences. We have policies expressing that, as a collective, we do not discriminate on the basis of race or other characteristics in our operations.
Recently collaborating on a diversity statement for the PALNI Press was an opportunity to incorporate anti-racist practice in our library publishing program’s infancy. It identifies our platforms as a mechanism to promote scholastic and creative outputs from different voices and viewpoints. In this policy, diversity in authors, peer-reviewers, and editorial groups are expressly encouraged. Our policy also describes how, as an open access publisher, we promote equal, equitable, and free access to our content by all users.
I take these values and policies seriously and allow them to be present in my everyday work. I understand that anti-racism is not simply the absence of racist action or rhetoric — rather it is to actively oppose racism and to act consciously to promote equity. I continue to learn and seek out media reflecting anti-racist and anti-oppressive values, and I look for ways to apply them in my life. If given the opportunity to serve on the LPC Board, I’ll apply those same values in the work we do.
Mike Nason
Bio: Mike Nason is the Scholarly Communications and Publishing Librarian at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He is also the Metadata and Crossref Liaison with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and a PKP Publishing Services team member. At UNB, Mike has been involved in the hosting and production of journals within OJS and XML typesetting and technical work since 2006 at the Centre for Digital Scholarship within UNB Libraries. He is involved in digital publishing projects, including conference proceeding collections (OCS and OJS), monographs (OMP), research data (Dataverse), and manages UNB Scholar, UNB’s Institutional Repository (Islandora). He currently serves on the Coalition Publica technical committee and is the chair of their metadata working group, a two-year project to establish better metadata practices for the Coalition Publica membership and broader OJS community. He serves on the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ (CARL) Open Repositories Working Group, the Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL) Open Educational Resources Committee, is involved in co-development projects between PKP and Crossref, and is the current chair of the ORCID-CA governing committee as part of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) consortia.
Candidate statement: In 2006, I started working as a “text encoder” at UNB Libraries. After five years of performing that work and having the opportunity to attend conferences, make connections with staff at PKP, and learn more about publishing, I wrapped up my MA. I started my MLIS to “make things official.” I was more than lucky to graduate with an opportunity to work in my hometown of Fredericton at UNB Libraries and, though other responsibilities dilute my direct involvement with our publishing work, I still find myself deeply involved in discussions around publishing with faculty, service providers, librarians, not-for-profit service providers, administrators, and funding agency representatives. The through-line has always focused on helping researchers of all stages better understand publishing, their rights, their responsibilities, and the emergent narratives that shape the decisions they’ll make.
This is, to my estimation, what the Library Publishing Coalition is all about. As a board member, I will continue to connect the dots. I will work with and for the library publishing community. I will learn from that community. I will keep pushing to expose the ubiquity and necessity of open scholarly infrastructure; to promote open source and open access. I will continue to try to make scholarship available to the public. I will continue to furrow my brow at exploitative or opportunistic practices from large publishers. I will continue to make connections, ask questions, draw attention, and improve publishing and metadata literacy with articulation, care, and gesticulation.
Statement of anti-racist practice: I acknowledge that everything about my life and career is a product of privilege. I am a white, cis-gendered male who works in academia in a small Canadian province of, overwhelmingly, white people. I work on the unsurrendered and unceded traditional lands of Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet). This territory is covered by the Treaties of Peace and Friendship, which the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. I know that this – our University-approved territorial statement – is not praxis.
I acknowledge that academia is an engine for reproducing the political goals of whiteness, settler-colonialism, and empire. The hierarchies into which I was born are built on colonial violence, gendered violence, and racial violence, and that my nation continues to participate in this imperial narrative.
I acknowledge the difficulty, longevity, discomfort, and never-ending nature of the decolonial project. To re-shape or dismantle our institutions and reconstitute them in a way that permanently breaks white domination, we must make room for something new. We must listen. We must hold one another accountable, push against the norms of capital, and sit with our discomfort. We must question our employers, impulses, and colleagues.
I acknowledge, lastly, that my role as a librarian is limited. I am committed to providing access to knowledge and scholarship. I am committed to chipping away at the ivory tower. I am committed to making space. I am committed to asking questions and being questioned. I am committed to listening more and talking less.
Kate Shuttleworth
Bio: Kate is the Digital Publishing Librarian at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, Canada, and a Publishing Support Specialist with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). At SFU Kate oversees the library publishing program which hosts and provides support for 40 open access journals, one scholarly press, 4 monographs, and 3 sets of conference proceedings. The program’s focus is on providing guidance and support towards ethical publishing practices, and offering a venue for important scholarly and educational knowledge on niche topics and scholarship that falls in the margins between disciplines. Kate is particularly active in promoting open access publishing projects in for-credit classroom environments, and, along with her co-authors, was awarded an honorable mention for the 2020 Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing for a paper on using course journals in the classroom to support open pedagogy and information literacy.
At PKP, Kate contributes to community-based, sustainable open source publishing infrastructure by contributing to documentation and usability projects to support a global community of academic publishers using PKP’s open source publishing software.
Kate currently serves as a member of the LPC’s Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board. She has an MLIS from the University of British Columbia, and has previously worked as a Digital Scholarship Librarian, where she was responsible for campus outreach in support of the University’s Open Access Policy, and as a Community Scholars Librarian, where she worked to connect local non-profits and charities with information literacy skills and research techniques for using published academic research in their work.
Candidate statement: As an early-career librarian and a relative newcomer to the Library Publishing community, I am grateful for the knowledge and guidance shared so generously with me by members of the library publishing community. My contributions as a member of the Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board allow me to contribute to this sharing of knowledge and expertise that is fundamental to the mission of the LPC. Joining the LPC Board would allow me to further contribute back to this community and support others in developing and strengthening their practices, while encouraging the continual sharing of resources and expertise that are key to the LPC’s mission.
I bring various perspectives which would benefit the LPC and library publishing community in different ways. As an early-career librarian, I bring fresh ideas, enthusiasm, and the ability to relate to and understand the needs of others who are starting out in the library publishing field. Through my work with the Public Knowledge Project, I bring knowledge of sustainable open infrastructure and a global, multilingual, and diverse publishing community. And as a librarian working in a Canadian context, I bring a particular interest and focus on decolonizing publishing practices to create more inclusive and equitable systems of knowledge sharing. As a Board member, I would be interested in opportunities to support the LPC in its goal to support library publishing across geographic and cultural contexts. I also bring a background in communications which would allow me to contribute to developing strategies towards advocating for and raising awareness about library publishing.
Statement of anti-racist practice: In British Columbia, I live and work on the traditional, unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) First Nations. I am committed to antiracist and decolonial practices which centre underrepresented voices and ways of knowing. Working within a Canadian context, I am particularly concerned with opportunities to decolonize publishing practices, and centre Indigenous ways of knowing, while acknowledging colonial violence, racism, and structural inequalities embedded within our institutions and broader society.
Equity, diversity, inclusion are central to the work I do, both at SFU and PKP. I am a founding member and inaugural chair of the PKP Equity and Inclusion Team which exists to recommend practices to improve organizational transparency and prioritize the inclusion and experiences of members of equity-seeking groups within PKP, its decision-making processes and leadership, and its community. I am also a member of the SFU Library’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group, which acts in an advisory capacity to promote policies and practices that are antiracist, which name and dismantle inequities, and which serve the cause of social justice. My work in and beyond these groups includes a great deal of personal learning and development, as well as organizing reading and discussion groups with library colleagues to explore topics of decolonization of scholarly publishing, and working with PKP colleagues to identify options for decolonizing publishing practices within OJS.
Justin Gonder
Bio: As Senior Product Manager, Publishing at California Digital Library (CDL) Justin oversees a portfolio of publishing initiatives and manages a team of product managers and technical staff. His primary responsibility is eScholarship, the University of California’s open access publishing platform and institutional repository, which publishes more than 90 open access journals and nearly 300,000 scholarly works affiliated with over 400 UC departments and research units. Through his many years of experience running services at scale to support the goals of individual authors and campus publishing partners, Justin has acquired deep and broad knowledge of the library publishing landscape. He is intimately familiar with the goals, needs, and constraints of authors, editors, and administrators. In addition to providing strategic management for CDL’s locally developed platform eScholarship, he has direct working knowledge of many of the core community based tools, including PKP’s OJS, OMP, and OPS; Birkbeck’s Janeway (for both journals and preprints); Manifold; and Editoria. He has also represented stakeholder needs in development efforts internally and externally.
Candidate statement: Justin has been an active member of the Library Publishing Coalition community since 2014. He currently represents CDL in the Library Publishing Workflow Project and is in his second year on the Library Publishing Forum Program Committee, this year as chair. As a Program Committee member, he worked with colleagues to rapidly and successfully transition the 2020 Forum to be entirely online, thereby successfully navigating the unforeseen challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In his current role as Program Committee chair, Justin is providing similar leadership by working to refine the 2021 Forum based on lessons learned from last year’s online effort. Through his engagement on the Workflow Project and the Forum Program Committee, he has gained firsthand knowledge of the diversity of LPC member organizations and their priorities, ambitions, and challenges. Justin is particularly interested in furthering community support for academy-owned infrastructure, developing models for supporting library publishing activities at scale, and adapting operations to meet the evolving demands of the rapidly changing world.
Statement of anti-racist practice: I acknowledge that systemic racism is prevalent throughout society including in the academy, within scholarly communication and also in library publishing. In order to help realize a just future, I work to actively to elevate and amplify voices that have been historically sidelined. As co-facilitator of the 2020 FSCI course “Tools and Best Practices for Publishing an Open Access Journal: A Workshop for Beginners,” diversity, equity and inclusion was made a core theme that students were asked to engage with throughout the two-week course. As the Forum Program Committee chair, I am working with the committee to ensure that issues at the intersection of scholarly communication and social justices are brought front and center. While I try always to seek out diverse perspectives in my work, I recognize the ways that my own privilege can sometimes make me unaware of inequities and injustices. I therefore pledge to engage in ongoing, lifelong learning and openly welcome input and feedback as to how I can step up as an advocate and ally.
Sarah Wipperman
Bio: Sarah Wipperman started working at Villanova University’s Falvey Library in January 2020 and is excited to expand Villanova’s scholarly communication services and infrastructures, including building an institutional repository and publishing program. Previously, Sarah worked at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, first managing Penn’s institutional repository, ScholarlyCommons, developing services, workflows, and creative staffing programs to support this initiative and to expand it into a publishing program. She then worked with the Digital Scholarship team to expand the capacity of researchers at Penn to create and share new kinds of scholarship. Sarah additionally led the development of SCUBA (Scholarly Communication UnBoxed Activities) and many of the beprexit (“bepress exit”) initiatives to move the institutional repository off of bepress and onto an open source system. Sarah has a Master in Law from Penn Law with a focus on copyright and contracts, and she is “all but thesis” for an MPhil in Organizational Dynamics with a focus on service design and leading emergence.
Candidate statement: Honestly, I just really love LPC. I think this is a fantastic organization filled with amazing, accomplished members; I want to take a more active role in guiding the future of this organization, helping it to continue to live up to its mission and values, and being an advocate for the LPC community. I have spent nearly a decade building both successful and, to be frank, unsuccessful publishing programs. Having the support of the LPC community has been pivotal for me not just in successes but also in setbacks; I have relied on this community on numerous occasions to help me troubleshoot issues, learn new ways of doing things, and, ultimately, find paths to success. As a member of the LPC Board, I would like to expand and build on LPC’s network in order to promote more knowledge sharing and support activities. I have had the honor of serving on the Research Committee, Library Publishing Editorial Board, and being a peer-mentor in the Mentorship Program, and I believe that there is still so much untapped potential and opportunities for our members to connect, collaborate, and create together. LPC is well-situated to facilitate the emergence of new ideas and cross-institutional partnerships, and I would like to grow its capacity to do so. I believe my background in Organizational Dynamics, experience in building publishing service and workflows, and passion for open access and library-led programs would enable me to be a valuable member of LPC’s Board and advocate for the LPC community.
Statement of anti-racist practice: On an individual level, I actively work to learn more about these issues and how I can take initiative in my own spaces to dismantle the structures that systematically enable and sustain racist and oppressive practices. On an organizational level, I strongly believe that publishing programs can take an active role in anti-racism work and have the ability to raise and amplify the voices of BIPOC and others who have been adversely affected by traditional publishing structures. As I work to build a new institutional repository and other publishing programs at Villanova, I have been working with my colleagues to integrate anti-racism practices at all levels, from our mission to collection development and cataloguing practices. This was also a major part of our Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund that I revamped this summer: one of our criteria for evaluation and questions in the application packet ask how the work contributes to anti-racism and DEI work. I hope to continue to learn and grow in this space and to advocate for reform across libraries.