We know it’s been quiet on the UBPF front since our launch webinar last fall, but there’s been a lot happening behind the scenes. Here’s a quick round-up of what we’ve been up to AND a save-the-date for an in-person gathering in 2026!
Statement signatories: We have added 26 new signatories to the community statement! Those 24 join the original three communities that kicked off this work – the Association of University Presses, the Library Publishing Coalition, and the Association of Research Libraries. If your organization is not yet a signatory, you can still become one by filling out the Organizational Support Form.
Knowledge Sharing Working Group: This group is working on a brief survey to identify existing resources and professional development needs. Keep your eyes open for that this summer!
Advocacy Working Group: This group has completed a landscape scan and is developing a strategic communications campaign to support university-based publishers in communicating the value of publishing in a university setting to critical audiences.
Ad-hoc signatories working group: There is an option on the Organizational Support Form to indicate that your organization would like to help support the community’s work beyond becoming a signatory. We invited representatives from the organizations that checked that box to a meeting in January where we reviewed the work happening and the gaps that still needed filling. The conversation was so productive that the group decided to keep meeting as a sort of ad-hoc working group. This group will keep an eye on the progress of the working groups, help connect their work to important audiences, and fill in support gaps for the facilitating organizations. (For example, a member of the signatories group stepped up to co-facilitate the Knowledge Sharing Working Group.) This group is also taking the place – for now – of the planned cross-working group leadership meetings, though we do hope to still create an opportunity for the different working groups to meet with each other.
UBPF Group Hub in Knowledge Commons: At our launch webinar, we invited anyone who was interested in being a part of this community to register on Knowledge Commons and join the UBPF Group Hub. Our hope was that this would enable asynchronous discussion and community formation. However, due to a combination of technical hurdles (people having trouble signing up) and lack of facilitator bandwidth for seeding those conversations, this hasn’t happened. The signatories group is aware of this as a gap in our planned set of activities, and is thinking about alternative communications strategies to keep the community in the loop.
UBPF gathering, June 2026: The AUPresses 2026 Annual Meeting and the 2026 Library Publishing Forum are both taking place in June in Seattle, WA. We deliberately scheduled them a day apart so that we could co-host a day of joint programming (June 16) that would welcome participants from both conferences (and anyone who just wants to pop in for the day). Plans for that event are still in development, but we are tentatively planning for it to be University-Based Publishing Futures-themed, so please pencil it in! In addition to giving us our first opportunity to gather in person, that event will serve as a check-in point for the community. The working groups are considering it a deadline for their current work packages, so it will be a good moment to think about next steps for this community.