April 25, 2018
University of Pittsburgh: Making progress toward community-owned infrastructure
By Lauren Collister
As we gear up for the Library Publishing Forum and the start of a new membership year in July, we are publishing a series of member profiles. These profiles will showcase the wide variety of publishing work happening at member institutions, and celebrate our community’s contributions to the wider publishing landscape. Many thanks to the members who agreed to answer our questions! See all of the published profiles, and look for a new one each week until the Forum.
To learn more about their program, check out Pitt’s latest Library Publishing Directory entry.
Tell us a bit about your publishing program.
Our journal publishing program was a natural outgrowth of our work with subject-based open access repositories going back to 2001. We were among the first libraries to offer publishing services to partners outside our home institution. Today, we publish 40 peer reviewed journals with about half of our partners external to Pitt, as well as four subject-based archives and an institutional repository. Our portfolio includes titles in the humanities, social sciences, technology, law, and health sciences. Our partners are diverse and range from Pitt student groups, scholarly societies, and teams of independent scholars around the world. We are committed to making open access a reality for publication and realize that libraries can do more than advocate – we can take action in this space to lower the costs of publishing and make tangible progress towards making scholarship available to all to read and use. Whenever we can, we use open source software for our publishing and our repositories because we believe that the best future is one where the community owns the infrastructure.
