Posts by Melanie Schlosser

September 20, 2024

Reporting out on the finances of the 2024 Library Publishing Forum

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This is the third of three planned report-outs on this year’s Library Publishing Forum. The other two were on our COVID policy and on the closing plenary discussion. Check them out! 

Conference finances are tricky – ask anyone who has ever planned a multi-day, in-person event. Costs are sometimes unpredictable and revenues almost always are. The last four years have added additional complexities for many conference planners, including wildly fluctuating attendance and binding hotel contracts for events that were forced to go virtual. Conference finances also tend to be somewhat mysterious to attendees, who can be left wondering what their registration fees actually cover and whether the event is intended to break even or to make money for its organizers.  We at LPC are big fans of transparency, so we have decided to report out publicly on the financial details of the Library Publishing Forum. We did this once before (as part of a series of reflections on the 2021 virtual Forum), but our plan is to make it a regular component of Forum planning going forward. To that end, this post will report out on the finances for the in-person Forum held in May of 2024 in Minneapolis, MN. We hope that this post will serve as a resource for fellow conference planners, as well as helping our community better understand the decisions we make around the event.

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September 18, 2024

Wrapping up our 10th anniversary celebration with the LPC Yearbook!

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Our thanks to the LPC community for celebrating our 10th anniversary with us over the last year! We’ve had some great conversations (both nostalgic and forward-looking), we’ve eaten some celebratory cupcakes, we’ve given out a special service award, and we’ve welcomed a batch of new members via our 10th anniversary membership special. Now we are putting the icing on the cake that is this year with the publication of the LPC Yearbook.

The Yearbook is an informal, collaborative publication full of photos and quotes contributed by community members, organized by year. If you’ve ever wondered what LPC’s original website looked like (very Drupal-y), or wanted to see photos of our most iconic conference swag ever (the Pubrarian/Liblisher totes from 2016), or just wanted to take a trip down library publishing memory lane, check it out!

Many thanks to the community members who contributed to the Yearbook, but especially Katherine Skinner and Justin Gonder for the wealth of photography.

Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below
August 13, 2024

A 10-Year Vision for Library Publishing (LPForum24 Closing Plenary Reflection)

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The 2024 Library Publishing Forum opened with a keynote address that looked back on LPC’s first 10 years. Katherine Skinner reflected on the formation of the community, its original goals, and what it has accomplished. For long-time community members, the talk was a trip down memory lane. For newer folks, it was a stellar orientation. It also fit beautifully with our 10th anniversary theme for the conference, but it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it provided grounding for the real conversation we wanted to have at the event: where we want to be 10 years in the future. 

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June 24, 2024

Reflecting on the 2024 LPForum COVID policy

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A back view of Katherine Skinner, keynote speaker, with McNamara Memorial Hall in the background
Katherine Skinner gives the keynote at the 2024 Library Publishing Forum. Image credit: Adria Carpenter/U of M Libraries

 

Multiple groups within LPC spent months developing a COVID policy for this year’s in-person Library Publishing Forum. Now that the event is behind us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how the policy was developed, how it worked in practice, and the feedback we received from the community. I hope that this blog post, in conjunction with the policy itself, will serve as a resource for other conference planners.

Policy recap

Our COVID policy was designed around three principles:

  1. As the organizers, we have a responsibility to provide the safest possible conference for our community. In the same way that we provide attendees with chairs to sit on and meals to eat, and speakers with microphones so that everyone can hear them, it is our job to provide attendees with a safe conference environment.
  2. Each attendee has a responsibility of care to the rest of the community. This principle is grounded in our community Code of Conduct, which lays out an expectation that community members will follow health guidelines.
  3. The policy needed to be flexible enough that attendees could determine which precautions were possible for them without having to disclose private medical information to conference staff and other attendees.

Once these principles were clear, the policy itself was fairly straightforward: we would provide masks, tests, supplemental air filtration, and boxed meals that could be taken outside; and attendees would manage their own COVID precautions (encouraged by copious and emphatic messaging before and during the conference). There is more detail in the full policy, including a list of precautions that we encouraged attendees to take, but the overall message was that everyone needs to do their part.

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June 18, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: Érudit

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LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

 

About

Website: https://www.erudit.org/
X (Twitter): @eruditorg
Strategic affiliate since: 2024

Érudit is the leading research dissemination platform in Canada, specializing in the humanities and social sciences. Supported by an inter-university consortium, it provides French and English research communities with a range of services in digital publishing and dissemination. Visit erudit.org to learn more.

Érudit works with the Public Knowledge Project in Coalition Publica, a partnership to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Together, we are supporting the social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable open access.

We are developing a non-commercial, open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research—combining Open Journal Systems and the erudit.org platform—as well as research investigating the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

We publish research notes and reports on developments in scholarly publishing, the digital dissemination of research and culture, and the open science movement.

We host webinars of interest to the library and journal communities, a few recent examples include:

We work with journals and libraries to improve metadata quality in OJS, particularly for multilingual publications, here are some guides we’ve produced:

Subscribe to Érudit’s newsletter to keep up to date!

Collaborations

In 2022–2023 Érudit, through Coalition Publica, participated in the LPC Canadian Community Development Working Group, which identified areas of common interest for our organizations and communities. With Érudit now an LPC strategic affiliate, we look forward to sharing progress and expertise to advance Diamond and institutionally supported open access publishing.

June 6, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: Public Knowledge Project

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LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

About

Website: https://pkp.sfu.ca/
X (Twitter): @pkp
Mastodon: mastodon.social/@PublicKnowledgeProject
Strategic affiliate since: 2017

A core research facility of Simon Fraser University, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is the world’s most widely used free and open source software for scholarly publishing. Open Journal Systems (OJS) is used by more than 44,000 active journals publishing in 148 countries, and more than 12 million articles have been published in journals using OJS. The 3.4 version of the software works with 70 languages, and journals themselves are publishing with OJS in more than 60 languages.

PKP is more than free software. We believe in community-led, scholar-owned publishing, and for this to be possible we provide the tools to do the work – PKP Community Forum, GitHub, open documentation, PKP School, free and open events, development news webinars, annual PKP Software Sprints, community governance, interest groups, research, and more. This means that scholars can download the software, and then have the knowledge and power to use it. Upon request from communities who prefer to have PKP host their platforms, we also provide PKP Publishing Services.

There is no open access without open infrastructure, and we’re pleased to be part of Coalition Publica, in partnership with Érudit, to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Together, we are supporting the social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable open access.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Our resources are free and open to the community. Some examples are the PKP Community Forum, GitHub, open documentation, PKP School, free and open events, developer updates, the Archipelago Community Newsletter (click on the “Community Newsletter” category), annual PKP Software Sprints, community governance, interest groups, research, and YouTube.

Sign up for security announcements, developer updates, or our community newsletter, to stay up to date!

Collaborations

The LPC brings together library publishers from around the world, many of whom make extensive use of PKP software applications. PKP is a proud affiliate of the LPC, regularly attending LPC events, and participating on LPC committees and working groups. PKP recently hosted a very successful sprint and preconference alongside the Library Publishing Forum in Minneapolis.

May 1, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association)

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LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

 

About

Website: https://oaspa.org/
X (Twitter): @OASPA
Strategic affiliate since: 2017

OASPA is a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship. Our membership includes scholar-led and professional publishers of books and journals, across varied geographies and disciplines, as well as infrastructure and other services. We are a trusted convenor of the broad, global spectrum of open access stakeholders and a proven venue for productive collaboration.

OASPA works collaboratively with other allied organisations on things we think are important. This includes our continued support of the OA Journals Toolkit with DOAJ, participation in the European Commission-funded DIAMAS and PALOMERA projects, working on the committees for Think. Check. Submit., C4DISC, the OA books author toolkit, and our ongoing support of OA Switchboard.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Collaborations

OASPA is an active participant in the event planning knowledge share calls that LPC hosts, and our regular check-ins with OASPA staff keep LPC’s staff and Board in the know about developing trends in the OA space. Additionally, our two communities work side by side within the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), of which we are both active members.

April 29, 2024

Announcing the winner of LPC’s first ever Service Leadership Award

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We are delighted to announce the Library Publishing Coalition’s first ever Service Leadership Award. Part of our 10th Anniversary celebrations, this award is designed to recognize a community member who has made multiple, sustained contributions to the community through service and leadership over the last five years. Nominations for the award were sought this past fall from current and former Board members, and the winner was selected by the Board.

The awardee

The award goes to Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University). Over the last 5+ years, Joshua has demonstrated ongoing, unwavering commitment to LPC through service. He has stepped into leadership roles when needed, but has also been happy to follow others’ lead and work quietly in the background. Some highlights of his service include his contributions to and stewardship of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, his substantial contributions to LPC’s first Strategic Plan during his term on the Board, his consistent presence on and interim leadership of the Curriculum Editorial Board, and his service on the DEI Committee.

Joshua was nominated for this award by multiple people; here is a quote from one nomination:

“Joshua has given so much of his time and expertise to the LPC community and helped advance the profession in so many ways. He has participated in and/or led multiyear efforts to create and improve the Library Publishing Curriculum and to update the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. These two LPC resources are among the most comprehensive ones freely provided to the library publishing community, and they raise LPC’s profile in the scholarly communications ecosystem. LPC is incredibly lucky to have such a dedicated and talented individual who is willing to give so much back to the community!”

A statement from Joshua:

“I’m so grateful for this honor and without discounting it, I recognize that most of my colleagues in library publishing have given just as much to this first decade of the coalition, and many have given more. I’m so grateful for this coalition, and the inventive, thoughtful, generous, skilled women and men who make it the unique professional community it is. Perhaps you serve so consistently because your fellow librarians and publishers consistently model service, each of you pushing each other to be the best versions of yourselves. I think that’s what you’ve done with/for/to me, and someone decided to pin an honorarium on it, and I celebrate you for it. Thank you for including me in your remarkable decade, building a new professional coalition, an exemplary body of practice, and a mutually supportive and generous community. I’m so grateful.”

The award

The award consists of a $1,000 honorarium and travel support to attend the 2024 Library Publishing Forum.

Please join us in congratulating Joshua and celebrating 10 years of the Library Publishing Coalition Community!

April 17, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: CLOCKSS

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LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

About

Name: CLOCKSS
Website: https://clockss.org/
X (Twitter): @CLOCKSSArchive
Strategic affiliate since: 2021

CLOCKSS is a community-led collaboration of academic publishers and research libraries around the world, working together to provide a sustainable online archive. Together we ensure the long-term survival of our shared intellectual heritage.

At CLOCKSS, we provide services to libraries and publishers built over the award winning LOCKSS software, to instill confidence in authors, scholars, policy makers, libraries, and publishers that scholarship is safely and securely preserved for future generations.

How does it work? Simply put more copies = more security. But add to that, the less correlated those copies the safer, the more dependable each copy the safer, and the faster failures get detected and repaired the safer the content is.

CLOCKSS preserves content for a wide array of library publishers around the world, and we are happy to provide advice and guidance about approaches to ensure that the content you publish is protected.

CLOCKSS complements other preservation services and preservation activities at local, national, regional, and international levels. In some cases, our holdings are unique thanks to our trusted relationships. In other cases, we provide necessary resilience. According to the KEEPERS registry, 2,010 of the journals preserved in CLOCKSS are uniquely preserved by us. An independent non-profit, CLOCKSS makes sustaining financial contributions to the broader community of LOCKSS-based preservation services who in turn archive at least 5,244 more unique journal titles.

Digital preservation is an important part of every publisher’s disaster recovery strategy. Be sure you are a part of the solution. Learn more at https://clockss.org/.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Collaborations

From 2021-23, LPC convened a Preservation Task Force (2021-23) which investigated the preservation needs and practices of library publishers, and recommended actions to LPC’s Board to support work in this area. CLOCKSS participated in that group, and has continued their involvement with the follow-up Preservation Working Group, which is currently implementing some of the task force’s recommendations.