Posts by Melanie Schlosser

February 12, 2025

LPC investigates publishing platform accessibility

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by Melanie Schlosser and Shannon Kipphut-Smith

LPC is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to web accessibility this year. The updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act – as well as similar regulations in other parts of the world – are aligned with our values as a community, but will take substantial effort to comply with for most library publishers. To support this work, LPC has teamed up with the Library Accessibility Alliance to provide a variety of professional development opportunities, including  webinars and a themed Documentation Month. Looking outward, we are also using our position as a community hub to investigate one of the elements of web accessibility that library publishers can’t control individually – publishing platforms. 

Creating a list of platforms

With the support of LPC’s Board, a small group of staff and volunteers from both communities made a list of the most-used platforms (based on data from the Library Publishing Directory) and identified a subset of particular interest. The criteria for inclusion were: 

  • The software is in a stable, production version and is still being developed and supported. (Example: We excluded PubPub upon hearing from the PubPub team that they are in the process of moving away from their legacy platform and developing a new one.)
  • The software is publishing-specific. (Example: We included Digital Commons, because it has specific publishing functionality, but excluded DSpace as a repository platform that is incidentally used for publishing.)
  • The software is widely used or emerging (Example: Janeway and Scalar had the same number of users in the Directory [13 each], but Janeway is a new platform that is rapidly growing its user base within library publishing.)

The final list of platforms to investigate was: 

There are a number of other platforms used by our community (including some that were developed by community members, like Manifold), and we hope to reach more of them in a second round of the process. This abbreviated list was a jumping off point to allow us to try out this process. 

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December 18, 2024

How has the field changed in the last 10 years? An excerpt from the 2024 Library Publishing Directory

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Editor’s note: As much as we love the searchable online interface for the Library Publishing Directory, it doesn’t include the introduction found in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction includes a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data that highlights trends and new developments in library publishing as reported by the programs that contribute their information. To make it easier to find, we are republishing that portion of the introduction here.

By the LPC Directory Committee

Key Findings/Overview

In recognition of the Library Publishing Directory’s 10 year anniversary, we took this opportunity to look back at the first Directory from 2014 and to highlight some of the trends and developments we identified in the data from 2014 to 2024.

In this year’s edition of the Directory, we received responses from 179 publishers in 18 countries, and 167 long-form responses are featured in the Directory. The number of respondents has grown gradually since the first Library Publishing Directory in 2014, when 116 library publishers completed the survey. We also see a much higher number in the unique institutions that have participated in the last decade: in the Directory‘s lifetime 383 library programs have responded to the call for entries. Most respondents (92%) represent academic libraries, which is consistent with previous years. Of the remaining respondents, 5% identified their institution type as consortia, 1% as member organizations, and 2% as other.

The survey itself has grown and changed over the years, beginning with just two main sections, Overview and Publishing Activities, in 2014. By 2024 it has grown to include sections on each publishing program’s organization and oversight, partnerships, technologies and services, program highlights, and most recently, policies.

The information we wanted as a community in the first half of the Directory’s life focused on what services to offer, what technologies balance functionality and sustainability, and the quantity of resources, human or otherwise, to dedicate to these efforts. More recently, the community is asking questions about managing existing services, formalizing policies, working in collaboration within and outside of our institutions, and sustaining the people that make all this happen.

In comparing the 2014 and 2024 survey results, we identified a number of positive trends in terms of staffing, technology use, geographic diversity, and publishing program expansion and stability. These positive trends are highlighted here and explained in more detail in the relevant sections below:

  • The Directory has become much more geographically diverse, with publishers from 18 countries contributing in 2024 compared to 5 countries in 2014. 
  • The median age of respondents’ programs has increased 100% from 7 years to 14 years, even as dozens of newly established programs have contributed to the Directory. For example, 53 of the 2024 respondents’ programs did not yet exist when the first Directory was published.
  • In 2014, 61% of respondents were using a proprietary platform for at least one of their publishing initiatives. In 2024, however, less than half (47%) of respondents were using a proprietary platform.
  • Staffing at library publishers has increased 33% from a median of 1.5 FTE in 2014 to 2 FTE in 2024.
  • A typical library publisher added one service between 2014 and 2024, with a median of 10 services offered in 2024 compared to 9 in 2014. The number of possible services identified by the survey increased significantly (29%) over the decade, from 24 to 31.
  • Although services increased in multiple areas, the reported provision of traditional library services such as cataloging and metadata decreased by over 10%.

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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.