Posts by Melanie Schlosser

January 19, 2018

Upcoming webinar with Creative Commons USA

Do you use Creative Commons licenses? Do you have questions about how best to implement them in your publishing? Do you find yourself wondering what constitutes “noncommercial” use or what the heck “share alike” means? Make sure to tune in at 1pm EST on Tuesday, January 30th for a webinar titled “Copyright and Creative Commons: Publishing with open licenses,” hosted by the Professional Development Committee and presented by staff from Creative Commons USA.

Can’t make the webinar? Not at a member institution? Our webinar recordings are made freely available on our website, so check back in February!

January 8, 2018

New resource: Publishers and Service Providers List

As part of our new Publishers and Service Providers Program, LPC is releasing a new resource for the library publishing community: the Publishers and Service Providers List. The list is a place where any organization eligible for the larger program (non- and for-profit publishers and service providers that work with, or provide services of interest to, library publishers) can indicate its interest in working with library publishers. Check out the list page for further details about how the list is created and updated.

We will continue to add to the list as new inquiries come in, but as of today, it includes the following organizations: bepress, BiblioLabs, Project MUSE, Overleaf, Public Knowledge Project, PKP Publishing Services, Scholastica, Ubiquity Press, and Veruscript. (See the list page for more information about each of them.) We are delighted to have so many organizations on board at launch, and would especially note the impressive array of options for journal hosting. We hope to see the list continue to expand in future – both in number and in scope. Other organizations we would like to see on the list include additional platforms and tools (open source, commercial, and hosted), preservation services, discovery services and platforms, editorial and publishing workflow support services, and publishers who are interested in partnering with libraries on publishing projects. If you work with an organization that works with library publishers – or would like to – fill out the inquiry form to request inclusion on the list.

We hope that this list will help connect library publishers with crucial support, and further strengthen the ecosystem of scholarly publishing. Let us know what you think!

View the List

January 2, 2018

New year, slight change to the blog

Happy New Year, library publishers! Since we launched our new website in October, we’ve really enjoyed having a blog where we can quickly share information with the community and do some informal publishing. When we originally set it up, we turned on the commenting function so that readers would have an opportunity to participate in the conversation. We were not, however, terribly surprised when we didn’t get any. Blog commenting in general has become less useful as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gained prominence, and it’s increasingly common for news sites and other online publications to disable commenting. The amount of time we spend moderating spam comments is pretty minimal [1], and if the comments function was proving useful to the community, we would happily invest that time to keep the content human-generated. As it is, we have made the decision to instead turn off commenting and focus our website-maintaining energy elsewhere. This is an easily-reversible decision, and one we will happily revisit in future if the need arises. In the meantime, we would encourage you to comment on LPC blog posts on the listserv (members), on Twitter (everyone), or on your own blog (feel free to send us a link that we can share).

[1] And, honestly, it was all worth it when we got a spam comment that read, “Your goal is to breed all the different dragons available to you.”

December 19, 2017

Announcing our new Publishers and Service Providers Program

As the year draws to a close, we have one more big announcement: the official launch of LPC’s new Publishers and Service Providers Program! The Publishers and Service Providers Program is a multi-tier sponsorship program designed to provide opportunities for its participants to engage with the community of library publishers. To ensure that it is welcoming to a wide range of organizations, the program also includes a free tier consisting of inclusion in LPC’s Publishers and Service Providers list (coming in 2018).

While we have always relied on sponsors to support the Library Publishing Forum, we have not been able to provide opportunities for sponsors and community members to engage during the other 363 days of the year. The new program still includes Forum-only tiers, but it also provides opportunities for organizations who want to participate more fully in the LPC community. Year-round benefits include participation in LPC’s listserv, attendance at member-only events, and the opportunity to present a vendor webinar.

This new program is a companion to our Strategic Affiliates Program, which is focused on peer membership organizations. The Publishers and Service Providers Program is much broader, and is appropriate for a wide range of non- and for-profit organizations. Both programs are intended to help the LPC develop closer relationships with other organizations in our space, to raise the profile of library publishing, and to help our members make connections that will benefit their publishing programs.

Interested in participating? Just fill out this form to get the ball rolling!