LPC Blog

The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.

July 16, 2024

LPC welcomes a new strategic affiliate: the Library Accessibility Alliance

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The Library Publishing Coalition is delighted to welcome the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) as a new strategic affiliate! A statement from LAA:

The Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) promotes equitable access to library services and electronic resources. Our member libraries are committed to providing equal access to information for all library users, and we work together to improve vendor products, educate our community, and advance digital accessibility.

And a statement from LPC on the new relationship:

We have already started partnering with LAA to incorporate more accessibility-related education into our programming, and we’re grateful for their help with this challenging but critical topic. As library publishers struggle to meet accessibility requirements, LPC hopes to serve as a resource for both professional development and advocacy. This partnership is supporting that work and our community.

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.

June 4, 2024

Understanding the Revised ADA Title II: Implications for Library Publishing

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Accessibility is a critical issue for all library activities, but library publishing has a unique set of opportunities and challenges in this area, including web accessibility and production workflows. With ADA Title II regulations going into effect by the end of June, it is important for library publishers to understand what role they will play. The Library Publishing Coalition and the Library Accessibility Alliance will co-host a webinar on this topic on Tuesday, June 18, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time.  

Join Pete Bossley, former Deputy ADA Coordinator at The Ohio State University and current Senior Manager of Accessibility at Thomson Reuters for a 60-minute webinar (30-minute presentation followed by Q&A) about the revisions to ADA Title II and its implications for library publishing. He will discuss what public entities need to know about their obligations under the new regulations, and what organizations serving these entities can do to support them in meeting those requirements. Angel Peterson, Production Specialist and Accessibility Coordinator at Penn State, as an expert in both digital accessibility and library publishing, will facilitate the Q&A. 

This webinar is critical for all library publishers LPC and LAA members as well as the broader library community to understand these revision requirements and what’s at stake. 

LAA will host the webinar and include American Sign Language interpretation and captioning. A recording of this event will be shared publicly for those who aren’t able to attend.  

This collaborative effort between LPC and LAA is just the first in an ongoing partnership. While libraries and library publishers are beholden to publishers and their platforms, this new partnership seeks to set a path to meaningful collaboration and action toward ensuring our content and systems are accessible.

Speakers

Peter Bossley is an experienced digital accessibility leader, having spent 17 years professionally in the technology field. He currently leads accessibility specialists at Thomson Reuters, working to make products accessible to the widest audience possible. Prior to his role at Thomson Reuters, he led the digital accessibility compliance program at The Ohio State University. He has also provided consulting services to customers in the private and public sector including nationwide retail and food service, state and local government, as well as being an expert witness in federal court for a national disability rights organization. As a person with a disability himself, but with a strong understanding of the challenge of implementing accessibility at scale, he brings a unique and balanced perspective on accessibility issues. He is a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

Angel Peterson is the Production Specialist and Accessibility Coordinator with Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing program. She provides production support for monographs and bibliographies as well as document and web accessibility support and training for all publication types. She has been on the Board of the Library Publishing Coalition since 2023.

Webinar Details

Understanding the Revised ADA Title II: Implications for Library Publishing

Tuesday, June 18, 2024 at 12 PM EDT

Register for Understanding the Revised ADA Title II

May 30, 2024

LPC welcomes Érudit as a new strategic affiliate

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The Library Publishing Coalition is delighted to welcome Érudit as a new strategic affiliate! A statement from Érudit:

With over 5 million users a year, Érudit is Canada’s leading platform for disseminating research 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. 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.

And a statement from LPC on the new relationship:

This new relationship with Érudit builds on our existing partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and our ongoing support of the Canadian community of library publishers (most recently via the Canadian Community Development Working Group). Having both PKP and Érudit as affiliates will allow us to continue to develop our relationships with each community and with their joint endeavor, Coalition Publica. The Canadian library publishing community is a developing model for other regional and consortial publishing efforts, and it is one that LPC is excited to learn from.

Strategic affiliates are peer membership associations who have a focal area in scholarly communications and substantial engagement with libraries, publishers, or both. See our list of strategic affiliates or learn more about the program.

LPC Strategic Affiliates icon

May 8, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Manifold

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Manifold
Website: https://manifoldapp.org/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Manifold works with presses and publishers to create enhanced digital publications that are linked to audio and video files, interactive maps, and other kinds of digital resources. It is an open source project, and libraries have used it most often to create Open Educational Resources, utilizing the reading group and annotation features that Manifold has built to optimize classroom uses. We’ve also seen it used in the library space to give students the chance to become publishers themselves — to assemble and annotate archival material, anthologize their own writings, or to create new editions of classic texts.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We recently released Version 8 of Manifold, which includes a rich text editor so that project creators can make changes to files they’ve ingested into the platform. We’ve tried to make the platform very intuitive and user friendly for everyone, but this is a big step forward in that process. Accessibility has also been an ongoing priority of our work and development of the platform, and we’ve been taking steps to make sure that the Manifold experience, whether that is simply reading, or annotating and engaging, or creating your own project, is as accessible to as many people as it possibly can be.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

A number of our team members are librarians, or have experience working in libraries. We’ve found that libraries and Manifold tend to be “on the same page” in terms of expanding offerings in the open access space, and providing low or no-cost educational materials to students. It has been great to work with library publishers and digital humanities centers to think creatively about what is possible to publish in Manifold; many of these experiments have driven our development of the platform. Recently we’ve seen art exhibit catalogs, audio archives and podcasts, textbooks, all sorts of cool projects coming from this space.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We look forward to seeing some of our users who regularly attend our virtual Manifold Community Meetups in person! It’s also always exciting to see what other projects in the space have been up to, and to check in on the bigger picture things — the state of open infrastructure and the larger institutional questions that a lot of folks are thinking about.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

We are a team of about a dozen working from three locations: the CUNY Graduate Center in New York; the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis; and the development firm Cast Iron Coding in Portland (Oregon). We’ve been meeting regularly online for about a decade now. Every once in a while we get together in person in one of our cities for a more in-depth, in-person discussion, meetings that have been known to lead into late night sessions in bars … Our official team portraitist Jojo Karlin does a lot of the artwork for our releases, and often makes scarily accurate drawings of our team which she calls “doodles.”

Useful resources

May 7, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Pressbooks

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Pressbooks 
Website: https://pressbooks.com/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books. We partner with organizations to support open education initiatives, institutional publishing programs, curriculum development projects, and more.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Pressbooks works with over 500 educational institutions, including many higher education systems and consortia. As we’ve added more of these statewide and regional partners, we’ve been learning more about their unique needs so we can make sure our product fits those needs.

Over the past several months, we’ve worked closely with eCampusOntario, a consortial client, as a co-development partner helping us design new administrative features for this part of our community. We’re excited to launch the result of that work, our new Shared Network Plugin. It’s currently in beta testing, but we’ll be launching it broadly soon. This new feature set will make it easier for system and consortia clients to empower their members and manage how they use Pressbooks to create and share knowledge effectively across their member networks through streamlined administration, enhanced analytics and more.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

At Pressbooks, we love the commitment that library publishers have to making knowledge more accessible (whether that’s through open educational resources or other initiatives). Empowering knowledge sharing is at the heart of Pressbooks’ mission as a company, and so we’ve always found great alignment with those who work in library publishing.

Also, libraries are at the point of the proverbial spear with regard to information and digital transformation. It’s exciting to work with library publishers because they have been eager to embrace the possibilities of digital transformation when it comes to publishing and sharing information. Lots of great ideas and experimentation come out of this community.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Post-pandemic it’s still a bit novel to be able to meet up with people in person, so we’re looking forward to the unique energy that comes from in-person meetings. A lot of long-time Pressbooks clients will attend this meeting, and we always love connecting with our user community and hopefully making new friends. Open education is a strong thread through this year’s conference, so it will be great to listen and learn about what others are seeing and doing in this space. We’re also excited to host two panel sessions on Thursday morning, “From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiative,” and “Growing OER Publishing Programs: Watershed Decisions that Drive Impact.”

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The team at Pressbooks is made up of people who rally behind the mission of making knowledge sharing more accessible. We have a lot of publishing pros, bibliophiles, open source advocates and edtech evangelists. Our founder/CEO, Hugh McGuire, is a familiar face for many in the OER publishing space from his work with Pressbooks as well as The Rebus Foundation. Another longtime colleague, Steel Wagstaff, was an enthusiastic Pressbooks customer supporting open publishing at the University of Wisconsin Madison before he joined the team and became our product manager. Julie Curtis will be at the Forum on behalf of Pressbooks. Julie, our VP Growth & Strategy, has spent much of her career in education technology helping institutions navigate the intersection of digital learning and open educational resources. Together with several of our institutional partners, Julie created the Open Education Maturity Model as a framework to help institutions in this work, and she’ll be presenting this model during the “From OER to Open Press” panel session.

Useful resources

May 2, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Janeway + Fulcrum

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Janeway + Fulcrum
Website: https://janewayfulcrum.olh.pub/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Between our two programs, we build world-leading, open-source digital publishing infrastructure to provide a sustainable platform for open access journals and media-rich books. Our in-house software engineers have developed an intuitive, agile, and responsive platform for journal hosting, migration, manuscript submission, review, copyediting, and typesetting (Janeway) and an accessible, durable, flexible, discoverable platform for book publishing (Fulcrum). We’re proud to have done this work fully within the academy.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Our teams are working on integrating Janeway and Fulcrum, allowing us to host audiovisual media in Fulcrum where it can be preserved on library infrastructure, and have its own metadata and DOI. This allows journals to embed media in their articles using accessible media playing technology and to avoid relying on commercial services like YouTube and Vimeo for scholarly media content.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

Andy Byers, Janeway: I find working with library publishers deeply rewarding due to their alignment with values of open access and knowledge dissemination. Library publishers prioritise community impact over commercial interests, allowing for meaningful contributions to academia and society. Collaborating with library publishers offers a unique chance to contribute to a more inclusive, sustainable, and impactful scholarly ecosystem.

Jason Colman, Fulcrum: We are library publishers ourselves at Michigan Publishing, so getting a chance to collaborate more deeply with our peers is always enriching. They’re trying to solve the same problems we are and working together helps remind us that we are not alone in the challenges we face.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Seeing colleagues we only talk to on Zoom and Discord, of course! Our teams first met each other at the 2018 Forum in Minneapolis, so this year will be like a reunion for us.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The Janeway / Open Library of Humanities team are based at Birkbeck, University of London, but make up a geographically distributed network of expert bookworms, specialist software developers, and typography enthusiasts. Although we work remotely from across the UK and beyond, we’re united by our belief in the power of shared knowledge and our commitment to the open-access revolution. We also have a shared love of arts and culture, retro gaming, AI glitches, and dreadful puns, and a strong desire to make the world of academic publishing a better place.

The Fulcrum team is based at the University of Michigan Library, and most of us are located in Michigan, although we have folks based in Colorado, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania as well. We’re a group of librarians, technologists, and publishing experts and we’re dedicated to ensuring the broadest access to knowledge we possibly can. Our puns may be more dreadful than the Janeway team’s, but we’ll have to have a pun-off to be sure…

May 1, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Ubiquity

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Ubiquity
Website: https://ubiquity.pub/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Ubiquity is a leading provider of open publishing services, covering the entire research lifecycle. We provide full publishing infrastructure and services to libraries and university presses, repositories for libraries and institutions and journal and book publishing for academic societies.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We’re adding AI functionality across our platform, from enhancing search to making the author journal smoother and editors’ jobs easier to perform.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

We’re mission aligned with libraries in our dedication to open access and open source platforms, and in our guarantee to provide services with fair and transparent pricing.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We can’t wait to meet with people face-to-face again, to listen to what challenges the community is facing, and to learn from the solutions being developed.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

Our team (https://ubiquity.pub/about/) are first and foremost all deeply committed to open science, open access and open source. We have deep experience in areas including publishing, libraries, research data and software development. The majority of the team is based in London, but we are spread across eight countries overall.