LPC News

LPC Releases 2025–2026 Annual Report

The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce the release of its 2025–2026 Annual Report.

In addition to outlining LPC’s finances, membership, and ongoing inclusion efforts, the Annual Report highlights the release of several new resources, including: 

• the Library Publishing Creates advocacy website (including Showcase Week content), 
• new Quick Guides to Digital Preservation for Library Publishers, 
• an AI Editorial Policy Guide, and
• Powered by People: Staffing and Capacity in Library Publishing Programs (a report from our 2024-26 Staffing Survey Task Force

This year’s Annual Report also includes an illustrated guide to LPC’s extended network, including strategic affiliates, joint projects, and meta communities!

We encourage community members to share this report with colleagues and administrators who may be interested in getting involved or in understanding what membership dues make possible. 

Kudos to Jessica Kirschner

The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

Jessica has led the way to standing up a robust Discord server to make sure everyone has an opportunity to engage with the Forum, whether they are in Seattle or tuning in from afar. Her expertise and attention to detail will ensure an inclusive and professional virtual complement to the main conference, and will offer a template to build on in future years!

A quote from Jessica:

“The LPC/library publishing community is one of my favorites, and I loved the opportunity to help increase opportunities for engagement at LPF with both the sessions and community. I know online engagement is going through a period of change, and I hope the Discord was a welcome opportunity for connections and backchanneling during the conference. Big shout out to my other wonderful members of the RETF for all the community and collaboration over the past year!”

This Kudos was submitted by Jessica’s colleagues on the Remote Engagement Task Force.

Kudos to the 2025-2026 Curriculum Editorial Board

The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

This year, for the first time in the group’s history, the Curriculum Editorial Board (Johanna Meetz, Joshua Neds-Fox, Chelcie Rowell, John Warren, and Rebecca Wojturska) recruited a new group of authors to create updated content for the curriculum. The editorial board scoped out the necessary revisions and new content, created templates and guidance, recruited authors, and supported them through the writing and editing process. The new Policy units won’t be published until next program year, but I wanted to acknowledge the stellar work done by the outgoing cohort of editorial board members in making this work happen. Kudos!

A quote from the Curriculum Editorial Board:

“Thank you for this honor! The updated policy module is the culmination of many years of work from this Board, from previous Board members, many of whom have served two terms, and our former Editor in Chief, Cheryl Ball. We are also grateful to LPC for the funding they allocated to pay the authors for their work, and the authors for their contributions.”

This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser.

Kudos to the 2025-2026 Professional Development Committee

The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

This year’s Professional Development Committee (Anna Dimoula, Cosette Bruhns Alonso, DeDe Dawson, Lora Lennertz, and Patti Sherbaniuk) set out to create space for conversations about artificial intelligence in library publishing. In a stellar example of follow-through, an exploratory community call led to a webinar (on AI editorial policies), which they followed up by creating guidance for library publishers who wish to document expectations and rules around the use of AI in scholarly publishing. This is a significant contribution to an emerging area of practice in the field, and great work by an LPC committee!

We’re happy to include comments from some of the committee members.

“Working alongside a passionate community of professionals to shape the AI Editorial Policy Guide has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my time as chair of the Professional Development Committee.”—Anna DiMoula

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“I do not work in the realm of library publishing so I joined this committee to learn more about it. This group has been great to work with, very knowledgeable and patient with me as a newbie.”—Patti Sherbaniuk

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“Serving on the LPC Professional Development Committee has been a great way to contribute to the library publishing community and learn at the same time. I’ve also made some new professional contacts along the way. It has been a valuable experience!”—DeDe Dawson

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This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser.

Kudos to the Staffing Survey Task Force (2024-2026)

The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

This Kudos recognizes the 2024-2026 Staffing Survey Task Force, the group charged with carrying out LPC’s first ever Directory off-year deep-dive survey! Melissa Chim, Miranda Phair, Michelle Brailey, Lauren Collister, Heather Hankins, Alyssa Huffman, Bailey Lake, Barbara Loomis, Joseph Muller, Donna O’Malley, and Anita Walz devised and tested a survey of staffing practices in library publishing, gathered responses, analyzed the survey data, and drafted an interesting and informative report. This was a substantial undertaking, and will contribute significantly to our understanding of how library publishing programs are staffed.

We’re happy to include comments from some of the task force members.

“I really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to contribute to an LPC initiative (and the inaugural deep-dive topic for directory off years) especially as I come from a non-member institution. Many thanks to my fellow committee members for all of their enthusiasm and hard work in completing the project.”—Miranda Phair (co-chair)

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“It was a pleasure to work with this group on this timely and important topic. We addressed a big, broad question, and learned a lot from each other and our participants along the way. It’s my hope that this work will be a first step towards improving our understanding and advocacy for staffing and capacity, and that this knowledge can be built upon in the years to come.”—Lauren Collister

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“Working on the Staffing Survey Task Force has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It provided a wonderful opportunity to connect with talented colleagues across the field and to learn more about the library publishing climate. I’m excited to see how the data gathered will benefit library publishing programs moving forward! Thank you to the Library Publishing Coalition for putting this task force together!”—Bailey Lake

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This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser.

LPC welcomes new members: UJ Press, Ball State University, Georgia Institute of Technology

LPC is delighted to welcome three new members who’ve taken advantage of our membership special: UJ Press, Ball State University, and Georgia Institute of Technology!

UJ Press is an Open Access University Press based at the University of Johannesburg Library. The press publishes both Gold and Diamond Access books and journals in print, electronic and audio formats.

Ball State University is a public research university in Muncie, Indiana, with over 20,000 students, 120 undergraduate majors, and 100 graduate degrees offered through its seven academic colleges. Ball State University offers a number of highly ranked programs and has a vision to be a national model of excellence for challenging, learner- centered academic communities that advance knowledge and improve economic vitality and quality of life. This vision is shared by the University Libraries where the Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communication unit advances the creation, dissemination, and preservation of open access research and digital scholarship through collaborative opportunities, workshops and instruction, consultative services, and technology solutions. Our projects span from GIS, to scholarly communication, digital projects, and journal hosting. We strive to focus on innovation, accessibility, and new program development such as textbook and monograph publishing.

Reflections on My Experience as a Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellow

This year, I was one of 12 Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Fellows, and I thought I would share reflections on my experience with the LPC community!

Overall, I found this experience invaluable as an early-career professional. The fellowship provided me with a suite of professional development opportunities, including a good amount of networking (and as someone who is not extroverted most of the time, this was extra impactful for me). The elements of the fellowship I’ll cover here are being assigned an industry expert mentor, creating a research poster with other fellows, and attending the Annual Meeting, though we also had regular group check-ins and other professional development opportunities.

To start, I was assigned a wonderful mentor: David Haber, Publishing Operations Director at the American Society for Microbiology. The thing I appreciate most about our conversations is how I’m able to be myself—I don’t feel the need to tiptoe around my stronger opinions (or language). We’ve only been meeting for a handful of months, but we’ve already been able to learn so much from each other, especially in areas where our opinions don’t quite align. Gaining the perspective of a society journal publisher has been important as I’ve taken on more journal responsibilities in my role, but it’s also been quite useful to know how and what changes happen in other parts of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, especially regarding the development and implementation of new technologies.

The most time-consuming part of the fellowship was creating a research poster to present at the Annual Meeting. The timeline was tight, with the journey from research idea to final poster being just three months. Our group created a poster that sought to visualize where open peer review takes place in open access publications, via data gathered from DOAB and DOAJ. Was it kind of awkward standing against a wall near our poster, waiting for people to talk to me? Yes—but the conversations I had were lovely, extending beyond the poster and into library publishing and accessibility, among other things.

Speaking of the poster presentation, attending this year’s Annual Meeting was incredible! I will say that, with how budgets have shaken out recently, attending the meeting was made possible by my fellowship benefits, which included a travel stipend and registration waiver. I attended sessions on disability and accessibility, journal publishing, AI, and new technologies. I was also invited to be part of a panel of early-career professionals, where we shared our experiences and advice. And of course, it was absolutely lovely meeting up with the other fellows in person for the first time (I also wrote about my experience for The Scholarly Kitchen, if you’d care to read more).

Though my fellowship is technically over, later this year I’ll be rolling onto SSP’s DEIA Committee—I’m excited to see what kind of work this group does while also being in my second year on LPC’s DEIA committee. All in all, I highly recommend that grad students and early-career professionals in the library publishing space apply for this fellowship. It has been such a unique way to learn about the scholarly publishing landscape and make strong connections within the industry—I wouldn’t trade it for the world!