LPC News

April 7, 2021

Participate in this year’s Research Interests Match Program!

LPC’s annual Research Interests Match Program connects individuals interested in finding collaborators for research projects, conference proposals, and more. After filling out a short form, participants are matched based on research interests and given an initial introduction. 

If you are interested in being matched with someone who shares your research interests, fill out the Library Publishing Research Interests Match Form by May 17, 2021. Looking to get involved in research but don’t have a specific topic in mind? There’s a question that allows you to choose a topic from the Library Publishing Research Agenda!

In June, the LPC Research Committee will match participants based on their research interests and provide an initial email introduction for matches. The Program encourages matched participants to connect and discuss shared research interests, but participants are under no obligation to start a collaboration or project. All form responses will be made publicly available to enable further connections. 

This is a new annual program organized around the Library Publishing Forum, so a new form will be issued each spring, and the previous year’s responses will be retired when the new year’s are released. 

This resource was developed by the LPC Research Committee, and modeled on the Research Interests Match for Residents and Early Career Librarians, developed by the ACRL Residency Interest Group. Email contact@librarypublishing.org with questions. 

March 22, 2021

LPC Statement Supporting Asian Americans and Asians

The Library Publishing Coalition stands together with the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), the American Library Association’s Executive Board, the Black Caucus of ALA, and other librarians, library institutions, and library users in recognizing and condemning anti-Asian hate crimes in the US and elsewhere. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in discrimination, hate speech and rhetoric, and violence towards Asian Americans, continuing a long history of violence, scapegoating, stereotyping, and exclusion of Asian Americans and Asians in the US. As noted in the statement from ALA, library and information workers must combat cultural bias and bigotry in their work, and in this vein LPC has recently published a roadmap to taking accountable actions for the LPC itself and its member organizations. LPC pledges to combat hate and ignorance and to take anti-racist action in its own community and in collaboration with other information and publishing professionals. In this instance, we direct colleagues looking to take action to resources to combat Anti-Asian violence.

Library Publishing Coalition Diversity and Inclusion Task Force

Library Publishing Coalition Board of Directors

March 3, 2021

New LPC Board members elected

The nine-member Library Publishing Coalition Board oversees the governance, organizational structure, bylaws, and the review and direction of the membership of the Library Publishing Coalition. We have three newly elected Board members, with terms running from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2024:

• Justin Gonder, California Digital Library (2021-2024)
• Willa Tavernier, Indiana University (2021-2024)
• Sarah Wipperman, Villanova University (2021-2024)

They will join the returning Board members:

• Karen Bjork, Portland State University (2019-2022)
• Christine Fruin, Atla (2019-2022)
• Jessica Kirschner, Virginia Commonwealth University (2020-2023)
• Ally Laird, Penn State University (2020-2023)
• Emma Molls, University of Minnesota (2020-2023)
• Jody Bailey, Emory University, jody.bailey@emory.edu (ex officio Past President)
• Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute, melanie@educopia.org (ex officio Community Facilitator)

Note: Sarah Hare is stepping down from the Board a year early. We will fill her spot as usual next year. 

Many thanks to outgoing Board members Vanessa Gabler, Scott Warren, and Sarah Hare for their service!

March 1, 2021

Kudos to the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force!

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

This Kudos recognizes Cheryl Ball (Wayne State University), Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas), Harrison Inefuku (Iowa State University), Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University), Angel Peterson (Penn State University), and Willa Tavernier (Indiana University) for their excellent work on the new LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice:

The Diversity and Inclusion Task Force has done a huge amount of excellent work since it convened in July of 2019, but its recently published LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice is likely to have the largest and most lasting impact on the organization. The task force held a community call on anti-racism in September of 2020, and spent the next four months reviewing, organizing, and fleshing out the ideas that arose into a long-term plan for LPC to engage in anti-racist practice. They held extra meetings to accomplish this work alongside their regular activities (such as meeting with representatives from other LPC groups), and put in a substantial amount of time on it outside of meetings, as well. The result is a foundational document for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee that will launch in July of this year, and one that will make it possible for that group to hit the ground running with community-driven anti-racist leadership for the whole organization. The task force deserves the recognition and thanks of the entire community. Kudos!

Statements from the task force:

Joint statement: “Working on the DEI Task Force is a way for us to demonstrate our commitment to anti-racist work in scholarly publishing. The anti-racist roadmap shows how the LPC stands behind these mandates on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Cheryl: “Already I have cited the roadmap to senior library leaders and have begun implementing its suggestions in other areas of my publishing work.”

Angel: “I joined the Library Publishing Coalition in 2020 and working on the anti-racist roadmap was my first official duty within the coalition. It is really inspiring to see our commitment to being a diverse and inclusive community. I fully plan on using these principals in my day-to-day work!”

Willa: “LPC has an amazing sense of community and the support for the work of the DEI Task Force that has come from the community is tremendously inspiring!”

This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser

March 1, 2021

Kudos to the Documentation Month planning group!

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

This Kudos recognizes Allison Brown (SUNY Geneseo), Erin Jerome (University of Massachusetts), and Emily Stenberg (Washington University St. Louis) for their stellar work on Documentation Month:

The idea for a documentation event came up during a community call on creative staffing solutions, and it was picked up by the Professional Development Committee for implementation. It was Erin, Allison, and Emily, however, who brought it to life. They defined the purpose and structure of Documentation Month, created the Documentation Toolkit, planned and hosted community calls, and drafted communications. For five months, they met regularly to plan and did substantial work outside of meetings, coordinating with the Professional Development Committee and Educopia staff to ensure a successful event. Their Documentation Month is likely to serve as a model for future events, within LPC and in the wider community. Kudos!

A statement from Allison, Erin, and Emily:

“When we first began meeting as a group to work on mapping out what our Documentation Month would look like, the project felt incredibly ambitious and just a bit overwhelming. It’s been really amazing to see all the pieces fall into place and to know that the LPC community is just as excited as we are about this endeavor.”

This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser

February 25, 2021

The LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice

As part of our commitment to anti-racism, LPC’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force has prepared the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This document owes a great deal to the ideas and input of library publishing workers at last fall’s anti-racism community call, which was hosted by the task force and the Board. In that call, participants were asked to consider how LPC has perpetuated inequality and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and to envision ways that we can adopt anti-racist practice throughout the organization. The task force took the resulting ideas, further developed them, and organized them into an action plan. 

The roadmap consists of a 6-month plan that the task force is currently enacting, and offers a menu of longer-term ideas that the organization and members can choose to implement. The items are organized in six categories: building an anti-racist organization, community building, demographics, education, resource creation, and supporting BIPOC library publishing workers. Several of the items suggested for LPC Committees are to support members in implementing anti-racism in their programs. We want to work together as a community to make library publishing an inclusive, equitable, flourishing endeavor.

As this roadmap is meant to guide the entire organization in anti-racist practice, you will see a number of different LPC groups referenced as being responsible for individual items. These should be considered suggestions from the task force at this point. Since the soon-to-be-established Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee will be working in a consultative capacity with its peer committees and task forces, there will be plenty of opportunities to review the items in the roadmap and decide together what to prioritize. 

This publication is a snapshot of an internal, working document that will be updated as work progresses. As future iterations of the DEI Committee and other LPC groups identify near-term action items, our expectation is that a new snapshot can be generated for the community. 

LPC Diversity and Inclusion Task Force: Cheryl Ball (Wayne State University), Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas), Harrison Inefuku (Iowa State University), Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University), Angel Peterson (Penn State University), Willa Tavernier (Indiana University)

February 10, 2021

2021 LPC Board election: Candidate bios and statements

Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, February 26. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. The candidates are:

• Willa Tavernier, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Alissa Miller, Middle Tennessee State University
• Amanda Hurford, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI)
• Mike Nason, University of New Brunswick
• Kate Shuttleworth, Simon Fraser University
• Justin Gonder, California Digital Library
• Sarah Wipperman, Villanova University

Each candidate has provided a brief biography and an election statement; this year we have also asked candidates to provide a statement on anti-racism.

(more…)

February 4, 2021

Sunsetting LPC’s Service Providers List

For the last few years LPC has maintained a list of service providers on our website. Although it was very lightly curated and intended to serve as a starting point for research, we felt it was worth maintaining because of the lack of any similar resources. 

We have been excited to see the growing interest in researching, tracking, cataloging, and assessing scholarly communications infrastructure. Now that several of these efforts have come to fruition, we feel it’s time to retire our basic list and direct our efforts towards supporting these more comprehensive resources. Because January is when we normally update the list, this is a good moment to sunset the service providers list and direct library publishers to these other resources. 

In particular, we would like to recommend the recently-announced Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat), developed by the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as part of the Educopia-hosted Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project. NGLP is also doing transformative work on aligning scholcomm infrastructure with academic and values that will add much to this conversation over the next couple of years. Further, we encourage library publishers to follow the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) initiative, which is the new organizational home of the Census of Scholarly Communication Infrastructure. These efforts have already begun to produce sophisticated tools to support the needs of libraries and other mission-driven publishers, with more in the works. 

To avoid broken links, we are retaining the page that the Service Providers List lived on, but replacing the content with a link to this post. We have an archived version of the list for reference, so please feel free to reach out to us at contact@librarypublishing.org if you need it for any reason. We will continue to have a sponsorship program for the Library Publishing Forum that will allow library publishers to connect with service providers.