LPC News

March 2, 2018

Announcing two new LPC sponsors – PKP and Fulcrum

We are excited to announce two new organization-level sponsorships through our Publishers and Service Providers Program: the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Fulcrum. We are especially pleased to note that both of our new sponsors are open source software developers affiliated with LPC member institutions (Simon Fraser University and the University of Michigan, respectively). Both are also participating in the upcoming event Owned by the Academy: A Preconference on Open Source Publishing Software, so LPC members and Forum participants should have lots of opportunities to learn about what’s new. We sincerely appreciate their support!

Statement from PKP:

PKP is a non-profit research and development project at Stanford and Simon Fraser University. We provide free, open source publishing/workflow software (Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph Press), as well as free services for technical support (PKP Support Forum), indexing (PKP Index), digital preservation (a LOCKSS based PKP Preservation Network), training (PKP School), and more. We are strong supporters of the Library Publishing Coalition and share their mission to help build the capacity of library-based publishers and publishing service providers in the interest of expanding access to research.

Statement from Fulcrum:

Fulcrum is an open source publishing platform and a hosted solution, helping publishers present the full richness of their authors’ research outputs in a discoverable, accessible, and durable form. Fulcrum is being developed by the University of Michigan Library on the Samvera repository framework, accompanied by a range of publishing services that help small publishers scale their programs efficiently. As library publishers ourselves, we are committed to developing flexible infrastructure that can assist our community’s mission-driven publishing work.

Fulcrum has been developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is being made available as a hosted solution through a business development relationship with LYRASIS.

February 7, 2018

Opportunity for spring memberships for new LPC members

Thinking about applying for LPC membership for the 2018-19 membership year? Interested in starting your membership even earlier? The LPC membership year runs from July 1st to June 30th, and a flat fee of $2,000 is required for new memberships, regardless of when they are instated. Due to increased interest in LPC membership this year and the importance of the spring quarter for our community (the Library Publishing Forum, committee recruitment, and more), the Board has decided to offer new members a chance to start their memberships before July 1st. This membership “special” will cover April through June of this year, and the dues will be the equivalent of one quarter of the standard membership year dues. See below for details and email contact@librarypublishing.org with questions.

• Criteria: As with all LPC memberships, this opportunity is open to academic and research libraries and library consortia who are engaged in or planning scholarly publishing activities.
• Duration: April through June of 2018
• Cost: $500
• Benefits: New members will receive all standard membership benefits, including two discounted registrations to the Library Publishing Forum.
• Renewal: As with all LPC memberships, the spring quarter memberships will be automatically renewed, and full membership dues ($2,000) will apply for the 2018-19 membership year.
• How to apply: Fill out the application form available on our website.

February 2, 2018

Upcoming webinar with Claire Redhead of OASPA

Want to learn more about best practices in open access publishing? Join us at 12:00pm (EST) on Thursday, March 15 for a webinar with Claire Redhead, the Executive Director of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). In addition to sharing a global perspective on the OA publishing landscape, Claire will explain the role that her organization plays in promoting high standards for OA scholarship, demystify OASPA’s membership criteria, and answer questions from the LPC community. This will also be an opportunity for her to hear from LPC’s members about the issues that are important to us in the OA realm. Get the details.

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

January 30, 2018

LPC 2017 Year in Review

Want a quick overview of what the LPC community accomplished last year? Check out our handy 2017 Year in Review! (We’ll return to our regular Quarterly Update in April.)

January 22, 2018

Announcing three new LPC Sponsors – Ubiquity Press, SSP, and bepress

As part of our new Publishers and Service Providers Program, we are delighted to announce our first batch of organization-level sponsors for the LPC: Ubiquity Press, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and bepress. These organizations are contributing financially to the ongoing success of the LPC and contributing an important set of voices to community discussions. We sincerely appreciate their support and look forward to working with them in the coming year!

Statement from Ubiquity Press:

Ubiquity Press is an open scholarship services platform that makes open access publishing and repositories affordable for everyone. We are excited to support the Library Publishing Coalition, because we share a focus on sustainable publishing services and believe libraries have an vital role in shaping innovative academic publishing.

Statement from the Society for Scholarly Publishing:

SSP is a community for everyone engaged in scholarly publishing. We place a high value on the advancement of scholarly communication and professional development through education, collaboration, and networking. We share similar goals with the Library Publishing Coalition and have become a sponsor in order to demonstrate support for library publishing as a community of practice and to facilitate dialogue among the broader publishing community.

Statement from bepress:

The bepress community publishes over 1,400 journals on the Digital Commons platform, from double-blind peer-reviewed faculty journals to undergraduate arts and literary magazines. With such a strong library-led publishing community, bepress has long been eager to support the Library Publishing Coalition; we are delighted to finally be able to do so as an official sponsor.

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.”