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.

September 18, 2024

Wrapping up our 10th anniversary celebration with the LPC Yearbook!

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Our thanks to the LPC community for celebrating our 10th anniversary with us over the last year! We’ve had some great conversations (both nostalgic and forward-looking), we’ve eaten some celebratory cupcakes, we’ve given out a special service award, and we’ve welcomed a batch of new members via our 10th anniversary membership special. Now we are putting the icing on the cake that is this year with the publication of the LPC Yearbook.

The Yearbook is an informal, collaborative publication full of photos and quotes contributed by community members, organized by year. If you’ve ever wondered what LPC’s original website looked like (very Drupal-y), or wanted to see photos of our most iconic conference swag ever (the Pubrarian/Liblisher totes from 2016), or just wanted to take a trip down library publishing memory lane, check it out!

Many thanks to the community members who contributed to the Yearbook, but especially Katherine Skinner and Justin Gonder for the wealth of photography.

September 10, 2024

Launching the University-Based Publishing Futures Community

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Please join us on Monday, September 30, 1:00-2:00 pm EDT, for the launch of the University-Based Publishing Futures community.

Register here

In the spring and summer of 2022, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Association of University Presses (AUPresses), and Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) convened a series of discussions to explore shared values and common interests related to academy-owned scholarly communications infrastructures. These conversations led to the development of a community formation document and proposed plan of action, including a statement of shared values and commitments that we are proud to share on September 30th. Come to this launch webinar to hear organizational and community leaders explain the history of the initiative, what we mean by university-based publishing, and how to participate in our inaugural projects. Presenters will include Peter Berkery and Brenna McLaughlin (AUPresses), Melanie Schlosser (LPC), Annie Johnson (U of Delaware), Kate McCready (BTAA), and John Sherer (UNC Press).

Agenda:

  • Welcome & Background

  • Importance of the University-Based Publishing Initiative

  • Overview of Community Statement

  • Call to Action

  • Questions

September 3, 2024

PKP implements the Library Publishing Curriculum Introductory Module as a PKP School course

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The Library Publishing Coalition, the Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board, and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) are thrilled to announce the addition of the new Library Publishing Curriculum’s Introduction Module to the PKP School’s Getting Started in Library Publishing series. 

PKP’s new course is based on the Curriculum’s Introduction Module, which includes history, theory, and trends around library publishing as an introduction to the field. PKP writes: “The introduction provides a clear, entry-level overview of the basics, covering the essentials of who, what, when, where, and why in library publishing. It’s designed to give newcomers a solid foundation before diving into the more detailed aspects of the field. The Introduction Module was added to the Library Publishing Curriculum in 2024 and was adapted for PKP School in August of this year.”

The new module, alongside the rest of the Curriculum, is also available as a PDF from WSU’s institutional repository. 

PKP School is a collection of online, self-paced courses designed to enhance scholarly publishing practices globally. The courses cover a range of topics, and are available in English and Spanish.   

More details can be found in PKP’s announcement about the new course.

Library Publishing Coalition logo               

August 27, 2024

Welcome to our new members!

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We’re thrilled to welcome these LPC members, who have joined or rejoined in the past few months under the 10th Anniversary Membership Special offer!

 

Brown University

Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Brown partners with leading scholarly publishers to ensure that these groundbreaking works are validated via rigorous academic review and reach the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.

University of Maryland

The University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland. As the only public research university inside the Washington, D.C. beltway, UMD has forged strategic partnerships with national institutions and federal agencies to uniquely position the university’s faculty, researchers and students. Driven by its diverse and proudly inclusive community of more than 40,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff, and 300 academic programs, UMD is fearlessly committed to addressing the grand challenges of our time and serving the public good.
UMD’s library publishing initiatives are developed by its Open Scholarship Services team, whose mission is to increase knowledge equity and to encourage inclusive and creative approaches to public scholarship. In addition to journals and open educational resources, UMD Libraries hope to support digital scholarship projects in collaboration with the forthcoming StoRI Lab, which will foster innovative research storytelling on our campus.

Adelphi University

Adelphi University is located in Garden City, New York, a short distance from New York City, with satellite campuses in the city, Hudson Valley, and Hauppauge. Adelphi offers a number of highly ranked degree programs for undergraduate and graduate students with particular strengths in psychology, nursing, business, and social work. The digital publishing program at Adelphi University Libraries, which began in 2022, currently publishes a peer-reviewed scholarly journal and an undergraduate magazine. The program is also responsible for managing Adelphi’s institutional repository, Scholarly Works, and using it to disseminate scholarly and creative content produced by the Adelphi community.

Tufts University 

Tufts University is a student-centered R1 research university, with 10 schools and colleges including Arts, Sciences & Engineering, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Medicine, Dental, Veterinary, and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. Tufts libraries currently support publishing activities through repositories, DOI minting, support for OER creation, and the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team. We’ve recently signed a hosting agreement with PKP/OJS and are excited to begin

 

VIVA

VIVA is the consortium of academic libraries in Virginia representing 71 institutions of higher education. Members include 39 public colleges and universities, 31 independent private non-profit institutions, and the Library of Virginia. Since 1994, VIVA has worked to build an equitable, accessible, and robust infrastructure of library resources and services for Virginia higher education students and faculty. VIVA Open Publishing is an Open and Affordable initiative providing centralized publishing support for VIVA Open Grant recipients and support for our member institution’s library publishing programs. For more information, please visit www.vivalib.org.

Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below
August 13, 2024

A 10-Year Vision for Library Publishing (LPForum24 Closing Plenary Reflection)

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The 2024 Library Publishing Forum opened with a keynote address that looked back on LPC’s first 10 years. Katherine Skinner reflected on the formation of the community, its original goals, and what it has accomplished. For long-time community members, the talk was a trip down memory lane. For newer folks, it was a stellar orientation. It also fit beautifully with our 10th anniversary theme for the conference, but it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it provided grounding for the real conversation we wanted to have at the event: where we want to be 10 years in the future. 

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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