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.
Check out our latest Quarterly Update! It includes:
A belated welcome to our newest member: Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar. Welcome, colleagues!
Registration is now open for the 2020 Library Publishing Forum, to be held May 4–6, 2020, at UMass Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts.
More information about registration, including rates and refund policies can be found on the Registration and Travel page on our website.
General registration is open through April 10.
Professional communities can provide many levels of support as you develop open publishing projects and programs. In this info session, facilitated by Amy Hofer, Coordinator, Statewide Open Education Library Services at Open Oregon Educational Resources, you will have the opportunity to learn about three communities that support open publishing practitioners: the Library Publishing Coalition, the Open Textbook Network, and the Rebus Community. Conversation will focus on organizational similarities and differences, new programs to support publishing, approaches to community work. The webinar will be especially helpful to LPC members interested in Open Educational Resource (OER) publishing support.
Presenters:
This webinar takes place at 2 PM EST/ 11 AM PST on January 23, 2020. The session will be recorded and captioned to share later.
Call-in number: 669 900 6833
Participant PIN: 776 101 789
The Library Publishing Coalition is delighted to welcome Crossref as a new strategic affiliate! A statement from Crossref:
“We have seen hundreds of library publishers join Crossref as members over the last few years so the Library Publishing Coalition is a vital partner in helping us to understand the needs of this growing and important group. We’re super happy to be a strategic affiliate and look forward to learning more, seeing where we can help, and to creating information-sharing opportunities and benefits for our mutual members.”
And a statement from LPC on the new relationship:
“Crossref provides important infrastructure for scholarly publishing, and we are very excited to have this opportunity to deepen our existing relationship. We are already planning some important collaborative work in 2020, and we look forward to learning more about how library publishers can most effectively participate in the scholarly ecosystem that Crossref supports.”
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.
The Fellows Journal is a forum for the current Library Publishing Coalition fellows to share their experiences and raise topics for discussion within the community. Learn more about the Fellowship Program.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been plugging away on a project that began with my participation in KairosCamp, a digital publishing institute run by Cheryl Ball and staff for the journal Kairos. For the camp, I’d proposed the idea of creating a digital text that would challenge readers by forcing them to read, navigate, and perceive the writing in an unfamiliar way. The idea was to replicate a feeling that one may experience when being excluded from accessing a particular space—a level of discomfort that readers wouldn’t expect to have when browsing online.
As I designed my project, I found myself slipping into talk of simulations. As in, “this project will simulate the experience of [x] disability for [x] assistive device.” When I talked to web accessibility folks on my campus, they were excited about the possibilities of showing faculty how the structure of a webtext can limit or exclude people from reading and engaging with it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there exists a whole literature about the problems with disability simulations, which can promote stereotypes about people with disabilities, inaccurately represent the full breadth of disabled experience, promote negative feelings about disability, and situate the “problem” of disability in particular people rather than in social and cultural barriers to inclusion (see French, 1992; Lalvani & Broderick, 2013; Nario-Redmond, Gospodinov, & Cobb, 2017; Olson, 2014). Not the territory I wanted to tread with my original project concept.
I was troubled when I began reading this literature about simulations, largely because I hadn’t been aware of it in the past. Partly, I thought that I should have been inherently cognizant of these issues because I also have a disability. I was born blind and, while I had surgeries that restored part of my vision, some was permanently lost. Recognizing faces is hard for me, as is navigation and a slew of tasks that I’m still identifying now as an adult. That said, I don’t use screen readers and my vision currently doesn’t substantially hamper my reading, unless distance is involved. Some of the key concerns in web accessibility aren’t automatically apparent to me because I fall somewhere between sighted and unsighted. Somehow I needed this reminder as my project evolved.
In a way, I’ve always felt that I should “inherently” understand both disabled and able-bodied experiences—as if I could understand and empathize with both by sheer force of will. And of course, the truth is, none of us will automatically understand the challenges others face despite having all the best intentions in the world.
It’s a simple anecdote but I’ve thought about this a lot lately as I start this fellowship with the Library Publishing Coalition. As I continue working with library publishing at my own institution, I am hoping to deepen my engagement with accessibility as well as intersecting experiences that I and others have too frequently overlooked. I’m a Scholarly Communication Librarian and yet haven’t put as much time as I’d like into considering how access extends to people who have perceptual differences in how they read and engage with information. These are issues that deserve renewed consideration even if we are in a profession that’s devoted to fantastic ideals like universal access. There are always assumptions, misunderstandings, and oversights still to explore.
Over the next two years, I hope to make these concerns a greater part of my focus professionally and share some of the things I find along the way. I’m looking forward to learning from others in the LPC community who have already thought deeply about these issues. In fact, if you have questions or research topics you’d like to see addressed related to accessibility and library publishing, please get in touch—talea.anderson@wsu.edu. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.
Thank you to the LPC community and leadership for welcoming me in and providing the opportunity to do this work—it’s a privilege I don’t take lightly, and I am grateful.
Photo Credit: Gray framed eyeglasses, CC0
It’s time to reflect on the pilot year of our new Mentorship Program and to kick off participation for year two! We’ve made some exciting changes for year two – keep reading to learn about our new focus for 2020 (peer mentorship) and how to get involved.
This year, the Library Publishing Coalition Professional Development Committee introduced a new member opportunity: The LPC Mentorship Program. The goals of the program were two-fold. First, the program aimed to orient mentees to the LPC, to enrich mentors’ experiences with the LPC, and build relationships between the two. A secondary goal of the program was to further the development of library publishing through a professional, semi-structured mentorship program.
Activities of the program included a virtual getting-to-know you meeting to kick things off, continuing with monthly calls and email correspondence between mentors and mentees. Participants were provided with a list of suggested questions to help start their mentor/mentee relationship, and were then encouraged to continue the discussions in whatever direction was most desirable for the partners. An in-person meetup also took place at the Library Publishing Forum in Vancouver to provide an opportunity to further strengthen relationships.
The meeting at the Forum took place over the lunch hour on the second day, and proved to be quite fruitful! Not all of the mentor/mentee pairs could attend, but we spent the majority of the time sharing out about our experiences and discussing with other participants about what has worked for them, what they enjoyed most, what suggestions they had for improvement, and networking with others that were participating in the pilot year. After the lunch meeting, all mentors and mentees were sent the list of discussion questions we used at the lunch, and were also encouraged to fill out a mid-year survey to assess the program and provide feedback.
The first cohort is currently wrapping up their participation, and their reception of this program has been positive. Participants of the first pilot year had many good things to share, including the following:
“Things are going well! Really nice to have time and energy dedicated to chatting with a peer who does not have the same institutional context as me.” – Emma Molls, University of Minnesota
“I really enjoyed serving as a mentor during this inaugural year of the LPC Mentorship Program. Benefits included expanding my professional network through forming a strong relationship with my mentee, broadening my expertise through learning about library publishing at his university, and the opportunity to contribute back to this wonderful community. All of these positives resulted from a minimal time commitment of about one hour per month to meet with my mentee, so future program participants can be confident that they will receive an outstanding payoff with nominal effort.” — Jody Bailey, Emory University
“The LPC Mentorship program did a fantastic job pairing me with the best mentor for my individual professional development goals. My mentor and I connected from the get-go and I learned so much from her experiences and advice, and made a real friend. Given how thoughtful and personalized the process, I think that this program is an essential tool in an early-career library publishing professional’s toolkit as they start out!” — Amanda Wentworth, SUNY OER Services
“Being quite new to library publishing, the LPC mentorship program was a fantastic way to get a personal & friendly introduction to the world of library publishing outside of my own institution. It was incredibly helpful to compare & contrast how location, institutional history, funding, and size of operation affects our daily workflows. My mentor was very generous and I got access to some excellent resources to share with my team!” — Emily Zheng, University of Alberta
In response to a successful pilot year, the LPC Professional Development Committee will be offering the program again, with one key change. The focus for the 2020 year will be on peer mentor relationships, rather than having specific mentor and mentee roles. We hope to welcome many more members into the 2020 LPC Peer Mentorship Program!
Timeline for 2020 Cycle:
Apply for the 2020 LPC Peer Mentor Program now!
The Fellows Journal is a forum for the current Library Publishing Coalition fellows to share their experiences and raise topics for discussion within the community. Learn more about the Fellowship Program.
It is an honor to have been named in the second cohort of Library Publishing Coalition Fellows. I thank the community and its leadership for welcoming me, and providing structure and support. In this blogpost, I will introduce myself, my history, and my professional interests.
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Our campus held a celebration of first-generation students a few weeks ago. A colleague on his way there stopped by and asked if I was first gen. I replied that I wasn’t. There is a bit of further nuance to that, which feels appropriate for me to reflect upon here. No, both of my parents attended college, and in fact both held master’s degrees. It was an incredible privilege to grow up in a home where the idea of higher education was not shrouded in mystique, and I don’t know that I ever independently questioned how tuition would be paid for. I suppose it came up, but never in a way that actually made me feel any real concern. Again, just an incredible privilege.
My upbringing could easily have been much different. I was born in South Korea to extremely young parents, who I recently discovered did not complete high school. When I was put up for adoption, I’ve always assumed the decision must have been largely related to financial concerns. The records show I have an older brother, who was not put up for adoption. Had I been firstborn, I would likely be living in Korea now, presumably engaged in some sort of occupation that would seem foreign to the person I became. Instead, I was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, in a solidly middle-class home, raised by white parents that were firmly married, employed, and socially connected. As I told my work colleague, no, I am not a first-generation college student, at least not technically.
With that part of my story established, let me expose another bit of nuance. Both of my American parents have been wheelchair-bound since childhood. My father, a son of Louisville, caught the poliovirus as a child. His mother had been a nurse who administered doses of the polio vaccine to students in his elementary school. To her regret, she did not vaccinate her son, because of the age cutoff. My mother, a daughter of Cincinnati, had a tumor growth on her spine; the surgeon assigned to her was drunk during the removal operation. My parents met each other at the University of Illinois, which was one of the more handicap-friendly institutions in the region at that time. Perhaps it’s the same for everybody, but it has always felt true for me that who I am today has largely been contingent upon serendipity.
These are things that rarely cross my mind anymore. I’ve lived in a college town in peaceful, rural Western Kentucky for almost 18 years now. Since 2016, I’ve been employed as a tenure-track scholarly communication librarian and assistant professor. My ethnicity, adoption, and parents’ wheelchairs no longer count among the top ten salient factors of my waking consciousness. Though it takes a painful long time for my family to load in and out of our van, it’s because I have three children who need help buckling in, not two parents who need extra time to strap in. When my wife is asked when she “got” her children, the factual answer is “upon birth” and not some date related to paperwork.
I am spilling guts here because I have realized how I have forgotten these things in recent years. It has been incredibly easy to forget both the privileges I grew up with and those I recently gained. In their use of this LPC platform, past Fellows Charlotte Roh and Reggie Raju have reminded me of my privileges. From what I understand, the work Talea Anderson has planned will do so as well.
From an external view, my road to scholarly communication was perfectly serene. As Reggie discussed in his introductory blog, he was born the son of indentured labourers, transplanted from India to apartheid-era South Africa. While I put in work to get where I am personally and professionally, the situational challenges I faced were a couple orders of magnitude simpler than had I not been the second born to my family in Korea.
At the 2019 Fellows Forum, Charlotte Roh live-streamed her presentation from home. Roh aptly concluded her talk on personal and professional intersections by revealing her (beautiful) newborn baby under her care. At times, I have wondered how much more productive my research output could be without the sleep deficits that accompany co-raising my three young children. That’s a pretty crude thought for me to have, considering the overall health of our family and the herculean efforts my wife puts in as a mother. In truth, I wouldn’t have a career at all without my immediate and extended familial support networks.
As I’ve become acquainted with Talea, I’ve come to know of her interests in web accessibility. In his twenties, my father served on the public transit board in Louisville, where he had a major impact on accessibility for wheelchaired people in the city. For a decade, I’ve luxuriated in my ability to move freely about in both physical and digital spaces. The intent of Talea’s projects seem to be akin to those of my father’s: advocating independence for those not secured it.
The concerns of Reggie, Charlotte, and Talea are not quite at the forefront of my research agenda. But thanks to them, and the experience afforded to me through this Fellowship, the blips these topics make on my radar are increasingly audible.
Let me now return to the ‘introductory’ purpose of this post, and discuss what I hope to bring to the table. The research areas I hope I can help initiate conversation on in the LPC community are open peer-review, open citation data, research assessment reform, and AI/machine learning in research. Open infrastructure and the Latin American publishing model are heavily on my mind as well. I’ve previously written about (and not abandoned) novel methods of introducing students to scholcomm concepts. (I may have a future blogpost in me, critical of my own work, tbh.) Earlier this year, I was wowed by Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book Generous Thinking, on reconnecting the work of the academy with the community, which has helped inspire my planned future research writing project, centering around methods to make published research not just more accessible, but more comprehensible to public audiences.
As part of my Fellowship, I will serve on the Forum Program Committee. At Murray State University, I coordinate two campus-wide student conferences and one statewide conference annually. (I also oversee a student-led journal, and assist with three faculty-led journals.) I’ve come to view conference planning as not dissimilar to managing a journal. As a community, we’re quite familiar with wrongdoing in scholarly publishing. We’ve also grown in our shared public awareness of wrongdoing in scholarly conferences.
Discourse on conferences has become a trending topic, at least in my feeds. Whether it’s been the harm directed toward our Hathcocks, the harm emanating from our Tennants, or the harms we disagree on as harms, it is no longer an option for us to ignore these. How we handle these as conference participants and organizers must be tackled. I am eager to be further conscious of and conversant in these topics, plus many others. To wit: enforcing mic usage at Q&As; making it more of a question than a comment (I’m guilty); slide accessibility; getting the bathroom sitch in order; considerations of alcohol and animal protein in catering; land acknowledgements; and carbon and currency costs of conference travel. I don’t purport to have the answers, but I am coming to learn that asking the questions is a healthy and vital practice.
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Thank you for reading.
Image Credit: Suzy Hazelwood, 2018.
On behalf of the LPC Board, we are delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2019 LPC Award for Exemplary Service is Jessica Kirshner, Open Educational Resources Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University. The Award recognizes substantial contributions by an LPC community member to advancing the mission, vision, and values of the Library Publishing Coalition. Jessica served as the chair of the Directory Task Force during the 2018-19 program year, and is currently serving as the chair of the Directory Committee. She was nominated for the award because of her dedication and effective leadership, both in steering the publication of the 2020 Directory and in revising the Directory’s data model for the future. This award recognizes her unique contributions to the community.
A statement from Jessica:
“It’s an honor to be recognized with this year’s LPC Award for Exemplary Service. Having served on and chaired the Directory Committee/Task Force, I’ve had the opportunity to work with great colleagues from the library publishing community to review the Directory’s current data model. This work will ensure that the information we collect—and the process we use to collect it—serves the needs of both LPC members and the library publishing community at large. I look forward to the release of the 2020 Directory, as well as the exciting partnership with IFLA through which we will share information on library publishing programs on an even larger scale.”
Jessica will receive a complimentary registration to this year’s Library Publishing Forum and a $50 gift card. She will also be recognized at the Forum.
In its Strategic Plan for 2018–2023, the Library Publishing Coalition has a core goal of strengthening the community of library publishers. More specifically, objective 2.4 states that we will “build our support for and engagement with the international community of library publishers.” When the LPC Board of Directors started discussing this year what that support and engagement might look like, one of the ideas we landed on was increased attendance at international conferences (or U.S.-based conferences with many international attendees) since, after all, it is difficult to engage with people one does not know, and conferences are some of the best networking opportunities around. Until this point in LPC’s history, LPC Community Facilitator Melanie Schlosser had been attending all conferences where we felt an LPC presence would be beneficial, but with our goal to increase international engagement, a sole individual could not do it all. Therefore, the Board made the decision to begin sending Board members as representatives to select conferences with an international focus and an alignment with library publishing, and I was selected to attend the 41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). The theme this year was “Shaping the New Status Quo: Global Perspectives in Scholarly Publishing,” so it met the goals of the LPC Board members to become more involved in conversations with scholarly publishing stakeholders beyond North America.
I was excited to attend this conference for several reasons. First, I’m a long-time reader of the Scholarly Kitchen (SSP’s widely read official blog) who has been at times thrilled, frustrated, and downright angered by the views expressed by the SK “chefs” (regular blog contributors). Second, I’ve worked as a librarian for 10 years, focusing on scholarly communications for the past 4 years, so the conversations at SSP are squarely in my wheelhouse. Finally, before obtaining my MLIS, I worked in scholarly publishing for 10 years; therefore, I was looking forward to chatting with folks in that world again.
What I discovered during the conference was surprising on many levels. Here are a few of the things that surprised me most.
In fact, many of the people I met who work in scholarly publishing have the same primary goal as mine: a fully open environment for scholarly communications. Granted, some of these folks work for publishers that are already fully open, such as PLOS, but some do not. What everyone seemed to be focused on, however, was Plan S and how we are all going to get to an open access environment and still be able to keep subscription revenue–reliant businesses afloat. Yes, some of the big guys were there (Wiley, Taylor-Francis, Elsevier, etc.), but many (most?) of the attendees were from small to medium publishers who are just trying to figure out how to survive in a post–Plan S world.
In the days leading up to the conference, I perused the program and was frankly surprised to see how many sessions were of interest to me. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) hosted a well-attended premeeting, “Fact or Fiction? OASPA Lifts the Lid on OA Publishing,” and my day started off on the right foot as I got to chat with a colleague working for Annual Reviews, an SSP Fellow from Nigeria, and another attendee from OCLC. The sessions to follow that day (all sponsored) and in the subsequent two days of the actual conference offered a cornucopia of topics; in fact, for almost every concurrent session, I had a really difficult time choosing which session to attend since for most time slots, a choice of six sessions was offered. Also of particular note were the two keynotes: one by Dr. Mariamawit Yeshak, a faculty member in pharmacognosy at Addis Ababa University, focusing on scholarly research and publishing in Africa; and the other by Betsy Beaumon, CEO and founder of Benetech, in which she discussed the role of technology in increasing equity and inclusion for people with disabilities.
Highlights of the conference included the following:
I confess that I had a somewhat simplistic idea in my head of what scholarly publishers talk about these days, and it all revolved around money and how they could make more of it. What I found instead was a group of thoughtful professionals who are sincerely looking for a way forward into a fully open-access world. Most wholeheartedly agree that open access publishing has many positives; chief among them is increasing readership generally but also expanding access to critical research in parts of the world that currently cannot obtain it. As a scholarly communications librarian, I can certainly relate to this goal. Their desire to keep their businesses afloat may be different from academic librarians’ goals of ensuring that our libraries are perceived as vital to the work of our campuses, but we definitely share a passion for increased access to knowledge for the global community.
Jody Bailey
Head of Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University Libraries
Library Publishing Coalition Board of Directors, President-Elect