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.

March 21, 2019

Reflections on the first meeting of the IFLA Special Interest Group on Library Publishing

By Suzanne Stapleton

Sixty librarians met in Dublin, Ireland on Feb 28 – Mar1, 2019 as the first meeting of the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA)’s new Special Interest Group on Library Publishing. The idea for this group developed from a pre-conference on library publishing in Michigan, USA prior to the 2016 IFLA World Congress/Annual Conference. IFLA approved the new Special Interest Group in the fall of 2018. The Dublin Business School eagerly offered to host the group’s first meeting, providing a comfortable venue for inspiring presentations and rich dialogue. During the meeting, news broke of the University of California’s decision not to renew subscriptions to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect journals package, a reminder of the urgency of the need to make scholarly work accessible and the potential role of library publishing to address these needs.

Library publishing aligns well with the traditional library mission to share knowledge freely. As knowledge has transformed from print to digital formats, library publishing is a logical modern application of the library mission. Approaches in library publishing from the University of Florida, Stockholm University, White Rose University Press in the UK, Pennsylvania State University and case studies shared throughout the meeting affirmed the strategic role for library publishing. Presenters candidly shared successes and challenges experienced in their publishing activities including resources utilized. Librarians offer a unique perspective to publishing as a result of their expertise in knowledge curation, dissemination and preservation.

Academic library publishers are also keen to educate users throughout the publishing process. A session on education and mentoring in library publishing highlighted the publication of appropriate curriculum including the Library Publishing Coalition’s An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, a pilot course required of student editors at Columbia University, embedding library publishing within a university writing course at Simon Fraser University, and development of a certification program to improve digital pedagogy among faculty with resulting massive open online courses (MOOCs) demonstrating improved student performance at Olso Metropolitan University. Library publishing lends itself to the production of Open Educational Resources and other informational literacy educational objectives such as addressing misconceptions on campus about open access, options for authors rights retention and types of peer review.

(more…)

March 8, 2019

Help us livestream the 2019 Library Publishing Forum!

By Hilary Hickman

Help us livestream the 2019 Library Publishing Forum! Volunteers needed. No experience required, training provided. @LibPubCoalition. #LPForum19. http://bit.ly/lpforum19_livestream. Library Publishing Coalition.

In order to make our program more accessible to members of the community who cannot attend in person, the LPC Program Committee has decided once again to livestream the 2019 Library Publishing Forum. We’re seeking interested volunteers to join us in a coordinated effort to capture and stream conference sessions live to Twitter (via Twitter’s livestreaming platform, Periscope).

Here’s how this will work:

If you have a smartphone that you can use to capture and stream sessions to Twitter, and if you are interested in joining us in this effort, please let us know your name and contact information via this form by Monday, April 8. Please note that we will have access to campus wifi, so you will not be required to use your wireless data connection for this.
Educopia’s communications manager will send a training manual to each volunteer and will be available to answer any questions before and during the conference. If a volunteer would like additional training ahead of the conference, one-on-one training sessions can be arranged.
Educopia will provide tripods and microphones in each room to improve the quality of the streaming.
Each volunteer will receive their livestreaming assignments (including session, room number and location, tweet text, and presenters) via email the week before the conference. We will take volunteer preferences for livestreaming assignments into account whenever possible.
We will only stream presentations where the presenter has given us permission to do so.

We hope you’ll consider helping us make this year’s Forum more accessible and inclusive by volunteering to livestream sessions! Please do sign up if you’re interested, or feel free to email Hannah Ballard (hannah@educopia.org) if you have any questions or concerns.

Volunteer

March 6, 2019

Preliminary program for the Library Publishing Forum is live!

By Melanie Schlosser

The preliminary program for the 2019 Library Publishing Forum is now available, with titles and presenter names for all sessions. Abstracts and other details will follow later this month. As you can see, we have a ton of fantastic sessions from a wide range of presenters, as well as a couple of optional lunchtime meetups. We are also delighted to announce that the Forum reception on Thursday evening (May 9) will be held at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art!

Past Forum attendees may note a difference in this year’s program, with four concurrent sessions in each time slot. This is an experiment by the Program Committee to balance the limitations of space and time with the many excellent proposals which were submitted. We look forward to hearing the community’s feedback on this setup to inform the program for future Forums!

View the Preliminary Program

Multi-colored umbrellas on blue sky background

February 26, 2019

Wayne State University: Widening spheres of influence

By Joshua Neds-Fox

In February 2019, we are publishing our second series of member profiles. These profiles showcase the wide variety of publishing work happening at member institutions, and celebrate our community’s contributions to the wider publishing landscape. This series will also spotlight resources the profiled institutions have contributed to the Shared Documentation library. Many thanks to the members who volunteered to answer our questions! See all of the published profiles, and look for a new one each week in February.

To learn more about their program, check out Wayne State’s latest Library Publishing Directory entry.

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

Wayne State University Libraries’ publishing program grew out of our commitment to supporting scholarship on campus, to advancing open access in scholarly communications, and to creative service to our scholarly community. The journals that have found a home at the WSU Libraries each have a unique arrangement:

a journal in applied statistics that another department could no longer support was rescued because our hosting platform represented a sunk cost that didn’t need to be recovered;
because we were able to invite and train collaborators, a medical student journal could design a workflow that incorporates student editors and uses the platform as a pedagogical tool to introduce future doctors to scholarly publishing;
and our experience developing hosting policy made it easy to draft an arrangement that opened up the backlist of a long-running fraternity journal.

We very much see these efforts as providing space or support for scholarly work that doesn’t fit in other parts of the publishing ecosystem, and therefore see our publishing program as a vital niche in supporting the overall scholarly endeavor at Wayne State.

Photo of three men, two standing and one sitting in a chair. Text reads: "What is something you have accomplished with your program that you're proud of - big or small? It’s a small but significant story: there’s a literary journal run out of the School of Medicine at Wayne State (Brain Candy: Wayne State University School of Medicine Journal of Arts and Culture, http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/ghhs/), that uses our publishing program as a distributor. When it was languishing, our program pitched in design and production work that helped it bridge the lean years, until the School could re-establish an editorial team. I’m proud that we contributed to the life of this humanist outpost in an intense medical education. — Standing, Joshua Neds-Fox and Cole Hudson, and seated, Graham Hukill, Digital Publishing Librarians in the Wayne State University Libraries. Not pictured: STEM/Digital Publishing Librarian Clayton Hayes, Digitization Technician Beck Caterina, and adjacent teammate Dr. Cheryl Ball.

(more…)

February 25, 2019

LPC-AUPresses Cross-Pollination Waivers for 2019 are here!

By Melanie Schlosser

Last year, LPC and our strategic affiliate the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) partnered on a very successful cross-pollination program for our two conferences. Two LPC community members received registration waivers to attend the AUPresses Annual Meeting in San Francisco, and two AUPResses members joined us for the 2018 Forum in Minneapolis. You can read the reflections from the awardees on our blog. To keep up the cross-pollinating, we are offering the same program this year! Applications are due March 8th.

Details and Application

February 20, 2019

Michigan Publishing: Focus on discoverability and accessibility

By Jason Colman

To learn more about their program, check out the University of Michigan’s latest Library Publishing Directory entry.

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

Michigan Publishing brings together the University of Michigan Press, Michigan Publishing Services, and the Deep Blue data and document repository into one big publishing team. Our home is in the Buhr Building, which is an old ball bearing factory that also holds a few million library books and could double as a labyrinth. Every year, we publish about 125 books, 30 journals, and thousands of documents and datasets. We’re also the production and distribution arm of Lever Press, an author-fee-free Open Access publisher of peer-reviewed scholarly works that resonate with the mission of liberal arts colleges, and we’ve spent the last few years building a publishing platform, Fulcrum, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We’re pretty busy these days, but we do still find time for the occasional pun battle.

Tell us something you have accomplished with your program that you’re proud of – big or small.

We recently launched the University of Michigan Press’s eBook collection (more than 1,000 books) on Fulcrum, our digital platform. It was a ton of work for folks across the whole organization and we’re really proud of the finished product.

On a more whimsical note, we just published our first board book, Off He Goes! – it’s for kids who have a medical condition called Brachial Plexus Palsy, and was put together by a neurosurgeon at Michigan Medicine. The project brought us our very first plush toy tie-in, Wimbo the Elephant!

Photo of man in plaid shirt holding stuffed elephant and book titled "Off He Goes!" Text reads: "One thing that really gets our team up out of bed in the morning is our work continuing to push the boundaries on making our books and journals more accessible. Fulcrum aims to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards, and we’re committed to having all University of Michigan Press books published in Fall 2019 and after having basic textual descriptions of images (alt text). By June 2021, all titles the Press publishes will have complete textual descriptions of images (alt text and, when applicable, long descriptions) supplied by our authors." — *Patrick Goussy, Senior Digital Publishing Coordinator, poses with Wimbo the elephant and Michigan Publishing’s first foray into board books.*

(more…)

February 18, 2019

LPC featured on Educopia’s blog as part of community cultivation series

By Melanie Schlosser

To accompany the release last fall of its Community Cultivation Field Guide, the Educopia Institute launched a new blog and a series of posts on community cultivation. The series includes a case study of each stage in the community lifecycle, featuring Educopia’s affiliated communities. To illustrate what the “acceleration” stage might look like, I contributed a post on LPC’s recent strategic planning process. Check it out!

Read the Post

February 13, 2019

Indiana University Bloomington: Educating and onboarding editors with the New Journal Toolkit

By Sarah Hare

This post was written by Sarah Hare and Jenny Hoops.

To learn more about their program, check out Indiana University’s latest Library Publishing Directory entry.

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

Indiana University Bloomington has been publishing journals using the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems platform since 2008. The Office of Scholarly Publishing, a strategic partnership between IU Press and IU Libraries Scholarly Communication Department to support publishing at IU broadly, was created in 2012. The program centers on access: journals only need an Indiana University affiliation to participate in the library publishing program. 50 journals currently participate in the publishing program in some capacity. This includes formally peer-reviewed faculty publications, student journals, informal serials like newsletters, active journals, and journals that are no longer active but have an extensive, open access back list. Journals receive hosting and operational publishing services at no cost, with the exception of more resource-intensive services like copyediting and print on demand.

IU Libraries’ journal publishing program is part of a larger suite of services centered on “open scholarship” and ensuring that all IU affiliates can make their scholarly outputs–including journal articles, book chapters, media, data, and learning objects–open, regardless of the level of openness they are interested in. Other services the library provides include data management planning, assistance finding and creating OER, repository deposit, and consultation on demonstrating impact. These services contribute to the journal publishing program, giving IU affiliates a comprehensive support structure for engaging with openness.

Tell us something you have accomplished with your program that you’re proud of – big or small.

We have reached a major milestone of 50 total journal publications. While our journals were initially focused on folklore, history, and education, we now host journals on university administration, public affairs, optometry, art, and several other subjects, with journals published by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students across several schools and departments. We take pride in making our legacy journals with comprehensive backlists more discoverable. For example, recently we have been providing metadata clean up and article-level discoverability, ensuring open access back lists are appearing in searches.

Our program also completed a major platform upgrade last year, updating our instance of Open Journal Systems from 2 to 3. OJS 3 provides our editors with an enhanced, user-friendly interface and customizable editorial workflows. We’ve worked with our editors to help them adapt to the new system and take advantage of the new features while providing support for journal indexing and website design. As we continue to onboard new journals, we hope to publish and support innovative scholarship for a diverse set of editors and disciplines.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

For Open Access Week 2018, we held a workshop on starting an open access journal with IU Libraries. We also interviewed editors of journals we currently publish and our new Open Scholarship Resident, Willa Liburd Tavernier, to learn more about their passion for open access. We hope to continue to use these materials when promoting the program but we are also excited to start to promote our program more systematically. We’re currently working with marketing and communications experts within the Libraries to create more promotional and informational material about our journal publishing program. Right now, editors learn about our program by word of mouth or by interacting with our team through another service. More systematic promotion will enable us to reach IU affiliates that are unaware of our program and are interested in creating or “flipping” a journal to open access.

Photo of seven library staff members at Indiana University Bloomington — *Pictured from left to right: Willa Liburd Tavernier, Richard Higgins, Jamie Wittenberg, Jenny Hoops, Sarah Hare (top row), Allison Nolan, and Brian Watson (bottom row)*

(more…)

February 11, 2019

LPC Board elections: Candidate bios and statements

By Melanie Schlosser

Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, March 1st. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. The candidates are:

Jennifer Beamer, The Claremont Colleges Library
Karen Bjork, Portland State University
Christine Fruin, American Theological Library Association
Sarah Hare, Indiana University
Annie Johnson, Temple University
Mark Konecny, University of Cincinnati

Each candidate has provided a brief biography and an election statement:

(more…)

Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below

February 6, 2019

Academy-owned? Academic-led? Community-led? What’s at stake in the words we use to describe new publishing paradigms

By Melanie Schlosser

Editor’s note, 6/21/19: A Spanish translation of this post is now available on Blog Ameli: “¿Propiedad de la academia? ¿Dirigido por la academia? ¿Dirigido por la comunidad? Lo que está en juego cuando utilizamos palabras para describir los nuevos paradigmas de publicación.” Our thanks to AmeliCA for the translation!

Editor’s note: This blog post is LPC’s official contribution to Academic Led Publishing Day (ALPD), a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives. LPC is participating in ALPD because it presents an opportunity to have a multi-stakeholder discussion about an issue of growing importance to libraries, and to call attention to the lack of a shared vision in this critical area. Our goals in this post are to highlight some of the unresolved questions in this space and to call on libraries to grapple with them.

This post was co-authored by Melanie Schlosser (LPC Community Facilitator) and Catherine Mitchell (Director, Publishing & Special Collections, California Digital Library; Past President of the LPC Board).

***

There is no question that we are facing significant challenges and opportunities as the traditional publishing model begins to falter. How the academy positions itself at this moment will have consequences for years to come.

***

“Academy-owned” seems to be the descriptor du jour in scholarly communications circles. We talk increasingly about academy-owned infrastructure, academy-owned publishing, academy-owned publications, etc. We find ourselves at meetings and conferences where we explore the challenges of supporting new forms of scholarly research, new modes of publication, new communities of readers — and there it is again — “academy-owned,” lurking in the conversation. We write grants whose very premise is that the academy will rise to claim its rightful place as the source, the maker, the distributor, the curator of its greatest asset — knowledge. There is definitely a movement afoot.

Why has this phrase taken hold lately? The landscape is increasingly dominated by large, multinational corporations that are vacuuming up tools and platforms throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle. Although many of these corporations are familiar to libraries as content publishers, they are expanding their reach well beyond publishing to control both upstream and downstream activities: pre-print servers, OA publishing platforms, current research information systems, etc. A rebellion is stirring among those who worry that we are increasingly abdicating control of the academy’s intellectual property, its data, its ability to share information — even its values — to for-profit companies. The more we rely on licensed resources to read, distribute, and measure the impact of our research — as well as to determine the success of our researchers and the value of our institutions — the more in thrall the academy is to a set of values that are derived from a profit-driven marketplace founded on restricted access to information and abstract performance metrics.

And yet this noble impulse to claim a space for the academy in the exchange and evaluation of scholarly research is also rife with linguistic confusion. While the drive toward “academy-owned” solutions is pervasive, the language we use to articulate this drive lacks precision. Sometimes we talk about “academy-owned” projects, but just as often we describe them as “academic-led” or “community-led” or any number of other permutations. [1] These phrases are not synonymous — their distinctions are actually quite important — yet we use them interchangeably and nod to each other, as if we know what we mean. What, exactly, do we mean? It’s time to ask ourselves to identify the big issues and difficult questions embedded both in the terms themselves and the vagueness with which we use them.

(more…)