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.

October 31, 2023

Library Publishing Coalition Releases 2022-2023 Annual Report

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The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce the release of its 2022-2023 Annual Report.

In addition to outlining LPC’s finances, membership, affiliates, and ongoing inclusion efforts, the Annual Report highlights several programmatic milestones, including:

  • Launching both the Canadian Community Development Working Group and the Research Cohort pilot initiative
  • Publication of An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, Version 2.0
  • Recommendations from the Preservation Task Force

We are thrilled to celebrate our community’s shared success. LPC’s continued sustainability and effectiveness result from the work undertaken by LPC members, staff, our partners, and affiliate organizations. All the people involved in this work offered their time, energy, and expertise to fulfill our vision of an open, inclusive, and sustainable scholarly publishing landscape.


Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below
October 31, 2023

Coming Together: Consortial Publishing at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library in Support of 4 HBCUs in Atlanta, GA

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Consortial publishing profiles is an occasional series highlighting library publishing programs that offer centralized publishing services to multiple institutions within a geographic region or a consortium


By Vanesa Evers, Author, Digital Publishing Librarian, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library and  Christine Wiseman, Editor, Assistant Director, Digital Services Department

 

What is the focus and scope of the program?

The AUC Woodruff Library supports the teaching, learning and research missions of four institutions of higher education that comprise the world’s largest consortium of HBCUs: Clark Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center,  Morehouse College, and Spelman College.  Consequently, the Library hosts and supports digital publishing services for all of our member institutions. We host student journals, literary journals, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and faculty-led academic journals using OJS. Since the needs of our partner institution are so unique, we provide very diverse services to each institution.

How and why did it get started?

The Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library (AUC Woodruff Library) has a solid relationship with its stakeholders, including students, staff, and faculty. Over the last few years, publishing opportunities have increased due to the Library expanding its digital platforms like Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Pressbooks. Since the Library serves four institutions, the needs are unique to each institution. Faculty and student editors might need limited assistance with a particular platform, whereas another institution might need more in-depth support with a new project.

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October 19, 2023

2024 Library Publishing Forum Call For Proposals

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The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in or considering publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum to be held at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN on May 15 and 16, 2024! Proposals may address any topic of interest to the library publishing community. The proposal deadline is November 20, 2023.

Note: The deadline for submitting proposals has been extended to December 15, 2023.

Proposal submissions for the Forum are welcome from LPC members and nonmembers, including library employees, university press employees, scholars, students, and other scholarly communication and publishing professionals. We welcome proposals from first-time presenters, representatives of small and emerging publishing programs, and employees of non-member institutions.

We are committed to expanding the diversity of perspectives we hear from at the Library Publishing Forum. Working towards some of the “Continuing Initiatives” from the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice, we ask all proposals to explicitly address how they are inclusive of multiple perspectives, address DEI, or incorporate anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. Presentations about specific communities should include members of that community in their speaker list, and for sessions with multiple speakers, we seek to avoid all-white and all-male panels.

Learn more about session formats and submitting on the Forum program web page.

Submit a proposal

LPC Program Committee

Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington (2023–2024 co-chair)
Jennifer Coronado, Butler University (PALNI) (2023–2024 co-chair)
Jason Boczar, University of South Florida
Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech
Loftan Hooker, Virginia Commonwealth University
Alexandra Marcaccio, University of Guelph
Emma Molls, University of Minnesota (host liaison)
Melanie Schlosser, Library Publishing Coalition


September 18, 2023

Finding the Right Publishing Platform

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A Research blog post from

  • Corinne Guimont, Digital Scholarship Coordinator & Interim Director, Virginia Tech Publishing, Virginia Tech
  • Matt Vaughn, Open Publishing Librarian, Indiana University Libraries
  • Cheryl E. Ball, Independent publishing consultant and Executive Director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals

A key job responsibility for many library publishers is to collaborate with authors to determine the best mechanisms to share and publish their research. Open-access publishing has been on library publishers’ radars for over two decades, and the types of publishing that librarians are responsible for has expanded from PDFs in Institutional Repositories to faculty and student journals, digital humanities projects, and open educational resources. Further, authors and editors are interested in publishing their work in a digital and open environment with innovative content, including interactive elements and multimedia. While there are numerous commercial and open-source platforms available for publishing research (i.e., bePress, Drupal, WordPress), the number of academy-owned or -affiliated publishing platforms has flourished in the last five years, and the choices can feel overwhelming to librarians, let alone authors and editors. So, then, how do potential users find out about which platforms may be available? The librarians’ answer: A crosswalk!

We are delighted to announce the release of “Finding the Right Platform” (https://doi.org/10.17613/z27e-0z11), a crosswalk that compares 10 academy-owned and open-source publishing platforms commonly used in library and university press publishing. “Finding the Right Platform” is published under a CC-BY license on Humanities Commons.

The crosswalk begins by asking users what type of project they want to publish and what features they are looking for in publishing platforms. Our goal was to help librarians, publishers, and authors/researchers make a decision to further pursue one platform over another (or to identify and further research a smaller group of platforms that might be suitable for their projects).

This 34-page, hyperlinked crosswalk includes at-a-glance feature comparisons for the following platforms

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August 30, 2023

LPC welcomes a new member: Oregon State University

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Please join us in welcoming Oregon State University as a new member of the Library Publishing Coalition! The voting rep for Oregon State University is Margaret Mellinger.

About Oregon State University Libraries and Press:

Oregon State University Libraries and Press includes The Valley Library in Corvallis, Guin Library at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, and the OSU Cascades Library in Bend, Oregon.  The Special Collections and Archives Research Center houses rare and unique materials, including notable collections in the history of science and technology, cultural and ethnic groups in Oregon, Northwest hops and brewing, natural resources and university history.  And our award-winning University Press has been publishing exceptional books about the Pacific Northwest since 1961.

 


August 22, 2023

Celebrating 10 years of the Library Publishing Coalition!

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This program year (July 2023 – June 2024), the Library Publishing Coalition is celebrating 10 full years as a membership community! Want to get in on the fun? Here are some opportunities!

Join us at the Library Publishing Forum

The next in-person Library Publishing Forum will take place May 15 & 16, 2024, at the McNamara Alumni Center on the campus of University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN). As always, the Forum will be welcoming and affordable, but we are working overtime this year to make sure it’s also full of the kinds of experiences you can only have at an in-person event. Join us to learn, to connect, and to celebrate! Save the date for now, and keep an eye out for the call for proposals this fall.

Sign the LPC Yearbook

Sure, we have (super cool) annual programs and (amazingly effective) committees and (fabulous) staff, but at its heart, LPC is made up of connections – between colleagues, between publishing programs, between people and ideas, and between professional communities. To celebrate that fact, we invite you to contribute to the LPC Yearbook! Will it have awkward, posed photos of every community member and ‘most likely to’ lists? Absolutely not. Will it serve as a space to reminisce, to recognize colleagues, and to say ‘I was there’? Yes! The Yearbook will be a low-key publication that anyone can contribute to by filling out this brief form. Submit as many entries as you like, just make sure they are in by the end of December.

You can also contribute pictures from LPC events! Just follow the prompts in the form.

Contribute to the Yearbook

Write a blog post

The LPC Blog isn’t just a news platform – it’s also a publication venue for some pretty great original writing on library publishing-related topics. You can browse the whole Reflections category to get an overview, or dive into themed series like Transitions or Intersections. This year we will launch a new series in honor of the 10th anniversary. In it, community members who have been involved in LPC or the field of library publishing throughout the last 10 years will reflect on what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and where they think things are headed. Are you a veteran library publisher or longtime LPC community participant? Would you enjoy an opportunity to take a step back from the daily grind and think about the long view and the big picture? Email Melanie Schlosser (LPC Community Facilitator) to learn more about writing a guest post!

Want to stay in the loop?

We will announce additional 10th anniversary activities throughout the year, in addition to all the usual LPC- and Forum-related news; if you don’t want to keep checking the blog, you can head over to our home page and sign up for our public news list.

Join LPC!

And finally, if your library isn’t already a member of LPC, now is a great time to join! Learn more on our membership page.

Here’s to 10 more years!


June 27, 2023

Announcing Version 2.0 of An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing

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Ethical Framework 2.0 PDF CoverLPC is delighted to announce the publication of Version 2.0 of An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. A dedicated task force worked for two years to draft this update to the Library Publishing Coalition’s 2018 Framework. The result is a remarkably different document, structured to orient library publishers to how they might proceed toward ethical thinking in their discipline. The form, scope, and direction of this Framework are entirely new; we’re looking forward to hearing from the community about how it is used and how it can be improved — please email contact@librarypublishing.org with feedback and suggestions!

This version of the Framework is available alongside Version 1.0 at Purdue University Libraries (https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317619), as well as on the LPC’s Resources page. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so it can be freely copied, distributed, and built upon (where possible, please link to the version of record rather than reposting, to help us track the document’s impact and to ensure that the latest version is easily discoverable).

Thanks go to the outstanding volunteers who labored to make this unique framework a reality:

Tina Baich, IUPUI
Nina Collins, Purdue University
Jaime Ding, UCLA
Bernadette A. Lear, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg
Anna Leonard, University of Namibia
Zoe Wake Hyde, Humanities Commons
Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University (task force chair)
Charlotte Roh, California Digital Library
Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute
Kate Shuttleworth, Simon Fraser University and the Public Knowledge Project
Christine Turner, University of Massachusetts Amherst


June 26, 2023

2023 Library Publishing Directory now available

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The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce the publication of the 2023 Library Publishing Directory! This year’s print, PDF, and EPUB versions of the Library Publishing Directory highlight the publishing activities of 159 library publishers across the globe..

The Directory illustrates the many ways in which libraries are actively transforming and advancing scholarly communications in partnership with scholars, students, university presses, and others. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction presents a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data, which we also publish in a related blog posting.

The 2023 Directory also reflects an ongoing  partnership with the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Library Publishing Special Interest Group (LibPub SIG), and includes international entries, translated by IFLA LibPub SIG members. Libraries who chose to complete the full survey appear in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions of the Directory. All entries appear in the online version. IFLA’s Library Publishing Map of the World is a first-of-its-kind online database of global library publishing initiatives. .

Publication of the 2023 Directory was overseen by the LPC’s Directory Committee:

The Library Publishing Coalition Directory Committee
Karen Stoll Farrell, Indiana University – Bloomington, Chair
Jody Bailey, Emory University
Briana Knox, University of North Texas
Ryan Otto, Kansas State University
Ted Polley, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Nicholas Wojcik, University of Oklahoma

IFLA Special Interest Group on Library Publishing Subcommittee
Grace Liu (Canada)
Ann Okerson (USA)


June 26, 2023

The state of the field: An excerpt from the 2023 Library Publishing Directory

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As much as we love the searchable online interface for the Library Publishing Directory, it doesn’t include the introduction found in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction includes a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data that highlights trends and new developments in library publishing as reported by the programs that contribute their information. To make it easier to find, we are republishing that portion of the introduction here.

THE 2023 LIBRARY PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE

The yearly Library Publishing Directory provides insights into library publishing activities, allowing us to consider how the field has evolved, prevalent current practice, and possible future directions. While we discuss trends below – often in comparison to prior years – please note that the number and composition of the data set of Directory listings changes yearly, thus a strict comparison year to year is not possible. Further complicating any analysis of the data are changes to the survey itself. We do try to update the survey as changes in technology and publishing platforms emerge. The Directory Committee routinely evaluates the data model to ensure that it best reflects the library publishing field. Many of the survey questions remain the same year to year and new questions are periodically added.

GENERAL DEMOGRAPHICS 

As in previous years, the overwhelming majority of respondents are from academic libraries, with 92% reporting this institution type. This year, 73% of respondents reported that their program is established, a slight increase over last year’s 68%, while 23% report their program as early. Just over half of respondents (n = 80) report that their program was established before 2010; similar to the 2022 survey, 68% of respondents report that their programs have been in operation for at least a decade.

Open access remains a priority for most reporting library publishers, as 85% defined open access as central to their mission, with 58% of respondents reporting that all of their publications are open access and 31% reporting that most of their publications are open access.

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June 16, 2023

Report on Library Publishing Forum 2023 Demographic Survey

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The development and use of this survey was based on the recommendations found in the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This is a charge carried out by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. The 2023 survey was made available to Library Publishing Forum (LPF) attendees in order to understand who attends the Forum and to help ensure we are building DEI into existing structures, registration forms, list of speakers, and improving workflows or resources. Moreover, this survey helps us make concrete improvements to the Forum and track demographic changes over time.

Notes

As all questions were optional, not all questions were answered. Therefore, numbers/counts do not always add up. There were minor changes to the survey this year in an attempt to be less restrictive to answer options. Rather than forcing attendees to select one of the options given to them, instead, some questions just provided an open response option. This also gave an opportunity for the respondent to fill in an answer that may not have been listed and to optionally identify as they saw fit. The respondent information includes both LPF attendees and presenters.

Summary of responses and comparisons

The 2023 LPF had 267 registered attendees, while 2022 had 330 registered attendees (246 were virtual while 84 were in-person). 

We received 86 responses to the demographic survey from 2023 LPF attendees, which is roughly the same as the previous year (83 in 2022). The number of responses two years ago was 166 in 2021. The response rate in 2023 was 32%, compared to 28-30% in 2022 (a virtual/in-person combination), and 36% in 2021.

In 2023, most respondents fell into the 30-39 and 40-49 age ranges (28 people in each range), however, there was representation across all 20-60+ ranges. In comparison the majority of 2022 attendees were in the 30-59 age range.

For the 2023 survey, the question framing for race and ethnicity changed. This year’s results show 14% of respondents identified as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), while 86% do not. In comparison, in 2022, 80% of respondents selected “White” as their racial/ethnic identifier.

Of the 85 responses related to gender, most respondents identified as a woman (80%). Other 2023 responses include identifying as a man, as using another term, or non-binary. Participants were also given an option to specify other terms in use and the option to provide further gender identity comments in the 2023 survey. A few additional terms or comments were provided.

Of the 52 responses related to having a disability, most respondents do not have a disability (63%). About 29% of respondents in 2023 identify as having a disability, compared to 17% in 2022.  Both 2022 and 2023 respondents had the open response options that enabled explanation or alternative answers. Chronic illness were additional answers, as well as some noting that having a disability and stating so are culturally difficult. For the 2023 survey, the question framing for this added another prompt specific to neurodivergence based on feedback from the 2022 survey. In 2023, there were 55 responses to the question on identifying as neurodivergent. About 24% identify as neurodivergent, while 71% do not. There were also a few who might consider or do not know if they are neurodivergent. In 2022, only one respondent provided a neurodivergent identifier.

 In 2023, employment status of respondents had a majority of full-time employment (92%), compared to 95% in 2022. Other statuses included full-time and student, part-time, student, part-time and student, and full-time and part-time combination. These other statuses were less in number in 2022 and included a retired status.

 New to the 2023 survey was the open response question about any other identities. Less than 10 responses included the following: Queer, Bisexual, Immigrant, Child of immigrants, and works in North American but not from North America.

Final Comments

The 2023 LPF was entirely virtual, while the 2022 LPF was both in-person and virtual. Moving forward, virtual and in-person years will alternate. This aspect will need to be considered when evaluating demographic surveys in future years and the comparisons across years.

The Library Publishing Coalition’s DEI Committee members are incredibly appreciative of the many LPF participants who took the demographic survey during this year’s Forum. 

We welcome LPF participants and LPC members to contact us at inclusion@librarypublishing.org if you have additional resources or feedback you would like to share to help us improve our work.