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.

Colorful books with gray overlay and text that reads: "Library publishing curriculum. Virtual workshop. Sustainability module. July 9-30, 2018. Taught by Holly Mercer, Associate Dean for Research, Collections, and Scholarly Communications, University of Tennessee, Knoxville." Educopia Institute, Library Publishing Coalition, and IMLS logos included.

June 11, 2018

Library Publishing Curriculum: Register for the Sustainability Virtual Workshop

By Hilary Hickman

The Library Publishing Coalition and the Educopia Institute are excited to host a series of virtual pilot workshops based on the IMLS-funded Developing a Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing project. Our first virtual workshop – Library Publishing Curriculum: Sustainability – will begin on July 9, 2018 and will last four weeks, ending on July 30. The workshop is limited to 30 participants, and registration is first come, first served. There is no registration fee.

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June 11, 2018

Challenges and opportunities (but mostly opportunities) for open source infrastructure in library publishing

By Melanie Schlosser

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of reflections by community members on the recent Library Publishing Forum. See the whole series. This post is guest written by Alison McGonagle-O’Connell, Editoria Community Manager and Owned by the Academy presenter.

As a first-time Library Publishing Forum attendee, presenter, and a participant in the “Owned by the Academy” pre-meeting, I was struck by how truly welcoming and collaborative this group is! These meetings also provided me with a few key takeaways:

Open Source (OS) publishing technologies are proliferating, and are of increasing interest to the broader library publishing community.
These tools and platforms represent one way for the community to reclaim some control of the scholarly communication marketplace.
Hosted service models for OS tools will be necessary for some to take the leap from commercial products.
OS providers need to work together to ensure interoperability, and to effectively map tool capabilities to the unique needs and requirements of the community

The first two takeaways are general observations, largely supported by those who attended, tweeted, and have subsequently discussed the meetings openly. OS technology gives organizations the ability to design and customize platforms to support their own needs and values. There is significant freedom in not being locked in to a commercial solution’s unalterable roadmap. Want to design accessibility into the platform with your user community? Go ahead! Concerned about security? Need support for interactive images including integration with data sets? Want to support multiple languages? Done. Nothing is off the table with this kind of community-driven and -supported infrastructure. (more…)

June 8, 2018

From services to access: Reflections of a first-time Forum attendee

By Melanie Schlosser

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of reflections by community members on the recent Library Publishing Forum. See the whole series. This post is guest written by Talea Anderson, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Washington State University and recipient of a Library Publishing Forum First-Time Attendee Scholarship.

In May I attended my first Library Publishing Forum with support kindly provided by LPC. The conference was filled with meaningful experiences for me. I’d mention in particular the time I was able to spend with the editorial staff of Kairos as part of KairosCamp and the opportunity I had later in the week to participate in the first pilot of the Library Publishing Curriculum. I manage a small, service-focused scholarly communication program at Washington State University, and these two workshops provided a glimpse of the editorial services that help keep journals running. On my campus, we are currently moving forward with supporting faculty who would like to create and publish open educational resources and I came away with a better understanding of the kinds of needs these faculty members may have when it comes to preparing, editing, and publishing their work.

These workshops were a great introduction to editorial work and publishing services, but for me the most meaningful part of LPF came on the first day when Catherine Kudlick spoke about web accessibility (slides coming soon). Kudlick invited us as library publishers to build accessibility into our workflows from the start, and to see this work not as punitive but as a service to all people, including disabled communities. This message is certainly important but I connected to it on an unexpectedly personal level. I learned, on introducing myself to Kudlick after her keynote, that we share the same eye condition and face similar challenges when it comes to doing things like presenting to audiences and reading texts on mobile devices. I rarely encounter others who can relate to the way I see—it’s rarer still to find people in academia who cope with vision loss while engaging with publishing and scholarly communication. The brief chat I had with Kudlick was, to say the least, a special opportunity for me. In the end, thanks in part to this encounter, I came away from LPF feeling inspired to continue improving access to information for everyone, including people like me and Kudlick and many others who benefit from inclusive publishing practices.

Talea Anderson
Scholarly Communication Librarian
Washington State University

June 7, 2018

Library publishing services visualized

By Melanie Schlosser

Have you ever asked yourself, “What do library publishers actually DO, and can I see it represented in the form of a word cloud?” If so, you’re in luck! I was mucking around with data from the 2018 Library Publishing Directory in support of a project the Professional Development Committee is working on when it occurred to me that it would make a great word cloud. Just for fun, here is a visual representation of more than 100 libraries’ answers to the question, “Which of these additional services does your library offer in support of library publishing activities?”

created at TagCrowd.com

June 7, 2018

What do we value in academic ownership?

By Ian Harmon

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of reflections by community members on the recent Library Publishing Forum and Owned by the Academy: A Preconference on Open Source Publishing Software. See the whole series.

When I learned that this year’s Library Publishing Forum preconference was called “Owned by the Academy,” I knew right away that I had to attend. I was just beginning my new job as Scholarly Communications Librarian at West Virginia University, and our Dean had recently mentioned to me the idea of academically-owned publishing. So the preconference presented a perfect opportunity to learn more about an area of interest at my new institution.

I anticipated that I would learn about lots of different open source publishing platforms, and leave the conference better informed to make recommendations as to which of these would be a good fit for my library, and this certainly happened. But since returning from Minneapolis, I’ve also been spending a lot of time reflecting on owned by the academy as a concept, and so I’m going to dedicate this post to sharing some of my thoughts on this issue.

Prior to the preconference, the phrase owned by the academy brought to my mind open source publishing software built and supported by a community of academic librarians, IT and development staff, and academically-oriented non-profits. I imagined that under an “academically-owned” setup, the software and infrastructure would be hosted at the institutional or consortial level and that commercial entities would not have a role to play.

But in light of my experience at the Owned by the Academy Preconference (and the Library Publishing Forum as a whole), I’ve been reconsidering what owned by the academy really means. At the preconference, there were representatives from colleges, universities, and non-profits, but some for-profit businesses were represented as well. So I’ve been thinking a lot about whether for-profit involvement is compatible with academic ownership. (more…)

May 16, 2018

Watch the livestream of the Library Publishing Forum

By Melanie Schlosser

For the second time, we will be livestreaming portions of the Library Publishing Forum (5/22-23)! You can see which sessions will be streamed on the Program Page (look for the little camera icon next to the presentation title). All streaming will be done via LPC’s Twitter account and will be shared via the conference hastag: #LPForum18. Can’t watch the stream live? Links to the recordings will be added to the program after the conference.

A BIG “thank you” to our Forum livestreaming volunteers: Lauren Collister (University of Pittsburgh), Sean Crowe (University of Cincinnati), Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas), and Jody Bailey (University of Texas at Arlington). We couldn’t do it without you!

We will also be streaming the plenary sessions at Owned by the Academy: A Preconference on Open Source Publishing Software, so make sure to tune in on 5/21 starting at 8:30am CDT. Access to the livestream of the preconference will be via LPC’s Twitter account and the preconference hashtag: #OwnedByTheAcademy.

May 10, 2018

Announcing two new LPC sponsors: ProjectMUSE and BiblioBoard

By Melanie Schlosser

We are excited to announce two new organization-level sponsorships through our Publishers and Service Providers Program: Project MUSE and BiblioBoard. We sincerely appreciate their support!

Statement from Project MUSE:

Project MUSE was born from a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries. We are delighted to continue our involvement with the library community by supporting the Library Publishing Coalition. Project MUSE provides a full-service journal and book hosting platform. Libraries can publish open access journals and books on MUSE or use our fulfillment services to offer subscription-based journals. Content on MUSE benefits from synergies with our corpus of 600+ journals and 50,000+ books from non-profit publishers.

Project MUSE logo

Statement from BiblioBoard:

BiblioBoard is a leader in OER and OA content creation, curation and distribution software. Our platform transforms access to information by delivering a simple, intuitive user experience along with the best content creation tools. We work with public and academic institutions of all sizes to democratize access to information and lower costs for students.

BiblioBoard logo

Multi-colored umbrellas on blue sky background

May 9, 2018

UCL Press: Open access with a global reach

By Lara Speicher

As we gear up for the Library Publishing Forum and the start of a new membership year in July, we are publishing a series of member profiles. These profiles will showcase the wide variety of publishing work happening at member institutions, and celebrate our community’s contributions to the wider publishing landscape. Many thanks to the members who agreed to answer our questions! See all of the published profiles, and look for a new one each week until the Forum.

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

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

UCL Press (University College London) launched in June 2015 as the first fully open access university press in the UK. It publishes scholarly monographs, textbooks and journals by both UCL and non-UCL authors and all our books and journals are made freely available to download, as well as being sold in print. Since launching, we’ve published 70 books and 8 journals. We have built particular strengths in publishing books on architecture and built environment, anthropology (including a very successful series on social media usage in different parts of the world), archaeology, history, education and sustainability. These subjects reflect some of the great strengths in UCL’s social sciences and humanities departments, with several ranked in the top 10 in the world, for example the UCL Institute of Education, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Institute of Archaeology. We now publish around 35 books a year and aim to increase to around 40 or 45 next year.

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

I am particularly proud that we have established a press that is a high-quality scholarly press in its own right and that attracts authors both from UCL and from all around the world. Many of our authors are motivated by our open access policy, but they also seek high-quality publishing services – from rigorous peer review, through copy-editing and strong marketing support – all the things that they would hope for from any other publisher. Many of our authors are now publishing their second and even third book with us, and our books are regularly reviewed in the national press. Strong publishing services, right from the acquisition stage, set up your future relationship with your authors and contribute to a positive reputation, and I think it’s crucial to provide such services alongside open access dissemination.

Pictured (from left to right): Lara Speicher (Publishing Manager), Chris Penfold (Commissioning Editor), Alison Fox (Marketing and Distribution Manager), Jaimee Biggins (Managing Editor), Ian Caswell (Journals Manager)

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Stack of books, "Library Publishing Curriculum", logos of LPC, Educopia, and IMLS

May 3, 2018

Library Publishing Curriculum: Sustainability module released

By Hilary Hickman

Professional development for library publishers has been a priority for LPC since its initial project phase. We put on lots of fantastic webinars, and of course the Library Publishing Forum can’t be beat, but there is still an unmet need for more comprehensive, structured educational resources for this growing field. Fortunately, as part of the ‘Developing a Curriculum to Advance Libary-Based Publishing‘ project, a stellar team of individuals and organizations has been working for the last year to develop a set of openly-licensed curriculum materials. This project is a partnership of Educopia, LPC, the Public Knowledge Project, NASIG, and BlueSky to BluePrint, generously funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

We are delighted to announce the release of the Sustainability Module, the third module to be released in the four-part curriculum series! Two other modules, Content and Impact, were made available earlier this year, and the final module, Policy, will be released later this summer. Each module contains an introduction plus 4-7 “units” that address topics of interest. Each unit includes the following components: a narrative, a slideshow with talking notes, activities for use in a physical or virtual classroom for workshops and courses.

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May 2, 2018

Syracuse University: Building capacity for open access and open publishing

By Amanda Page

Check out Syracuse University’s latest entry in the Library Publishing Directory!

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

In 2017, Syracuse University Libraries created Open Publishing Services formally. (I started in June, and we just hired a project coordinator). Within the department of Research and Scholarship, our menu of services includes support for various needs relating to scholarly communications, research support, education, and the Institutional Repository. We currently take on library publishing projects selectively as time allows but do not have a full-blown library publishing program (yet!) Projects we are involved in include hosting numerous open-access journals, the institutional repository, and our Syracuse Unbound imprint. Syracuse Unbound is an imprint to foster library publishing of open-access works through collaborations between the Syracuse University Libraries and the Syracuse University Press that was created in 2013, through which we complete occasional ad hoc publishing projects. Digital Commons, Open Journal Systems, WordPress, and Ensemble are the main platforms in our publishing workflows. We have a varied program that is growing capacity.

Over the last year, our publishing projects and institutional repository (SURFACE) work focused on enhancing quality publishing practices and specifically on increasing accessibility (ADA) standards, usability, and discovery for the Digital Commons platform, our websites, and content. This is ongoing and we are continually striving to improve. For example, a re-design of our institutional repository website, SURFACE, was completed in February, and we are implementing new ingest processes for accessibility standards, and integrating accessibility into our open-access educational work.

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

One project I am proud of is Triple Triumph: Three Women in Medicine, a monograph we published through Syracuse Unbound in August 2017. I am proud of this project because it focuses on three female physicians, who have had remarkable careers and lives. I am proud to have been a part of the process in making the work openly available for anyone to read because I found inspiration and hope in the stories. Besides that, we started the project right after I came onboard in June, and it was a lot of fun to jump right into the work.

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