January 30, 2018
LPC 2017 Year in Review
By Melanie Schlosser
Want a quick overview of what the LPC community accomplished last year? Check out our handy 2017 Year in Review! (We’ll return to our regular Quarterly Update in April.)
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.
January 22, 2018
Announcing three new LPC Sponsors – Ubiquity Press, SSP, and bepress
By Melanie Schlosser
As part of our new Publishers and Service Providers Program, we are delighted to announce our first batch of organization-level sponsors for the LPC: Ubiquity Press, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and bepress. These organizations are contributing financially to the ongoing success of the LPC and contributing an important set of voices to community discussions. We sincerely appreciate their support and look forward to working with them in the coming year!
Statement from Ubiquity Press:
Ubiquity Press is an open scholarship services platform that makes open access publishing and repositories affordable for everyone. We are excited to support the Library Publishing Coalition, because we share a focus on sustainable publishing services and believe libraries have an vital role in shaping innovative academic publishing.
Statement from the Society for Scholarly Publishing:
SSP is a community for everyone engaged in scholarly publishing. We place a high value on the advancement of scholarly communication and professional development through education, collaboration, and networking. We share similar goals with the Library Publishing Coalition and have become a sponsor in order to demonstrate support for library publishing as a community of practice and to facilitate dialogue among the broader publishing community.
Statement from bepress:
The bepress community publishes over 1,400 journals on the Digital Commons platform, from double-blind peer-reviewed faculty journals to undergraduate arts and literary magazines. With such a strong library-led publishing community, bepress has long been eager to support the Library Publishing Coalition; we are delighted to finally be able to do so as an official sponsor.
January 19, 2018
Upcoming webinar with Creative Commons USA
By Melanie Schlosser
Do you use Creative Commons licenses? Do you have questions about how best to implement them in your publishing? Do you find yourself wondering what constitutes “noncommercial” use or what the heck “share alike” means? Make sure to tune in at 1pm EST on Tuesday, January 30th for a webinar titled “Copyright and Creative Commons: Publishing with open licenses,” hosted by the Professional Development Committee and presented by staff from Creative Commons USA.
Can’t make the webinar? Not at a member institution? Our webinar recordings are made freely available on our website, so check back in February!
January 8, 2018
New resource: Publishers and Service Providers List
By Melanie Schlosser
As part of our new Publishers and Service Providers Program, LPC is releasing a new resource for the library publishing community: the Publishers and Service Providers List. The list is a place where any organization eligible for the larger program (non- and for-profit publishers and service providers that work with, or provide services of interest to, library publishers) can indicate its interest in working with library publishers. Check out the list page for further details about how the list is created and updated.
We will continue to add to the list as new inquiries come in, but as of today, it includes the following organizations: bepress, BiblioLabs, Project MUSE, Overleaf, Public Knowledge Project, PKP Publishing Services, Scholastica, Ubiquity Press, and Veruscript. (See the list page for more information about each of them.) We are delighted to have so many organizations on board at launch, and would especially note the impressive array of options for journal hosting. We hope to see the list continue to expand in future – both in number and in scope. Other organizations we would like to see on the list include additional platforms and tools (open source, commercial, and hosted), preservation services, discovery services and platforms, editorial and publishing workflow support services, and publishers who are interested in partnering with libraries on publishing projects. If you work with an organization that works with library publishers – or would like to – fill out the inquiry form to request inclusion on the list.
We hope that this list will help connect library publishers with crucial support, and further strengthen the ecosystem of scholarly publishing. Let us know what you think!
January 2, 2018
New year, slight change to the blog
By Melanie Schlosser
Happy New Year, library publishers! Since we launched our new website in October, we’ve really enjoyed having a blog where we can quickly share information with the community and do some informal publishing. When we originally set it up, we turned on the commenting function so that readers would have an opportunity to participate in the conversation. We were not, however, terribly surprised when we didn’t get any. Blog commenting in general has become less useful as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gained prominence, and it’s increasingly common for news sites and other online publications to disable commenting. The amount of time we spend moderating spam comments is pretty minimal [1], and if the comments function was proving useful to the community, we would happily invest that time to keep the content human-generated. As it is, we have made the decision to instead turn off commenting and focus our website-maintaining energy elsewhere. This is an easily-reversible decision, and one we will happily revisit in future if the need arises. In the meantime, we would encourage you to comment on LPC blog posts on the listserv (members), on Twitter (everyone), or on your own blog (feel free to send us a link that we can share).
[1] And, honestly, it was all worth it when we got a spam comment that read, “Your goal is to breed all the different dragons available to you.”
December 19, 2017
Announcing our new Publishers and Service Providers Program
By Melanie Schlosser
As the year draws to a close, we have one more big announcement: the official launch of LPC’s new Publishers and Service Providers Program! The Publishers and Service Providers Program is a multi-tier sponsorship program designed to provide opportunities for its participants to engage with the community of library publishers. To ensure that it is welcoming to a wide range of organizations, the program also includes a free tier consisting of inclusion in LPC’s Publishers and Service Providers list (coming in 2018).
While we have always relied on sponsors to support the Library Publishing Forum, we have not been able to provide opportunities for sponsors and community members to engage during the other 363 days of the year. The new program still includes Forum-only tiers, but it also provides opportunities for organizations who want to participate more fully in the LPC community. Year-round benefits include participation in LPC’s listserv, attendance at member-only events, and the opportunity to present a vendor webinar.
This new program is a companion to our Strategic Affiliates Program, which is focused on peer membership organizations. The Publishers and Service Providers Program is much broader, and is appropriate for a wide range of non- and for-profit organizations. Both programs are intended to help the LPC develop closer relationships with other organizations in our space, to raise the profile of library publishing, and to help our members make connections that will benefit their publishing programs.
Interested in participating? Just fill out this form to get the ball rolling!
December 14, 2017
Thinking about accessibility and sustainability in scholarly communication
By Charlotte Roh
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.
In addition to my duties as a scholarly communication librarian, one of my roles at the University of San Francisco is liaison to the Migration Studies program. It’s a relatively new program in a relatively new field, so search terms are still evolving. For example, one of the common roadblocks that students encounter is that research data is available under “refugees” rather than “migrants.” This search term confusion is easily remedied, but there are also problematic descriptors such as “illegal” and “undocumented”. One of the questions that came up this past year was, What do you call someone who has valid legal immigration status but who is deported or detained? (People in the class agreed “illegal” is unacceptable, and “undocumented” is inaccurate.) Since many of the students in the program have a personal stake in these issues, these conversations around naming are not taken lightly.
In addition to these discussions in the classroom, naming and authority are, of course, important to librarianship as well. More recently, I have been thinking about “accessibility” and “sustainability” as terms that are heavily used both in my work as a scholarly communications librarian and more broadly outside of my professional niche.
December 6, 2017
What library publishing looks like in 2017 – Excerpt from the Library Publishing Directory
By Melanie Schlosser
If you haven’t yet checked out the latest edition of the Library Publishing Directory and the new, searchable online platform, well…they’re pretty cool! See our previous post for the full announcement. While we are super excited about the online platform, the one thing it doesn’t have is the Directory‘s front and back matter, which is more interesting than you’d think.
Each year, the Directory‘s introduction includes a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data. It highlights trends and new developments in library publishing as reported by the programs that contribute their information. We wanted to share this year’s on the blog to make it easier to find and discuss. The following is an excerpt from this year’s Directory, written by Melanie Schlosser, Liz Hamilton, Joshua Neds-Fox, Tom Bielavitz, and Alexandra Hoff.
LIBRARY PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE 2018
Each year, the Directory Committee mines the Directory data set in order to highlight trends and unique aspects of library publishing. In our fifth year, the trends and tendencies pointed out in previous introductions have started to reveal themselves as enduring characteristics and essential features of the library publishing landscape. We believe this reflects both the growing data set and the maturing of the field itself. This introduction highlights that continuity (“The Song Remains the Same”) and draws out two of those essential features for consideration (“Openness” and “Publishing and Pedagogy”).
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME
This year’s data is remarkably consistent with what we have seen in past Directories. Most of the numbers are very similar to last year or within range from previous years. Of the two areas where there are noticeable changes—services and digital preservation—one of them is in line with previously noted trends.
Partnerships
Partnerships remain important to library publishing programs, and individual faculty and campus departments are still our most common partners. We continue to see significant numbers of partnerships with graduate and undergraduate students, and the number of university press partnerships continues to rise slowly. The only substantial change from last year was a jump in partnerships with graduate students (from 72% last year to 77% this year).
December 6, 2017
Announcing the 2018 Library Publishing Directory and a new online platform
By Melanie Schlosser
The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce publication of the 2018 Library Publishing Directory, as well as the launch of a new, searchable online platform for the Directory data.
2018 Library Publishing Directory
This year’s Library Publishing Directory highlights the publishing activities of 125 academic and research libraries, and is openly available in PDF and EPUB format. 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.
New Online Platform for the Directory
We are also excited to share the Directory in a new format – a searchable online platform! As of launch, the new platform includes the data from the 2017 and 2018 Directories, with 2014 through 2016 coming soon. In addition to full-text searching, the new platform allows users to sort and limit by a number of factors, including location, publication types and formats, and software platforms used. We are delighted to provide this new functionality for the Directory’s rich data set, and we welcome feedback on it.
Publication of the 2018 Directory was overseen by the LPC’s Directory Committee:
- Liz Hamilton, Northwestern University (2017-18 chair)
- Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University
- Tom Bielavitz, Portland State University
- Alexandra Hoff, Purdue University
- Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute (ex officio)
The Directory is made possible by the generous donation of services from Purdue University Libraries and Bookmasters.
November 29, 2017
LPC becomes a PKP Strategic Partner
By Melanie Schlosser
Remember when we rolled out our Strategic Affiliates Program a few weeks ago? One of the fun things about launching that program was talking to our new strategic affiliates about the ways that they work with their own communities, and the opportunities for organizations like ours to get involved. As it turns out, the Public Knowledge Project has a similar program of their own – the PKP Strategic Partners. As of today, we are delighted to announce that LPC is an official PKP strategic partner! Some dueling quotes from the announcement:
John Willinsky, PKP’s Founder and Director stated: “The Library Publishing Coalition represents the growing number of academic libraries in North America and elsewhere that are providing the publishing services and support needed to expand open access. Libraries and open access publications represent two closely aligned and cooperative communities that PKP seeks to serve, and so it is fitting for us to collaborate with the LPC and their members given our sharing of many common goals.”
And our response:
“The LPC is delighted to join the list of PKP’s Strategic Partners and to formalize the already-strong partnership between our two organizations. PKP’s software has been invaluable to the community of library publishers, and our community continues to benefit from innovations such as PKP’s Private LOCKSS Network. We look forward to continuing to work with PKP on community-focused initiatives, and to future collaborations around education and advocacy.”
Thanks for the invitation, PKP – we’re very happy to join!
