LPC Blog

November 6, 2017

LPC welcomes a new member: University of Cincinnati

The Library Publishing Coalition is delighted to welcome University of Cincinnati as a member! About their program:

The University of Cincinnati Library Publishing Services (CLiPS) an imprint of the University of Cincinnati Press, provides professional publishing services to faculty, staff, departments, and centers associated with the university. CLiPS assists authors and editors in publishing output in print, digital and open access incorporating new technologies to provide our community with a full range of services promoting academic scholarship. We support faculty-authored publications sponsored by UC academic departments, publications edited by UC organizations, affordable textbooks, open educational resources, and student run publications. We encourage the exploration of new types of publications in print or electronic forms working with materials beyond traditional written papers and monographs.

November 3, 2017

Keep current with the LPC Quarterly Update

Want a handy summary of what we’ve been up to lately?  Check out the LPC highlights reel in our quarterly update!

November 2, 2017

Upcoming Event: Roundtable Discussion on Elsevier’s Acquisition of bepress

Want to talk about Elsevier’s recent acquisition of bepress and what it means for library publishers? (You know you do!) Join us on Friday, November 17 at 2pm EST for a roundtable discussion hosted by LPC’s Board and facilitated by Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University). See the event post for more details.

About LPC Roundtables: These member-only discussions take place approximately every other month, and each one has a specified topic and an LPC member facilitator, and they often include at least one guest participant. They are informal (no presentations, no recordings), and are designed to give the LPC community an opportunity to discuss a topic of interest, as well as to identify opportunities for collaboration and areas that need further investigation or programming. Roundtable discussions are open to all staff at member institutions.

November 2, 2017

Members section of LPC website is here!

We hope you’ve been enjoying the public-facing areas of our redesigned website! We’ve been putting the finishing touches on the members section, and are ready to share it with the community. Any staff member at an LPC member institution can request a website login which you can use to:

• Access the Shared Documentation
• Upload your program’s documentation to share with the community
• View other member-only content, such as Board meeting minutes

To request an account, email contact@librarypublishing.org, cc’ing your LPC voting representative.  Please note that LPC website accounts will be linked to the users’ institutional email address, so if you contact us from a third-party email service (e.g. Gmail), make sure to include your institutional email in the message. To share documents via the website, follow the instructions in the policies & procedures document.

November 1, 2017

Upcoming Event: Webinar on Creating Accessible PDFs

PDF is a common format for library publishers, but it comes with a host of accessibility challenges.  LPC members are invited to join us on Wednesday, December 12 at noon EST/9am PST for a webinar on PDF accessibility, organized by LPC’s Professional Development Committee. Attendees will learn how to evaluate the accessibility of existing PDFs and create new PDFs to be as accessible as possible.

The webinar will be led by Carli Spina, from LPC member institution Boston College Libraries. If you haven’t already seen it, Carli recently taught an excellent webinar on creating accessible presentations for the Digital Library Federation. Check it out!

Not an LPC member? Can’t make it to the live webinar? Never fear! We will record the presentation and make it available in our webinar archive after the event.

See the event post for more details.

October 26, 2017

Announcing LPC’s new Strategic Affiliates Program

While we’re making big announcements (new website, 70th member, etc.), we have another piece of exciting news to share: the launch of a new Strategic Affiliates Program! (Clearly we’ve been busy lately.)  When the LPC was founded, our original Strategic Affiliates Program was extremely helpful to us in understanding the landscape and building relationships with other organizations in our space. As we have grown, however, we have recognized a need for more engagement with our strategic affiliates, and are updating the program accordingly. The new program is limited to other membership organizations, and includes more regular communication and benefits, such as participation in LPC’s listserv and attendance at member-only events. We are launching the new program with seven initial affiliates: the Association of American University Presses, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Directory of Open Access Journals, NASIG, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the Public Knowledge Project, and the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

We welcome inquiries from other membership associations who are interested in participating in the Strategic Affiliates Program. Email Melanie Schlosser to get the conversation going! (If your organization doesn’t meet the criteria, check out our soon-to-launch Publishers and Service Providers program.)

October 20, 2017

LPC welcomes our 70th member: the University of Alberta!

The Library Publishing Coalition hits a major milestone this week as we welcome our 70th member institution: University of Alberta! To celebrate, we have asked them to answer a few questions:

Tell us a little about your library and your publishing activities!

University of Alberta is a large, research-intensive university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and home to a fantastic library team. The Libraries, which includes the University of Alberta Press, offer free journal hosting services to any Canadian journals committed to open access.

Why did you decide to join LPC?

We are excited to join the LPC community in order to learn from and engage with fellow members. We look forward to also sharing our experiences and giving back what knowledge and expertise we can to this group. We feel the goals and activities of the LPC align very nicely with our own! LPC membership complements other partnership work we are involved in, e.g. UAL is a PKP Development Partner.

How do you think membership will benefit your organization?

LPC offers a large community (70 members strong!) working to influence and reshape scholarly communications through the engagement of libraries as active partners in this process. The LPC will no doubt provide us with many sources of inspiration and encouragement, and with helpful supporting resources and a growing community of potential collaborators to join forces with in doing this work.

Are there any aspects of membership that you are particularly excited to tap into?

Collaborating with the community to promote and support the work libraries do (and have long done) in publishing will be rewarding work. Connecting with like-minded individuals and organizations via the conference and communication channels will help our staff learn and grow in their own initiatives as well. A number of the committees and working groups look to be doing interesting work. We look forward to joining these efforts!

While we are welcoming the University of Alberta, we also wanted to take a moment to recognize and celebrate all of our members and the amazing community that they have built. Hats off to each one to you!

Onwards and upwards,
The LPC Staff

October 17, 2017

Announcing the launch of the new LPC website!

After five months of hard work and digital soul-searching, we are delighted to announce the launch of the new Library Publishing Coalition website!

Throughout the redesign process, we strived to refresh the look of the website while simultaneously making it easier to update and maintain. We’re excited that the new website is more mobile-friendly than our previous site and better showcases the Library Publishing Forum. We’ve also added this brand new blog, so be sure to check back for updates from the LPC team and original content from the community!

The new site will also feature improved member-only functionality, including a revamped Shared Documentation Portal. The member content will launch the week of October 30th, so stay tuned for an announcement and instructions on how to access it.

We hope that the new website makes the exciting work of the Library Publishing Coalition more accessible and engaging. We are deeply grateful to all of our partners who devoted their time and energy to the redesign process!

If you have questions, suggestions, or feedback, please email Melanie Schlosser.