Reflections

December 2, 2025

LPC Connections: 2025 in Reflection

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This month we celebrate another successful LPC Connections program (formerly known as the LPC Peer Mentorship program). The program, which is managed by the LPC Professional Development Committee, provides an opportunity for participants to meet other members in LPC, share ideas and thoughts about library publishing, learn new things, share experiences, and generally support their peers in their library publishing program.

In 2025, the Professional Development piloted a new model for the program, moving from a one-to-one model, where participants meet with the same person regularly for a year, to a one-to-many model, where participants meet with a different person each month, giving them the opportunity to meet more like-minded individuals with varied experiences. This change was based on comments provided by the 2024 cohort in the mid-year and annual feedback forms.

The one-to-many pilot commenced in February 2025. In the mid-year and end-of-year reviews, we learned that participants liked the new model because it created an opportunity to learn about many different types of library publishing models and to meet a larger number of individuals; however, they also missed the deeper connections that a one-to-one model can provide.

Consequently, the current LPC Connections coordinators are making a few adjustments to the program for the coming year. In 2026, we will be organizing the meetings in small groups (2 to 3 people, depending on the number of participants) for 2 to 3 times before rotating the groups, bringing together the best of both worlds. We hope many of you will consider joining the program for 2026 and sharing your knowledge and experiences with your fellow LPC members.

Timeline for the 2026 cycle:

  • Applications open December 10! We are accepting applications through January 14, and we’ll send out regular reminders.
  • The list of participants and rotation schedule will be shared so you can get to know your Connection(s) before meeting up. You and your Connection(s) can schedule a meeting time that works for everyone.
  • The LPC Connections coordinators will provide you with talking points to help jump-start the conversation, but you are welcome to delve into any topic that interests you. We imagine that meetings will be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes (most participants reported meeting for at least 45 minutes) but it’s flexible.
  • We will send out mid-year and annual feedback forms so you can let us know how it’s going and how we can improve the program.

Questions? Feel free to reach out to the LPC Connection Coordinators: Stefanie Buck (stefanie.buck@oregonstate.edu) and Cosette Bruhns Alonso (cosette_bruhns@brown.edu)

2025 Forum Banner
May 28, 2025

Reporting out on the finances of the 2025 Library Publishing Forum

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We at LPC are big fans of transparency, so we have decided to report out publicly on the financial details of each year’s Library Publishing Forum. These reports are meant to serve as a resource for fellow conference planners, as well as helping our community better understand the decisions we make around the event. If you missed the report out on last year’s in-person conference, you can read it here. This post will report out on the finances for the virtual Forum held May 5-8, 2025.

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February 12, 2025

LPC investigates publishing platform accessibility

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by Melanie Schlosser and Shannon Kipphut-Smith

LPC is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to web accessibility this year. The updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act – as well as similar regulations in other parts of the world – are aligned with our values as a community, but will take substantial effort to comply with for most library publishers. To support this work, LPC has teamed up with the Library Accessibility Alliance to provide a variety of professional development opportunities, including  webinars and a themed Documentation Month. Looking outward, we are also using our position as a community hub to investigate one of the elements of web accessibility that library publishers can’t control individually – publishing platforms. 

Creating a list of platforms

With the support of LPC’s Board, a small group of staff and volunteers from both communities made a list of the most-used platforms (based on data from the Library Publishing Directory) and identified a subset of particular interest. The criteria for inclusion were: 

  • The software is in a stable, production version and is still being developed and supported. (Example: We excluded PubPub upon hearing from the PubPub team that they are in the process of moving away from their legacy platform and developing a new one.)
  • The software is publishing-specific. (Example: We included Digital Commons, because it has specific publishing functionality, but excluded DSpace as a repository platform that is incidentally used for publishing.)
  • The software is widely used or emerging (Example: Janeway and Scalar had the same number of users in the Directory [13 each], but Janeway is a new platform that is rapidly growing its user base within library publishing.)

The final list of platforms to investigate was: 

There are a number of other platforms used by our community (including some that were developed by community members, like Manifold), and we hope to reach more of them in a second round of the process. This abbreviated list was a jumping off point to allow us to try out this process. 

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September 20, 2024

Reporting out on the finances of the 2024 Library Publishing Forum

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This is the third of three planned report-outs on this year’s Library Publishing Forum. The other two were on our COVID policy and on the closing plenary discussion. Check them out! 

Conference finances are tricky – ask anyone who has ever planned a multi-day, in-person event. Costs are sometimes unpredictable and revenues almost always are. The last four years have added additional complexities for many conference planners, including wildly fluctuating attendance and binding hotel contracts for events that were forced to go virtual. Conference finances also tend to be somewhat mysterious to attendees, who can be left wondering what their registration fees actually cover and whether the event is intended to break even or to make money for its organizers.  We at LPC are big fans of transparency, so we have decided to report out publicly on the financial details of the Library Publishing Forum. We did this once before (as part of a series of reflections on the 2021 virtual Forum), but our plan is to make it a regular component of Forum planning going forward. To that end, this post will report out on the finances for the in-person Forum held in May of 2024 in Minneapolis, MN. We hope that this post will serve as a resource for fellow conference planners, as well as helping our community better understand the decisions we make around the event.

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August 13, 2024

A 10-Year Vision for Library Publishing (LPForum24 Closing Plenary Reflection)

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The 2024 Library Publishing Forum opened with a keynote address that looked back on LPC’s first 10 years. Katherine Skinner reflected on the formation of the community, its original goals, and what it has accomplished. For long-time community members, the talk was a trip down memory lane. For newer folks, it was a stellar orientation. It also fit beautifully with our 10th anniversary theme for the conference, but it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it provided grounding for the real conversation we wanted to have at the event: where we want to be 10 years in the future. 

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June 24, 2024

Reflecting on the 2024 LPForum COVID policy

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A back view of Katherine Skinner, keynote speaker, with McNamara Memorial Hall in the background
Katherine Skinner gives the keynote at the 2024 Library Publishing Forum. Image credit: Adria Carpenter/U of M Libraries

 

Multiple groups within LPC spent months developing a COVID policy for this year’s in-person Library Publishing Forum. Now that the event is behind us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how the policy was developed, how it worked in practice, and the feedback we received from the community. I hope that this blog post, in conjunction with the policy itself, will serve as a resource for other conference planners.

Policy recap

Our COVID policy was designed around three principles:

  1. As the organizers, we have a responsibility to provide the safest possible conference for our community. In the same way that we provide attendees with chairs to sit on and meals to eat, and speakers with microphones so that everyone can hear them, it is our job to provide attendees with a safe conference environment.
  2. Each attendee has a responsibility of care to the rest of the community. This principle is grounded in our community Code of Conduct, which lays out an expectation that community members will follow health guidelines.
  3. The policy needed to be flexible enough that attendees could determine which precautions were possible for them without having to disclose private medical information to conference staff and other attendees.

Once these principles were clear, the policy itself was fairly straightforward: we would provide masks, tests, supplemental air filtration, and boxed meals that could be taken outside; and attendees would manage their own COVID precautions (encouraged by copious and emphatic messaging before and during the conference). There is more detail in the full policy, including a list of precautions that we encouraged attendees to take, but the overall message was that everyone needs to do their part.

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January 16, 2024

Collaborative, Strategic, Innovative: Consortial Publishing with PALNI Press

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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 Amanda Hurford, PALNI Scholarly Communications Director

Getting Started

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) is an organization owned by 24 small private colleges, universities, and seminaries working under the tagline “Collaborative, Strategic, Innovative.” In 2015, the idea behind one manifestation of those values took root: the PALNI Press library publishing program. PALNI’s Institutional Repository Advisory Group, a team of librarians investigating shared repository services, proposed establishing and piloting shared instances of popular open-source publishing platforms. When PALNI added a full-time position dedicated to supporting scholarly communication initiatives to its staff in 2017, it was the right time to formally support the creation of journals, exhibits, textbooks, and more. As PALNI’s first Scholarly Communications Director, I soon convened a Library Publishing Task Force to explore creating a more robust publishing service by addressing structure, benefits, needs, and plans for the future. In this findings report, the Task Force recommended the establishment of an ongoing team to support the PALNI Press service. The Publishing Services Administration Team was formed to design library publishing policies, provide services, and engage with the Library Publishing Coalition.

Focus and Scope

The PALNI Press and its related teams support publishing open-access content in various formats: repository materials like ETDs and gray literature, exhibits, journals, and books. The service is open to faculty, staff, and students affiliated with any of PALNI’s institutions who want to publish to support their institution’s teaching and learning objectives. We provide “basic level services,” including initial consultation and project setup, introductory education on publishing-related topics, platform hosting and maintenance, data backup, and documentation to use the systems. Additionally, we provide limited support for each publishing platform, including troubleshooting, training, and help with workflow design. Finally, we offer some discovery services by creating MARC records and assigning ISBNS and DOIs, and we also provide print-on-demand services through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. A subset of our work is the PALSave Textbook Creation Grant initiative, in which we collaborate with faculty authors to publish open textbooks. We provide author stipends for those projects and coordinate peer review and copyediting for a polished final product.

Technical Setup

PALNI Press is built on a suite of publishing platforms: Samvera Hyku for repository content, Omeka S for exhibits, Open Journal Systems for journals, and Pressbooks for books. Except for the Hyku repository, hosted by Software Services by Scientist.com, PALNI self-hosts all its platforms. The PALNI Development Team handles installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

Staffing and Finances

Staffing for the program consists primarily of my role as Scholarly Communications Director, which also is responsible for leadership in other scholarly communications initiatives, and a distributed team of librarians providing support across the consortium. We rely on PALNI’s part-time Development Team for technical expertise, as well as input and help provided by members of the PALNI community with expertise in this area. PALNI’s Strategic Communications Director includes marketing services like writing press releases and web design for our catalog. PALNI’s Cataloging Coordinator catalogs publications when they are completed.  A quarter-time Publishing Services Coordinator and a team of volunteer project managers at PALNI schools support the Textbook Creation Grant initiative. PALNI Press is funded by the consortium’s central budget, with additional dedicated money coming from our PALSave Affordable Learning Program grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to fund the Textbook Creation Grants, its related staffing, and production costs. Supported institutions can use all the platforms as part of their participation in PALNI — no additional fees are charged above annual PALNI dues.

Governance and Decision Making

The Publishing Services Administration Team created a set of policies to help with governance and decision-making. The group set the mission for the service, eligibility, responsibilities for both contributors and the Press, and guidelines for copyright, privacy, diversity, and accessibility. I consult with the publishing team and PALNI’s Board of Directors on program direction. Each new publication does not require approval but must meet the eligibility requirements and responsibilities listed on the website. Typically, a contributor will propose a publication, and team members will meet with them to discuss expectations before getting started. A separate OER Publishing Task Force set up all the program documentation for the Textbook Creation Grants (such as the call for proposals, application, selection rubric, etc. — all available CC-BY on the project website), and the two programs’ policies complement each other.

Lessons Learned

We learned that exploring the need for consortial publishing services is beneficial. Our task force surveyed library directors about their interest in and barriers to library publishing, which helped to define future directions. Our team also found that it’s been helpful to have policies documented to guide decision-making, and defining and documenting responsibilities is essential. The approach to categorize services into manageable groups made the idea of developing a comprehensive support model seem less daunting. Also, leveraging the talents of all consortial staff and participating librarians is essential to building a service that is not too demanding for any one person. One pitfall to avoid in projects with deadlines is to check in early and often with authors and to ask them to create a writing schedule. 

PALNI is delighted to work with librarians, faculty, and others on this exciting path to library publishing!

 To reach PALNI Press, email press@palni.edu.

Featured item: Comunidades

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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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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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February 16, 2023

Intersections: Incorporating Trans and Gender Diverse Inclusion into Library Publishing

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Intersections is an occasional series where community members reflect on what they are seeing in other parts of their professional world and what library publishers can learn from it. 

By Stephen Krueger, Scholarly Publishing Librarian, Dartmouth College

When I do workshops on trans and gender diverse inclusion for libraries, I often wrap up with a slide listing every type of library work I can think of. This is to remind people that the issue is part of every single role in the profession, from instruction to cataloging to HR (plus adjacent work like cleaning and security). Library publishing and scholarly communications are no exception. Why would they be? Without active, sweeping change and accountability, we continue the inequities that have been built into this profession (whether or not this was intentional). The specifics simply depend on what those inequities happen to be in our particular area of work. But that change is not impossible; it is only that individuals and organizations must go out of their way to enact it. This takes work—significant amounts of it, committed to in the long-term.

In discussing a topic like this, it can be easy to devolve into positive-sounding buzzwords like diversity, equity, and inclusion (or acronyms that lump all the concepts together), but that evades the scale and impact of the problem. Naming the things that libraries are not implies some sort of neutral in-between space, letting us sit stagnant and complacent in the status quo. But these words have antonyms: Library workers aren’t not diverse; they are homogenous. They are inequitable. We don’t not include; we exclude, passively and actively. Libraries are not for everyone and never have been–because, historically speaking, they weren’t intended to be, and the complete overhaul needed to get rid of the practices developed throughout that history has not happened. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to develop our libraries so that they do support patrons and workers of all identities, but it is wilfully obtuse to pretend this is the case at present; denying and ignoring the problems perpetuates harm.

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