Research

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 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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