Forum News

October 24, 2024

2025 Library Publishing Forum Call For Proposals

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The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in or considering publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice.

The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of LPC to attend.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2025 Virtual Library Publishing Forum to be held May 5–8, 2025! The deadline for submitting a proposal is January 6th, 2024. (Updated 11/15 to extend from 12/2.)

Proposal submissions for the Forum are welcome from LPC members and nonmembers, including library employees, university press employees, scholars, students, and other scholarly communication and publishing professionals. We welcome proposals from first-time presenters and representatives of small and emerging publishing programs.

We are committed to expanding the diversity of perspectives we hear from at the Library Publishing Forum. Working towards some of the “Continuing Initiatives” from the LPC Roadmap for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility, we ask all proposals to explicitly address how they are inclusive of multiple perspectives, address DEIA, or incorporate anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. Presentations about specific communities should include members of that community in their speaker list, and for sessions with multiple speakers, we seek to avoid all-white and all-male panels.

Learn more about session formats and submitting on the Forum program web page.

Submit a proposal

On behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition Program Committee:
  • Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech (2024-2025, chair)
  • Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington
  • Jennifer Coronado, Butler University
  • Loftan Hooker, Virginia Commonwealth University
  • Ryan Otto, Kansas State University
  • Jessica Thorlakson, University of Alberta

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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May 8, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Manifold

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Manifold
Website: https://manifoldapp.org/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Manifold works with presses and publishers to create enhanced digital publications that are linked to audio and video files, interactive maps, and other kinds of digital resources. It is an open source project, and libraries have used it most often to create Open Educational Resources, utilizing the reading group and annotation features that Manifold has built to optimize classroom uses. We’ve also seen it used in the library space to give students the chance to become publishers themselves — to assemble and annotate archival material, anthologize their own writings, or to create new editions of classic texts.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We recently released Version 8 of Manifold, which includes a rich text editor so that project creators can make changes to files they’ve ingested into the platform. We’ve tried to make the platform very intuitive and user friendly for everyone, but this is a big step forward in that process. Accessibility has also been an ongoing priority of our work and development of the platform, and we’ve been taking steps to make sure that the Manifold experience, whether that is simply reading, or annotating and engaging, or creating your own project, is as accessible to as many people as it possibly can be.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

A number of our team members are librarians, or have experience working in libraries. We’ve found that libraries and Manifold tend to be “on the same page” in terms of expanding offerings in the open access space, and providing low or no-cost educational materials to students. It has been great to work with library publishers and digital humanities centers to think creatively about what is possible to publish in Manifold; many of these experiments have driven our development of the platform. Recently we’ve seen art exhibit catalogs, audio archives and podcasts, textbooks, all sorts of cool projects coming from this space.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We look forward to seeing some of our users who regularly attend our virtual Manifold Community Meetups in person! It’s also always exciting to see what other projects in the space have been up to, and to check in on the bigger picture things — the state of open infrastructure and the larger institutional questions that a lot of folks are thinking about.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

We are a team of about a dozen working from three locations: the CUNY Graduate Center in New York; the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis; and the development firm Cast Iron Coding in Portland (Oregon). We’ve been meeting regularly online for about a decade now. Every once in a while we get together in person in one of our cities for a more in-depth, in-person discussion, meetings that have been known to lead into late night sessions in bars … Our official team portraitist Jojo Karlin does a lot of the artwork for our releases, and often makes scarily accurate drawings of our team which she calls “doodles.”

Useful resources

May 7, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Pressbooks

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Pressbooks 
Website: https://pressbooks.com/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books. We partner with organizations to support open education initiatives, institutional publishing programs, curriculum development projects, and more.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Pressbooks works with over 500 educational institutions, including many higher education systems and consortia. As we’ve added more of these statewide and regional partners, we’ve been learning more about their unique needs so we can make sure our product fits those needs.

Over the past several months, we’ve worked closely with eCampusOntario, a consortial client, as a co-development partner helping us design new administrative features for this part of our community. We’re excited to launch the result of that work, our new Shared Network Plugin. It’s currently in beta testing, but we’ll be launching it broadly soon. This new feature set will make it easier for system and consortia clients to empower their members and manage how they use Pressbooks to create and share knowledge effectively across their member networks through streamlined administration, enhanced analytics and more.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

At Pressbooks, we love the commitment that library publishers have to making knowledge more accessible (whether that’s through open educational resources or other initiatives). Empowering knowledge sharing is at the heart of Pressbooks’ mission as a company, and so we’ve always found great alignment with those who work in library publishing.

Also, libraries are at the point of the proverbial spear with regard to information and digital transformation. It’s exciting to work with library publishers because they have been eager to embrace the possibilities of digital transformation when it comes to publishing and sharing information. Lots of great ideas and experimentation come out of this community.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Post-pandemic it’s still a bit novel to be able to meet up with people in person, so we’re looking forward to the unique energy that comes from in-person meetings. A lot of long-time Pressbooks clients will attend this meeting, and we always love connecting with our user community and hopefully making new friends. Open education is a strong thread through this year’s conference, so it will be great to listen and learn about what others are seeing and doing in this space. We’re also excited to host two panel sessions on Thursday morning, “From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiative,” and “Growing OER Publishing Programs: Watershed Decisions that Drive Impact.”

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The team at Pressbooks is made up of people who rally behind the mission of making knowledge sharing more accessible. We have a lot of publishing pros, bibliophiles, open source advocates and edtech evangelists. Our founder/CEO, Hugh McGuire, is a familiar face for many in the OER publishing space from his work with Pressbooks as well as The Rebus Foundation. Another longtime colleague, Steel Wagstaff, was an enthusiastic Pressbooks customer supporting open publishing at the University of Wisconsin Madison before he joined the team and became our product manager. Julie Curtis will be at the Forum on behalf of Pressbooks. Julie, our VP Growth & Strategy, has spent much of her career in education technology helping institutions navigate the intersection of digital learning and open educational resources. Together with several of our institutional partners, Julie created the Open Education Maturity Model as a framework to help institutions in this work, and she’ll be presenting this model during the “From OER to Open Press” panel session.

Useful resources

May 2, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Janeway + Fulcrum

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Janeway + Fulcrum
Website: https://janewayfulcrum.olh.pub/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Between our two programs, we build world-leading, open-source digital publishing infrastructure to provide a sustainable platform for open access journals and media-rich books. Our in-house software engineers have developed an intuitive, agile, and responsive platform for journal hosting, migration, manuscript submission, review, copyediting, and typesetting (Janeway) and an accessible, durable, flexible, discoverable platform for book publishing (Fulcrum). We’re proud to have done this work fully within the academy.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Our teams are working on integrating Janeway and Fulcrum, allowing us to host audiovisual media in Fulcrum where it can be preserved on library infrastructure, and have its own metadata and DOI. This allows journals to embed media in their articles using accessible media playing technology and to avoid relying on commercial services like YouTube and Vimeo for scholarly media content.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

Andy Byers, Janeway: I find working with library publishers deeply rewarding due to their alignment with values of open access and knowledge dissemination. Library publishers prioritise community impact over commercial interests, allowing for meaningful contributions to academia and society. Collaborating with library publishers offers a unique chance to contribute to a more inclusive, sustainable, and impactful scholarly ecosystem.

Jason Colman, Fulcrum: We are library publishers ourselves at Michigan Publishing, so getting a chance to collaborate more deeply with our peers is always enriching. They’re trying to solve the same problems we are and working together helps remind us that we are not alone in the challenges we face.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Seeing colleagues we only talk to on Zoom and Discord, of course! Our teams first met each other at the 2018 Forum in Minneapolis, so this year will be like a reunion for us.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The Janeway / Open Library of Humanities team are based at Birkbeck, University of London, but make up a geographically distributed network of expert bookworms, specialist software developers, and typography enthusiasts. Although we work remotely from across the UK and beyond, we’re united by our belief in the power of shared knowledge and our commitment to the open-access revolution. We also have a shared love of arts and culture, retro gaming, AI glitches, and dreadful puns, and a strong desire to make the world of academic publishing a better place.

The Fulcrum team is based at the University of Michigan Library, and most of us are located in Michigan, although we have folks based in Colorado, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania as well. We’re a group of librarians, technologists, and publishing experts and we’re dedicated to ensuring the broadest access to knowledge we possibly can. Our puns may be more dreadful than the Janeway team’s, but we’ll have to have a pun-off to be sure…

May 1, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Ubiquity

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Ubiquity
Website: https://ubiquity.pub/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Ubiquity is a leading provider of open publishing services, covering the entire research lifecycle. We provide full publishing infrastructure and services to libraries and university presses, repositories for libraries and institutions and journal and book publishing for academic societies.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We’re adding AI functionality across our platform, from enhancing search to making the author journal smoother and editors’ jobs easier to perform.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

We’re mission aligned with libraries in our dedication to open access and open source platforms, and in our guarantee to provide services with fair and transparent pricing.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We can’t wait to meet with people face-to-face again, to listen to what challenges the community is facing, and to learn from the solutions being developed.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

Our team (https://ubiquity.pub/about/) are first and foremost all deeply committed to open science, open access and open source. We have deep experience in areas including publishing, libraries, research data and software development. The majority of the team is based in London, but we are spread across eight countries overall.

February 1, 2024

2024 Library Publishing Forum registration and updates

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Registration for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum is now open! This year’s Forum will be held on May 15-16 at McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. More information about registration, including rates and refund policies, can be found on the Registration & Travel Information page.

We have also begun adding travel information, including information about hotels and transportation options in Minneapolis.

And we are very excited to announce a Forum affiliated event: PKP will be hosting a Sprint and Pre-Conference Event on Monday, May 13 and Tuesday, May 14, to be held at the University of Minnesota Libraries, Wilson Library. PKP Sprints are interactive events where our community works together to improve our open-source software. This is the first PKP Sprint in North America since 2019 and not to be missed!

A full-day sprint is planned for Monday, followed by a half-day pre-conference on Tuesday.

To learn more about the PKP Sprint and Pre-Conference Event, please see the Save the Date announcement.

 

January 31, 2024

Full COVID Policy for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum

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[Updated 24 June 2024 to add the short version of the policy at the end of this post.]

Goal

LPC’s goal for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum is to encourage the safest possible in-person conference environment through careful planning and mutual care. 

Although public concern has waned, COVID-19 is still a serious health risk. Even otherwise healthy individuals are at risk for complications and for long COVID, and those risks increase with repeated infections. For individuals with weakened immune systems or other vulnerabilities, the risks are heightened significantly.

We acknowledge that an in-person event will inevitably carry a higher level of risk than a virtual one, and that even the most careful precautions may not reduce the risk enough for some community members to attend safely. For that and other reasons, we will continue to alternate in-person events with fully virtual ones.  

Planning

Our planning team is working to create the safest possible conference environment through attention to the following areas: 

Ventilation and air filtration

McNamara Alumni Center was built to meet the codes that prevailed at that time. The original design of the system dictates maximum MERV capabilities, which currently is use of a MERV 13 air filter. Air changes depend on the number of people and the pressure in the building. Spring and fall typically have the highest percentage of outside air in comparison to the coldest or hottest days of the year that the minimum air requirements were designed for.

Spaces within the venue

Because we are planning for a lower number of attendees than the space typically accommodates, we can have fewer tables and ask to have them spread out. Boxed lunches will be provided on both days, so attendees can choose to take their lunch elsewhere. There are about 12-15 small tables located outside the Alumni Center on a first-come first-served basis. Because meals will take place in the same location as the main conference session, risk of transmission will be heightened at sessions immediately following meal and snack times 

Provision of masks and tests

We will provide masks and rapid COVID self-tests for all attendees.

Reliable information and clear communication

We encourage attendees and potential attendees to reach out to us with questions and concerns by emailing contact@librarypublishing.org

Mutual care

Mutual care will help provide a safer conference environment. Below, we have laid out a number of strategies for mutual care and we encourage attendees to utilize as many of them as possible. We aren’t mandating particular strategies across the board, because there will be community members for whom any particular intervention isn’t possible (e.g., individuals who cannot be vaccinated or who cannot wear a mask for an extended period of time). However, attendees are encouraged to do as many of these things as they are able and to do their best to care for their fellow conference-goers.  Individuals are expected to isolate from other attendees if they are sick.

Vaccination

We will strongly encourage all attendees to receive up-to-date vaccines against COVID at least two weeks prior to the event. According to the CDC (at the time this policy was written), you’re up to date on your COVID vaccine if you received an updated vaccine after September 12, 2023. 

Masking

We strongly encourage attendees to wear masks whenever possible. We will make medical-grade masks (KN95 or similar) available throughout the event, and we encourage all attendees who are able to wear them whenever they aren’t eating, drinking, or presenting. 

The venue is part of the UMN campus, and it will include staff, attendees of other events, and potentially members of the public who may or may not be masked.

Testing

Although rapid COVID self-tests are not currently a reliable indicator of whether someone is infected (because of the prevalence of false negative results), they are a fairly reliable indicator of whether an individual is contagious on the day they take the test.(1) We will make tests available (one per attendee per day of the conference) and encourage all attendees to test each morning before coming to the venue. Further information will be posted and/or sent to attendees when available.

Isolating

Individuals who test positive or who are experiencing any moderate or severe symptoms of COVID are expected to isolate from other attendees. This means not attending conference sessions in person, and not gathering for social events with other attendees during the conference. 

Policy updates

This policy was designed based on conditions during early 2024. We are posting it in advance of the conference so that attendees can make an informed decision about their attendance, and we won’t make changes to it lightly. However, this policy is subject to change based on national trends and/or in accordance with CDC updates to guidelines and regulations. We will notify attendees of any changes as soon as possible. 

Contact

Questions about this policy? Please email contact@librarypublishing.org. 

 

(1)  Lopera TJ, Alzate-Ángel JC, Díaz FJ, Rugeles MT, Aguilar-Jiménez W. The Usefulness of Antigen Testing in Predicting Contagiousness in COVID-19. Microbiol Spectr. 2022 Apr 27;10(2):e0196221. doi: 10.1128/spectrum.01962-21. Epub 2022 Mar 29. PMID: 35348350; PMCID: PMC9045251. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35348350/ 

COVID Policy Short Version

LPC’s goal for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum is to encourage the safest possible in-person conference environment through careful planning and mutual care.

COVID remains a serious health risk, especially for those with weakened immune systems or other vulnerabilities. Because of these risks, we feel that precautions for in-person gatherings are warranted.

Some of the precautions LPC is taking include:

  • Providing masks
  • Providing rapid COVID tests
  • Encouraging community members to have up-to-date vaccinations, to test each morning before entering the venue, and to mask when possible

Please see the full COVID Policy for more details on the venue, scheduling, ventilation, and other COVID-related guidance.

An in-person event will inevitably carry a higher level of risk than a virtual one. For that and other reasons, we will continue to alternate in-person events with fully virtual ones.

November 9, 2023

Call for Applications for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum Scholarships

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The Library Publishing Coalition is offering scholarships to offset travel costs for first-time Forum attendees from the United States and Canada, with a focus on individuals who will bring new and diverse perspectives to the community. There are two scholarships available, each of which will cover up to $2,000 USD in travel-related expenses, including airfare, hotel, and meals. Scholarship awardees will have Forum registration fees waived and will be paired with a community mentor to help introduce them to the conference and the community. For awardees from non-member institutions, the award includes guest access to the LPC community for the year following the in-person Forum. This would include access to the listserv and service opportunities, and the opportunity to participate in the peer mentorship program. All recipients will also receive a waived registration to the virtual Forum planned for May 2025. 

Eligibility

This round of the scholarship program will only be open to applicants from the United States and Canada. Applications will be accepted from individuals at both Library Publishing Coalition member and non-member institutions. Anyone who has not attended a previous in-person Library Publishing Forum is eligible to apply. (Anyone who has -only- attended the Library Publishing Forum virtually is encouraged to apply for this scholarship for travel funding to the 2024 in-person Forum.)

Ideal applicants will be new to their librarianship career (first 3–5 years), or new to the field of library publishing. Applicants who identify as members of a group (or groups) underrepresented among library and publishing practitioners will be given preference. These groups include – but are not limited to – members of a racial/ethnic minority, first-generation college graduates, immigrants and refugees, persons with a disability, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Applications from people who could contribute to the diversity of perspectives at the Forum in other ways are also warmly welcomed.

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October 19, 2023

2024 Library Publishing Forum Call For Proposals

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The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in or considering publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2024 Library Publishing Forum to be held at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN on May 15 and 16, 2024! Proposals may address any topic of interest to the library publishing community. The proposal deadline is November 20, 2023.

Note: The deadline for submitting proposals has been extended to December 15, 2023.

Proposal submissions for the Forum are welcome from LPC members and nonmembers, including library employees, university press employees, scholars, students, and other scholarly communication and publishing professionals. We welcome proposals from first-time presenters, representatives of small and emerging publishing programs, and employees of non-member institutions.

We are committed to expanding the diversity of perspectives we hear from at the Library Publishing Forum. Working towards some of the “Continuing Initiatives” from the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice, we ask all proposals to explicitly address how they are inclusive of multiple perspectives, address DEI, or incorporate anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. Presentations about specific communities should include members of that community in their speaker list, and for sessions with multiple speakers, we seek to avoid all-white and all-male panels.

Learn more about session formats and submitting on the Forum program web page.

Submit a proposal

LPC Program Committee

Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington (2023–2024 co-chair)
Jennifer Coronado, Butler University (PALNI) (2023–2024 co-chair)
Jason Boczar, University of South Florida
Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech
Loftan Hooker, Virginia Commonwealth University
Alexandra Marcaccio, University of Guelph
Emma Molls, University of Minnesota (host liaison)
Melanie Schlosser, Library Publishing Coalition