Forum News

June 18, 2025

Save the date and call for volunteers: 2026 Library Publishing Forum

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Library Publishing Forum 2026

The Library Publishing Coalition invites you to save the date for our next in-person conference: June 17-18, 2026, in Seattle, Washington. Many thanks to long-time LPC member institution University of Washington for hosting our first west-coast Forum since 2019.

Collaboration with AUPresses

We are also thrilled to announce that we are co-locating the Forum with the Association of University Presses’ Annual Meeting (6/13-15) and that our two communities will collaborate on a day of shared programming on Tuesday, June 16. 

Travel challenges

We recognize that travel—especially international travel—is increasingly difficult for many community members for a variety of reasons. After extensive discussion (including with attendees of the 2025 virtual Forum), we have decided there is sufficient interest in an in-person conference to make it worth trying. The opportunity to work closely with AUPresses also tipped the scales in favor of meeting in person next year. To those who already know you won’t be able to travel to Seattle, please know that we see you, we value your participation in the community, and we are exploring ways to facilitate remote engagement with the conference. Speaking of which …

LPForum26 Remote Engagement Task Force

If you are invested in the success of the Forum and in creating opportunities for virtual participation, we invite you to volunteer for a special task force! See the call for volunteers for details.  

Questions?

As always, if you have any questions, please email contact@librarypublishing.org. We hope to see you next year in Seattle!

June 18, 2025

Help us make the 2026 Library Publishing Forum accessible to everyone!

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We are planning to be back in person for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum, and there was quite a bit of discussion at this year’s virtual Forum about barriers to attendance. We have heard about cuts to travel funding at some institutions, and we recognize that travel is increasingly risky for a variety of reasons. There is still enough interest to justify an in-person event, but we want to do everything possible to include community members who can’t be there in person. We don’t have the resources for a fully hybrid conference, but there are a variety of tools at the community’s disposal that may be useful in this effort. These include volunteer livestreaming (those of you who have been around for a while may recall that we used to do this!), supporting the hosting of local and regional gatherings), and some of the tools we use during virtual Forum years (like our Discord server). 

We are looking for volunteers for a task force that will help us plan and implement a remote engagement with next year’s Forum. This group will work closely with LPC’s Program Committee (which plans the conference program) and the LPC staff responsible for conference logistics. It would be wonderful to have some task force members who are planning to attend in the Forum in person, as well as some who will be relying on the group’s work to participate remotely. You do not need to be at an LPC member institution, or to have attended the Library Publishing Forum, to serve on this group. The group will meet monthly starting in July of this year, wrapping up its work after the Forum next June. 

If you’re interested, please fill out the volunteer form by July 18. Email contact@librarypublishing.org with questions. 

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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January 14, 2025

DEIA Committee Report on the Library Publishing Forum 2024 Demographic Survey

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The development and use of this survey was based on the recommendations found in the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This is a charge carried out by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. The 2024 survey was made available to Library Publishing Forum (LPF) attendees in order to understand who attends the Forum. Moreover, this survey helps us track demographic changes over time. (View the reports on the 2023 and 2022 surveys.)

The 2024 Forum was an in-person event held May 15 and 16, 2024 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This may explain the smaller number of registered attendees and higher percentage of survey completion than the virtual forum in 2023. Comparing responses between this year and last year allows us to gauge demographic trends across different conference formats. But we recognize the forum that would be the most comparable to this year’s is the in-person portion of the 2022 Forum. However, since that event was significantly smaller than this year’s, it might not serve as an effective baseline. The 2024 Forum may instead function as the baseline for in-person conferences going forward.   

Notes

As all questions were optional, not all questions were answered. Therefore, numbers/counts may not always add up. The respondent information includes both LPF attendees and presenters.

Summary of responses and comparisons

The 2024 LPF had 154 registered attendees, while 2023 had 267 and 2022 had 330 registered attendees (246 were virtual while 84 were in-person).

We received 66 responses to the demographic survey from 2024 LPF attendees, which is an increase in the response rate, but a decrease in total number of responses (86 in 2023, 83 in 2022). The response rate in 2024 was 42%, compared to 26% in 2023 (a virtual/in-person combination), and 36% in 2021.

In 2024, the age of forum attendees ranged from 20 to 60+. Most were between 40-49 years in age (38%), with the next closest range being between 30-39 years in age (34%). This is similar to the 2023 forum. In comparison, the majority of the 2022 forum respondents ranged between ages 30-59.

This year’s results show a decline in attendees identifying as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), from 14% in the 2023 survey to just 6% in this year’s. (Again, the 2023 Forum was all virtual and had a larger number of registrants overall, so meaningful comparisons are difficult.) Participants were given the opportunity to share additional details about their identity. One person who identified as BIPOC shared they were Asian American. The only other respondent did not identify as BIPOC; they used this field to report they were White. In 2022, 20% of respondents selected race and ethnicities typically contained within the phrase BIPOC. Those options included Asian, Black, Hispanic or Latina/o/x, First Nations, Native Americans Alaska Native, or Metis, and I didn’t as another race/ethnicity/Unknown. 

Of the 65 responses to the question on gender, most (79%) respondents were women, which is a slight decrease from previous years. Additional responses include men (15%), non-binary (4%), and genderfluid (2%). Participants were also given the option to share additional information on their gender identity. Only one person responded, sharing that though they had identified themselves as a woman in the previous question, they do not identify with their gender. 

Only 37 people responded to the question related to having a disability. Most of these (76%) shared they did not. About 22% of those who responded to this reported having a disability, compared to 29% in 2023 and 17% in 2022.  Since 2022, respondents now also have the ability to include an explanation or alternative response to this question. These additional responses included chronic conditions, migraines, OCD, and ADHD. 

Since 2023, respondents are asked whether they identify as neurodivergent. In 2024, there were 39 responses to the question on identifying as neurodivergent. About 31% of these responses identified as neurodivergent.

 In 2024, all respondents indicated they were employed full time, 2 respondents also indicated they were students. In 2023 92% of respondents were employed full-time with  95% reporting full-time employment in 2022.

Beginning with the 2023 survey was the open response question about any other identities. Less than 10 people used this field to share information on their ethnicity (Ashkenazi Jew), sexuality (bisexual, queer), their predominant language (non-English dominant speaking), their political views (socially conservative), their religious culture (Christian), and their caretaker roles (parent, mom).

New to the 2024 survey was an open response asking if something could have been done to make the conference more accessible for attendees. We received 9 substantive responses. Several focused on better audio, consistent use of microphones was specifically mentioned several times, and exploring the possibility of captioning as part of the slide desk display. Others suggested several accommodations for individuals that use mobility aids or may not be able to stand for longer periods. Related to the food service, one respondent asked for more consistent labeling of potential allergens.

Final Comments

The 2024 LPF was entirely in person, while the 2023 LPF was online and the 2022 LPF was hybrid. Moving forward, virtual and in-person years will alternate. This shift in format will need to be considered when evaluating demographic surveys in future years and the comparisons across years. 

We recommend that future forum planning committees incorporate accessibility recommendations, as suggested by attendees of this year’s in-person forum. We also recommend thoughtful efforts to reach and engage a more diverse representation of library publishing professionals. Some ideas from previous notes and discussions include coordinating opportunities for in-person/virtual meet-ups for BIPOC library and publishing professionals, establishing a group for BIPOC library publishing professionals, and providing professional development funding and/or mentorship programs for BIPOC library publishing professionals. We also recommend that the Library Publishing Coalition create and regularly issue a census of its committee members and program participants.

We hope that the next in-person forum planning committee will incorporate the recommendations made by this year’s attendees. 

The Library Publishing Coalition’s DEI Committee members are incredibly appreciative of the many LPF participants who took the demographic survey during this year’s Forum. 

We welcome LPF participants and LPC members to contact us at inclusion@librarypublishing.org if you have additional resources or feedback you would like to share to help us improve our work.

 

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.