Sponsors of the Library Publishing Forum demonstrate their commitment to the emerging community of library publishers, including their many affiliates and partners. By becoming a sponsor, you will reach a highly influential, international audience of potential new partners and clients. Sponsorship dollars fund the costs associated with hosting this conference.
More information about sponsorship opportunities will be available soon.
The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2025 Virtual Library Publishing Forum to be held May 5–8, 2025!
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.
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.
We welcome proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
Please review the event and session format descriptions carefully to determine which best fits your proposal.
These presentations are 60 minutes long, including time for Q&A, and are delivered live to an online audience.
Panel presentations must involve presenters from more than one institution. If multiple proposals come in on similar topics, the committee may put you in touch with the other session presenters and encourage you to collaborate on a single session.
Active sessions are 60 minutes long and are delivered live to an online audience. They should use interactive formats, possibly integrating polls, chat discussions, etc. Some examples include meetings, workshops, hackathons, deep dives, un-conference sessions, etc. In your proposal, please describe what resources you will need to conduct your session and whether there is a limit on the ideal number of session attendees.
If you have any questions about active sessions, please contact the Program Committee at contact@librarypublishing.org.
Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are 60 minutes long.
Birds-of-a-feather sessions allow for informal conversations around a certain topic using Zoom breakout rooms. This is an ideal opportunity to lead a discussion to help individuals work through issues at their particular institutions or to help formulate collective action plans. In your proposal please describe your general topic, what you hope session participants and/or the wider community will gain from the discussion, your thoughts on how to drive discussion within the groups, and what structures you will suggest to help participants turn conversation into action. While discussion leaders are not expected to be experts in the topic, they should be able to actively guide the session through talking points, discussion prompts, or some other method.
These pre-recorded presentations are 15 minutes long and will be streamed to a live online audience. These presentations will be combined into 1-hour sessions. Presenters will attend the session and have the opportunity to answer questions from the audience during a live Q&A.
Individual presentations are appropriate for one to two presenters on a single topic. These may be project updates, research reports, or new ideas.
These pre-recorded presentations are 2–3 minutes long and will be streamed to a live online audience. Several presentations will be combined into a longer session. Presenters attend the scheduled session and will have the opportunity to answer questions from the audience during a live Q&A.Lightning presentations are an opportunity to share and describe a poster or brief slide deck. These sessions work well for visual content, brief concepts, and product or platform updates.
Feedback from previous years indicates that sessions incorporating the following are particularly well received:
Submit proposals using the submission form.
Submission Deadline: January 6th, 2025
Acceptance Notification: February 2025
The LPC Program Committee will review and accept proposals based on:
Email us at contact@librarypublishing.org.
On behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition Program Committee:
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.
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.
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out the application form. Applications are due by Jan. 12, 2024.
The Library Publishing Coalition’s Forum Scholarship Committee will review applications and notify applicants by Mar. 15, 2024.
Email contact@librarypublishing.org.
We are happy to announce that we’ve completed uploading videos from the 2023 Library Publishing Forum to a playlist on LPC’s YouTube channel. You can also access them, along with additional resources, through the links on the program page on the website.
With the addition of this year’s sessions, we now have 150 videos from the last four Library Publishing Forums freely available for viewing, including keynotes, plenary sessions, 15-minute presentations, 60-minute panels, posters/lightning talks, and active/workshop sessions. We are thrilled to be able to provide this wide range of content to the library publishing community and extend our gratitude to all the presenters who have made it possible.
Next year is LPC’s and the Library Publishing Forum’s 10th anniversary; we hope you’ll be able to join us in person in Minneapolis, MN on May 15–16, 2024. We’ll be posting more information about next year’s Forum on the website in the coming months.
Day/time: May 11, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD
Title: Metadata for Everyone: Identifying Metadata Quality Issues across Cultures
Presenter: Julie Shi, Digital Preservation Librarian, Scholars Portal
Description: Metadata is crucial to the dissemination and communication of research. Well-formed metadata facilitates discovery and access and provides contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions in metadata spaces may be interpreted as metadata quality issues, political acts to assert identity, or strategic curatorial choices to maximize discoverability and visibility. In this context, we engaged with Crossref on the Metadata for Everyone project to understand how metadata quality, consistency, and completeness impact individuals and communities.
Working from a sample of records known to have erroneous, incomplete, or otherwise imperfect metadata, this project set out to identify and classify the issues stemming from how metadata and communities press up against each other to intentionally reflect (or not) cultural meanings. Beginning with an overview of the context and our qualitative approach, this presentation will go on to discuss various metadata quality issues that were identified and the typology we developed to better understand them. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and describing next steps.
Title: Puppies as a Veneer for Cheering Genocide: How Should a Press React When an Accepted Manuscript is Problematic?
Presenters:
Description: It was good enough to make it into the accepted stack, but a deeper editorial dive found racist language and a pro-colonial genocide epistemological framing in a book about a certain dog breed. This editorial crisis coincided with the national reckoning in the summer following the murder of George Floyd, and the collective conversation about structural racism underpinned our analysis of how we had arrived at this moment: with a racist book, a signed contract, and an author who was ready to dig in his heels.
In working through the manuscript and this blunder, we created a language through which we figured out how to move forward, both with the manuscript and as an office, creating policies and processes to prevent a recurrence of such a problematic manuscript in the accepted stack.
Chelsey Shannon (she/her[s]), editor of the University of New Orleans Press, raised the alarm and began the conversation. Ultimately, Chelsey created a heuristic for (future) manuscript intake and consideration, and editor-in-chief Abram Shalom Himelstein (he/his) took on the role of demanding changes from the author or, in the case of refusal, withdrawing the publication agreement. (Hi… it is us writing about ourselves in the third person.)
This stumbling block ultimately moved the Press toward a systematized way both of evaluating possible acquisitions and of distributing the psychically difficult work of dealing with authors who are unwilling to engage honestly with the racism and other forms of prejudice in their work and make changes.
Day/time: May 11, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD
Title: Discovering, Using, and Getting Involved with the Library Publishing Curriculum
Presenters:
Description: The Library Publishing Curriculum (https://librarypublishing.org/resources/library-publishing-curriculum/) encompasses a suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians, which are open and free to use and adapt under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This dynamic, extensible curriculum is intended to empower library publishers to meet local demands to launch and/or enhance scholarly publishing activities. The Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board has been working to develop a new Introduction Module, to complement the existing Content, Impact, Sustainability, and Policy Modules.
In this interactive session, we will introduce the new Introduction Module, explore its content, and participate in a brief activity from the introduction’s Instructor Manual. We will also discuss how you can use the Curriculum in your outreach efforts at your institution, and how you can get involved in the future development of the Curriculum.
Day/time: May 11, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ETD
Title: Making Beautiful Books and Articles: Lowering the Costs of Open Access and OER Publishing via Automated Typesetting
Presenters:
Description: Library publishers are often beholden to contractual typesetting processes which can cost $3 – $5 per page and add weeks onto the production timeline. Pagedjs is an automated typesetting solution that is 100% open source and community driven which can drive down the cost and time to almost zero. The Coko Foundation team and the Open Education Network Publishing Director will present Paged.js and how it is used to produce beautiful books and articles for open access and OER publishing. Learn about the realities of automated typesetting from a team of experts with real word experience.
Day/time: May 11, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ETD
Title: When Does Your OER Program Become a Library Publishing Program?
Presenters:
Description: The OER program at this large, public institution began as a grassroots effort between the library and two faculty members in 2013. Today it is an established program that has awarded more than $60,000 in grants and facilitated student saving exceeding $3.7 million. And, as our program enters its tenth year, it is at a crossroads. We will discuss our OER Team’s journey into OER publishing. What kind of support we’ve offered, what platforms our authors are using, what we have learned and improved. Major questions at the forefront as we assess our future:
We will conclude with a discussion of the potential risks and rewards of scaling up the OER Program to fully embrace the role of library publisher and suggestions for how to assess your own program and facilitate these discussions at your institution.
Title: Indexing of Student Journals: Barriers and Opportunities for Discoverability
Presenter: Mariya Maistrovskaya, Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
Description: Despite the growing number of student-run academic journals and the predominant electronic and open access nature of their publication, their content is not easily discoverable online. Traditionally, academic journals seek to expose their content via commercial or non-commercial indexes, aggregators, and databases, many of which have specific (often very strict) inclusion criteria. Do any of those criteria present barriers to the inclusion of student journals? How well (or poorly) are student journals represented in the major indexes and databases? And finally, what does discoverability mean to student journals, and do they actually aim to be included in academic indexes or do they pursue other content promotion opportunities?
This presentation reports on the results of an original study of Canadian student journals that looks at the above questions from two perspectives: that of indexes and their requirements, and that of student journal editors and their views on discoverability. It features student journal specific indexing tips, discoverability do’s and don’t’s, and insights from interviews with index representatives and student journal editors.
Title: Going Wayback: Digitally Preserving a Defunct Student Journal
Presenters:
Description: Regular turnover in student journal editorial teams is a challenge to maintaining consistent publication and succession planning for student journals. This precariousness can contribute to a greater frequency of student journals that come and go over time. Library publishers need to work towards robust preservation programs that can address the need to preserve journal content when journals cease or become inactive, as discussed by the LPC’s Preservation Task Force during the October 2022 Community Call.
There are also specific challenges with preserving content from student journals that began and ceased before a library publisher was even aware of their existence. What strategies can we use to preserve content we were not involved in publishing in the first place?
To explore this question, we will draw on our experiences of migrating a defunct student journal — the NeoAmericanist—to Open Journal Systems (OJS) in fall 2022. We will share our observations about the project’s implication for the work of supporting student journals as a library publisher. We will discuss what we have learned from this process and some of the key decisions we had to make without knowledge or insight into how decisions were made in the first place.
Previous LPF sessions have discussed reasons why student journals have ceased and methods for supporting the preservation of publications from student journals. While our presentation will briefly touch on these elements, we will explore the NeoAmericanist migration to OJS as a case study in managing journal preservation projects. We’ll discuss using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to access missing content from lost webpages, and how this exercise in journal preservation has informed how we engage with student editors of active journals to support their publications.
Day/time: May 11, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD
Title: to come
Description: to come