LPC Blog

The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.

May 2, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Janeway + Fulcrum

By

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

By

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.

May 1, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association)

By

LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

 

About

Website: https://oaspa.org/
X (Twitter): @OASPA
Strategic affiliate since: 2017

OASPA is a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship. Our membership includes scholar-led and professional publishers of books and journals, across varied geographies and disciplines, as well as infrastructure and other services. We are a trusted convenor of the broad, global spectrum of open access stakeholders and a proven venue for productive collaboration.

OASPA works collaboratively with other allied organisations on things we think are important. This includes our continued support of the OA Journals Toolkit with DOAJ, participation in the European Commission-funded DIAMAS and PALOMERA projects, working on the committees for Think. Check. Submit., C4DISC, the OA books author toolkit, and our ongoing support of OA Switchboard.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Collaborations

OASPA is an active participant in the event planning knowledge share calls that LPC hosts, and our regular check-ins with OASPA staff keep LPC’s staff and Board in the know about developing trends in the OA space. Additionally, our two communities work side by side within the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), of which we are both active members.

April 29, 2024

Announcing the winner of LPC’s first ever Service Leadership Award

By

We are delighted to announce the Library Publishing Coalition’s first ever Service Leadership Award. Part of our 10th Anniversary celebrations, this award is designed to recognize a community member who has made multiple, sustained contributions to the community through service and leadership over the last five years. Nominations for the award were sought this past fall from current and former Board members, and the winner was selected by the Board.

The awardee

The award goes to Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University). Over the last 5+ years, Joshua has demonstrated ongoing, unwavering commitment to LPC through service. He has stepped into leadership roles when needed, but has also been happy to follow others’ lead and work quietly in the background. Some highlights of his service include his contributions to and stewardship of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, his substantial contributions to LPC’s first Strategic Plan during his term on the Board, his consistent presence on and interim leadership of the Curriculum Editorial Board, and his service on the DEI Committee.

Joshua was nominated for this award by multiple people; here is a quote from one nomination:

“Joshua has given so much of his time and expertise to the LPC community and helped advance the profession in so many ways. He has participated in and/or led multiyear efforts to create and improve the Library Publishing Curriculum and to update the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. These two LPC resources are among the most comprehensive ones freely provided to the library publishing community, and they raise LPC’s profile in the scholarly communications ecosystem. LPC is incredibly lucky to have such a dedicated and talented individual who is willing to give so much back to the community!”

A statement from Joshua:

“I’m so grateful for this honor and without discounting it, I recognize that most of my colleagues in library publishing have given just as much to this first decade of the coalition, and many have given more. I’m so grateful for this coalition, and the inventive, thoughtful, generous, skilled women and men who make it the unique professional community it is. Perhaps you serve so consistently because your fellow librarians and publishers consistently model service, each of you pushing each other to be the best versions of yourselves. I think that’s what you’ve done with/for/to me, and someone decided to pin an honorarium on it, and I celebrate you for it. Thank you for including me in your remarkable decade, building a new professional coalition, an exemplary body of practice, and a mutually supportive and generous community. I’m so grateful.”

The award

The award consists of a $1,000 honorarium and travel support to attend the 2024 Library Publishing Forum.

Please join us in congratulating Joshua and celebrating 10 years of the Library Publishing Coalition Community!

April 17, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: CLOCKSS

By

LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

About

Name: CLOCKSS
Website: https://clockss.org/
X (Twitter): @CLOCKSSArchive
Strategic affiliate since: 2021

CLOCKSS is a community-led collaboration of academic publishers and research libraries around the world, working together to provide a sustainable online archive. Together we ensure the long-term survival of our shared intellectual heritage.

At CLOCKSS, we provide services to libraries and publishers built over the award winning LOCKSS software, to instill confidence in authors, scholars, policy makers, libraries, and publishers that scholarship is safely and securely preserved for future generations.

How does it work? Simply put more copies = more security. But add to that, the less correlated those copies the safer, the more dependable each copy the safer, and the faster failures get detected and repaired the safer the content is.

CLOCKSS preserves content for a wide array of library publishers around the world, and we are happy to provide advice and guidance about approaches to ensure that the content you publish is protected.

CLOCKSS complements other preservation services and preservation activities at local, national, regional, and international levels. In some cases, our holdings are unique thanks to our trusted relationships. In other cases, we provide necessary resilience. According to the KEEPERS registry, 2,010 of the journals preserved in CLOCKSS are uniquely preserved by us. An independent non-profit, CLOCKSS makes sustaining financial contributions to the broader community of LOCKSS-based preservation services who in turn archive at least 5,244 more unique journal titles.

Digital preservation is an important part of every publisher’s disaster recovery strategy. Be sure you are a part of the solution. Learn more at https://clockss.org/.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Collaborations

From 2021-23, LPC convened a Preservation Task Force (2021-23) which investigated the preservation needs and practices of library publishers, and recommended actions to LPC’s Board to support work in this area. CLOCKSS participated in that group, and has continued their involvement with the follow-up Preservation Working Group, which is currently implementing some of the task force’s recommendations.

April 3, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

By

LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

About

Name: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Website: https://doaj.org/
X (Twitter): @doajplus
Strategic affiliate since: 2017

DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of over 20,000 diverse open access journals from around the world. Our mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals.

DOAJ is a vital part of the open access infrastructure. We are a global community, with team members, ambassadors and volunteers based in 45 countries around the world, speaking 36 languages. Our criteria have become a gold standard for open access publishing.

DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its primary services and metadata as free for everyone.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Beyond being a widely used and integrated resource itself, DOAJ has collaborated with a number of industry partners to provide several other tools and resources. The Open Access Journals Toolkit (OA Journals Toolkit) was launched in 2023, and is a self-guided online resource for anyone managing or supporting an open access journal. This resource is created and managed by DOAJ and OASPA, and has since its launch been translated to French, with an Arabic translation due to be released soon. If you have questions that cannot be answered by this resource, you can try Publishers Learning and Community Exchange (PLACE), an online forum for publishers and those involved in publishing, managed by Crossref, COPE, OASPA and DOAJ. Both these resources are completely free, and developed to help the community with best practice in publishing.

JASPER is a project developed to help diamond open access journals with limited resources to preserve their content for the long term. This project enables journals that are indexed in DOAJ and meet set criteria to get free help with archiving and preservation.

In addition to these resources to help journals with best practice, DOAJ is also a co-founder of Think.Check.Submit, a resource for researchers to identify trusted journals and publishers for their work. Think.Check.Submit is an international cross-sector initiative that aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

To keep up to date with the latest information on DOAJ and affiliated projects, visit the DOAJ blog.

Collaborations

DOAJ and LPC worked together on a task force in 2017-18 to evaluate the needs of LPC members in relation to DOAJ indexing, mentor members thorough the application process, and recommend ongoing support. The task force facilitated a workshop at the 2018 Forum and produced a How-To Guide for Library Publishers, which was last updated in 2021.

LPC also maintains an official DOAJ Liaison (currently Emma Molls) to serve as a first point of contact for LPC members navigating the DOAJ application process, but the DOAJ team is also happy to work with LPC members to assist with their DOAJ applications. Several LPC members have volunteered as DOAJ editors to help to review journal applications.

April 1, 2024

March 2024 LPC Update

By

The March 2024 Library Publishing Coalition Update has been published! In it you’ll find recent news from the Library Publishing Coalition including

2024 Library Publishing Forum News

  • Registration is open
  • Keynote announcement
  • Affiliated event (PKP Sprint & Pre-Conference Event)
  • COVID policy released

Community News

  • LPC’s new 5-year Community Plan
  • 10th Anniversary Membership Special
  • Call for entries for 2024 Library Publishing Directory
  • New Board members and updates to the LPC Bylaws
  • Much more!

Blog Post Spotlights

  • The first half dozen Strategic Affiliate Spotlights
  • The newest consortial publishing profile: Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI)

Read the Update

March 25, 2024

Announcing the new LPC Board members and Bylaws update

By

LPC Board Election Results

We are delighted to announce that incoming LPC Board members, with terms running from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2027 are:

  • Leigh-Ann Butler, Université d’Ottawa | University of Ottawa
  • Sarah Frankel, University of Louisville Libraries
  • Erin Jerome, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Annie Johnson, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press
  • Regina Fisher Raboin, University of Mass Chan Medical School

They will join the returning Board members:

  • Janet Swatscheno, University of Michigan, jswatsch@umich.edu President (2022-2025)
  • Amanda Hurford, PALNI, Past President (2022-2025)
  • Liz Scarpelli, University of Cincinnati Press (2022-2025)
  • Sonya Betz, University of Alberta (2023-2026)
  • Harrison Inefuku, University of Iowa (2023-2026)
  • Angel Peterson, Penn State University (2023-2026)
  • Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute, melanie@educopia.org (ex officio, community facilitator)

The Library Publishing Coalition Board oversees the governance, organizational structure, Bylaws, and the review and direction of the membership of the Library Publishing Coalition. As your elected representatives, you are welcome to contact them at any time with questions, comments, or suggestions for LPC.

Many thanks to outgoing Board members Justin Gonder and Emma Molls

LPC Bylaws Update

This year’s election was especially important as we worked to update the LPC Bylaws to ensure they are in accordance with our current organization, activities, and values in practice. The Bylaws are our organizational governance document, outlining what the organization is and how it is run. While the Board reviews the document annually, proposed changes accumulate until they reach a significant quantity or bear a significant impact on the daily activities of the organization. The LPC Bylaws were last updated in March, 2022.

Thanks to everyone who voted, we surpassed the required 2/3rds threshold of member institutions voting in favor. Thus, the proposed changes are approved and have gone into effect. You can find the new bylaws on the LPC Website’s About page.

March 20, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)

By

LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024. 

About

Name: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)
Website: https://www.celj.org/
X (Twitter): @celj_editors
Strategic affiliate since: 2020

The Council of Editors of Learned Journals is an international association for scholarly journal editors. Our mission is to enable conversations, collaborations, and communication around scholarly journal editing and to mentor editors and authors by creating an inclusive scholarly communications landscape.

Resources

If LPC members are journal editors or work with journal editors who could use more support or training in being editors, CELJ is a welcoming organization that can help!

The organization’s greatest strength is its members, who participate in editor–editor mentoring through our members-only discussion list and editor–author mentoring through face-to-face and virtual Chat with an Editor sessions at institutions and conventions. These discussions create space for potential authors and editors to ask questions they might be afraid to email into the editorial abyss about getting published or starting editorial work. The virtual spaces have proven especially helpful to BIPOC and other multimarginalized scholars, which in turn helps us make scholarly publishing more inclusive. Collective knowledge-sharing of scholarly editorial workflows among the members and with potential authors and new editors is a cornerstone of CELJ’s inclusive mission.

CELJ offers free resources on its website to assist editors with their work. Some of these resources include in-house authored guides on Best Practices for Online Journals, Guidelines for Contributors, Tips on Publishing, Tips for Starting a New Journal, and a Letter of Support for Editors. CELJ also maintains up-to-date links to inclusive style guides from a range of identity-specific organizations (e.g., National Association of Black Journalists, Native American Journalists Association, The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Trans Journalists Association, etc.).

CELJ also provides a Featured Journal section on its website in which we interview one of our member journal editors. As an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, CELJ’s membership is mostly humanities and humanistically oriented social science journal editors, and we welcome journal editors from any disciplinary background. At the annual MLA convention (not to be confused with the Michigan Library Association or the Music Library Association), CELJ sponsors several sessions that feature key topics on editorial work. This past year’s convention featured sessions on Graduate Student Labor and the Future of Editing, Mentoring New Editors into Scholarly Journal Publishing, How to Get Published in a Scholarly Journal, Inclusive Citation Practices in Research and Editing, and Making Digital Humanities Projects Public. Previous years have also featured sessions on inclusive editing practices, peer review, and editorial workflow issues. Some of these sessions have been recorded and posted on our members-only website and will be featured in virtual CELJ conferences, starting in 2024.

CELJ is a resource for library publishers or the journal editors they work with. Publishers and editors can access free resources mentioned above or join (individually or as a group through the library publisher, who then gets one free membership for themselves) to gain access to exclusive resources, such as the confidential discussion group and the annual journal and editorial awards CELJ offers. Many journals and press journal managers join for the awards and stay for the rich mentoring discussions.

Collaborations

CELJ collaborates with several organizations to produce knowledge-sharing about editorial processes and scholarly publishing. CELJ has shared several reading group meet-ups with LPC members to cover new documents and guidelines on diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in scholarly publishing (e.g., C4DISC Toolkit for Disability Equity; Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in APA Journals; Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices heuristic, etc.).

As CELJ continues to create knowledge-sharing events on editorial processes, we will invite LPC members to its reading groups, webinars, and future conferences.

March 6, 2024

Affiliate Spotlight: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

By

LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.

About

Name: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Website: https://www.cni.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cni.org/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/coalition-for-networked-information/
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@cni
X (Twitter): @cni_org
Strategic affiliate since: 2017

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is a joint program of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE that promotes the use of information technology to advance scholarship and education. Over 200 organizations representing higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly and professional organizations, foundations, and libraries and library organizations, make up CNI’s members. Learn more at cni.org.

Resources

We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.

Collaborations

Our two communities haven’t undertaken any formal projects together, but we regularly share information and cross-promote items of interest. CNI staff have also contributed enormously to an ongoing series of discussions about event planning (hosted by LPC staff and attended by strategic affiliate representatives and other community managers), which have helped us to shape the Library Publishing Forum program going forward.