“We are pleased to announce that incoming LPC Board members, with terms running from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2026, are:
Sonya Betz, University of Alberta
Harrison Inefuku, University of Iowa
Angel Peterson, Penn State University…”
“We are very excited to announce that Jeremy Ottley will be serving a two-year term as LPC’s first Research Resident. Jeremy’s research on publishing at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) explores a critical area of practice, and we are excited to be able to support its continuation. Jeremy has a bachelor’s in creative writing from Emerson College, and a master’s in the business of publishing from George Washington University….
This is a new program for LPC, but one that aligns well with our mission of fostering high-quality research in the field, as well as our commitment to supporting publishing activities by and for marginalized communities. The primary goal of the program is to support the research, but we also expect it to inform LPC’s programs and practice in the field. To that end, Jeremy will meet regularly with community leadership and will provide updates to the community on his work through blog posts and presentations at the Library Publishing Forum.
The residency officially begins on April 1, 2023 and runs through March 31, 2025.”
“Sarah Lippincott will present on the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) Project which she is leading. The Next Generation Library Publishing project aims to transform the scholarly communication landscape by empowering academic libraries and their collaborators. Library publishers provide a crucial complement and potential competitive alternative to commercial publishing. But they require robust, flexible, interoperable tools, workflows, and service providers to fulfill their potential. NGLP is building these resources in ways that meet the unique needs of library publishers and concretely align with academic values. This webinar will be recorded.”
“…we now launch a new blog post series, Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens. This series will showcase the work of library publishers around the world, provide an opportunity to get to know the people who are working in this exciting field of librarianship, and highlight the diversity of perspectives on and approaches to library publishing globally. Our first two contributors are Jill Claassen [JC] and Devin Soper [DS].
Describe your work in library publishing?
JC: I work at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Libraries, in Cape Town, South Africa and oversee scholarly communication and publishing. Library publishing started in 2016, when the library didn’t have much skills in this area, but we were able to call on the assistance of the Public Knowledge Project initially. At that time, we published our first open access journal, which was a student journal and then started publishing open monographs and textbooks. We now have six open access journals, and 23 open access monographs and textbooks, with a lot of the skills now self-taught amongst the staff, using Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP). This diamond open access publishing service ensures that local publications are available, accessible and discoverable to an African audience, first and foremost, and then to the rest of the world. We have two full time staff in the scholarly communication and publishing section at UCT Libraries. However, as our Research and Learning’s (one of two divisions in UCT Libraries) structure is based on functional librarianship, library publishing is one of the services that form part of the job description of library staff. Thus, we are able to have a thriving library publishing service at UCT because we have a flexible staff structure.
DS: I work at Florida State University (FSU) Libraries in Tallahassee, Florida, where I lead a small team that supports our library publishing program, Florida State Open Publishing (FSOP)….”
“We recently welcomed TIB Open Publishing as an OASPA member in the Small Professional Publisher category. The Press joins a growing list of over 210 OASPA members. We asked Xenia van Edig, Publication Platform Manager, a few questions so we could learn more about TIB Open Publishing and the decision to become an OASPA member….”
“The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of The UMass Amherst Libraries Falcon Curriculum: An Open Source, Common Core PreK-12 Curriculum on Peregrine Falcons, by Lauren Weiss, Associate Editor, Digital Content, UMass Amherst Libraries, and Margaret Krone ’12MS, ’25PhD (College of Education). It is the first open access textbook developed and published fully by the Libraries.
The curriculum is an open educational resource (OER), meaning that it is freely available to anyone, anywhere, to use and adapt. The lesson plans are mapped to the Common Core, a set of educational standards for teaching and testing between pre-kindergarten and 12th grade, which allows teachers to incorporate them into their curricula more easily….”
Introduction: Access to learning resources is not always affordable or equitable for students in higher educa-tion, and high-cost resources, which are commonly prescribed in course reading lists, create barriers for learn-ing. Incorporating open access textbooks in reading lists responds to these issues. Academic librarians’ expertise in curating, organizing, and disseminating knowledge coupled with a long-held passion for open access means that they are well positioned to drive partnerships with academic colleagues that prioritize the use and creation of open educational resources resulting in resources that are accessible, high quality, flexible, and appropriate to support learning in all modes (online, blended, face-to-face). Description of program/service: At La Trobe University Library, a commitment to openness provided a start-ing point for rethinking the role of the library as a publisher of open educational resources. The La Trobe eBureau is an Australian academic library publishing initiative designed to produce high-quality, peer-reviewed open textbooks by La Trobe University authors for La Trobe University courses. Situating the library as an open textbook publisher in partnership with academics improves the affordability of course resources, the student online learning experience, and the visibility of academic outputs and, importantly, has impact and value across higher education institutions. Next steps: This article shares reflections and challenges from the perspective of eBureau authors and library staff. The Library will continue to build on the success of eBureau collaborations and look more broadly to enact the future role of academic libraries in sustainable open textbook publishing within La Trobe University and across the higher education sector.
“oday marks the launch of Research Information Live, a three-day series of webcasts, sponsored by The MIT Press. Proceedings started with a great line-up of expert speakers who all centred their discussions around the evolving business models that libraries can engage with to strengthen publishing research.
First, we heard from Simon Bains, university librarian at the University of Aberdeen, who gave a brief overview of the history of university presses to begin with, as they are not a new phenomenon, but rather have had something of a re-emergence in recent years. Some of the challenges that Bains highlighted, taken from his experience at the University of Aberdeen, were that of culture alignment and sustainably shifting from a more established model to the new era of open access research. Further to this, the existing model of traditional journal publishing and the reliance on impact factor metrics was interrogated, leading to Bains concluding that publishing models need to be more inclusive and diverse if supporting open research is to become a reality.
This was echoed in Tracey Stanley’s presentation where she gave the perspective of Cardiff University Press, which was established in 2014. We heard about hos the mission of Cardiff University press is to create ‘academic capital’ and foster a research community – and this is evidenced by their recent research excellence framework (REF) submission results. Stanley advised those seeking to build open access presses to create and build networks of researchers and other stakeholders, but also to raise the profile and visibility of the work being built. The REF is a key lever for this according to Stanley because as she aptly put it “it’s more about the quality of research rather than the quantity of a press’ output”. All of this will tie into the academic mission of the university….”
“The Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project is working to change that by providing libraries with resources to create a robust, values-driven, and community-led system to share knowledge. With support from an Arcadia Fund grant, the NGLP began as a collaboration of Strategies for Open Science (Stratos), the California Digital Library (CDL), and Educopia with three co-investigators: Kristen Ratan, Catherine Mitchell and Katherine Skinner.
The team gathered feedback from the library community, developed open-source software, and has piloted technology solutions that are showing promising results. Their aim is to provide tools that will help librarians become key players as publishers – complementing their work as repository managers – to offer a sustainable, non-commercial alternative as knowledge brokers….
One pilot included five library publishers interested in testing a turnkey, hosted journal and institutional repository solution. Another, led by California Digital Library (CDL), tested the NGLP ecosystem’s ability to serve a large consortial publisher hosting in-house. And yet another, led by University of North Carolina Press and Longleaf Services, tested a journal and journal portal solution. All participants are eager to continue production services. …”
“The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2023 Library Publishing Forum! We are thrilled to offer a virtual forum during the week of May 8 to May 11 (times TBD). We warmly encourage proposals from first-time presenters and representatives of small and emerging publishing programs. Proposals may address any topic of interest to the library publishing community. Proposal submissions 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. Please view the Call for Proposals for detailed information about the Forum and the different formats of proposed sessions. The submission deadline is December 16, 2022….”
“…We welcome proposals on topics including, but not limited to: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), decolonial approaches to library publishing, intersections of library publishing with broader social issues, university presses, society and association partnerships, funding models, copyright, open access publishing, and Open Educational Resources (OER)….”
“Open access (OA) and the broad sharing of research outputs has been empirically shown to accelerate scientific progress and benefit society and individuals at scale through improved health outcomes, socioeconomic mobility, and environmental well-being, to name a few. Academic research libraries, for their part, have made significant investments in opening up research and scholarship—particularly research conducted on their campuses and made available through journal subscriptions. Yet these investments are difficult to collect given their distribution across many budget lines, the lack of standardized reporting categories, and inconsistent data collection practices.
In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its US-based academic research libraries to better understand OA expenses. The survey asked respondents to categorize expenses into six areas of investment: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs. This ARL report provides a summary and analysis of the aggregate data from the survey, provides charts on institutional responses and averages, and discusses some outcomes and next steps….”
In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its US-based academic research libraries to better understand OA expenses. The survey asked respondents to categorize expenses into six areas of investment: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs.
by Melanie Schlosser
LPC’s current 5-year strategic plan (PDF) is winding down. Published in summer 2018, it was our young community’s first concrete statement of our strategic goals. From LPC’s seed-funded project period (2013-14) through our first two years as a full-fledged membership association (2015-2017), we relied for guidance on our original scoping materials and focused much of our energy on getting the community’s infrastructure and ongoing programs on solid footing. By 2017, it had become apparent that we were ready to think more strategically about the future and put in the work to make sure we were pulling in the same directions across the community. The strategic planning process we undertook was a traditional one, involving a SWOT Analysis, an environmental scan, and community consultation. The outcome was a traditional 5-year strategic plan consisting of three goals, with nested objectives and action items.
[…]
“McGill Library’s support for a new seismology journal is just one example of how the Library is helping researchers challenge the status quo in academic publishing…
Seismica, which charges neither subscription fees for readers, nor publication fees for authors, is a landmark in Rowe’s move away from the world of for-profit academic publishing. After more than 10 years serving on the editorial boards of several journals in her field, she says she decided to cut ties with big publishers. A watershed moment came in 2020 when the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced an author fee of €10,000 for each paper published in one of its ‘open access’ journals. At a time when government funding agencies are increasingly requiring researchers to publish their work in open access journals as a condition of their grants, moves like this are seen by some as a strategy on the part of commercial publishers to shore up their revenue base by shifting fees from subscribers to authors.
According to Rowe, however, researchers themselves are partly to blame for feeding a cycle of high fees and perceived status in academic publishing. “The only reason authors would pay [these fees] is for the prestige – and potential career benefits – of publishing in Nature,” she says. “In other words, we academics have created an expensive spiral of prestige and power – which we ourselves enforce on one another – which drives the flow of grant money toward these publishing companies.” …”