How Library Publishers Are Doing Big Things by Working Together
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00:00
Meeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:10
Hi, everyone. I am Dr. Robert and I'm the electronic publication manager at the University of Pittsburgh and I am also the current president of the Library Publishing Coalition.
00:22
I'm here today to talk about what the Library Publishing Coalition is doing and how library publishers are doing big things by working together. First, I'm going to talk a little bit about what library publishing is, why libraries are engaged in this space,
00:41
and who benefits when libraries get involved in publishing. Just a quick check around here. How many of you are identifying a library publisher? Okay, so quite a lot of you. So some of this is going to be familiar to a lot of you, but hopefully there will be some new takeaways.
01:03
So what is library publishing? What sets us apart from other types of publishers is that in addition to the publishing activities that we perform, we also have a set of values that strive for openness, inclusivity, and sustainability.
01:21
We're driven by mission and not by profits, and our goal is to serve our communities and improve the scholarly publishing ecosystem for all. Serving our community means these key characteristics that are very familiar to libraries in general that we also share through our publishing experiences in a new way.
01:43
We're willing to experiment with new publishing models and new content. We're looking to facilitate learning and providing core services and engaging in partnerships with our community. Why do we publish? Libraries publish for a variety of reasons, and it's not always the same for every publisher.
02:04
But in general, we have an interest in the access and discovery of knowledge and the preserving the scholarly record. For many academic libraries, our role is beginning to shift away from the traditional model, and so services like publishing and data management are a lot of ways
02:22
to continue to demonstrate our value throughout the research life cycle. We're also supporting research that is coming out of our institutions. The majority of library publishers are focused on their publishing content from their own campuses. Publishing activities in the library are also usually subsidized,
02:43
and this means that we're not dependent on cost recovery and can publish work that others might not, such as hyper-niche research, material of local concern, voices marginalized by traditional scholarly publishing, and new forms of scholarly outcome.
03:02
Many of us in the library community are focused on developing and implementing an infrastructure and practices that benefit authors and readers in their tribute to a more equitable scholarly communication system. Who benefits from library publishing?
03:36
I'll just tell you about who benefits from library publishing. Humanities and social sciences and other highly specialized areas of study,
03:44
for which there are extremely small markets, even by academic publishing standards. Also, student publications, there's not a strong market value for many student publications, but it's a great learning experience for students, and it gives a home to their academic output.
04:01
Also, journals that service in practice-based disciplines, such as public health or social work that may not find a home in traditional publishing. And a vast majority of library publishers who were surveyed in the 2019 Library Publishing Directory indicate that open access is a primary motivator for their library publishing programs.
04:23
And that aligns with our core value as libraries are fostering openness in scholarly publishing. So, just a brief history of library publishing. Many libraries got their start by partnering with university presses who were already involved in the publishing process.
04:43
Also, early on in electronic publishing, libraries were involved with things like Project MUSE in higher ed press. Spark was formed in 1998. And then in the early 2000s, platforms such as OJS began developing, and this gave us a venue, a platform for our publishing activities.
05:03
This was a huge boost to library publishing because we can't afford most of the commercial online publishing platforms, so having open source options was a really big boost to library publishing. LPC formed in 2019, and here we are today where open source infrastructure is proliferating and bounds everywhere
05:24
and we have a lot of options to choose from, and those options are getting better and better all the time. So, what do libraries publish? Some of the early publishing that was done at libraries was theses and dissertations, pre-print, spray literature, conferences, technical reports.
05:42
Now you see a lot more of library publishing is journals, books. A big one is open educational resources now, data sets, things that are supporting their institutions, their scholars, and making knowledge open. Here are some examples by some of our members
06:01
of the various types of publishing. So, what kind of services do library publishers provide? Some library publishers are able to offer a home for the journal through hosting something like OJS and giving that platform to the journals,
06:20
but other library publishers are able to provide a wide variety of services in support of these publications. And these things, these publishing services and what it takes to create and output this content are things that libraries already know a lot about. So, the expertise that is needed to provide these publishing services
06:45
are things that libraries are in a great position to provide. One of the ways that I often describe what I do to people, which, if you are a library publisher, know, can be very difficult to explain to people who are not in this space, is that the editors for all of the journals are experts in their fields, in their disciplines,
07:03
but they might not know a lot about publishing. As library publishers, it's our job to be the experts in all of those extra things. So you need skills like copyright and fair use, project management, not just for your library publishing program, but teaching how the journal editors have project management
07:21
for their journal, and advice on their publishing workflows. You need to be experts in a variety of publishing workflows so that we can work with our individual editors to figure out what works best for them and their resources and their discipline, as well as content acquisition, and this is conducting peer reviews,
07:42
this is building an editorial board, and this is soliciting answers. So the library publishing units can be honed in a variety of places within the library, there's our scholarship centers, we'll have cooperations with the presses, there are the offices. Some common questions that we face
08:01
are how to decide what to publish and what not to publish. Only published things produced by faculty on our campus and students, faculty only, what kind of services the library was willing to provide, for what services would we need to charge,
08:20
and about open access and what rights the authors will retain and how that content will be made. Also what role equity, diversity, and inclusion will play in our programs and the content that we publish. And very important, how to sustain, how to build infrastructure and sustain the library publishing program over the long term.
08:43
One way to do that is by developing a business plan. Many library publishing programs start out informally. A faculty member comes to the library, a place they're used to coming to for help and support, and says, I want to start a journal, or I have a journal, can you help? So these may start out as pretty informal things,
09:00
but for it to sustain a long term publishing program, you need things like business plans, policies, financial structures, and a way to measure your success over time to ensure the longevity of your program. So, that's a lot to navigate. This is the part where I get to plug in my kayak and just keep dancing my fries.
09:26
So, that's a lot to navigate. Plug my kayak in the picture. I apologize for that. So, as library publishers, it can feel like we're trying to figure things out on our own with limited resources.
09:41
Often, it's only a few people at the library providing the service, or maybe even only one, trying to meet their community needs. Also, the publishing landscape is filled with publishers who are bigger, who have been around longer, and have maybe been able to provide more services, which we're not yet prepared to provide.
10:04
But together, we are building the Library Publishing Coalition, a community of support with common values to share our knowledge and resources. We believe that we can do more together than we can do alone.
10:20
The Library Publishing Coalition is an independent community-led membership organization of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing, and its mission is to extend the impact and sustainability of library publishing and open scholarship by providing a professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise.
10:44
Our membership institutions are located primarily in North America, but we do have a few international members, and we welcome any international community to join our coalition. We engage with the community
11:00
through various professional development opportunities like the LPC listserv, the Annual Library Publishing Forum, which is a place where we can get together once a year in person to share our knowledge, our successes, and our ideas for the future. Members can lead change in the scholarly communications and publishing
11:22
by helping set strategic direction of the library publishing and through participation in committees, task force, and the board, and a growing and highly collaborative community practice. Groups form and dissolve according to the needs of the community and the purpose of the group.
11:42
Some are expected to renew each year. Here's an example of a few of the committees that we have right now. The program and directory committee are ones that renew pretty much every year, but we're always adding to it when a new area of interest comes up. A fairly recent is the diversity and inclusion task force
12:02
because we felt that was a need for the community, and together we decided to create that and explore what we can be doing better in that area. So new committees and task force are forming all the time in response to the needs of the community. The Library Publishing Coalition
12:21
offers a variety of resources to support its measures. The Professional Development Guide compiles training and professional development materials including courses, webinars, readings for library publishers. The shared documentation portal is a space where members can share
12:40
and find resources to support the program such as memorandum of understanding, copyright agreements, business plans, and project workflow guides, and it's being added to on an ongoing basis. Whereas most of these resources are freely available to members and non-members, the shared documentation portal is specific to members only.
13:01
Other resources include the ethical framework for library publishing, which introduces library publishers to important ethical considerations in a variety of areas and provides concrete recommendations and resources for ethical scholarly publishing. The curriculum only partnered with PKP, NASIG, and who's guided through the print.
13:21
The library publishing curriculum includes four modules that address major competencies in library publishing. Content, impact, policy, and sustainability. We have a how-to guide that we created in partnership with the Director of Open Access Journals, and we also have a library publishing bibliography,
13:42
which brings together a scholarship about the fuel of library publishing, and that is added to and developed on an ongoing basis. Three current major three major LPC initiatives at this time is that for the
14:01
library publishing curriculum, we see this is a very important resource that should be updated and added to on an ongoing basis. So we've appointed an editor-in-chief for this, Cheryl Baugh from Wayne State University, and at this time Cheryl is gathering an editorial
14:21
team that is going to support the curriculum moving forward at its permanent home in the library publishing coalition. LPC has also partnered with Educopia and 12 other partner libraries to study the workflows for library publishing programs. We believe that if we can
14:41
study these various workflows, we can learn from each other and share them with others so that we can all improve our workflows and that we can support those who are just starting out. We also are starting our second round of the fellowship programs. The first round of fellowship programs was incredibly successful.
15:01
We were able to bring on two fellows who were not from member institutions so we could include their voice in our discussions. And these are geared toward those who provide access to underrepresented groups and also those who are just starting out in their library publishing careers. The LPC is always
15:21
bringing on new projects and new initiatives. So these three are definitely not the only three major initiatives that are going on. We're continuously partnering with other organizations who have shared interests with us and have an idea of something they want to work on and bring it to us because they think we may be interested in it as well
15:42
and responding to the needs of the community. So we always have a lot of balls in the air when it comes to initiatives. And so these are just three examples of what we're currently doing. The LPC developed its first strategic plan in 2018. It's a five year
16:00
plan. We use this strategic plan to evaluate new opportunities that come our way like some of the forms I was just describing and to ensure that they fit with our community's needs and our long term goals. This can also mean that not only using it as a way to evaluate other communities that come our way but to guide the
16:20
development of these initiatives and partnerships by strengthening those by expanding their scope or incorporating our own values and priorities into that proposed project which can result in even more meaningful outcomes for the greater community through those projects. We also don't want to just
16:41
publish scholarly content. We want to create a scholarly publishing landscape that is open, inclusive and sustainable. So for us it's not just about publishing the content. It's about affecting real change in the way that the publishing landscape works as a whole. So what is it that our community needs
17:01
to move forward now for a greater impact? Well, we need more of you. Our partnerships are our strengths and so we are stronger together. The more people that we can bring into the conversation, the more we all benefit as a result. Local investments of each scholarly publisher
17:21
brings something to the table and when they invest locally and then bring it back and share it, we all benefit from that. What we need to work on is developing more best practices and defining our standards and making sure that our library publishing activities live up to
17:40
what is expected of the library publishing. To do this, we need to develop and share a common body of expertise and knowledge. That's what we're trying to do through a lot of our programming and our shared documentation. A lot of our activities are keeping this in mind. We also want to know the development
18:00
of what the library publishing ecosystem at scale means. We want solutions for libraries at all resource levels. Some of our members are just a single person at a library who was asked to start publishing. And some of our library publishing partners have a lot of resources
18:21
and a lot of activities. And we need to make sure that we don't leave one behind the other while serving or one behind while serving the other. We need to keep in mind all of our members at their whatever various stage and who they are for their library publishing programs. So, included in my slides are just references and further reading about
18:42
library publishing in general, what we're up against, what we've learned so far. Happy to take your questions.