Library Publishing Coalition
Background: The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is a membership organization of about 80 academic and research libraries and library consortia based mainly in the United States and Canada. It was founded in 2014 in collaboration with the Educopia Institute, which continues to be its fiscal host. The growing momentum in libraries to be engaged in scholarly publishing prompted the formation of the community.
Mission: LPC provides a professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise among librarians interested in creating a scholarly publishing landscape that is open, inclusive, and sustainable.
Community over Commercialization:
“When we talk about our community, we're actually talking about multiple levels. At the most basic level, the community is made up of individuals who show up and do the work. One level up is our member libraries, who support the work. And at the highest level of abstraction, our community is the entire field of library publishing. Almost everything we produce, we put out as open access because it is meant to support the widest possible community.“
“We're a community of library publishers and everything that we do is geared towards building and supporting and sustaining that community.”
“It's very much a community-led group. We have a very engaged elected leadership board that directs things at every level. The way many LPC activities happen is that issues bubble up from the community level. We provide opportunities for the community to identify what is important to them and then LPC directs time, attention and resources.”
“Another kind of community focus is that when we come across something that is a challenge or too big for us as a little community of member libraries our initial impulse is always to partner with other communities. There is a growing international community of library publishers and we want to be engaged. We have focused on building a strong partnership with the International Federation of Library Associations, and Library Publishing Special Interest Group. Our approach generally is to find some other communities doing the work and work with them.”
“Library publishing, as a type of scholarly publishing, tends to be very service oriented. A lot of library publishing is basically addressing scholarly communications needs that are not well served by the commercial publishing ecosystem. Library publishers work with a lot of small, niche, experimental and interdisciplinary publications.”
“There's this interesting tension within the library publishing community because most have a firm practical and philosophical commitment to both open access and open source. And yet, we also have a strong commitment to meet the publishing needs on our campus. Sometimes we have to live in some tension. It’s balancing advocacy with partnerships to meet the needs of my community on campus. It's a very nuanced place to be in.”
-Melanie Schlosser, Community Facilitator, Library Publishing Coalition, and Senior Community Facilitator, Edutopia Institute