The LPC is an independent, community-led membership association.
Its purpose is to support an evolving, distributed range of library publishing practices and to further the interests of libraries involved in publishing activities.
About the Strategic Plan. This strategic plan was created by the Library Publishing Coalition Board based on community input from the 2016 and 2017 membership meetings, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis, and an environmental scan.
It also benefited from the contributions of a group of LPC community members who volunteered to support this work by serving on Board subcommittees, reviewing drafts, and providing input on the in-progress plan. The plan will be used by the Board to direct LPC’s resources (human and financial) toward activities that will have the biggest impact on the organization and the larger community of library publishers, and it will be used by the standing committees to focus their work on high-priority areas. Specifically, action items in the plan will be mapped onto projects and activities to be undertaken by the organization.
Between January 2013 and December 2014, 61 academic libraries, in collaboration with the Educopia Institute, founded the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). The project emerged from conversations between Purdue University, the University of North Texas, and Virginia Tech regarding the need for a community dedicated to advancing the field of library publishing.
Academic libraries and the researchers and organizations they support are facing a new paradigm in scholarly publishing. The web, information and social media technologies, and the open source and open access movements are changing the framework in which scholarship is created, collected, organized, and disseminated. Yet, as shown by the highly regarded Strategies for Success project (funded by IMLS and led by Purdue University, the University of Utah, and Georgia Tech), library-based publishing groups lack a central space where they can meet, work together, share information, and confront common issues.
The Strategies for Success project laid a strong foundation for further action. The vision outlined in that proposal was vetted by representatives from 18 major libraries and consortia in July 2012 before being released to prospective participants in August 2012. More than 50 academic libraries formally joined the project team before the project kicked off in January 2013. Over the next eighteen months, participants worked to produce the LPC’s first deliverables, including the Library Publishing Directory and the inaugural Library Publishing Forum. At the request of the community, on July 1, 2014 the LPC formally launched as an ongoing membership organization, six months ahead of schedule.
