23965 shaares
Background: At the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) Membership Meeting at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum in Baltimore, Maryland, the community discussed how the LPC can respond to the current political climate. The discussion was wide-ranging, but kept coming back to the importance of library values and our responsibility as library publishers to center our publishing practice around them. A number of those present offered to devise a way for the conversation to continue beyond the Forum. That group included Marilyn Billings, Jason Boczar, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Harrison W. Inefuku, Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Emily Stenberg, and Monica Westin, who proposed a task force to tackle the issues raised. This task force was charged with creating an Ethical Framework for Library Publishing . From July of 2017 to June of 2018, the task force members (listed on the title page as authors of this document) identified the topics to be covered in the framework, and then worked in subgroups to review the literature on those topics and identify existing resources of particular relevance to the community of library publishers. The subgroups then drafted the sections you see in this document. Throughout this process, they worked iteratively to devise a structure and format for the framework—a challenging task, and one for which there were many inspirations, but no clear models. In the end, they decided that the most effective structure for the document would break each section into an introduction , a scope statement , a review of existing resources , and a set of recommendations for library publishers. Some sections also include a note about new resources that are needed and/or further readings on the topic. Context: library publishing and ethics: Academic libraries have entered the publishing space due to changes in ways of disseminating information and in response to faculty members’ desire to control their own publishing destiny. This work has been enabled by the emergence of open source or low-cost technologies for publishing, but the motivations for it are broad and deep—for example, library publishers are also deeply engaged with emerging forms of scholarship (and emerging disciplines) that do not yet have a voice within the traditional publishing environment. These motivations often include a desire for increased openness and sustainability in the scholarly communication landscape. Unlike commercial publishers and traditional presses, the work of library publishers is largely funded through existing library budgets without a profit motive. The goal is