Library Publishing Coalition (LPC)

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia that operate or are developing scholarly publishing programs -- library presses, journal-hosting platforms, open monograph publishing, and related services. It was formed between January 2013 and December 2014 when 61 academic libraries, working with the Educopia Institute, organized around a shared professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise in library-based publishing; the founding conversation originated among Purdue University, the University of North Texas, and Virginia Tech, building on an earlier IMLS-funded planning project. LPC is not a publisher, a certification body, or a standards-setting organization in the way NISO or DOAJ are -- it is a community of practice: a membership association whose value is peer knowledge-sharing, an annual member directory, a professional development curriculum, and an annual forum, run day-to-day through Educopia Institute (Atlanta, Georgia), which provides LPC's operational and staff support.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A university library that has launched an open-access journal-hosting platform for its faculty and graduate students joins LPC as an institutional member to benchmark its program against peer library presses, list itself in the annual Library Publishing Directory, and send staff through LPC's professional-development curriculum for library publishing.

Is an instance

A library consortium considering whether to start a shared library-press service for several member institutions consults LPC's community forums, working-group outputs, and the Library Publishing Directory's aggregate program data (staffing levels, output types, business models across dozens of reporting institutions) before designing its own program.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A commercial or university-press book publisher is not an LPC member in the relevant sense -- LPC's membership is specifically library-based publishing programs (a library, or library consortium, running the program), not academic presses operating independently of a library.

Not an instance

LPC itself does not peer-review, certify, or accredit any journal or monograph -- an output being published through an LPC-member library's platform says nothing on its own about that output's editorial or peer-review rigor, which has to be assessed the same way for library-published venues as any other (see CASRAI's guide on identifying predatory journals and publishers, and its entry on the scholarly monograph, for how that assessment actually works).

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia that run, or are building, scholarly publishing programs: library presses, journal-hosting platforms, open monograph publishing, data-journal and student-journal services, and related infrastructure. LPC was formed between January 2013 and December 2014, when 61 academic libraries organized — in collaboration with the Educopia Institute — around a shared professional forum for developing best practices and shared expertise in this specific, fast-growing corner of scholarly communication. The founding conversation began among Purdue University, the University of North Texas, and Virginia Tech, building on an earlier IMLS-funded planning effort (“Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success”).

LPC is worth distinguishing carefully from other organizations that appear in the same open-access landscape. It is not a publisher itself, not a certification or accreditation body, and not a technical standards-setting organization the way DOAJ or NISO are. It is a community of practice: its value is peer knowledge-sharing among library publishing programs, a shared professional identity for a role (library publisher) that didn’t have a clear one a decade-plus ago, and collectively produced resources — most notably an annual member directory and a shared curriculum — rather than a review or approval process any individual journal or book passes through.

What LPC Does

Library Publishing Directory. An annual, self-reported directory in which member and participating library publishing programs describe their staffing, output types (journals, monographs, conference proceedings, data, textbooks), platforms, and business models. It is the field’s closest thing to a census of who is doing library publishing and how, and is frequently cited in scholarly-communication research on the field’s scope and growth.
Professional development and curriculum. LPC has produced shared training materials (developed with IMLS funding) aimed at library staff moving into a publishing role for the first time, covering topics from journal workflow design to monograph production that many library publishers otherwise learn ad hoc.
Library Publishing Forum. An annual conference bringing the community together to present research, share program case studies, and discuss shared challenges (sustainability, peer-review workflow support, metadata and discoverability, staffing models).
Working groups and community-produced guidance. LPC convenes member-driven working groups that have produced guidance documents on topics like ethical and quality standards for library-published journals — shared reference points for a field that, unlike commercial and university-press publishing, doesn’t have one long-established professional body setting norms.

Relationship to Educopia Institute

LPC is not separately incorporated with its own staff; it operates as a project of the Educopia Institute, a nonprofit based in Atlanta, Georgia, that provides shared operational, communications, and program-coordination support across several such library- and archives-community coalitions. This is a common structure for grassroots professional communities that want a persistent institutional home without building out a freestanding nonprofit of their own — LPC’s governance (an elected steering/leadership structure drawn from member institutions) sets direction and priorities, while Educopia handles the operational backbone.

Why Library Publishing Is Its Own Category

Library-based publishing programs sit in a distinct position relative to commercial publishers, university presses, and scholarly societies: they are typically mission-driven rather than revenue-driven, are frequently free to authors and readers (functioning much like diamond open access in practice, even when a given program doesn’t use that label), and are often staffed by librarians rather than career publishing professionals — which is exactly the gap LPC’s professional-development work is aimed at closing. A library publishing program might host a small, specialized open-access journal, provide platform infrastructure for a student-run journal, or partner on open monograph publishing — often overlapping with the same institution’s institutional repository infrastructure, though publishing and repository services are functionally distinct (a repository hosts already-published or self-archived content; a publishing program runs the editorial and production workflow that produces a new, formally published output in the first place).

For researchers and research offices, the practical relevance of LPC membership is mostly diagnostic, not evaluative: a journal or press being run through an LPC-member library tells you something about its operating model (library-based, typically no-fee) but nothing on its own about editorial rigor or peer-review quality — that has to be checked directly, the same way for a library-published journal as any other. See CASRAI’s guide on how to identify predatory journals and publishers for that separate assessment, and CASRAI’s comparison of gold vs. green vs. diamond vs. hybrid open access for how library-publishing’s typical no-fee model maps onto the broader open-access funding taxonomy.

Related Terms

Use in your systems

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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