Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition

Library publishing is both a growing area of interest in academic libraries and an increasingly visible subfield of scholarly publishing. This article introduces the field of library publishing—and the opportunities and values that make it unique—from the perspective of the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). The LPC is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing, and it is the only professional association dedicated to this emerging area of librarianship. In its first five years, LPC has produced a robust set of resources to support library publishers, including the annual Library Publishing Forum, the annual Library Publishing Directory, and a variety of freely available professional development resources. It has also built a strong community of members and an extended network of affiliates. This paper presents and contextualizes these accomplishments and shares new developments and future directions for the Library Publishing Coalition