Accessibility is about equitable access to resources for all people, regardless of physical ability. Scholarly publishing is about quality and impact — quality of content and impact of research.

Accessibility & Publishing addresses the intersections between scholarly publishing and equitable access for users. This briefing explores how the practices that promote accessibility in publishing can also advance — and potentially transform — publishing itself.

This briefing traces the diversity of activities that currently go into making publications accessible to readers with print disabilities — from retroactive conversion of print into braille and recorded sound, to the more radical incorporation of accessibility standards directly into digital publishing platforms. As scholarly communication is transformed by the shift to digital publishing, building accessible practices directly into the flow of publishing has the potential to become the industry norm.

Accessibility & Publishing offers an essential orientation to a complex landscape for anyone interested in the scholarly publishing ecosystem.

Publishing, after all, is a complex business, and the trend in the marketplace is to economies of scale and the consolidation of smaller publishers into the fold of the largest. It does not seem a propitious moment for a library to become a small independent publisher.

So why are libraries doing this? How is this similar or different from the services commercial publishers provide? Does it involve offering the same services, or are new models, types of content, and needs resulting in new solutions that suit new players?

This book will help the reader understand the context of library publishing. It also explores when a publishing program is a good fit for a library and provides guidance for defining, launching, or growing a publishing initiative.

At a time when universities and colleges demand that libraries demonstrate their value and users have so many other options to discover information, it seems bizarre that librarians would be so much against a tool that allows them to engage closely with the very users who are the lifeblood of libraries.

As Jill Heinze makes clear in this lively and passionate briefing, marketing is a tool that allows an institution to assess their place in a market and to communicate value to their users based on the users’ needs and problems. This marketing tool need have no relationship to traditional business concerns, and, indeed, mission- based marketing is now important even to for- profit institutions.

Embracing key marketing concepts and planning, says Heinze, can demand that libraries rethink organizational structures, operations, and missions, but she also demonstrates that this rethinking can be entirely commensurate with the mission of libraries within an educational context.