Affordable Course Readings, Library-Friendly Access, and Giving Voice to Social Identity in Context and Place

By David Parker, Publisher and Co-Founder

Lived Places Publishing launched in April 2021, guided by the belief that our team of editors and authors can innovate both in terms of content and with regards to access and affordability. Our enterprise is committed to delivering curriculum-ready content that allows students to engage with global author voices exploring the intersection of social identity and place or context. And we are developing a library-first purchasing model that supports unlimited user access without restriction, interlibrary loan, and open access.

What do we mean by the intersection of social identity and place or context? Our co-founder and Black Studies Collection editor Chris McCauley says it best:

“Lived Places Publishing is guided by the belief that story-sharing can both shorten the distance that separates us and increase our collective efforts against thinking and policies that penalize and exclude far too many people for simply being who they are. By “Lived Places” we mean more than geographical or physical locations, but also the social and institutional ones that we have been forced to inhabit and those that we have claimed and embraced.”

During the summer of 2020, when the world was ablaze with awareness, we began asking how the global higher education curriculum is representing the voices at the intersection of location and lived experience. We did in depth analysis of dissertation and theses publishing and course reading lists and syllabi across the social sciences. And we discovered that scholarship is especially focused, through the lens of discipline or interdisciplinary study, on social identity and place. And as we dug deeper into assigned readings and materials we saw that instructors explore these themes with students most often through scholarly readings, journal articles, and their own writing. Our insights empower collection editors to build disciplinary or interdisciplinary collections of course readings that can be assigned weekly, written by academics and activists across the globe who are concerned with the intersection of social identity and lived places and spaces.

With our content vision and mission in place, we turned to the question of pricing, access, equity, and affordability. Every Lived Places title will be available as a single title in print and digital formats at affordable price points. While some students will choose to purchase individual titles, we decided to focus especially on building an annual collection of titles that institutions can purchase for a set price tied to the local budget and economic context. Our model will provide access to every title in the collection at a fraction of the single title price and delivered without digital rights management restrictions and perpetual ownership. In addition, for libraries that wish to support interlibrary loan, the Lived Places collection will include an option to upgrade to single title interlibrary loan rights for all titles held with unlimited access. In other words, unlimited institutional access for the purchasing library and simultaneous single title loan rights to another institution.

We believe in and support open access and open educational resources. And we believe in returning a high royalty to our authors and editors. 35% of each sale will be allocated to royalty and funding for open access. Individual authors will be given the option to choose publishing open access or earning a royalty. Equity, in our view, requires fairness in royalty, support for open publishing, pricing that allows every global institution to purchase and, by extension, support the Lived Places mission to support open access and author royalty.

• We are actively seeking collection editors: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/collections
• We are actively seeking book authors too: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/call-for-authors

And if you just want to connect and learn more, you can reach me here directly.
And if you want to follow our blog and learn what our collection editors and authors are up to, please subscribe here.

Peace to you,
David Parker, Publisher

P.S. You can also follow our progress on Medium and Substack.

IMAGE CREDIT: Michael D Beckwith, used under the Unsplash License