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 July 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 identity and place or context. And we have developed 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 identity and place or context? Our co-founder and Black Studies Collection Editor Chris McAuley 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 dissertations, course reading lists, and syllabi across the social sciences, professional studies, and humanities. We discovered that research and teaching is especially focused on identity and place. As we dug deeper into assigned readings and materials, we saw that instructors explore these themes with students most often through scholarly monographs, journal articles, and their own writing.
Our goals, based on these insights:
- Empower collection editors to build disciplinary or interdisciplinary collections of course readings aimed at advanced undergraduates and Masters students.
- Allow them to focus on academic content specifically designed for course consumption rather than scholarly research.
With our content vision and mission in place, we turned to the question of pricing, access, equity, and affordability. Every Lived Places title is available as a single title in print and digital formats at affordable prices. While some students will choose to purchase individual titles, we focus especially on offering a collection that institutions can purchase for a one-time fee with unrestricted access and perpetual ownership. Our model provides access to every title in the collection, discounted from the single title price – delivered without DRM (digital rights management) restrictions. In addition, for libraries that wish to support ILL (interlibrary loan), the collection offers whole ebook interlibrary loan.
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 is allocated to royalty and funding for Open Access publishing. Authors are given the option to choose publishing Open Access or earning a royalty. Equity, in our view, requires fairness in royalty, support for Open Access, and pricing that allows every global institution to offer our collection to its patrons.
Here are the Open Access books we have published to date under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which means that you are free to download, copy, and redistribute these specific LPP books.
If our mission interests you, we invite you to get involved.
- We are actively seeking book authors:
https://livedplacespublishing.com/call-for-authors - We are actively seeking collection editors too:
https://livedplacespublishing.com/collections
If you 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 Substack and Medium.
IMAGE CREDIT: Michael D Beckwith, used under the Unsplash License
