Who We Are
What We Do
In the Library with the Lead Pipe is an open access, open peer-reviewed journal founded and run by a team of librarians working in various types of libraries. In addition to publishing articles and editorials by Editorial Board members, Lead Pipe publishes articles by authors representing diverse perspectives including educators, administrators, library support staff, technologists, and community members.
Lead Pipe believes libraries and library workers can change the world for the better. We improve libraries, professional organizations, and their communities of practice by exploring new ideas, starting conversations, documenting our concerns, and arguing for solutions.
If you like reading In the Library with the Lead Pipe and would like to write an article, we would love to hear from you. We encourage creative thinking, envelope-pushing, and constructive criticism. Articles indulging in non-constructive criticism will not be accepted.
What We Publish
We publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles in a range of formats. While we are open to suggestions for new article types and formats, including material previously published in part or full, we expect proposals to include unique and substantial new content from the author. Examples of material we would publish include:
- Original research with a discussion of its consequences (with or without an argument for action) that makes a unique, significant contribution to the professional literature.
- Articles using autoethnography, testimonios, or other accounts of the author’s own experience to analyze, theorize, situate, or otherwise contribute new insights to the professional literature.
- Articles arguing for a particular approach, strategy or development in librarianship, with suggestions for how it might be achieved.
- Transformative works with additional explanatory or interpretive content. For example, a transcription of an interview or panel discussion, with a substantial introduction explaining the importance of the subject to librarianship and a discussion of related literature.
Why Publish Your Article With In the Library with the Lead Pipe?
In the Library with the Lead Pipe is internationally recognized as a forward-thinking, open access, peer-reviewed journal.
Formerly considered a peer-reviewed blog, in 2012 Lead Pipe won the Salem Press Library Blog Award for ‘Best General Blog’. Later that year, after consulting with our readership, Lead Pipe was repositioned as a professional journal with the ISSN 1944-6195. We are listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals, LISTA, and Ulrich’s as a peer-reviewed journal. Thousands of readers subscribe via RSS, and Lead Pipe receives over 5000 unique visits from across the world each month.
If you are ready to submit an article proposal, please read our Submission Guidelines. You may also be interested in reading about the Lead Pipe publication process.
Open Access, Copyright, Licensing, and Article Processing Fees
In the Library with the Lead Pipe is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
Authors of manuscripts accepted for publication with In the Library with the Lead Pipe assign to the Editorial Board the non-exclusive right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently retrievable. All content posted on In the Library with the Lead Pipe, including comments, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Copyright remains with the author. Material that has appeared on In the Library with the Lead Pipe may be reused by the author in any form, provided that In the Library with the Lead Pipe is acknowledged as the original place of publication.
There are no Article Processing Charges or any other charges associated with publishing in In the Library with the Lead Pipe.
Contacting us
If you wish to submit an article proposal or have any questions regarding our licensing or editorial policies, please email itlwtlp AT gmail DOT com
Our Logo
The “Pipes” icon in our header logo is by Raz Cohen from the Noun Project.