Emerald appoints Jones, wins IPG Award
Emerald Group has appointed Phill Jones as its new Chief Technology Officer. Jones, who previously served as Director of Publishing Innovation at Digital Science, will take a strategic lead on the company’s delivery of digital solutions, including its Emerald Insight research platform. Emerald was recently named as Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year at this month’s IPG Awards, where it was praised by judges for having remained ‘nimble and responsive to customers’ despite its recent growth. The company has also been shortlisted in the Academic, Educational & Professional Publisher of the Year category at the British Book Awards, alongside Bloomsbury Academic, Edinburgh University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, Kogan Page (whose Head of Rights and Licensing Amy Joyner has been shortlisted for the Rights Professional of the Year Award), Maths – No Problem! (another winner at the IPG Awards), PG Online, and Sage Publishing. The winner will be announced on Monday 14th May.
McCune rewarded for lifetime achievement
Another award-winner is Sara Miller McCune, founder and executive chair of SAGE Publishing, who will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at next month’s London Book Fair. McCune founded SAGE in 1965, when she was only 24, and has overseen remarkable growth in the years since then. London Book Fair Director Jacks Thomas described her as ‘a pioneer and an inspiration … at the forefront of so many changes in the sector; she is surely one of the greatest and most enduring publishing visionaries’; Dame Lynne Brindley, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, called her ‘a role model for women in business and for young female entrepreneurs’. McCune will receive her award at the International Excellence Awards on the evening of the opening day of this year’s fair and will then speak at the Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum the following day. The International Excellence Awards celebrate publishing achievement outside the UK; the shortlist for this year’s Academic and Professional Publisher Award comprises Brill Publishers from the Netherlands, Brazil’s Editorial Atheneu, and International Labour Organization (ILO) Publications from Switzerland.
Academic publishing at the London Book Fair
Academic publishing will once again be well represented at the Fair. This year’s half-day Forum focuses on global trends within the industry, with speakers from Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Kohl Consulting considering issues including the rise of freely-available research, and whether we might be approaching ‘The End of Publishing as We Know It’. The Forum is complemented, as ever, by a series of free talks at the Faculty across all three days of the fair, addressing such key issues as inclusivity, open access, data, copyright, digital, and authors.
University of Westminster Press hits milestone
University of Westminster Press has announced that its open access monographs, collections, and journals have now been downloaded more than 200,000 times in the two and a half years since the publication of the press’s first journal; while the first 100,000 downloads took eighteen months, the second 100,000 have happened in less than a year. The press has also announced the launch of a new five-part interdisciplinary series called Law and the Senses, exploring the intersection of the law and each of the five senses.
Academic Book Week to return
Academic Book Week will return for a third outing next month, from April 23-28. Two events have already been announced, with Springer Nature hosting a half-day conference for authors and researchers on open access books, and Palgrave Macmillan running a publishing surgery for early to mid-career authors; anyone interested in hosting an event should contact the Academic Book Week team at acbookweek@booksellers.org.uk. As in previous years, a public vote will play a part in proceedings: a shortlist of 20 Academic Books by Women that Changed the World will be issued at the start of the week, and the winner announced at the end. Last year, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was voted the book that made modern Britain.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student
at the British Library and Bath Spa University
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