New board for the AUP
The Association of University Presses – formerly the Association of American University Presses – elected Niko Pfund as its new president at its recent virtual Business Meeting. Pfund, president of Oxford University Press USA, takes over the role from Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press, and will serve a one-year term; Lisa Bayer, director of the University of Georgia Press, has been named President-Elect. Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press, Allison Belan, director of strategic innovation and services at Duke University Press, and Stephanie Williams, director of Ohio University Press, have all begun three-year terms on the board.
Author and teacher Ned Stuckey-French was posthumously honoured with the inaugural AUPresses Stand UP Award in recognition of his keen advocacy work on behalf of several university presses threatened with closure over the past decade, including the University of Missouri Press, the University of Akron Press, and the University Press of Kentucky. Larin McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of the University of Washington Press, received the 2020 AUPresses Constituency Award for her work on diversity and inclusion within the university press community.
ALPSP shortlist and OLH OA awards
The finalists for the ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Awards have been announced: the eight-strong shortlist comprises Charlesworth’s WeChat Gateway, data-sharing AI DataSeer, international law and arbitration database Jus Mundi, SciScore’s Rigor and Transparency Index, flashcard generator Scholarcy, crowdsourced peer review platform Select Crowd Review, the WordToEPUB conversion tool, and the Open Library of Humanities.
The last-named of these has had a very encouraging month, having been shortlisted for two further awards – Best Digital Publishing Innovation and Small Digital Publisher of the Year – at the Association of Publishers (AOP) Digital Publishing Awards. OLH – which recently welcomed the latest member to its Library Partnership Subsidy system in the form of Switzerland’s University of Neuchâtel – has also announced the first two winners of awards from its Open Access Award Fund. The National Library of Kosovo will receive funding for consciousness-raising efforts around its digitisation projects, while the Open Access Digital Theological Library will use its funding to pay for the training of interns to create open access collections.
New platform for UCL Press journals
UCL Press’s education and social science journals, previously published by the UCL Institute of Education, are moving to the OpenScience platform. The Film Education Journal has already made the move, and four other journals – the History Education Research Journal, the International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, the London Review of Education and Research for All – will follow over the next few months.
New partnerships
Manchester University Press has announced that it will be partnering with the University of New South Wales Press’s NewSouth Books for sales and distribution in Australia and New Zealand from 1 August.
Knowledge Unlatched is working with the University of Bielefeld’s OpenAPC to expand the latter’s dataset to support the inclusion of Book Processing Charges (BPCs); the first stage of the project has seen KU share with OpenAPC a dataset consisting of all the payments made by KU to publishers for the near-1,000 books on the several KU Select programmes.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.