Academic Publishing – February 2023
Line-up and themes announced for The London Book Fair Research & Scholarly Publishing Forum
The London Book Fair has announced the programme for this year’s Research & Scholarly Publishing Forum, which will take place on Thursday 20 April – the final day of this year’s fair – at the Olympia Theatre. This year, for the first time, the Forum will extend for a full day. Starting at 9:25, the opening keynote, covering the transformation of science communication – and specifically, how preprints are changing scholarly publishing – will be delivered by Damian Pattinson, Executive Director at eLife Sciences Publications. It will explore both the thinking behind eLife’s recent decision to change its business model and the likely implications of these developments for other scholarly publishers.
The other morning sessions will focus on diversity and inclusion, copyright and publisher-related policy, and decentralised science. Elsevier SVP for Research Networks Dr Michiel Kolman will tackle the increasingly important topic of diversity and inclusion at STM publishers, asking what publishers know about the diversity of their staff, how they can address diversity in their publications, and how they can support an inclusive research agenda.
In the following session, run by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in partnership with Publishers’ Licensing Service, a panel chaired by Leslie Lansman from Springer Nature and featuring Will Crook (Publishers’ Licensing Services), Saskia Perriard-Abdoh from the British Copyright Council and Duncan Campbell of Wiley will discuss Publishing, Intellectual Property, Policy, and Parliament, explaining recently proposed changes to copyright in the UK and how it may affect publishers, and exploring not only current policy issues that publishers need to be aware of but also the policy challenges and political issues likely to appear over the next year. Then, in the final session of the morning, Professor Philipp Koellinger, co-founder of DeSCi Labs, and Isabel Thompson of LabDAI will introduce the concepts of decentralised science and Web3 technologies and explore how they might be deployed more widely within the publishing industry.
In the afternoon, a panel of librarians featuring Dr Torsten Reimer, Dean of the University of Chicago Library, Chris Banks (Director of Library Services at Imperial College London), and Julien Roche, President of LIBER and Director of Libraries and Learning Centre at the University of Lille, will explore how national and international policies are reshaping the world of scholarly communication. They’ll offer insights into how developments in publishing are viewed by leading librarians, updates on recent policy developments in the US, UK, and Europe, and an overview of the strategic needs of libraries in three key countries.
The final session before the closing remarks by conference chair Rob Johnson of Research Consulting will be run again by the ALPSP, this time in partnership with the Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact Fellows. Chaired by Dr Jo Wixon, director of Portfolio Strategy at Wiley, the session will see Sally Wilson (VP Publishing at Emerald), Dr Roger Worthington (Consultant in ethics and global health), and Gerald Beasley (University Librarian at Cornell University) reviewing the SDG Publishers Compact and offering practical guidance for publishers on how to contribute to it; they’ll be offering advice on becoming a signatory to the compact, insights into how a range of publishers of difference sizes are approaching this, and introducing resources from the fellows and examples of policies put into action.
More information about the Forum can be found here.
Open Library of the Humanities announces new symposium and latest higher-tier supporter
The Open Library of the Humanities has announced that it will be holding a free two-day symposium to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its own launch and the fifth anniversary of the launch of its open-source scholarly publishing platform Janeway. The symposium will explore future directions for Janeway engineering and open access publishing; a call for papers invites members of the Janeway, OLH, and open access communities to submit proposals for sessions on innovative current practices, ambitions for Janeway, or aspirations for open access publishing more broadly. The keynote speaker will be Johan Rooryck, Editor-in-chief at the journal Glossa and Executive Director of cOAlition S.
OLH has also welcomed another new member to its library board. The Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB Dresden) is one of Germany’s largest academic libraries; it has been a regular supporter of OLH for several years but has now increased its membership rate to become the organisation’s sixteenth higher-tier supporter.
Cambridge gets full marks for accessibility
Cambridge University Press and Assessment has become only the fourth publisher to achieve a 100% score from ASPIRE – the Accessible Statements Promoting Improved Reading Experience project, joining Kogan Page, Taylor and Francis, and Emerald Publishing at the top of the list. The accreditation – which certifies that publishers are providing a high quality of accessibility information for web-users who have disabilities – covers Cambridge’s main website, its academic publishing platform Cambridge Core, plus Cambridge Advance Online, its online learning platform. Launched in 2018, the ASPIRE project began as a crowdsourced project evaluating the quality of accessibility statements provided by publishers; it has since partnered with alt-text specialists textBOX.
Manchester partners with university on new book cover
Manchester University Press has announced a collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University which will see students studying for the university’s publishing degree competing to design the cover for Volunteering in the United Kingdom: the spirit of service, a new book written by John Mohan to be published in September next year.
Tributes paid to Cambridge’s John Clare
Colleagues at Cambridge University Press and Assessment have paid tribute to John Clare, PR and Research Communications Manager, who died unexpectedly in early January at the age of 49. Clare had worked at the Press since 2017 after previous stints at Anglia Water – during the 2012 drought and hosepipe ban – and as a journalist for papers including the Surrey Advertiser, Stockport Express, and Cambridge Evening News. Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge, described Clare as ‘brilliant at his job and a joy to work with’, while his former colleague at Anglia Water, Ciaran Nelson, said that he was ‘a fantastic talent … a hugely intelligent, decent and funny man who will be forever sorely missed.’
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.
Alastair writes our STM Publishing and our Academic Publishing Newsletters.