Chair: David Prosser, Executive Director, RLUK

ROZZ EVANS: 'New Approaches to Collection Management – what might it mean for publishers?'
UCL Library Services has a long history of providing world-class library resources for a world-class university. However, changes in user numbers, diversity, expectation and behaviour alongside the emergence of new areas of activity make this ever more challenging to deliver. In addition, research libraries have responsibility for maintaining and developing those unique and distinctive collections that form part of the world’s intellectual heritage. This presentation will provide an insight into collection strategy at a major research library and how access to improved collection management information and a sector appetite for collaborative collection management is enabling a fresh look at purchasing decision-making. This librarian’s view will provide food for thought on the implications such strategies might have for publishers of traditional academic content.

MICHAEL ZEOLI: 'The Changing Acquisition Model for Books in Academic Libraries'
It is a well-known fact that journal price increases have eroded library monograph budgets. What if suddenly journal prices dropped and there was plenty of money left in the budget? Would it be spent on books? Responses from librarians reinforce the idea that the clock cannot be turned back and that acquisition patterns have changed for good. This thought experiment pulls back the curtain on the question of costs and the role of libraries as ‘book-collecting organizations’. How much of our discussions are effectively backward-looking? How are business models lagging (far) behind developing content access models and the changing mission of libraries? Drawing on a wealth of historical data from GOBI Library Solutions, this presentation will share trends and look behind the curtain into the future.

Chair: Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services), University College London

PETER BERKERY: 'Supporting OA Monograph Publishing: How institutions and presses can collaborate'
The Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative (OAMPI) was launched in the USA in March 2017 and brings together the Association of University Presses, Association of Research Libraries and Association of American Universities in a collaborative venture, in which participating institutions commit to fund OA monographs publishing by their academics with a scholarly press. The scheme addresses some of the greatest issues in scholarly monograph publishing today: that AHSS subjects do not have sufficient funding, that institutions must play a greater role in supporting their academics in these fields to publish, that scholarly monograph print sales are in decline, and that university presses need greater financial and moral support from their institutions. Peter Berkery describes current progress and asks whether such a scheme could translate to other countries.

PIERRE MOUNIER: 'OPERAS - Open access in the European research area through scholarly communication'
Across Europe a large number of publishers and institutions are making SSH research available in open access in many languages, yet they work in a disparate way. This has revealed a growing need for pan-European infrastructures to support innovative and sustainable services to bring this research to wider attention, and to create a firm foundation for future growth of open access. In July 2017, OPERAS – a consortium of 34 partners from 11 European countries - published a design study for the development of just such a digital infrastructure for open scholarly communication. The study focused on the international landscape, user needs, existing technical capabilities and common standards, to identify solutions to the challenges and the principles that need to be adopted, to meet the next phase of open access for SSH.

FRANK SMITH: 'Open Access Monographs'
JSTOR added Open Access monographs to its platform in October 2016. The list of OA books on JSTOR has expanded rapidly to more than 2500 titles. JSTOR and the participating publishers have learned a great deal about the extraordinary demand for use of OA books and about the reach of OA to readers beyond the academy and in the global south. The experience has also pointed up lessons for the presses and for JSTOR for the future of the OA experience.

Chair: Nicole Mitchell, Director, University of Washington Press

CHARLES WATKINSON: 'Fulcrum: A Values-based Publishing Platform for Hosting Enhanced eBooks'
There is strong and growing interest in the library community in building open source infrastructure that is accountable to the community. An increasing number of mission-driven publishers are aligning around this movement. While not antithetical to commercial partners, University of Michigan Press has chosen to work within the open source Samvera community to build its own publishing platform, Fulcrum, strongly driven by values such as equity and openness. Other publishers are joining Michigan in this movement and this presentation will discuss the opportunities and challenges of taking such an approach. We will also show how Fulcrum supports new forms of long-form digital scholarship as well as traditional ebooks.

ALLISON BELAN: 'What’s a UP Like You Doing in a Place Like This?'
Duke University Press recently launched a new online publishing platform in support of its humanities and social sciences journals, ebooks, and collections. Significant energy in the university press world in the last couple of years has focused on open source tools and open access models. Duke’s own partnership with Cornell University Libraries in the open-source Project Euclid mathematics platform is successful and long-standing. Yet, for its humanities and social science publications, Duke partnered with a commercial provider to create and host the new platform. Allison Belan will share what drove Duke’s publishing technology choices, highlight the challenges faced by a UP adopting such technology, and explore how the site will become a platform for mission-driven, sustainable publishing of critical scholarship.

Chair: Frances Pinter, Director, Knowledge Unlatched Research

NIELS STERN: 'Monograph Publishing in Eight European Countries: Open Access, Policies and Funding'
The monograph is one of the most prestigious publication outlets – a hallmark of reputation and a means of disseminating fundamental ideas of scholarship. However, publishing practices and models vary enormously across Europe and the transition to open access for monographs has been slow and varied. This presentation reports on an in-depth study that compares and contrasts the OA monograph publishing landscape in eight European countries (including the UK). It offers controversial benchmarks, examples of OA monograph publishing experiments in Europe, and recommendations for ways of increasing OA monograph publishing further. The report is published by Knowledge Exchange and available here http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/event/open-access-monographs

JAN-PETER WISSINK: 'The Position of the University Press in the World of #MeToo and Fake News'
Publishers’ approaches to their markets vary widely from clear cut strategies to purely opportunistic behaviour, but the changing publishing landscape, combined with the changes in public opinion and expectation, will require a repositioning of presses and will force them to clarify their status and their aims. The debate about social justice and objectivity, and the changing reputation of research and scholarship in society will have implications for the role of a university press; I will try to put the purpose of the university press in the context of the current world of #MeToo and fake news.

In this presentation I will demonstrate some of Amsterdam University Press’s remarkable successes and some bitter failures. I will highlight our bestsellers and explain our sustained double-digit growth in the last four years, but also discuss the setbacks, the politics, and the publishing logic behind it all. The ideological divide between commercial and not-for-profit publishers will also be addressed, putting forward some of the lessons that university presses may learn from our commercial friends.

Chair: Shelly Turner, Head of Sales, Manchester University Press

SALEEM DHAMEE: 'Globalizing Sales and Logistics – implications'
Over the years, university presses and academic publishers typically maintained separate relationships across the globe to manage print sales from non-aligned distributors via a network of representatives serving specific territories. As the lines blur with ebooks, POD, and digital asset management systems, each serving different areas, how can we keep it all straight to maximize the reach of our books, while enabling sales to prosper.

ALAN LEITCH: 'Academic Bookselling in 2018 – A Sales Agent’s Perspective'
The landscape for academic bookselling today is very different from might be seen as a ‘Golden Era’ in the mid 1990s. But what has really changed – and what hasn’t? What are the new realities for campus bookshops and specialist booksellers generally and what do they mean for the university presses and other academic publishers for whom they remain a key channel to market? What is the future for academic bookselling in the UK and what are the essential things that university presses can do to help those customers maximise sales of their books?

Chair: Emma Brennan, Editorial Director, Manchester University Press

SIMON BELL: 'It’s Good to Talk: Publisher engagement with author and researcher communities'
The journey that an academic researcher takes in their career is complex and challenging. It’s a competitive and tough cycle from funding to research to the sharing and articulation of that work, to the impact of that in the wider community.

Against this backdrop Emerald Publishing set up their own Author Engagement team with the remit to work with the research community and provide them with the tools and services to help them navigate the path from research to publication.

I will be giving you an overview of our first 12 months, why Emerald felt such a team was needed and what we’ve learnt so far.

BRIAN HALLEY: 'Is Peer Review Working at University Presses?'
There are multiple forces at work in academia giving everyone in scholarly publishing a reason to examine peer review, including: experiments by scholars making use of new technologies; the emergence of presses based in university libraries; the changing labor market in academia; the call for more diversity in terms of whom we publish and whom we use as readers. In this presentation, I will consider where we stand with peer review now, as summarized nicely in the Association of University Presses’ Best Practices for Peer Review, while also considering new experiments in peer review occurring in the university press world.

KATHARINE REEVE: 'Reimagining the University Press Commissioning Editor for the 21st Century'
Commissioning editors are creative curators with a uniquely broad-ranging knowledge of their subject areas. They have a clear understanding of what makes an academic book critically and financially successful. In carrying out their responsibility to ensure the quality of their lists, they can become the target of criticism from academics for ‘gatekeeping’. Meanwhile, in-house, they face high acquisition targets in a challenging market. Digital training agendas have not tended to include commissioning editors. What could the future look like for commissioning editors? Will their role change as new types of publisher emerge? How might they add value for their authors and readers – and for the publishers whose income and reputations they support?

Chair: Melanie Schlosser, Community Facilitator, Library Publishing Coalition

AILEEN FYFE: 'Mission or money? Trends in UK scholarly publishing since c.1850'
Current debate on the future of academic publishing has generated much discussion about the best way to support financially the widespread circulation of knowledge. There have been debates on this since at least the 1890s. Drawing upon historical research, I describe how scholarly publishing has variously been supported by learned societies, universities, government & private donors. It was only in the early Cold War years that the commercial model (driven by sales rather than subsidy) came to dominate. For learned societies and university presses, income from publishing was enormously attractive to the host institution. My talk will seek to untangle the historical relationship between money-making & scholarly mission.

GRAHAM STONE: 'Re-envisioning Scholarly Publishing: New university presses and academic-led publishing in the UK'
The 2017 report, Changing publishing ecologies: A landscape study of new university presses & academic-led publishing, shows a discernible increase in new publishing initiatives over the last few years. These have a potentially disruptive effect on the scholarly communication environment, providing new avenues for the dissemination of research outputs. The findings of the research provide an evidence for future support for new university presses & academic-led publishing to help create a diverse publishing ecology. This paper will outline the recommendations of the report and explore the progress made in establishing an infrastructure for university & academic-led presses in the UK.

SARAH KEMBER: '‘So f**ing Goldsmiths’ (SFG)? Identity, intervention and collaboration in scholarly publishing'
Brand identity is important to establishing a new university press, but building that identity is only part of the story behind Goldsmiths Press. We are a scholar-led press aiming to redefine scholarship in its relation to publishing, performance & practice. Our mission is to intervene in the politics of communication across higher education policy & in below the line practices of peer review, citation & free labour. While we are happy to be ‘cool’, ‘arty’ & ‘individual’ (you will know a book that is SFG once you’ve read/seen/heard/sensed it), we do not seek to work alone. This talk will distinguish between collaborative publishing networks & competitive library subscription schemes.

Chair: Audrey McCulloch, Chief Executive, ALPSP

RICHARD CHARKIN: 'Who Needs Academic Publishers?'
The last fifty years have seen more change in academic publishing than the preceding centuries. There have been many drivers of this change – growth in higher education worldwide, the explosion of scientific research, the development of English as the lingua franca of business, scholarship and popular culture, and, of course, technology. Within the publishing industry itself a further driver has been the realisation that academic publishing could be a material source of profit and cash generation. This has led to conglomeration and to some extent homogenisation alongside the more positive aspects of heavy investment, better systems, and greater efficiencies. Within all this activity, many university presses, with their unique constitutions and objectives, have been able to thrive. But what does the future hold?