Tuesday 7 October 2008

ALPSP International Conference

I'm pleased to say that the first ALPSP International Conference was a great success.

We exceeded our target number of delegates, we had more people than ever at the annual ALPSP Awards dinner and, though I say so myself, there was a real buzz around the conference venue.

It was pretty challenging to put together keynote, plenary and parallel sessions that were of interest to the breadth of the ALPSP membership and especially difficult given that, this being the first Conference, we had no real point of reference. But I am delighted to say that evaluation forms have been extremely positive with lots of praise for the program and for the decision to build in plenty of networking time.

The speakers' slides will be loaded on to the ALPSP website shortly and we'll also be adding audio of many of presentations; both will be available to members only for download.

The Conference is an important element of our strategy to connect and inform the scholarly and professional publishing community. We will therefore definitely be making it an annual event and the dates and venue for the 2009 Conference will be announced in due course.

Our sincere thanks again to all of the speakers and session chairs, to our sponsors, and to the program committee for making this such a successful event.

Friday 3 October 2008

Isabel Czech joins ALPSP in North America

It's taken me a while to get this on the blog, but...

We were absolutely thrilled to announce last month that Isabel Czech has joined ALPSP as our North American Executive Director.

Many of you will know Isabel; she spent more that 30 years working in publisher relations at ISI / Thomson Scientific (now Thomson Reuters).

Isabel will be a huge asset to the ALPSP team. She will help us to develop our US educational program and ensure that we are in closer contact with our North American members and thus that our benefits and services are in keeping with the needs of those based in the States and Canada...

Isabel is already earning her corn and we have received applications for membership from a number of new North American members!

Your can read more in the press release...

CrossRef and search engine crawlers...

I've just received the latest resolution report from CrossRef for Learned Publishing (these are the reports that detail the number of link-throughs to articles via the DOI...)

Across all their members CrossRef resolved more than 26.2 million accesses in September 2008. This figure is after they have filtered out known search engine crawlers which in the same month added up to more than 22.6 million accesses.

Golly!