University Press Redux: The Return

In this guest blog, Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press and the curator/host of next year's conference, tells us the story of University Press Redux so far and her involvement in the next chapter.

For me, and I think for many others in the university press sector, the first University Press Redux Conference in March 2016 marked a sea change in the way UK university presses are seen, and see themselves.

Kick-started by the momentum generated by the Academic Book of the Future project (a two-year research project into the scholarly publishing industry, funded and supported by AHRC and the British Library, 2015-2017), the first University Press Redux Conference in Liverpool in March 2016 was launched by Anthony Cond, Managing Director of Liverpool University Press (winner of both the Bookseller and the IPG Awards for Independent Academic Publisher of the Year in 2015).

I use the word ‘launched’ deliberately, since 'organised’ does not fully convey what Anthony achieved in that first conference. Attended by over 150 delegates from around the world and with speakers from the US, UK and Europe covering all aspects of university press (UP) activities, and with representatives from all levels and functions, the conference offered an opportunity on this side of the Atlantic for university presses to meet, discuss and exchange ideas and information. The mood was buoyant, the presentations were stimulating, and we all learnt a huge amount.

Redux 2016 happened at a particular moment, which also helps to explain its success. Scholarly publishing is undergoing significant change, with a challenging market, changes in library supply, digital distribution, new HE policies, and changing university missions which have led to a reexamination of the purpose of university presses. At the same time, many new presses have been springing up, signaling a desire on the part of institutions to do things differently. Redux was an opportunity to share those challenges and changes with all those who work in the sector – not just the UPs, but also the affiliated sectors that we work with: libraries, authors, academics, suppliers, policy makers, funders and our own institutions.

The things that shone through clearly to me during that conference were threefold:

1) that we are a ‘thing’, with distinct skills, responsibilities and challenges, quite different from scholarly publishing generally, even though we share many similarities
2) that despite our shared identity, we are also remarkably diverse in our outputs, activities, practices, sizes and missions
3) that we should be incredibly proud of what we do, and that our parent institutions should also be incredibly proud of what we do for scholarship and for our universities’ brand recognition

And what also came through very clearly was the feeling that we must do this again.

And so Redux was born as a regular event on the conference calendar. The University Press Redux 2018 takes place on 13-14 February 2018, at the British Library Conference Centre. It will take place every two years, and it is now ably supported by ALPSP, putting it on a firm footing for the future. Each conference will be hosted in a different location by a different university press which is responsible for organizing the speakers and the programme.

I volunteered for Redux 2018 for the main reason that having only launched in 2015, UCL is very new university press with a fully open access model which is still very unusual. As such, UCL Press is keen to collaborate as much as possible with other university presses - to help establish itself, to learn, and to share its experience of its OA model. But also, I volunteered because it’s fun. I think we are incredibly lucky to work in such a collegial sector. There is a genuine eagerness to collaborate and help each other which really stands out.

Registration for Redux 2018 bookings is now open and well underway – please join us for two full days of stimulating conversation and presentations. We look forward to seeing you in February! 

Lara Speicher is Publishing Manager at UCL Press, which launched in June 2015. She set up the Press from scratch as the first fully open access university press in the UK. The Press has gone on to publish over 50 books which have been downloaded over half a million times round the world. The Press won the UCL Brand Ambassador Award in 2017 for the global reach of its publications and was also shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards in the Digital Innovation Category. 

Lara has worked in publishing for over 20 years and has previously held publishing roles at British Library Publishing and BBC Books. She sits on the HEFCE/UUK Open Access Monographs Working Group and on the School of Advanced Study (University of London) Publishing Advisory Board. 

Martin Hall and Jean-Claude Guédon ponder the future of research and the monograph in the humanities and social sciences

Professor Martin Hall

The crisis in monograph publishing in one form or other has been with us for over twenty years. Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Salford and Chair of the morning session of Open Access monographs in the humanities and social sciences conference observed that the great university presses started to lose the ability to publish monograph research in an affordable format way before digital developments accelerated. With the advent of thin clients - cheap, affordable devices - the challenge for scholarly publishing is how to manage the transition into realising possibilities of the future.

The amount of research money that goes into the humanities and social sciences is disproportionate compared to the impact and significance of these disciplines. Drawing on his own experience as an archaeologist, there are so many possibilities. Words can translated into digital, but what about the garage loads of stuff such as broken pot pieces? We also need to consider the potential for wider participation, for example, the general public going out, finding and recording archaeological material with mobile phones.

Jean-Claude Guédon from the University of Montreal followed Martin Hall as the keynote speaker at this JISC Collections conference. He urged the audience to forget about monographs and go beyond them. It is about making the conversations of the humanities as great as that of scientists; about making discussions as frictionless as possible to improve understanding. He outlined three sociologies of e-books: sociology of documents (production); society of documents (how they relate to each other); and sociology 'tout court' as knowledge of society (co-evolution of the two above so we know where we are going).

Guédon observed that 'we are in a situation where we are used to a fixed form of production'. Because of our author obsession we stick to the idea of a one-person authored product. But research is taken by all sorts of people, amended and debated to create a new argument or thesis. This is followed by the documentation of the process. In digital we translate the exact same approach and try to do the same thing in documenting the idea(s). 

It is easy to pick flaws in this linear, print or object-bound way of developing and documenting research in the humanities and social sciences. Think about the potential of communities when developing thesis. Why is it so important to have one author for a piece of work? Isn't it better to have several brains working on it to improve the quality of the work? Think of science - very few articles are written by just one person. There is nothing wrong with working together. One of the paradoxes of universities is they train people to work in a way that you will never work in the real world. It is about a flow of work or 'a stream of thinking in the river of humanity'.

If you accept that maybe more people should get involved, it helps reveal how you can approach the documentation. What form of publication works? Does the book have a place in that kind of conversation? Continuing with Hall's earlier example, archaeologists (as well as scientists) sit on treasure troves of images and artefacts. We only get one view point of this resource. This is a potentially flawed way of interpreting and developing knowledge.

There is a reward system in place that reinforces this approach, with an economy of prestige that constrains it. What kind of social entity do we have to create to make this work? Guédon believes we have to rethink the notion of the author. We have to really examine the peer review process. And we have to do this to rethink value in research.

It's not an issue of finding the right format. It is about considering how this new digital communication is going to fit into our society.