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. 

ALPSP's Top Ten Blog Posts from 2012

And here's to the next 40...

Every blog needs a count down to new year, so in the spirit of ushering out the old and bringing in the new, here's a round-up of our most viewed posts of 2012.

1. Open Access eBooks: the next big thing? 
At the Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar in November, Eelco Ferwerda, Director at Open Access Publishing in Europe Network, provided an overview of the latest developments. He included a list of some of the high profile open access book projects, updates on their research, and a cautionary word about the less scrupulous OA publishers out there.

2. Bill Matthews discusses data analytics on 15 November 
Bill is Director of Business Development at HighWire Press. He wrote about the importance of data analytics to content creation, editorial, marketing and sales as a trailer for the Analyzing Customer Data to Create Competitive Advantage webinar.

3. Fourth International M-Libraries Conference 24-26 September 
This post outlined the programme of the M-Libraries conference, hosted by The Open University, which was developed around the theme of 'From margin to mainstream: mobile technologies transforming lives and libraries.'

4. ALPSP Conference Day 2: The Scholarly Article in 140 Characters. Are you a denial-o-saur? 
Day two of the ALPSP conference in September saw a panel chaired by Leon Heward-Mills from the Society for Endocrinology discuss the impact of digital technology on the way we access and read information.

5. ALPSP Conference Day 2: Discovering the Needle in a Haystack 
Another ALPSP conference session from day two was chaired by Ann Lawson from EBSCO. The session was designed to help publishers understand how they can help academics and professionals to navigate quickly and seamlessly to the trustworthy content they need.

6. How to launch an open access journal 
Kathryn Spiller from BioScientifica outlined how they approached launching an open access journal during November's Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar.

7. ALPSP Conference Day 3: Giving away the farm 
Highlights from the penultimate session on day two of ALPSP conference. Chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD, the panel reflected on the pressure scholarly publishers are under to give away content. 

8. ALPSP Conference Day 1: Forty years in scholarly publishing 
Mary Waltham opened September's ALPSP international conference with an overview of 'Forty Years in Scholarly Publishing.' It was, she claimed, an eclectic view of what has gone on in the period that corresponds with ALPSP's own existence. 

9. IET and Minesoft launch Minesoft Inspec Platform 
Information on the announcement of this new initiative of a platform that links IET Inspec’s science and engineering research database with Minesoft’s patent information services to enable patent and intellectual property professionals to benefit from intuitive search function.

10. ALPSP Conference Day 1: News of the world - science journalism demystified 

Day one of the ALPSP conference in September and we were joined by Siân Harris, Editor of Research Information, who provided insight and guidance to the world of science journalism. She included some great tips on how to identify, pitch and position newsworthy items, plus advice on how to approach journalists.

ALPSP is nothing without its members and those who work with them. This blog provides a taster of some of the discussions the network had in ALPSP's 40th anniversary year. We look forward to continuing those conversations in 2013 and for the next 40 years.

Happy new year to you all!

Open Access eBooks: the next big thing?

Open access ebooks have historically been overlooked in favour of their journal big brother. But as Eelco Ferwerda, Director at Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), made clear in his morning session at Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar last week, they are a growing part of the publishing family and could well be the next big thing.

There is potential to explore open access for monographs to improve discoverability, usage and impact, while reducing costs through shared infrastructure and digital formats. And the provisional findings form OAPEN-NL, one of the pilot projects researching OA monographs, indicate this is only just starting, but enough is happening to take note.

Recent open access developments in books include some emerging business models such as the Open Access Publishing in European Networks Library which aims to 'improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed open access publications from across Europe'.

Other developments in 2012 include the Directory of Open Access Books which now has over 1250 books from 35 publishers listed.

The Public Knowledge Project has set up a beta software Open Monograph Press project. This is being piloted by a number of presses including Athabasca University Press, Open Humanities Press and the University of Murcia Publications in Spain, amongst others. This project is designed to facilitate uptake of OA software and could work for smaller publishers who need to start this kind of activity.

In August, SpringerOpen Books was launched at the Beijing International Book Fair. This provides authors with the opportunity to publish a book in the sciences that is fully open access immediately, making it freely accessible to anyone online via SpringerLink. Ferwerda pointed out the significance of OA books if a company like Springer is doing it

There is increasing discussion of and development of resources on OA books: at September's Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association conference in Budapest, there was an afternoon dedicated to OA books. Other useful resources include the Open Access Directory: a list of information, terms and resources, including books and OA publishers.

Jeffrey Beal has established Beall’s List. This highlights predatory, open-access publishers looking for APCs to make a quick buck and 'unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit.' At the moment there are approximately 200 of them. This is a real concern for the industry.

Ferwerda provided a sobering reminder of why open access books should be considered: scholarly monographs have lost sustainability and relevance between 1980 and 2000 with sales to US libraries dropping, on average, from 2000 to 500. Publishers need for a new publishing model for academic books.

He profiled the publishers that are trying open access book publishing. They include large and small publishers in academic and non-academic disciplines, the latter comprising the largest part of the market with a lot of self-publishing. They are commercial and not-for-profit, from established organisations to start-ups, with institutional and professional markets that are professional and ‘scholar led’.

There are several models: from free to read (all rights reserved); to free to use and reuse (CC-BY); to non commercial and/or no derivatives. In terms of formats, it's a case of online versus downloads. From online reading only (HTML, e-reader formats) to PDF (personal copy) or both. OA book publishing motives range from front list publishing to a back list long tail approach. Some have a dedicated OA programme or service traditional monographs.

The business models include:

• hybrid and dual edition publishing: OA and print/PoD - all from the publisher - probably not enough in itself
• institutional subsidies
• library-press collaboration (e.g. Mpublishing/Michigan UP, Göttingen University Press)
• author-side publication fee (Springer, Amsterdam University Press, some research councils: FWF, NWO)
• library licensing/consortium (e.g. OpenEdition Freemium, Knowledge Unlatched).

Examples of institutional subsidies include the Australian National University Press which has an E-press publishing OA monographs with the costs covered by ANU’s information budget. In Canada, Athabasca University Press receives support from government grants and from Athabasca University which together provide 80% of their budget. It was interesting to note that 1% of the overall university budget is allocated to the press for scholarly communication.

OA publication funds in the UK will be provided by the Research Councils to pay for the OA processing fee and it is likely that Germany will have something like this as well. New models are being explored such as OpenEdition Freemium which is a licensing model for libraries (so they take part in the funding of publication platform). It has been introduced as a pilot scheme and is based on the combination of free content in HTML + premium content (PDF, e-pub) and services, with a revenue split model.

The Knowledge Unlatched pilot launches next year whereby libraries form a global consortium, use existing acquisitions budget, select individually and purchase collectively. The price is based on fixed or ‘first digital copy’ costs and libraries receive a value-added edition. Monographs are then published open access.

A Swedish project has been established to achieve open access using existing funds for books: ‘Towards quality controlled Open Access Monographs in Sweden - exploring the possibilities of a consortium based approach.’

Ferwerda's own organisation, the Open Access Publishing in European Networks, has developed a Library which aggregates a collection of OA books to provide quality assurance, increase visibility and retrievability. They have more than 30 publishers with over 1000 books listed. He differentiated from other infrastructure services available as:

• the OAPEN Library is a deposit service
• the Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service
• and the e-Depot National Library is a preservation service.

Other OAPEN projects include setting up limited publication funds for books (2-3 years) in different EU countries. They are looking to cooperation of research funders and publishers and want to measure the effect of OA on usage and sales to come up with guidelines and recommendations.

The pilots running in the UK and Netherlands are very similar. OAPEN-UK is managed by JISC Collections. There are five publishers in the UK including Taylor & Francis, Liverpool University Press, University of Wales Press, Berg and Palgrave Macmillan. They have come up against a reluctance from publishers to take part so at the moment there are 80 OA books in total from 13 publishers in the two countries.

They hope to measure the effects of OA on the following areas from this study:

1. Discovery: visits in Google Book Search - 100% versus 10% open
2. Usage: page views in Google Book Search 100% versus 10% open
3. Impact: Citations in Google Scholar
4. Sales

While this is the early stage of the project - and there are limitations in the scale of the study - there are some observations they have been able to make. OA for books works by some measures. It improves discovery with three times higher visits and eight times higher page views in Google Books. OA books were also downloaded six and a half more times (but this is downloads not sales). So far, OA has NOT impacted sales, although it is too early for final conclusions. They have also tried to monitor the costs of books with total average costs of open access titles at 5678 euros while print is at 6489 euros. It is clear that there are still substantial costs for editing, acquiring and reviewing books with both approaches.

Time and data will shed further light on the realities of open access books, but it is worth taking time to consider the different options.