ALPSP eBooks Collection launched

It's taken a little longer to get off the ground than first planned, but I'm very pleased to report that the launch 'AeBC' eBooks Collection on the Ingram Digital MyiLibrary platform was launched at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Denver. Fifteen ALPSP publisher members have contributed 1,200 titles to the collection, in 11 subject collections.

The launch collection publishers include:
American Psychiatric Publishing; Amsterdam University Press; Australian Academic Press; Edinburgh University Press; EDP Sciences; Equinox Publishing; Federation Press; Hindawi Publishing Corporation; International Food Information Service (IFIS Publishing); IOS Press; NRC Research Press; Multilingual Matters; Policy Press; Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Full details of the AeBC and how the service works are available on the website. I'd be happy to provide more information and of course to welcome other ALPSP members who would like to add titles to forthcoming collections (there will two a year). Our main contact at MyiLibrary is Louise Weale who would also be happy to send details.

New Advice note about online piracy

A new ALPSP Advice Note - the 38th in the series - has just been issued. Many members have had concerns about the number of eBooks and journal articles that have been appearing online without permission. We have frequently been asked what action can be taken to prevent this happening. We are therefore very pleased that Dr Merlin Fox of the Royal Society Chemistry is prepared to share a case-study of how they went about tackling this problem, and to suggest some general ground rules and guidance. The Piracy of eBooks and other Scholarly Content Advice Note is available now as a free to download PDF to all members who have logged in to our website.

Academic Publishing in Europe Conference 2009

I attended the Academic Publishing in Europe conference held in Berlin from the 17th -19th of January on behalf of ALPSP. The overall programme was impressive, and the mainly European slant of the keynotes in particular meant that there was some interesting and fresh insights into scholarly publishing. Hopefully some of the presentations will be available from the APE09 site to download at some point. I found the session on the Google Settlement very useful (contributions from Dan Glancy from Google Book Search and Jan Constantine from the Author's Guild being very illuminating), and there were other highpoints including the best description I have heard yet of semantic web technologies from Prof Rudi Studer of the University of Karlsruhe, and a lively workshop on eBooks amongst much else. Of course there were many contributions from ALPSP members too numerous to mention. The conference had over 200 delegates and a waiting list, which was also impressive in these difficult financial times.

ALPSP had organised a pre-conference meeting on the 17th of January at the conference hotel, at which Carmela Ramjoue from the EC Research Directorate General gave a succinct summary of their programme of research as it relates to scholarly publishing. You can download her presentation if you log in as a member from the ALPSP website. A discussion was then prompted by comments from Richard Gedye of OUP and Nol Verhagen of Amsterdam University Library. Thanks to both for volunteering to do this without having seen Carmela's talk in advance - very impressive. The overall aim of the meeting was to involve European members who cannot always visit London, and also to introduce ALPSP to potential new members. I hope this was achieved, and it was certainly good to have a full room with about 60 people attending.

JISC's report on economic impact of alternative scholarly publishing models

JISC - the body that funds provision and support of ICT for UK education and research - has published a much anticipated report on the economic impact of alternative scholarly publishing models. The lead author, John Houghton, was also involved in a contoversial study on research communication costs in Australia published in September 2006.

I am afraid that I have not yet read the whole report, but:

Any study of this type depends heavily on the assumptions that the authors' make (these assumptions are very helpfully listed towards the end of the report). Many of the assumptions are based on 'industry consultation' and yet none of the major trade associations nor the major publishers (as far as I am aware; I am trying to verify this) have been consulted. Several of these assumptions are, IMHO, highly questionable although in fairness I have not yet been able to work out the impact on the headline numbers. More still are 'authors' estimates'. These seem to have no evidential basis at all and some of them appear to have a very direct impact on the headline numbers.

It doesn't inspire much confidence so far, but as I say I haven't had the chance to read and digest all 288 pages yet...

Ian

ALPSP workshops in Washington DC and Philadelphia

I am really pleased to say that planning is well under way for a series of workshops that will be held throughout 2009 in the USA.

The workshops are day-long, classroom style educational courses where numbers are kept deliberately small to ensure maximum interaction.

Full details of the workshops including dates, tutors and venues will be available shortly...

The workshops we'll be running in the USA in 2009 are:

• Introduction to Journals Publishing
• Effective Journals Marketing
• Creating High-Impact Marketing
• The Journal Editorial Office
• Introduction to Journals Finance
• Creating High-Impact Marketing
• Understanding Journal Metrics
• Electronic Publishing - A to Z
• Project Management in Publishing
• Managing Digital Rights

Audio of the 2008 ALPSP International Conference now available

I am pleased to say that audio files of many of the presentations made at the 2008 ALPSP International Conference are now freely available online to ALPSP members from our website.

The audio files are in MP3 format and contain the talks that we had permission to reproduce but not the question and answer sessions afterwards (well we do want to encourage you to actually come to the Conference!)

I am afraid that the quality of one or two of the recordings are a little bit poor in places – sorry but we are still learning how best to do this – and I’d like to apologise to Caroline Wain in particular for the poor quality of the recording of the first two and a half minutes of her talk (we’ve done what signal processing we can to make it audible and it is a great talk so well worth persevering!)

Roundtable meeting on access and authentication (London, UK)

ALPSP and Eduserv (the organization behind Athens, amongst other things) are getting together to hold a roundtable meeting on the morning of Friday 13 February 2009.

The meeting will begin at 10am at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, London.

The roundtable meeting will be to discuss access management in an environment characterized by national access management federations and in particular attitudes of publishers towards the support of international customers in this context.

In order to get the maximum benefit, attendees should have some technical knowledge of access management and of the issues surrounding Shibboleth although the roundtable meeting will be strategic in nature and therefore will not cover specific technical issues relating to supporting Shibboleth implementations.

The roundtable meeting is free to attend but numbers are very strictly limited. If you would like to express your interest in attending then please contact me as soon as possible.

ALPSP and Eduserv would like to express our thanks to the Royal Society of Chemistry for providing the meeting room for this event.