Online Communities - learn from the best of the rest

I suppose it's pretty appropriate that I'm using our Blog and other social network groups to send you news about an interesting ALPSP one-day seminar which is being held on the 7th of July in London entitled Online Communities: what can scholarly publishing learn from other industries?'

I hope that the meeting will appeal for a number of different reasons:

1) the speakers are all experts not from scholarly publishing but from related industries who use communities as part of their mainstream business (magazines, mobile devices, computer games, specialist newspapers, general books);
2) we're flying in an expert from the States who has published a major report on social networking;
3) you won't have heard of any of the speakers before as none of them are the "usual suspects" from scholarly publishing;
4) the "back it or bin it" format adds spice to the day by letting you choose who has made the biggest impression by allowing you to spend your specially printed "ALPSP pounds" on who you personally favour. So it'll be fun as well as educational.
5) Pam Sutherland from OUP will be Chairing the meeting, and that's a reason to come all on its own.

But most important of all it has a serious purpose: to lift the lid on how online communities need to be part of your core business.

See you there.

Yours,

Nick

Charlesworth Group tie up $1 million worth of deals in China

ALPSP member The Charlesworth Group has announced that they have successfully negotiated contracts between fourteen publishers and the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) nationwide consortia in China. The press release states that the deals represent additional gross annual revenue worth over US$1 million.

Charlesworth's China-based composition and pre-press services are well known and have given the organization a sizable footprint in the country; they employ 200 staff in Beijing and Langfang. It seems that they are increasingly focussing on brokering rights and licensing deals in China.

Ian

ALPSP Conference - early-bird discount ends June 14!!!

A quick reminder that the 2009 ALPSP International Conference early-bird discount ends on June 14 2009 and will not be extended!

The full Conference program is now available at the conference website along with a list of speakers. In fact we have speakers from five continents and we're sure you'll agree that it is a fantastic line up!

We've kept the registration fees at last year's level even though the program is longer.

Also don't forget that this year we will be holding parallel pre-conference workshops which are completely free for anyone attending the full Conference - another ALPSP credit crunch busting move!

Don't delay - register for your place today!

New URL for ALPSP blog

The ALPSP blog has a new URL - blog.alpsp.org

The blog has proved to be more popular than we thought and so we decided it was high time that it moved to an ALPSP web address.

The blog is still hosted by blogger and so the old address will still work (it just redirects to blog.alpsp.org)

ALPSP workshops all over the world!

May 12 was something of a red-letter day for ALPSP.

We held professional development workshops in Philadelphia (Introduction to Journals Publishing), Washington DC (Effective Journals Marketing), London (Effective Journal Editorial Management ) and Geneva (Creating High Impact Marketing)!

We've held courses in these places before, of course, but never in four cities across three countries on the same day!

The DC and Philly courses are part of our North American workshop program - we have seven more planned for Fall, 2009 - and I am delighted to say that both of the May 12 workshops were sold out! It's still early days for our US program, but what a start!

Ian

NISO start work to standardize single sign-on

NISO are setting up a new working group under the auspices of their Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee to create one or more recommended practices that will explore practical solutions for improving the success of single sign-on (SSO) authentication technologies.

NISO's current Chair, Oliver Pesch (Chief Strategist, EBSCO Information Services) is quoted as saying: "By developing recommended practices that will help make the SSO environment work better libraries and information providers will improve the ability for users to successfully and seamlessly access the content to which they are entitled."

In addition to forming the working group, NISO will be establishing an "interest group" e-mail list. If anyone would like to be a part of this new working group or to join the affiliated interest group, contact the NISO office at www.niso.org/contact.

Ian

Google Book Settlement delayed

As you may have heard already, the District Judge hearing the Google Settlement has ordered an extension to the opt-out deadline and the date of the Final Fairness Hearing.

The deadline for opt-opts is now set at September 4, 2009 with the Final Fairness Hearing scheduled for October 7, 2009.

Ian