ALPSP International Conference 2011 - Programme

As in previous years the sessions reflected the broad range of our membership and addressed key topics and developments in scholarly publishing. The conference, held at Heythrop Park UK, began with lunch on Wednesday 14 September 2011and concluded after lunch on Friday 16 September 2011.

Download full programme (pdf)

Podcasts and Presentations where available are indicated by links from the programme below. Please note the terms and conditions of use as stated in our Privacy Policy.

Video from the conference (link to River Valley TV)

Wednesday 14 September

12:00 - 14:00 Lunch & Registration

14:15 - 14:30 Opening remarks
Sarah Durrant, Chief Executive, ALPSP (audio)

14:30 - 15:30 Keynote 1: Will Books be different?
Kevin Guthrie, President, Ithaka (ppt) (audio) (Q & A at end audio)
Journals have pretty much fully navigated the path from print to digital delivery and yet there have not been transformative changes in the publishing environment. We are just embarking on this journey for books. Where might it take us? This talk will provide a high level overview of the various aspects of a print to digital transition for books used in scholarship and teaching. What are the key challenges and their implications for libraries, publishers, societies, authors and readers?

15:30 - 16:00 Coffee / networking break

16:00 - 17:30 Plenary 1: Waiting for Disruptive Change
Chair: Tony O'Rourke, Assistant Director, Head of Sales, IOP Publishing (audio)
Speakers:
Michael Clarke, Executive Vice President for Product and Market Development at Silverchair Information Systems (ppt) (audio)
Nicko Goncharoff, Head of Text Mining/Director, SureChem, Digital Science

As the discussion session audio file was large it has been split into Part 1 and Part 2
'Why Hasn't Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?' That was a question posed by Michael Clarke in a blog posting last year that became one of the most commented-on articles on the Scholarly Kitchen. The web was born out of academia and designed to radically transform the distribution of pre-prints, papers and other research information. Yet scholarly publishing probably wouldn't figure in the long list of industries that have undergone disruptive, revolutionary change as a result of the internet. In other industries historical market dominance has been swept away almost overnight and replaced by hugely powerful players who came seemingly from nowhere. But many think the core publishing system that undergirds so much of the culture of scholarship will remain largely intact. The publishing industry has changed, of course, and changed dramatically. But this change has been incremental and managed; evolution rather than revolution. This session will debate why disruptive change hasn't been visited on scholarly publishing already and whether the future of the industry will continue to be an orderly evolution of the past, or whether revolution is coming, but just hasn't happened quite yet.

19:00 - 22:00 Welcome reception and buffet sponsored by Publishing Technology

Thursday 15 September

09:00 - 10:00 Keynote 2: From E-phobia to E-phoria
Richard Charkin, Executive Director, Bloomsbury (ppt) (with introduction from Toby Green audio)

Digital publishing has been around a very long time in the academic and professional publishing world(Lexis-Nexis, Reuters, CD-Rom, OED, BioMedNet, Springerlink etc) and yet its impact on the general reader has only just begun to be reported in any serious way. This technology and media trend is reuniting many aspects of publishing which have grown apart over the last forty years. Richard will discuss the transformation of general publishing from a state of fear of technology to a perhaps over-exuberant embrace and whether there are any lessons to be learned for the ALPSP community.

10:00 - 10:30 Coffee / networking break

10:30 - 12:00 Plenary 2: All four corners: worldwide scholarly publishing
Chair: Hooman Momen, Editor & Coordinator of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (audio)
Speakers:
Mariana R. Biojone, Senior Business Development Editor, Springer (ppt) (audio)
Choon Shil Lee, Professor of Library & Information Science, Sookmyung Women's University (audio)
Arend Küster, MD Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (ppt) (audio)

There can be little doubt that Europe and North America - the traditional centres of scholarly publishing - continue to have a huge influence on our industry. However, innovative publishing initiatives in other parts of the world are emerging. Scholarly publishing in many countries is not financially self sustaining and therefore requires different models of financing. Often, but not always, this comes from direct or indirect public subsidy. Within this environment this session will examine some innovative initiatives from countries where the research community has realised the importance of scholarly publishing for their national development and how they have taken advantage of the lack of traditional publishers to experiment with novel ways of production and distribution.

12:00 - 12:30 ALPSP Annual General Meeting (members only)

12:00 - 14:00 Lunch / networking

14:00 - 15:30 Parallel 1 (a): Abort, Retry, Fail? - data and the scholarly literature
Chair: Robert Parker, Interim CEO, Royal Society of Chemistry (audio)
Speakers:
Todd Vision, Associate Professor of Biology, The University of North Carolina (ppt) (audio)
Max Wilkinson, Programme Manager Datasets, British Library (ppt) (audio)
Jonathan Goodman, Reader in Chemistry, University of Cambridge (ppt) (audio)

Everyone, it seems, is talking about publishing data, linking data to the primary literature and mining data to extract hitherto latent facts. It's an issue in science publishing, but also in social science and arts and humanities. Sure 'big science' generates terabytes of data and data management has been built in to the design of these large experiments but what about everything else? What about the reams of data generated by social science research, the performances captured in the arts or the overwhelming majority of bench science? This data is increasingly important and yet the publishing industry is generally still struggling to come to terms with how to assess, publish and preserve it. The time has definitely come to stop talking and start doing but where do you begin and what should you be doing?

14:00 - 15:30 Parallel 1 (b): Who Knows Best? Academic library book collections development in transition
Chair: Vivian Berghahn, MD Berghahn Books (audio)
Speakers:
Mark Huskisson, Vice President, EBL (ppt) (audio)
Anna Bullard, Director, Publisher Acquisitions & Relations, Ebrary Inc (ppt) (audio)
Arlene Moore Sievers-Hill, Head, Acquisitions Department, Case Western Reserve University (ppt) (audio)
Jill Taylor-Roe, Head of Liaison & Academic Services Newcastle University (ppt) (audio)

As academic library acquisitions shift further to electronic books, the more "traditional" forms of title selection are also undergoing a transformation. Library collections are under increasing pressure not only from reduced budgets overall but also from the allocation of funds to purchase e-resources ('"e" or elsewhere'). In addition, different business models, from Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA) to pay-per-view and bundled sales, are changing the ways in which librarians can make books available. What are the implications for acquisition workflows that have been - in addition to faculty recommendations - reliant on wholesaler approval plans and title profiling as well as specialist librarian expertise for those longer-term "just in case" collections? This panel will explore these changes from the perspectives of those involved on the acquisitions and delivery side, from librarians, to wholesalers, and e-book vendors. It will tackle how the title selection process is being impacted by these changes and ask what effect these different business models and new wholesaler/vendor platform partnerships has on academic library collections now and for the future.

14:00 - 15:30 Parallel 1(c): Industry Updates
Chair: Toni Tracy (audio)

Microsoft Academic Search: Next-Generation Scholarly Discovery (ppt) (audio)
Lee Dirks, Director for Education & Scholarly Communication, Microsoft Research Connections

Datacite: helping researchers to find, access and reuse data (ppt) (audio)
Tom Pollard, Datasets Outreach Officer, The British Library

Code RED - the future of Transfer (ppt) (audio)
Alison Mitchell, Business Management Director, Nature Publishing Group

The Chicago Collaborative: An Alternative to Mutual Assured Destruction? (ppt) (audio)
Irving E Rockwood, Editor & Publisher, CHOICE

15:30 - 16:00 Coffee / networking break

16:00 - 17:30 Plenary 3: What did the Romans ever do for us?
Chair: Simon Ross, Global Journals Director, Cambridge University Press (audio)
Speakers:
Jane Harvell, Head of Academic Services, University of Sussex Library (audio)
Ziyad Marar, Deputy Managing Director and Executive Vice President /Global Publishing, SAGE Publications (audio)
Mark Thorley, Data Management Co-ordinator, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). (ppt) (audio)
Huw Morris, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Dean of the College of Arts and Social Science at the University of Salford (audio)

Trade Associations like ALPSP do a great deal of work representing our industry to politicians, policy makers and other stakeholders and we put forward what we believe is compelling evidence that scholarly publishers are adaptable, innovative and responsive. Our industry is a success both financially and in terms of the service we provide to academia. And yet this message doesn't always get through. Publishers know that the services we provide are generally valued by our authors and readers but nonetheless key stakeholders question whether - in a world where public spending is under extreme pressure - scholarly publishing could be done more effectively and efficiently without professional publishers. Some suggest that the publishing processes that have served scholarship so well for 350 years now do more to slow the progress of scholarship than to advance it, and question whether the role of publishers as gatekeepers of information is a good thing. So are we deluded, or simply misunderstood? In order to answer this question, representatives of key stakeholder groups will give their views on the value that publishers add and whether they perceive publishers to be part of the problems facing scholarship or part of the solution.

19:00 - 22:00 Conference Dinner including presentation of ALPSP Awards & the ALPSP Quiz

Friday 16 September

9:00 - 10:30 Parallel 2 (a): Social media and the Scholarly record
Chair: Katie Sayers, Digital Marketing Manager, SAGE (audio)
Speakers:
Terry Hulbert, Director of Business Development, AIP (ppt) (audio)
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (audio)
Kaitlin Thaney, Manager, External Partnerships Digital Science (ppt) (audio)

Social media; love it or loath it, as a scholarly publisher you can't ignore it. Social networking services specially geared towards particular groups of academics are beginning to gain traction and researchers are finding collaborators via these mechanisms. At the same time blogs are being used to chronicle research but is social media too ephemeral to form part of the 'real' record of academic advance, or is it something that we ignore at our peril? Social media are also being used to comment on scholarly research but the original authors sometimes find it difficult to respond to comment in the blogosphere, especially given the issues of authority that social media raises - how are important contributions identified, or is it just case of who shouts the loudest?

09:00 - 10:30 Parallel 2 (b): Ebook licensing
Chair: Ed Colleran, Senior Director, International Division, Copyright Clearance Center (audio)
Speakers:
Wouter van der Velde, eProduct Manager eBooks, Springer SBM (ppt) (audio)
Diane Harnish, Principal Consultant, DH Consulting (ppt) (audio)
Ron Hogan, Project Manager, Electric Publisher (ppt) (audio)

E-books have transformed the concept of the book. No longer is a fixed medium the E-book is often an aggregation of many licensable objects. At the same time, once the E-book is published it can be continually transformed and its parts licensed into new publications and other products. This new reality offers great opportunities for scholarly publishers but also new challenges. How do we manage the licensing all of the components that make up an E-book? What opportunities have arisen from this new medium? What can we learn from journal publishers who faced these same challenges 10 years ago?

09:00 - 10:30 Parallel 2 (c): Learned Publishing Live!
Panel: Alan Singleton, Editor,
Diane Scott-Lichter, North American Editor (ppt)
Pippa Smart, Reviews Editor (ppt)
Vivian Berghahan, MD Berghahn Books
Bob Campbell, Senior Publisher, Wiley-Blackwell

This discussion has a large audio file and it has been split into part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4

We operate in a rich and diverse environment. While there are some goliaths in our industry, the majority of scholarly publishers are small - many of them very small - and a large number publish in a narrow subject area.
For these smaller publishers it can be difficult to find knowledgeable colleagues with whom to discuss the issues, to challenge your thinking or to find alternative points of view. Many of these issues are covered in the pages of ALPSP's journal Learned Publishing and in this session we have assembled a panel of experts who will discuss your questions, share their opinions and help you resolve how you should approach the practical issues that are facing your business.

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee / networking break

11:00 - 12:30 Plenary 4: Future proofing - how to make sure you're prepared to deal with the next big thing
Chair: Arend Küster, MD Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (audio)
Speakers:
Kevin Cohn, Vice President of Operations, Atypon (ppt)
Martin Marlow, Principal, Maverick Outsource Services (ppt) (presentation given by Sara Killingworth - audio)
M'hamed Aisati, Head of New Technology, Elsevier (ppt) (audio)

Scholarly publishing is a dynamic industry. Whether it is the semantic web, mobile delivery, data and text mining, social networking, or something hitherto un-thought of, there is always something new to have to deal with! In this session publishers large and small will discuss how they are dealing with constantly changing and evolving technologies. How can you keep track of developments and find out what has worked, and what didn't work? What is just around the corner, and how useful is it? Which technologies have been particularly successful and how can you implement them without blowing the budget? Do you have to react to the next big thing in a piecemeal fashion or are there things you can do to structure your business and your thinking to more effectively deal with whatever the future holds.

Closing remarks: Toby Green, Head of Publishing, OECD