Digital Publishing Conference at Wuhan

In November, I was back at the University of Wuhan as an invited guest speaker for the 6th International Conference on Publishing Industry and Publishing Education in the Digital Age (spot me in the group photo). I was presenting in the strand for Open Access Publishing which gave me the opportunity to speak to Open Publishing and the Open Science Agenda, showcasing the EU Digital Agenda, UCL Press and particularly the new UCL Megajournal. ORCID is an important part of the latter initiative to allow disambiguation and ensure correct attribution; this is starting to see some uptake in China although still limited. One of the other presenters particularly focused on the specific need for ORCID to identify individual Chinese scholars who may share very similar, if not identical names.

The School of Information Management at Wuhan is the top-ranking iSchool in China and, just as our iSchool – the Department of Information Studies, it is celebrating its centenary in 2020.

The University of Wuhan is generally acknowledged as being the most beautiful campus in China. It is a tourist attraction in the Summer with its extensive displays of blossoms. Autumn is another good time to visit with the changing colours of the leaves on the trees. The campus is on a sprawling hill, full of a wide variety of trees (each part of the campus is named after the trees there) and with a castle (now library and accommodation) at the very top.