X Close

LCCOS staff news

Home

News for colleagues within the LCCOS department.

Menu

UCL Press wins UCL Brand Ambassador award

By Alison Fox, on 16 February 2017

 

UCL Press was thrilled to win the UCL Brand Ambassador award at the UCL professional services awards yesterday. The award was made for the global reach UCL Press’s books and journals have achieved, with download figures now close to 200,000 in over 200 countries since its launch in June 2015.

When UCL Press launched, it was the first university press to set up from scratch with an Open Access model. As such, it was a brave step, and since such a venture had never been attempted before in the UK, it was hard to predict the outcome. The idea for the Press was that of Dr Paul Ayris, Pro Vice Provost, UCL Library Services, a leader in OA advocacy for many years, and the Press was the flagship addition to strong OA services and policies already established at UCL.

From the outset, the reaction at UCL to the Press has been unfailingly positive: authors have submitted proposals in the hundreds, many of them already committed Open Access advocates with few other OA options for publishing their monographs. For those early adopters, and for the Senior Management team at UCL who supported the setting up of the Press, their belief is now paying dividends, as research published by UCL Press reaches a huge global audience. Many of those reading UCL Press’s books would not be able to access a print version, either because they would be unaffordable to individuals or to local universities, or simply because print book distribution to many countries around the world is severely limited or indeed non-existent.

UCL is committed to being a force for good and enlightenment in the world, and ensuring that the products of its research are made as widely available as possible helps to support that commitment. UCL Press is excited to be contributing to the institution’s global presence, and proud that its books and authors are acting as UCL Brand Ambassadors worldwide.

I would personally like to thank the whole UCL Press team, our wonderful authors, David Price, Paul Ayris and Martin Moyle for their unfailing support and encouragement, our colleagues in Library Services, and our colleagues around UCL who support us – all of them make this happen.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

UCL Press And Academic Book Of The Future Announce Interactive Workshop To Celebrate Academic Book Week

By Alison Fox, on 17 January 2017

UCL Press and Academic Book of the Future are delighted to invite you to an event at the British Library to celebrate the publication of the Academic Book of the Future BOOC during Academic Book week. To register, please visit: http://bit.ly/2jFfLvm

UCL Press launched in June 2015, and it makes all its scholarly books and journals available freely online in open access form, as well as in print. Since it launched, it has published 30 books and 5 journals and its books and journals have reached more than 180,000 readers in over 190 countries around the world. As well as traditional monographs, UCL Press publishes innovative digital research on a browser-based platform, featuring articles and chapters of different lengths, different formats (blog, video, audio), and which are added over time – and so the BOOC was born (Books as Open Online Content). The first book in this format features the research outputs from the Academic Book of the Future project, an AHRC/British Library funded project led by researchers at UCL and Kings College London.

The UCL Press team will be available to:

• Demonstrate BOOC live:

• Answer questions about its open access model – or anything else about its publishing activity

• Show its books

• Present its new publishing services model for other institutions who wish to set up their own

• Presentation

A presentation about UCL Press will take place at 11 – 11.15, followed by a Q&A session.

To register, please visit: http://bit.ly/2jFfLvm

The 5th International Summit of the Book, Limerick 1-3 November 2017

By Alison Fox, on 7 November 2016

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

Last week I attended the 5th International Summit of the Book, held this year in Limerick. The Summit of the Book conference was initiated in 2012 by the Library of Congress, Washington, as an ‘annual global meeting to discuss and promote the book as a crucial format for conveying societies’ scholarship and culture’.

Speakers came from HEI and national libraries all over the world and included the Director of the Library of Alexandria, the Chief of Library Services at the UN office in Geneva, the Director of Scholarly and Educational Programs at the Library of Congress, the President of the African Library and Information Association, the Director of the National Library of Ireland, the President of LIBER, the Head of the European Library, and the Chair of IFLA’s Freedom of Access to Information Committee.

Along with many short presentations of case studies of practices and initiatives at libraries around the world, including the use of special collections for teaching, common reader programmes, the possibilities of digitization, and managing university libraries in different languages and cultures, the conference offered a global insight into the changes and challenges for libraries everywhere, some common to all and others particular to a country or circumstance.

I gave a presentation on the open access publishing model adopted by UCL Press, and the growing trend for libraries to set up their own open access publishing service. I described the global reach achieved by the Press’s books and journals since launching in June 2015 (getting on for 80,000 now) and the benefits that can accrue to an institution through making its research freely available to all. I hope that our experience might serve as an inspiration to other institutions of the transformative potential of having an open access press.

Two UCL Press authors win 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prizes

By Alison Fox, on 2 November 2016

We are delighted to share the news that two UCL Press authors are amongst the winners of the 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prize. Author of Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique Dr Vanesa Castán Broto (UCL Development Planning Unit, the Bartlett)  was awarded the prize for her work in the Geography category, whilst author of the upcoming book The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations: A Bilingual Edition and Commentary  Dr Lily Okalani Kahn (UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies) won for her contributions to Languages and Literature.

Awarded in recognition of the work of Philip Leverhulme, the prize recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition, and who show exceptional promise.  The 2016 award recognises achievement in the following areas:

  • Archaeology
  • Chemistry
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • Geography
  • Languages and Literatures

See a full list of winners here.

UCL Press partners with JSTOR

By Alison Fox, on 27 October 2016

UCL Press is delighted to announce a partnership with JSTOR to provide access to open access books on their widely used platform.  JSTOR is a leading digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources used by academics and researchers worldwide. All titles will also be preserved in Portico, ensuring that they will be available to researchers in perpetuity.

The only UK publisher to be an inaugural partner in this programme, UCL Press titles are included in an initial set of open access books available from four leading university presses, including University of California Press, University of Michigan Press and Cornell University Press.  Books published by UCL Press that will appear on JSTOR’s widely used platform from Wednesday 26th October include:

The ebooks are freely available for anyone in the world to use and do not have DRM restrictions, nor do they have limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. Users will not need to register or log in to JSTOR in order to access any of our titles. Free MARC records are available for librarians, who will also be able to activate the titles in discovery services; more information for librarians is available here. The titles are also cross-searchable with other content on JSTOR.org.

Open Access Drop-In (26 October 2016)

By Alison Fox, on 10 October 2016

The UCL Open Access Team and UCL Press would like to invite all UCL staff to a drop-in session to find out more about open access options and support available at UCL.

Find out more and register your interest at: uclopenaccess2016.eventbrite.co.uk

15:00-16.45 Drop-in Session

Drop in to meet the Open Access Team and UCL Press to learn more about the HEFCE mandate for REF2020 and publishing with UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open access university press.

Staff from UCL Open Access and UCL Press will be on hand to show you:

  • How to upload your paper to RPS for REF open access
  • The process of applying to have gold APCs paid for by the UCL OA funding
  • How to promote your book/journal via social media
  • The submissions process to publish a book with UCL Press
  • Display of UCL Press books published so far

16.45-17:00

Presentation for the 10 millionth download from UCL Discovery to Professor Daniel Miller (UCL Anthropology).

17:00-18.30 Speakers and book launch / drinks reception

Speakers

  • Andrew Morris, Honorary Fellow at UCL IOE, and author of Why Icebergs Float: Explaining Science in Everyday Life.
  • Nicholas Gold, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science

Find out more about the impact of open access publishing on the careers of guest speakers, and about UCL’s leadership in the open access arena.

Join UCL Press for the launch of Why Icebergs Float: Explaining Science in Everyday Life, a brand new open access book that explains how science can solve life’s mysteries. 

 

Gregynog Colloquium, 13-17 June 2016, Gregynog Hall, nr Newtown Powys

By Alison Fox, on 25 July 2016

The Gregynog Colloquium is the annual residential conference of WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum) and HEWIT (Higher Education Wales Information Technology) where Welsh HE librarians and IT specialists gather to share knowledge and ideas and to hear about new initiatives from other institutions. Drawing around 188 colleagues annually from Welsh HE libraries, the Gregynog Colloquium is held in the stunning location of Gregynog Hall in Powys, a 750-acre estate and national nature reserve with a fascinating cultural history, including its own private press. Gregynog is being established as an independent charitable trust to safeguard the important academic and cultural heritage of Gregynog under a University of Wales initiative, with support from the Gwendoline and Margaret Davies Charity, the sisters who owned Gregynog in the 20th century and established its cultural initiatives. It is used throughout the year for residential courses for students of Welsh universities. I was invited to speak about the work of UCL Press, and about the general increase in new open access university presses being established within libraries, both in the UK and abroad.

The Hall was rebuilt in the 19th century by the Sudeley family who were pioneers in the use of concrete as a building material. The Sudeleys owned the Gregynog Estate at the time but their primary seat was in Toddington in Gloucestershire. The innovative use of concrete can be seen throughout the building. The banisters are a particular achievement: I must admit, I don’t normally pay particular attention banisters, but these are worth a mention. Rather than being a traditional wooden handrail, the banisters at Gregynog are actually a handrail shaped groove in the wall, molded out of concrete.

After several hundred years of private ownership, in 1913 a huge estate sale saw Gregynog’s farms, cottages and woodlands sold off, many to their tenants. Gregynog Hall might have been demolished had not the wealthy Davies sisters acquired it in 1920 to become the headquarters of their enterprise to bring art, music and creative skills to the people of Wales in the aftermath of the First World War. For twenty years the house was full of music, fine furniture and ceramics, hand-printed books from the Gregynog Press and, most extraordinary of all, the sisters’ collection of paintings by artists such as Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh. Leading lights, such as George Bernard Shaw and Gustav Holst visited during these years for musical concerts – or simply to enjoy the beautiful gardens and woodland walks. At the end of the 1950s, after wartime use as a Red Cross convalescent home, Gregynog was bequeathed to the University of Wales as a conference centre. It welcomed its first students in 1963 and they’ve been coming ever since. The Gregynog Press, a private press founded by the sisters, printed the works of many rising stars in the world of illustration during its years of operation, and is still running to this day.

The Hall is still home to stunning artefacts and works of art. One of the original printing presses used by the Gregynog Press is on display in the Hall, as are works by many of the most famous artists who contributed works to the Press in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s – Agnes Miller Parker, Blair Hughes-Stanton, David Jones and Gertrude Hermes. The Davies sisters’ works of art are on display in their drawing room where the drinks reception was held during the conference. It is a place that feels slightly lost in time, where an Agatha Christie murder mystery would not be out of place. The Davies sisters’ library is still in situ, and contains a collection of books that anyone interested in the arts and humanities would be proud to own – not necessarily because of the rarity of the books in the collection but because of the breadth: classic works of fiction, monographs on significant artists, and works of philosophy, history and classics fill two large rooms and the corridors.

I was only there for the first day of the conference itself, which started with a keynote speech by Chris Banks, Director of Library Services at Imperial College London, who spoke inspiringly about the academic library of the future. This was followed by presentations by Steve Williams of Swansea University, and Paul Jeorett of Wrexham Glyndwr University, the latter talking about the rise and fall of international students from different parts of the world, and the potential of the outcome of the Brexit referendum to change the international student cohort figures significantly (it is hard now to remember a time when Brexit seemed just a remote possibility). He highlighted the important work librarians do to help international students.

I was sorry I couldn’t stay at Gregynog longer. The impressive surroundings and significant cultural associations, the fascinating history, the stunning location, and the association with a long-running private press, made this a memorable occasion. I enjoyed meeting the conference attendees and the staff at Gregynog, who were knowledgeable and passionate about Gregynog and its history.

What was most abundant and welcome, although slightly difficult to get used to, was the silence: there were no sirens, no traffic, there were no TVs in the rooms and no lifts, all the noises one usually hears in a typical urban hotel. All I could hear as the sun rose were the birds and the sheep.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

Announcing brand new open access formats from UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 29 June 2016

UCL Press is delighted to present its open access books online in three new distinct and innovative formats: enhanced digital editions, monographs with scholarly functionalities, and BOOCs (books as open online content).

Developed by Armadillo Systems (producers of the award-winning Turning the Pages system and Digital Bodleian), UCL’s platform offers new ways of publishing digital scholarship and responds to the needs of scholars working in non-traditional formats.

Its three strands are as follows:

Enhanced ed

Enhanced digital editions These beautiful digital books are presented in a format that offers both thematic and chronological navigation. Highly illustrated, they feature slide shows of images, deep zoom features, audio, video and 3D, and the format is perfectly suited to highly illustrated research outputs dealing with artefacts and manuscripts. Titles available as enhanced editions include the popular Petrie Museum of Egyptology: Characters and Collectionsand Treasures from UCL.

Monograph

Scholarly monographs

UCL Press’s scholarly monographs are presented in an online reading format with a suite of scholarly functionalities: here you can highlight, take notes, search, cite, export and save or share a personalised copy or extract. Content will include the output of UCL’s groundbreaking social media study Why We Post, including the popular titles How the World Changed Social Media andSocial Media in an English Village by renowned anthropologist Daniel Miller. Additional best-selling titles will include Temptation in the Archives by the late Lisa Jardine and Suburban Urbanities, edited by Laura Vaughan.

 

BOOC (Books as Open Online Content)These innovative ‘living books’ featBOOCure articles of various types, in a non-linear thematic presentation that offers readers the option to select and sort subjects they wish to read. With long and short articles, blogs, videos, audio and Storifys, content is added to these ‘books’ over a period of time. The first BOOC, which captures the outputs of Academic Book of the Future, an AHRC/British Library project, will launch in late Summer 2016. Find out more here.

El Pub: The 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

By Alison Fox, on 24 June 2016

In early June I attended ‘El Pub: The 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing’, hosted by the University of Göttingen. The conference brought together publishers, librarians, archivists and researchers to discuss the current – largely European – landscape of electronic scholarly publishing.

Although the papers varied greatly, open access was the dominant theme across the panels. The ECRs, in particular, spoke of a policy-driven need to make government-funded research available to the public without exception. They also spoke of the well-known predicament ECRs face in deciding where and how to publish. Many have the desire to share their data and reach a wide audience via an open access platform, yet their fear of the data being misappropriated – not necessarily for commercial means but by other researchers who might use it to write ‘better’ papers – is a growing concern.

Furthermore, they expressed frustration that their career progression is dependent upon publishing in subscription journals with high impact factors, which they feel is a system designed to undermine the feasibility of open access. This system can only be broken when open access journals have built up enough traction to compete with the high impact journals, or when a universal method of quality assessment emerges to replace the metric-intensive scale currently employed.

Posted on behalf of Chris Penfold, Commissioning Editor, UCL Press

Audio and Audio-Visual Academic Book of the Future

By Alison Fox, on 17 June 2016

On 23 May I was invited to speak at the ‘Audio and Audio-Visual Academic Book of the Future’ event, a symposium hosted by the British Library. The event was convened by Steven Dryden, a sound librarian at the BL, and aimed to bring together publishers, librarians and researchers to discuss the use of audio-visual content in scholarly books. I presented alongside two other speakers: Richard Mason, a novelist who showcased his new co-venture, Orson & Co, a platform that publishes audio-visual books, and Rebecca Lyons, who provided an overview of the Academic Book of the Future project, which she co-investigates.

Following the three presentations, the group engaged in an open discussion where all delegates reflected on their experiences of working with AV content in their careers or in their research. One question, which was pertinent to those attending from the BL, was on the issue of archiving: how do we determine which version of a book is the original when it is published simultaneously in different formats? Are ISBNs enough to identify each version, and how realistic is a future in which copyright clearance will be required for multiple e-formats even though print rights are challenging enough for authors to secure?

The floor was offered to a number of the ECRs in attendance who discussed their practice-based research and collectively emphasised a need for broader publishing options. They also raised the issue of attribution and lamented the difficulty of describing their contributions to online platforms and non-traditional forms of publishing. It was agreed that continued collaboration will be required between authors, publishers, librarians, archivists and coders to build a future in which AV content can be welcomed as a critical component of online publishing rather than viewed as an awkward luxury.

Posted on behalf of Chris Penfold, Commissioning Editor, UCL Press