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COASP – Conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (Lisbon, 20-21 September 2017)

By Alison Fox, on 27 September 2017

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

The annual conference organised by OASPA took place in Lisbon this year, and for the first time members of UCL Press were there to present a paper and to attend the conference. Now in its 9th year, COASP presents a key opportunity for publishers and affiliated colleagues – such as librarians, funding agencies, government, academics and higher education communities – to gather and discuss developments in open access for scholarly research.

This year’s conference started with an inspiring talk by Jean-Claude Burgelman, Head of Open Data Policy and Science Cloud for the European Commission, who outlined the Commission’s vision for open access to scholarly research. This included an announcement that the Commission would start to publish articles themselves and would be seeking a partner to provide a journal publishing platform with fast publication times and open peer review, along the lines of that adopted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (both of whom use the F1000 publishing platform).

Sessions followed on open infrastructure, APCs, research evaluation and assessment and peer review, with speakers including the Head of Scholarly Communications at Cambridge University Library, Danny Kingsley, the Publisher for PLOS, Louise Page, and the Head of Open Research for the Wellcome Trust, Robert Kiley. Interspersed, were panel presentations featuring related initiatives in OA infrastructure, policy and publishing.

The conference and the society are geared towards scientific journals, and there was therefore very little on OA monograph publishing. I was on the only panel discussing OA book publishing, focussing on peer review for OA monographs, along with Anke Beck, CEO of De Gruyter, and Aina Svensson, Head of the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University Library. Many delegates commented after our presentations on how different peer review is for books than for journals, since it involves considerably more editorial development and discussion, and often makes a significant contribution towards the shaping of the overall book, rather than simply evaluating quality.

Overall, it was an immensely useful couple of days and, as always at conferences, it was also a chance to see our many colleagues and partners in the industry who come from far and wide and who we don’t see very often, and to meet new publishers and hear about other initiatives and practices from around the world. I was particularly interested to meet the university presses of the University of Technology Sydney and Adelaide University, who both have thriving OA book and journal publishing programmes. It was also great to meet the Head of University of Missouri Library’s Open Scholarship and Publishing Services, who have a fantastic open access textbook programme that has seen great success so far, and from which UCL Press’s developing OA textbook programme can draw inspiration.

Join IAS & UCL Press for the launch of Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History

By Alison Fox, on 26 September 2017

Join the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and UCL Press to celebrate the publication of Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, edited by Zoltán Biedermann (UCL) and Alan Strathern (Oxford).

Date: 30th October 2017, 6-8pm

Location: UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

All welcome, but registration is required

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean. Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Read more about the book here.

UCL Press announces new journals platform

By Alison Fox, on 19 September 2017

Posted on behalf of Ian Caswell, Journals Manager, UCL Press

UCL Press is pleased to announce a new hosting partnership with ScienceOpen, a platform which will host its open access journal programme. ScienceOpen is an open access indexing platform provider based in Berlin and Boston, which indexes journal abstracts or full text OA articles. The platform, for the first time offered as a white labelled hosting platform, extends UCL Press’s list of dedicated and enhanced content discoverability for its authors, editors and journals. Published as full text XML and metadata (as well as the more traditional PDF), UCL Press journals can link better into search engines and other online scholarly materials and outlets.

Authors, editors, reviewers and readers will be able to make use of post-publication peer review, online commenting, individual article and author metrics (like Altmetric), citation and access tracking, ORCiD integration, and a whole host of other benefits that you can read more about on the ScienceOpen website and blog, here.

Dr Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, said ‘ScienceOpen’s new hosting service is the logical extension of our commitment to putting research in context. With our advanced technology, we can ensure that UCL Press articles are found by the right researchers and then give those readers the opportunity to interact with the content in a variety of ways. A range of aggregated journal – and article – level metrics then provide enriched usage statistics for the publisher to monitor impact.’

In the coming months, UCL Press plans to experiment with new forms of more transparent peer review and sees the open peer review infrastructure on the ScienceOpen platform as an ideal way to explore post-publication review workflows. All UCL Press journals will be available for continuous peer review – where articles can receive further review and comments after final publication, that are updated using a system of version control (meaning identified revisions and iterations of an article and its reviews) – to encourage collaboration and elicit debate and discussion. Further announcements on this will be made in due course.

Have a look at the journal webpages here!

Contact: Ian Caswell, UCL Press Journals Manager. Email: i.caswell@ucl.ac.uk | @UCLPress

September titles from UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 30 August 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of five new open access books from UCL Press in September:

New Open Access Books

Please note that Key Concepts in Public Archaeology was previously published as a living book and will be released for the first time as a free PDF download and in print.

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.

The Pro-Vice-Provost’s View

By Paul Ayris, on 19 August 2017

The future of monograph publishing

The future of the scholarly monograph is much debated in academic and publishing circles. Dwindling print sales and pressure on library acquisition funds mean that the future of the scholarly monograph as a unit of output is in some doubt. A recent report, The Academic Book of the Future, underlined the drop in sales figures being experienced by such monographs.

In a recent letter, published by the THE (Times Higher Education), 17-23 August 2017, p. 29, I offered evidence from the experiences of UCL Press to cast light on this thorny topic. Here is the letter as it was published:

Open optimism

Annual Report 15-16In her article “Open access monograph dash could lead us off a cliff” (Opinion [in THE], 27 July), Marilyn Deegan warns of the dangers of open access monograph publishng”. As head of UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open access university press, let me look at some of these concerns in more detail.

UCL Press has been in existence as an open access press since June 2015. In that time, we have published 42 books. These have been downloaded, along with our journals, 448,524 times. The most downloaded book, How the World Changed Social Media, has been downloaded 127,836 times. It is still possible to purchase copies of all UCL Press books in other formats, digital and paper, and these comprise 4,795 copies to date – an average of just over 114 per title. In addition, UCL Press titles are downloaded in 218 countries and dependencies around the world.

If it is true, as The Academic Book of the Future report shows, that monograph sales have fallen from an average of 100 to 60 per book in the UK in the past decade, the figures from UCL Press seem to show that open access represents a lifeline. Far from killing the book, open access is a possible route to salvation in an area of publishing that otherwise seems to be in terminal decline.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost

August titles from UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 1 August 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of one new open access book from UCL Press in August

New Open Access Books

New Open Access Journals

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.

The Academic Book of the Future: New BOOC From UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 21 July 2017

UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of The Academic Book of the Future, which is likely to be of interest to UCL Library staff. View it online for free: https://goo.gl/dbLS2N

This dynamic, innovative, evolving and open platform publishes contributions connected to the AHRC/British Library project, The Academic Book of the Future, which has been investigating key aspects of scholarly publishing for the last two years, led by a team of academics from UCL and Kings College London. The platform, which presents the content in the form of a BOOC (Books as Open Online Content), will grow as more content is created, and will allow different ways to explore and share the ideas and discussions.

Authors from all areas of the academic, publishing, bookselling and library communities discuss aspects of scholarly books and their possible futures: for example, the role of the editor, peer review, academic bookshops and libraries, open access, digital publishing and technology. The content – in a range of peer-reviewed formats including videos, blogs, chapters and reports – presents a fascinating variety of insights into the constantly evolving contexts of the academic book and will be of interest to anyone working in the HE sector and the publishing industry, and, indeed, to anyone interested in how ideas are disseminated to a wider general audience.

Content now available includes:

OPERAS – Open Access in the Scholarly Research Area through Scholarly Communication

By Alison Fox, on 18 July 2017

 

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

In June, I took part in the first meeting of all the members of a European consortium developing pan-European infrastructure and services for open access in the social sciences and humanities, led by the French organisation Open Edition. Partners from 22 organisations in 10 countries (Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK) gathered to discuss the progress of the project to date and next steps in development. UCL Press joined in March 2017 as one of eight core members of the consortium.

OPERAS already has two projects underway that have received significant funding from Horizon 2020. The first of these is OPERAS-D, a design study to address the long-term requirements for governance models, structures and scientific and technical concepts for future services that the infrastructure will provide. The second is HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), which focuses on the monograph as a significant mode of scholarly communication, and tackles the main obstacles preventing the full integration of publishing platforms supporting open access monographs. It will do this by improving five existing open access books platforms, enhancing their technical capacities and services, ensuring their interoperability and embedding them fully into the European Open Science Cloud.

OPERAS’ final goal is to clarify the landscape of Open Access book for libraries and funders through a certification service (DOAB – Directory of Open Access Books); to improve the accessibility and dissemination of research outputs in SSH through a single discovery service; and to increase the impact of multidisciplinary research on societal challenges through a single ‘research for society’ service. It will also provide communication and advocacy, training, R&D, development of business models, standardization of technologies, and adoption of best practices for open access.

OPERAS is now planning its next stages of development – its governance, business model, legal status, and operational development over the coming years, and UCL Press is looking forward to being more involved in the next stages. At the meeting its new work packages were launched, and UCL Press will be involved in the Business Models and Communications work packages. This highly ambitious project aims to address many of the challenges that currently hamper open access from becoming the standard practice for scholarly communication. By pooling resources and expertise from across Europe, OPERAS is developing a significant step forward on the path towards open access for all.

Find out more:

July titles from UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 10 July 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of 3 new open access books from UCL Press.

New Books (July)

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.

April to June titles from UCL Press

By Alison Fox, on 7 June 2017

We are delighted to announce the publication of 9 new open access books and 5 open access journal issues from UCL Press. Additionally, we are also delighted to provide information about a brand new student journal, Interscript, hosted on UCL’s student publishing platform.

New Books (April-June)

New Journals (April-June)

Student Journals Hosted by UCL Press (April-June)

  • Interscript: UCL Journal of Publishing (vol 1, issue 1). This journal is run by students of the MA publishing course, and hosted on UCL’s OJS platform. The students have also published an online magazine.

Please don’t hesitate to contact the UCL Press team with any questions or queries about UCL press or any of our titles.