United Kingdom

Since 2015, the number of self-published learned societies in the UK has decreased by over a third, with the remaining societies experiencing real-term revenue declines. All around the world, society publishers are struggling with increased competition from commercial publishers and the rise of open access business models that reward quantity over quality. We will delve into the distinctive position of societies in research, examine the challenges confronting UK and US learned society publishers, and explore actionable steps for libraries and policymakers to support the continued relevance of learned society publishers in the evolving scholarly landscape.

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

You don&#39;t know what you&#39;ve got till it&#39;s gone: Future directions for learned society publishing

You don't know what you've got till it's gone: Future directions for learned society publishing

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The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

Opening of the Conference

While research support teams are generally small and specialist in nature, an increased demand of its service has been observed across the sector. This is particularly true for teaching-intensive institutions. As a pilot to expand research support across ARU library, the library graduate trainee was seconded to the research services team for a month. This dialogue between the former trainee and manager will discuss what the experience and outcomes of the secondment were from different perspectives. The conversation will also explore the exposure Library and Information Studies students have to research services throughout their degree.

Fostering an Open Research culture: ARU's Graduate Trainee Secondment to research services

What are the impacts of the oldest publisher in the world going from 90% subscription content to 90% Open Access content in under 10 years and what does the future hold? Cambridge University Press is now well underway with an unprecedented transformation, but what does the next phase of Open Research look like for Cambridge and the industry at large? The efforts to get us to this point have been shared between authors, institutions, funders and publishers, and the future ecosystem of research publishing needs to be similarly balanced, sustainable and equitable. We would like to open a dialogue with the community, outlining our vision, and discuss what happens next for open scholarship..

What next for sustainable open scholarship? The Cambridge University Press transformation and beyond.

The introduction of Transformative Agreements created the need for Open Access and Subs & Access teams to work closely together to evaluate and manage implementation of these deals. However, R&P deals were never supposed to be permanent. Block grant support of R&P deals ends in 2025 shifting the full burden of the costs to subscription budgets. This panel discussion will aim to bring together subscription and open access librarians to discuss their priorities (access to resources vs publishing Open Access), where they overlap (supporting the use of Open Access material), potential plans for walking away from deals and what scholarly publishing may look like in the future.

Looking at the cliff's edge: the end of block grant funding for R&P deals

This breakout session will bring together several micro-presses from different backgrounds to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the smallest operators to survive and thrive in a quickly changing scholarly communications landscape. A commitment to bibliodiversity implies that the transition to a fully Open Access future should happen in a way that allows scholarly publishing to be done by presses at a range of scales, including the very small – yet some of the prevailing OA business models are difficult or impossible for micro-presses to engage with. How can tiny presses realise some of the benefits of scale in the marketplace? Is there demand or potential for new collective funding models or infrastructure to support micro-press OA journal publishing? Why are there lots of small society and scholar-led presses, and lots of larger professional publishers, but rather few independent micro-presses? We’ll bring together a society publisher, an independent micro-press and a small university press to explore these issues, with an eye to a truly bibliodiverse future.


Small Fish in a Big Pond: Micro-press Perspectives

Due to the evolving nature of Open Access many librarians find themselves managing an OA service on top of their main roles. Ruth O’Hara is a Collection Management & Resource Description Librarian and Grace O’Brien is an Electronic Resources Librarian at Maynooth University. Together they work on transformative agreements and deal with various queries on OA. In this talk they will offer tips on how to navigate challenges and share what they have learnt over the last few years. They will provide an overview on how to manage a successful Open Access service, while balancing the demands of their varied workloads.

How to manage a successful Open Access service in addition to the demands of a primary role

Library patrons want to search for and locate authors by particular identity markers, such as gender identification, country of origin, sexual orientation, nature of disability, and the many intersectional points that allow an author to express a point-of-view. Artificial Intelligence, skilled web researchers, and data scientists in general struggle to achieve accuracy on single identity markers, such as gender. And what right does anybody have to affix identity metadata to an author other than the author theirselves? And what of the risks in disseminating author identity metadata in electronic distribution platforms and in library catalog systems? Can a "fully informed" author even imagine all the possible misuses of their identity metadata?

Author Identity Metadata: Why a Small Publisher Can Address a Major Challenge

Research integrity leads in research-intensive universities engage closely with all aspects related to this topic, including, but not limited to, receiving and coordinating responses to issues raised related to potential breaches of integrity, developing and implementing relevant procedures and policies, developing and delivering training, and ensuring a positive research culture. I will take the audience through the processes initiated when concerns are raised to illustrate the sometimes unforeseen challenges that can arise and discuss potential improvements.

A practitioner’s view of research integrity: how it works on the ground

Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research both in physics and in bibliometrics in his spare time, and holds visiting academic positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.

A 30,000ft view of Research Integrity: Data, Trends and Actions

In 2000, there were about 40 retractions from the scholarly literature. In 2023, there were more than 10,000. That is a dramatic increase, even accounting for the growing number of papers published per year. In this talk, I will start with what a retraction is, and how perceptions and practice have changed. I will also explore the reasons for the increase, why it is good news, and why the real number should be even higher -- along with the root cause of why researchers end up having to retract. I will tell the stories of the sleuths who are finding problems in the literature, and describe efforts that academic libraries, publishers, technology vendors and others are making -- and can make -- to effect change.

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