The 50th annual ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards was a great forum for sharing knowledge, insights and catching up with old and new friends. The program was packed with provocative and challenging topics reflecting the turbulence in the scholarly communication landscape and a voice to potential solutions and opportunities. Here are a few top picks selected by the Maverick team:
- Opening session: Peter Cunliffe-Jones, Course Director & Researcher, University of Westminster. This presentation was focused on how we can build trust in information. Peter has supported a number of initiatives in Africa to set up fact checking centers. Recent disinformation has circulated that has impacted lives by dissuading people from getting vaccinated, reflected in polio rates growing exponentially as one example.
- Innovation award winners: Congratulations to Charlesworth Gateway and Gigabyte the joint winners of this year’s award.
- Session 2: The Future of Open Access Books Funding: Our big takeaways include the need for the sector to learn from the mistakes made by the journal programs during their transitions to OA, and improve metadata standards – if they can’t find it, they won’t use it. See the Maverick Case Study Now publishers library discovery systems audit and the Scholarly SEO service sheet.
- Session 6: Transparency in OA: This session brought publishers and librarians together to debate the progress of the move to open access. There is a strong and growing feeling that the APC model is causing increasing inequities in the market. Publishers were urged to innovate and experiment with models – “to be bold” and to improve how we communicate the value proposition to our funders, customers, producers and users (prosumer). See the Maverick Case Study, GeoScience World marketing strategy and roadmap.
- Session 10: What does the future hold? was a fun Friday session exploring the panelists’ predictions on how the scholarly ecosystem will evolve over the next 50 years! There were several common themes, including the transformation of the scholarly record outside of the current print-centric wrapper, and its relationship to the wider research lifecycle –repositioning how we conceive the publishing process whereby the need of the researcher becomes the predominant, influencing factor. Current functions that researchers need and must be supported include: registration, recognition, certification, preservation, dissemination and filtration. A future that requires robust and integrated systems and processes to support digital ambitions see the Production and Editorial Workflow service sheet
Maverick is already looking forward to next year’s ALPSP conference. To schedule a free consultation with Maverick, contact us.