NEWS

Society for Scholarly Publishing to organize 2018 Academic Publishing
in Europe Pre-Conference in Berlin

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is collaborating with Arnoud de Kemp to organize the APE 2018 Pre-Conference in Berlin, Germany, on January 15, 2018. Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) is an independent, multidisciplinary conference established in 2006 to be an ongoing international debate about the future of scholarly communication and scientific publishing.

The APE Conference aims at a better understanding of scholarly communication and the role of information in science, education and society. Attendees convene to debate about the future of value-added scientific publishing, information dissemination and access to scientific results and offer an independent forum for 'open minds’. Participants include academic, educational, scientific, technological, medical, legal and professional publishers, university presses, researchers, authors, editors, librarians, teachers, learned and professional societies and associations, funding agencies, politicians and policy makers, subscription agencies and booksellers, recruiting agencies, and technology providers.

“SSP is delighted to be collaborating for the first time with the Academic Publishing in Europe conference on a pre-conference day that will explore the theme of Ramping Up Relevance by looking at how the role of scholarly publishers may be changing given that new stakeholders, public policies, and funding sources are affecting the flow of research communication,” said Tim Cross, SSP Education Committee co-chair.

The Pre-Conference agenda will begin with an Oxford style-inspired debate: Resolved: Science and scholarship should be curated and hosted by public institutions, not by commercial publishers. Debaters include Jill Taylor-Roe, Head of Liaison, Academic Services and Special Collections at Newcastle University and Eric Merkel Sobotta, Director of Communications at de Gruyter. Next a panel will discuss how public policy and funding are changing the flow of scholarly communication. Panelists include Trish Groves, Director of Academic Outreach and Advocacy, BMJ, and Editor-in-chief, BMJ Open; Robert van der Vooren, Project Manager, VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands); and Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, Knowledge and Information Manager, Medical Research Council, London UK.

Participants will then break into groups, each of which will discuss a specific challenge to publishers in balancing relevance and acceptable engagement on the one hand with commercial return on the other. Groups will generate practical measures publishers can adopt to meet this challenge, both individually and as an industry, and report back to the full assembly.

The Pre-Conference will wrap up with a vision of Scholarly Publishing in the Future by keynote speaker, Michiel Kolman, PhD, President of the International Publishers Association, SVP Information Industry Relations at Elsevier, and Academic Ambassador Emeritus.

Following the SSP Pre-Conference, the APE 2018 Conference offers a broad program with 35 speakers in two day organized around the theme of Publishing 2020 - Ramping up Relevance. Experts will discuss open access, open data, open research, piracy, the needs of early career researchers, technology topics including artificial intelligence and blockchain, the importance of metadata, and where publishers and libraries go from here.

“The APE Conferences are ideally placed at the beginning of a new year—they provide a complete update,” said Arnoud de Kemp, organizer of the APE Conference since 2006. “There are still many open questions and nobody really can predict how the world of scholarly communication and scientific publishing will look like in the years to come. So there is a lot to talk about and we need to share experiences.”

The conference will be held in the Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the famous Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin Mitte and the pre-conference will be held nearby at the NH Collection Berlin Mitte at Checkpoint Charlie. To review the complete program for both events and to register, please visit http://www.ape2018.eu. Space is limited, so register soon to guarantee your place. SSP members receive a 25% discount on registration. The conference hashtag is #AcadAPE18.