Josie Dixon (Publishing Consultant), Publishing Workshop

Josie Dixon (Publishing Consultant), Publishing Workshop (details for advance registration and participation will be posted shortly)

9.30-11.00

Public lecture and discussion

‘Academic Publishing in the 21st Century: Markets and Technology, Survival and Change’

Debates about the future of scholarly publishing are not a new phenomenon, and the research monograph in the humanities and social sciences has long been a focus of particular concern. Yet the sense of crisis has sharpened in recent years, and changes in the market and in technology have resulted in some fundamental shifts in academic publishers’ business. Digital media offer new opportunities, but have arguably introduced at least as many problems as they have solved. The most fundamental issues for the sustainability of scholarly publishing relate to the larger workings of the academic economy – involving not just publishers but funding bodies, research assessors and tenure committees, libraries, and all the wholesale and retail links in the international distribution chain between publisher and reader. As part of that broader picture, we need to understand the varying pressures of supply and demand, together with recent changes in the economy of print publishing and developments in electronic publishing. In this wide-ranging lecture, based on 15 years’ publishing experience in both university-press and commercial-academic sectors, Josie Dixon reviews the state of the market and the strategies scholarly publishers have developed to ensure the survival of their business. She outlines some of the new challenges brought by digital technology, including some fundamental questions relating to copyright, access, and intellectual property. While these issues are being played out most dramatically in the sciences, it is clear that they are already encroaching on humanities and social science publishing, and likely to have a major impact in the coming years.

The following for workshop participants only:

11.00 Coffee

11.30-1.15 Workshop part 1

1.15-1.45 Lunch

1.45-3.30 Workshop part 2