Changing Dynamics of Scholarly Publishing – The 2016 ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards
London, UK: Enago attended the 2016 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Annual Conference and Awards held at the Park Inn Heathrow, London. Each year, ALPSP welcomes representatives from hundreds of organisations from around the world, publishers and associations, as well as individuals, from within the scholarly and professional publishing industry. The conference provides a friendly forum to learn about new initiatives and developments and openly discuss the challenges and opportunities facing academic publishing today.
The ALPSP Conference and Awards presents a rich and varied program each year. At this conference, the keynote speaker was Zoe Harris, Group Marketing Director at Trinity Mirror Group PLC, who discussed the survival tactics employed by newspapers in today’s unstable climate and how the scholarly publishing industry can learn from its mainstream counterpart. Other program highlights included plenary sessions on “Research and Scholarly Publishing in the Age of Big Data” led by Ziyad Marar, Global Publishing Director at SAGE Publishing, and “The Changing Role of Society Publishing” chaired by David Sampson, Vice President and Publisher, Journals, American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The three-day conference is also a chance for ALPSP to honor individuals, associations and organisations that have made exceptional contributions to the scholarly publishing industry. The recipient of the 2016 ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was Alice Meadows from ORCID. The finalists at the 2016 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing give a flash presentation summarising their work on the first day of the conference, and the winners are announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on the second day. Unusually, this year the judges were unable to select a single recipient and instead chose two winners, Cartoon Abstracts from Taylor & Francis and ChemPlanner from Wiley.
Next year’s conference will see a change of location. For the first time in its 10-year history, the ALPSP Conference and Awards will be held outside of the United Kingdom with the event taking place in Noordwijk, Netherlands (13–15 September 2017).
“The ALPSP conference is always an exceptional showcase of the creativity and innovation that abounds in scholarly publishing and this year was no different.” said Tony O’Rourke, who manages strategic alliances for Enago in Europe & North America. He continued, “We are delighted to be associated with an organisation committed to developing and promoting best practices in what is a fast-changing industry. We can’t wait to see what’s in store next year.”
