ALPSP Conference 2024 : Our Top Takeaways – An Inspired View

ALPSP, if you haven’t come across them, is the organisation that looks after the Academic, Scholarly, Scientific and Professional publishing community. They offer their members an incredible amount of support and benefits which enable them to develop, evolve, innovate and grow. The organisation runs with several committees run by ALPSP members, whose aim are to add more value for the membership through marketing, engagement, increasing collaboration, creating relevant training courses, events, conferences and educational opportunities. Inspired actually sits on the training committee and also has a lot of involvement in the educational one, as well as being active mentors via their international mentorship scheme. 

The annual conference is a real highlight of the ALPSP calendar and this year we were delighted to have curated and chaired one of the sessions at the conference which we think warrants its very own blog as there was so much useful information, hints and tips for us to all learn from and think about when thinking about how AI might influence or affect Talent Management so watch this space for more information on that!

The conference was held in Manchester and was attended by a truly global audience with people flying in from 22 countries! the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Kenya, France, to name a few. This meant that the conversations allowed us to have a geographically diverse view where we could learn from others’ experiences and come together on shared issues.  

So here are our top take takeaways:  

• Change needed to achieve growth – as we approach the 2025 OA deadline, changes to publishing models are being explored across all organisations and it was inspiring to hear the resilience and creativity of publishers as they explore different ways of publishing openly, giving them the framework to grow in a new era. A range of approaches and levels of readiness for the deadline were beautifully and honestly presented by De Gruyter Brill, CUP&A, Biochemical Society and JISC. 
• Innovation is happening everywhere: from new (and award-winning) AI powered detection tools to identify paper mills, to digital (and physical) new forests that are blossoming to save UK’s biodiversity as we saw from the Forest of Biologists, we were so Inspired by all the new ideas and tools that the publishing industry has come up with over the last year!
• OA for Books is well under way and seeing great results. Especially in the Humanities, OA is allowing niche research to reach a much wider audience and accessing much needed funding. 
• There was a call for more focus on how understanding data can make your marketing efforts much more impactful. We have so much data in our businesses but is it all joined up? Do we have systems in place to bring us actionable insights from across data sets? By questioning what we have, where we’re storing it and indeed what we don’t have, we can give ourselves the best opportunity to strengthen our marketing activity. Businesses such as Hum are coming into the market to bring tools for businesses to execute this more effectively. 
• Increasing impact is more important than focusing on Impact Factor, as we were reminded by Tamika Heiden, Founder of the Research Impact Academy. There was brilliant discussion around how the measuring of Impact Factor doesn’t necessarily truly represent the impact for individual communities, particularly for niche topics. Introducing clear and simple things could really help demonstrate what actual impact a journal could have and suggestions included something similar to a food labelling system or a simple one-liner in an abstract which states why you have done the research. 
• Rather than focusing on how we should prepare for an AI fueled future, consider how we want AI to fuel our futures. Let AI take us to where we want to go rather than getting too caught up in the full range of possibilities of AI. See more of our thoughts on this panel, chaired by our MD of Executive Search Abigail Barclay, in our blog  here. 
• As there seems to be more consolidation in the industry, smaller publishers are working more creatively to retain their position and relevance. With effective collaborations, based on strong and open communication, smaller publishers can thrive and continue to produce quality content to their audiences. 

We would also like to extend our hearty congratulations to the following alongside all the other tremendous initiatives that were shortlisted: 

• winner of the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing – David Warlock
• winner of the ALPSP Impact Award – JSTOR Access in Prison
• highly commended for the ALPSP Impact Award - The Forest of Biologists
• winner of the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing - The Papermill Alarm

The conference bookended with the outstanding Jake Okechukwu Effoduh, Assistant Professor at Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University on stage, opening with his Key Note and closing with him being joined by other remarkable industry leaders where they left us feeling uplifted and determined for the future. So, in conclusion, the picture we built from the last three days was that if we communicate better, collaborate better, be brave and look outside our immediate proximity there are solutions, innovations and opportunities that will help us influence wider, increase our impact and challenge our assumptions of what publishing should look like so we can continue to diversify, innovate and grow!