The Academic Book of the Future Project, funded by the AHRC in collaboration with the British Library, is a two year project exploring how scholarly work in the Arts and Humanities will be produced, read and preserved in coming years. As part of this project, the University of Sussex Library has organised a seminar to explore the future of the academic book. 

Wednesday 11th November 2015, 12.45- 14.00

Venue: The Meeting House, University of Sussex

Chair: Kitty Inglis, Librarian, University of Sussex

Speakers:

Caroline Bassett, Professor of Media and Communications and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex

The academic book is often invoked as an endangered but essentially unchanged object, something previously stable that is now under threat. A different approach, taken here, begins by asking how the academic monograph has already transformed into something new, and also asks what this implies for questions of authorship.

Kiren Shoman, Executive Director, Editorial Books, SAGE Publications UK

The changing Higher Education (HE) environment has resulted in responses from publishers like SAGE, covering new types of academic book formats, as well as the increasing offering of online materials, and innovative forms of publishing output. Whilst the book will never be fully replaced, a plethora of alternative academic materials may be required in HE today.

Martin Eve, Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London and Director of the Open Library of the Humanities

Academic book publishing is probably the point at which researchers are most exposed to the economic logic of scholarly communications. While in the world of journals the process is a simple "submit for review" effort, completing the "marketing" section of a monograph proposal, by contrast, can feel crass and demeaning for work that has no clear "market" value but is instead esoteric research. And yet, as we move into a digital and potentially open environment, these structural political economic aspects are only set to become more prominent in their exclusionary functions. All academic publishing has costs but ongoing reconfigurations of the means of dissemination are pushing awareness of this price burden onto new actors.

To explore these changes, in this talk I will focus on the roles of dissemination against evaluation in book publishing; the potential conflicts of market-gatekeeping with rhetorics of peer-review/quality; and progress towards the economics of open-access monographs.

The event is free but booking is required: http://acbookweek.com/events/18262731321/