So term has officially started and so have the guest speaker visits. I am taking a module on digital publishing and the department has set up weekly guest speakers on digital publishing, the first one was this week.

The speaker this week was Liz Marchant, Head of Science Publishing at Pearson. She told us about how they develop digital products and how this process is different to developing print products.

The main issues in digital educational publishing it seems are how to define and add value to a product when schools haven't adapted their budget to ongoing subscription models. Pricing is a key issue too, one that she admitted Pearson are still playing around with. Do you price per user or for groups and how do you make sure that people re-purchase your products.Publisher/customer relationships aren't just one off interactions anymore, they can go on and on and as such the user plays a much more important role in the development and especially the design of the product.

So there were a lot of issues that I hadn't really thought about before and while this was a talk about educational publishing, something I'm not interested in particularly, a lot of the issues are relevant to all digital publishing.

So yeah good start to the term and

So I woke up at half 6 again and tried to psyche myself up with a big mug of "I love London" mug.

It didn't really help but it got me on the bus. But once I had got there and woken up a bit things picked up.

I started my day by going through a list of all the titles available through the OAPEN scheme. These titles have been offered free through Open Access to see how popular they are compared to a control group. I went through the list and found each title on the publisher's website. I looked to see how well advertised the fact that the book was freely available was and took screen shots to go in a presentation. I also looked the books up on Google Books again to see how obvious it was that the books were free.

I can tell you now it was not obvious on most of the sites that these books were 

So on Tuesday I started at my new work placement with Jisc Collections. They are a government funded organisation that work on behalf of libraries and universities to secure good deals on journals but they also do a lot of research into new forms of access - and that's where I come in.

I am very interested in Open Access and hope to write my dissertation on it so this place really appealed to me. The research they do into not just open access but all new access models available to academics and researchers is so interesting, if you're into that kind of thing. And from what I learnt on my first day I think this placement is going to be really useful.

But day one means taking things slow and getting to grips with the place which is what we did. I arrived with my fellow Brookesian (that's a word right) and we were shown into a meeting room where our supervisor talked us through who Jisc are, what they do, why they do it and how we could help. Then we had an office tour and met everyone else and then it was lunchtime. So not much done yet.

But after lunch we got to work collating the results of a survey done by Humanities researchers about access models and how they feel about them, specifically how they feel about self-publishing as an option for their work. It was so interesting to see the range of responses although what came across the most was that the current academic climate wouldn't recognise self-published work and so many thought it would be a waste of their time to try and do it. Better to leave it to publishers who know what they are doing and would bring a level of prestige to the work.

But at the same time many were dissatisfied with the current service they were getting from publishers and would like to move away from the traditional publishing models if only the culture would let them. So it all comes down to people needing to be better informed about Open Access and self-publishing if they are going to accept it as a legitimate form of publishing.

Not bad for the first day. So I look forward to seeing what else I can learn over the coming weeks.

I haven't posted for a while but it's not neglect, I was busy at a two week work placement with TQMI, a management consultancy.

My main role was to write some content for the website by interviewing the consultants and writing what they said up into articles. But they were all out consulting a lot of the time so I also helped do some market research, looking at how the competition use their websites and social media in an effort to improve how TQMI use theirs.

While this wasn't a strictly publishing placement, I had a really good time and I learnt a lot that I can bring to publishing. Apart from the market research I did and the skills that taught me (very transferable), I learnt a lot from talking to the consultants.

I mean a lot of what they said went a bit over my head as jargon but once I got past that and got into it I really feel I benefited from it. I learnt about the key things a business needs to do do be formally recognised as excellent. I learnt about how to set up a business, how to keep up with constant change, the importance of an engaged staff and the principles and ethics behind good business. "Great but that's still not publishing" I hear vaguely cross your mind but as they have drummed into us from day one on the course - publishing is a business. So these business skills, yeah they aren't going to help me edit a manuscript, but they will help me get the most out of my work and the people around me.

So overall a very busy and very interesting 2 weeks. But I will admit, I'm ready to get out of the world of business development engagement processes and back to books. Simple, lovely books.