So last week was a busy week for all of us on the journals module.

First we had a visit to Wiley Blackwell where we had a workshop on society journals. We learnt about how societies choose publishers to take over their journal publishing and the process of bidding for a journal. We learnt about how to put a bid together, some of the key things to take into account and how to make good on the things you promise. There were a lot of things I hadn't thought about before like securing jobs, trying to make the transition as smooth as possible and the challenges that complacency and habit pose when trying to propose changes. It was also interesting to hear that a lot of problems come from the fact that decisions to change publishers are often made high up in the hierarchy and that the people who are actually involved in the day to day running of a journal are often not given much or any input in the decision even though it is them that will have to deal directly with the changes.

It was a really interesting session where we heard from everyone involved including editorial, marketing, finance and the often forgotten production. All this was in preparation for our second assignment where we have to write a specification from the point of view of the society and present a bid as a publisher. It sounded scary when I first heard about it but now I feel a lot more ready for it.

The other big event this week was the deadline for assignment one which was a 2000 word article on an issue in journals publishing. I chose to do mine on peer review and particularly the role private peer review companies like Rubriq could play in the system. While these companies have good intentions, I argue that they do not solve any of the problems in traditional peer review, such as issues around bias and quality, and that they may in fact add new problems. It was particularly interesting reading around the debate over whether paying reviewers is a good idea or not. On the one hand it's a nice gesture that acknowledges the work put in by the reviewers but on the other hand many of them are reviewing not for profit but through a sense of duty to the academic community and to further their own careers in which case formal recognition they can put on their CV and use in funding applications would be better than cash. I didn't know there was so much debate around peer review and I really enjoyed learning more about the debates in this area and the alternatives being offered.

So while everyone else on our course is getting excited about children's books and digital breakthroughs I am spending my time learning about peer review and journal bids and really enjoying it.

So this week saw the last of the lunchtime digital seminars put on by the university. I didn't get to attend as many as I wanted so I haven't been blogging about them regularly. So to catch up, here is what I had to say about the ones I did make it too.

Charley Darbyshire - Educake
Educake is an online homework resource for GCSE science students. Teachers can use the tests available as homework for their class and then can see the results and the students' progress online. Charley taught us about the difficulties of education publishing and keeping material up to date and appealing. This is especially hard with a digital subscription-based product as there has to be incentive for people to keep buying it. The product needs to be valuable enough to justify the investment you are asking of your customers. It is no longer the case that the customer-publisher relationship ends once the money is handed over, now the relationship is long term as you have to continually work to guarantee reinvestment.
So the main issues are pricing, justifying and defining value and maintaining good customer relationships, very different to a one off print purchase of a textbook.

Tom Scholes - Managing Director of Grove Street Media
Grove Street Media are a new media company that develop apps, websites and games. Tom taught us just how important good usability is and how extensive testing is just as important as the development in achieving this. You have to try things out to learn where they need improving. He also pointed out the problems that arise from customers not being entirely clear what they want. Many come and ask for expensive apps when a website would do just because they feel they should be. This is also the case with social media, everyone has heard of it and so everyone thinks they should be using it. But you have to match the format and the marketing to the product or you will miss your market. Tom then showed us some of his skills by building a basic game live in front of us that involved a giraffe and Kim Kardashian racing across the wild west.
So it's important to know exactly what you want, listen to developer's suggestions and test your product with real people.

So I've learnt a lot from these sessions about surviving in the real world of digital publishing. I've spent a lot of time in the classrooms learning the skills and building ebooks but I have absolutely no idea how to use these skills in the real world so it was great to hear from the people out there doing it now.

So last week was the last of the course organised publishing seminars and our guests were John Seaton and Martin Toseland who between them have over 35 years of publishing experience.

John Seaton as a freelance literary agent focused on the author side of publishing, stressing the importance of a good, long-lasting author editor relationship. Keep your authors happy or they will walk. He also talked about self-publishing and how important it is becoming now that agents themselves are often not accepting unsolicited manuscripts, instead heading to the net to find the next big thing. But it isn't all E L James as John told us a story of a friend who found her book sales suffer when she was picked up by a publisher. Low ebook prices got the blame as the publisher raised the price. It all comes down to someone really championing the book. Without someone, be they publisher or author, really supporting the book and shouting about it, it won't make it.

Martin Toseland has worked with backlist management at Faber and Canongate so he told us about how you manage a backlist and the importance of print on demand. Publishers can now keep books with small but steady sales in print whereas before they would be lost, along with what little income they bring in. This also stops obscure classics being lost and means they can be kept on reading lists around the country. One thing that is a problem sometimes though is a sudden increase in sales on a backlist title but no explanation as to why. Without knowing why the sales patterns have changed it's hard for publishers to react properly. And with backlist work there is a lot of risk and again it comes down to championing a title to keep it in print.

So the overall message was be enthusiastic and fight for the books you want to see in print be they your own writing or books you don't want to see go out of print (although this isn't the end anymore as POD means that works out of copyright can be brought back as backlist titles, even if it's by a different publisher).

On the 1st of March I attended a colloquium run by the Institute of Historical Research on the subject The Finch Report, open access and the historical community.

The event was split into three panels trying to give the society, publisher and intermediary views from the historical community. It was attended by a range of people from students and researchers to publishing company VPs and there was a lot of lively discussion. Suffice to say I felt a bit out of my depth.

The main issues that came out of the discussion were:

• In the humanities and social sciences green open access is preferable but it needs to be sustainable and the embargo periods need to be right (not too short)
• Humanities and social sciences are very different from STM subjects and so there can't be a one size fits all gold OA policy
• There are international concerns, mainly that the UK is going out on a limb by leading the way in OA and this could result in it becoming isolated in the global research environment
• There needs to be a diverse publishing environment and that publishing can't just be left to those big companies that can manage APCs as this may end in a monopoly that kills off smaller publications and publishers
• Licenses are still a thorny issue and people are still not sure what CC licenses cover

So as you can see there is still a lot of work to be done by governments, funding bodies and the academic community and publishers to make open access work for everyone. It all seems to boil down to the fact that people still don't understand OA completely. There needs to be more communication to rid people of their misconceptions about OA - and that's across the board including those making the policy and those doing the research.

One area that people seemed most confused about was monographs and where they fit in with recent research council mandates. In fact most people were barely thinking about monographs at all and they were definitely marginalised in this journal-heavy discussion. And why not when an academic can get the same REF score for writing two journal articles as they can for spending months, or even years, writing a monograph. But what these academics don't seem to understand is that if no one rallies for monographs we might lose them altogether.

But not to worry, monographs have a champion in the form of Jisc Collectios' OAPEN - UK scheme. This scheme sees a number of monographs from a range of subjects and publishers being made openly available online via the publisher website and Google Books. Caren Milloy from Jisc was there to make the case for monographs and to make sure they weren't left out of the discussion, and of course to plug the upcoming Jisc Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference in July.

So all in all a really good afternoon that raised a lot of issues, and I got a few business cards too.

I've had a busy week so I thought I would combine everything into one lovely post.

To start with there was day 4 at Jisc Collections. This week I was looking in detail at the results of some workshops Jisc did with publishers and authors. They asked groups of each to identify what parts of the publishing process they were involved with and how long it took them. This was really interesting as it gave me a chance to see all the hidden things that publishers do behind the scenes. When you say publishing most people just think editorial, you know

So a few fellow students interested and I attended an National Union of Journalists debate on Open Access hosted by the Wellcome Trust.The discussion was on the importance of editorial quality in Open Access publishing.



There was a great line up of speakers:

Philip Campbell - Editor-in-Chief, Nature 
Matt Cockerill - BioMed Central and Springer STM Professor
Stephen Curry - Imperial College and open access blogger
Peter Lee - Publishing Director, Cell Press 
Mark Patterson - Managing Executive Editor of open access journal eLife 
Pete Wrobel - NUJ, Magazines and Books

It was a really interesting discussion that raised a lot of questions about how people view Open Access. The main issue that came up was that some people feel that publishers no longer add that much value to articles but others argue that, especially with very technical STM articles, the editors play a vital role in making the content readable for the general reader.

So access isn't just a question of getting hold of the articles but being able to understand them as well and this is where editorial still have an important role.

A lot else was said and some people were voicing very passionate opinions because they felt this was their first chance to have their say (non-academic users of the content mainly). But there isn't space here to go into all the details but don't worry, the whole thing was filmed and posted on YouTube.

The one thing you will miss out by only seeing the video is the boozing and schmoozing at the end. We chatted with some big wigs from the NUJ and got some contact details so the evening was definitely a success, even if we may need to develop our mingling techniques to be a bit less blunt.

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

Today was a good day as we finished and printed out one of the three big assignments we have to hand in before Christmas. That's two down and one to go as earlier this week we handed in our mock new title proposal and presented it to the class. So the last one to go is a marketing report due in next week and then we are free until next year, hooray!

But it was also a good day because we had our last guest speaker of the semester in the form of Ruth Killick, Publicity Director at Profile Books. She gave us an insight into the life of a publicist and some good hints and tips for a good publicity campaign. Basically it seems it all comes down to planning and timing and making sure your information is up to date. And despite all the exciting new publicity opportunities opening up with new technologies and new markets it doesn't mean a thing if you don't generate any sales.

So even though the semester is coming to an end, things aren't winding down yet and I'm looking forward to next year.

Yet another guest speaker, oh Brookes you do spoil us.

This time it was publishing marketing and sales consultant Ruth Readshaw. She came to talk to us about 'Getting the Right Sales and Marketing Mix' in education publishing particularly.

Ruth began her career as a teacher and then moved into educational and academic publishing using her experiences to really engage with her market. This seems like a great idea as sales is a sector of publishing where personal relationships are so important so if you can relate to the people you are selling to, teachers and headmasters, then you are going to do pretty well.

We were also told about the importance of using all the marketing tools at your disposal but making sure they are using them correctly for your target market. She also touched on some of the big concerns such as the importance of relevant and up-to-date data, the role of digital in marketing and the tipping point when all direct mail is done online.

So another great speaker who has really given us an insight into the actual industry. It's so useful to see how the things we learn in lectures are applied to the real world and makes me feel that I could actually survive in publishing. We'll see how that turns out.

Today we had another guest speaker, Eve White the literary agent and her assistant. She runs a small independent literary agency from her London flat with only two permanent staff and a rotation of two interns. It's a small scale operation but this adds to the personal feeling of the company that makes it so successful with their clients.

It was a really great talk that covered all the basics of being a literary agent and how Eve got into the industry. I enjoyed learning more about this much discussed aspect of the publishing industry but I don't think it's for me. The idea of becoming close with authors and building up great working relationships appeals but a lot of their time is spent sifting through emails and reading manuscripts - something which doesn't appeal to me because I have always intended on keeping reading fiction and working in publishing separate, which is why I want to work in non-fiction.

So another day, another great guest speaker. I'm pretty sure there are now an extra 20 odd aspiring literary agents thanks to Eve's speech today.