ManofHarlech

Continue to think we have passed peak Coalition S…an important catalytic instrument of OA acceleration, esp in Europe, but it has never really changed global STEM publishing, or profits…

Probably the wisest thing said on social media about academic publishing this year. Up there with the other abiding, and related mantra: never, ever, underestimate in the worlds of schol comm what otherwise intelligent people don’t know…

The global Economic History Congress in Leuven c1990 remains one of my favourite conferences of all time, not least as the principal sponsor was Stella Artois. Great place for a meeting..

Redcliffe Salaman's History and Social Influence of the Potato from the 1940s was famously described by Eric Hobsbawm as a 'magnificent monument of scholarship and humanity'. Salaman did many things including being Master of Fox Hounds...

Interesting that overall OUP numbers have now been pretty static for three years. Profitability of about 9% on £795m turnover seems about right for a UP which funds its parent university (very) significantly. Surplus of between 5 and 10% I always thought the UP sweetspot...

After T&F yesterday, RELX incl Elsevier posted FY25 results showing underlying growth of 7% and profit growth of 9% to 35% for the whole group (which includes exhibitions like London Book Fair and many non-publishing things). But Elsevier STEM shows ‘good growth and developing momentum’…

T and F (including Routledge) showing first-half global revenue growth of 12% in FY2025. Underlying growth of 4% when you strip out one-off data licensing agreements. Subscription income still doing just fine, in the main…

Plan S was always part of a very specifically European political project in which the centrality of major European publishers like RELX/Elsevier and Springer Nature (key European employers and taxpayers) was a given.

I would argue that this is a 'science' problem as much as a 'publishing' problem per se. Scale will be central to any enterprise in which e.g. American, Indian, Chinese scientific researchers see themselves as working on common problems, and this is bit different from more fragmented worlds of AHSS

Really strong and important piece from Karin Wolf on the SK. UK experience has obvious similarities, but also some important divergences. Ultimately every single thing that has happened in my time in the sector has accelerated the relative flow of research resource away from AHSS towards STEM.

Facing north How can we create better infrastructure for British authors and readers across the north of England?

thebookseller.com/comment/facing-north
Interesting but what I always demur at in pieces of this kind are the implied assumptions about 'the South' which invariably mean simply 'London'. Cities like Plymouth are far more marginalised in cultural terms than e.g. Manchester or Leeds or Newcastle....

You always have to remember how unimportant the UK is to Routledge revenues, relatively. Maybe 12% or so. Much more important as a source of content. This disequilibrium is echoed by all the other big book publishers and has huge adverse implications for OA in the UK.

The demographic trends impacting BBC TV news audiences really show up in its current treatment of universities, and problems thereof, and contrast sharply with its treatment of e.g. NHS challenges. There is an inherent (and justified) assumption that those most impacted won’t be watching…

In Academic Markets Informa (owners of T&F/Routledge) report 'Underlying revenue growth of 13.7%, reflecting core like-for-like growth of 3-4%; Business is performing to plan and we continue to sign non-recurring licensing agreements with AI companies.' Still the most used book imprint for the REF.

Agreed 100%. I also do think that Hums and Lit people in particular always overestimate the levels of engagement of most soc sci academics with 'publishing' as a whole. Just not that interested, much of the time...

Well....it might. But you also have the massive collective action challenge of STEM v AHSS within institutions, and their often very differing schol comm needs. Don't count on library subscription savings from STEM being used in any way to support AHSS in 2025. No hard evidence from anywhere of this

This is a fundamental post on a fundamental topic. It’s always important to remember that UPs can differ in governance just as much as can universities themselves. But the nature of the good UPs can do remains elusive to (far) too many people within universities. Sadly.

You always have to remember that for the last two REF exercises more British AHSS scholars have published books with Routledge than with any other imprint. Routledge/Palgrave/Bloomsbury/OUP/CUP are still the Big Five of UK monographic outputs. The new UPs are absolutely tiny in comparison.

Much to ponder here but at the same time this is 100% the US academy perspective: from outside the US, the market and readership dynamics are very different. Fundamentally most US UP publishing is about readers in the US, and fundamentally most UK UP publishing isn’t about readers in the UK…

If I may say so, that's a really quotable quote. 'Transparency is often used in an Open Access context as a replacement for governance'. Discuss...

This is vvvv well worth reading (and not just on a wet Bank Holiday!). Super to have this level of critical engagement from a leading UK humanities scholar/funder…

Government response to the consultation on the UK’s future exhaustion of intellectual property rights regime

www.gov.uk/government/c...
Tldr The government has decided to maintain the current IP exhaustion regime...

Dr Carla Hayden was a truly great Librarian of Congress. It is an outrage that she has been sacked - a national shame on the United States. I had the pleasure of knowing her and working with her - she’ll continue to do good in the next phase of her career whatever that is.

A proud trio of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Booksellers Association (2016), ALPSP (2018) and, only last week, the IPG. Am a very lucky boy indeed, who has spent over 40 years working with some incredibly nice people in both publishing and the academy on something fundamentally v worthwhile.

Not quite sure why anybody is that surprised. NB the whole Plan S agenda was always a very specifically European political initiative, and you will recall when various senior EU officials called for the 'geo-blocking' of open research...

I think this has to be the most enticing historical invitation currently extant! Inverary is an extraordinary place…

In the context of reports on AHSS book manuscripts, of which I must have seen literally 1000s down the years, this sort of engagement isn’t (happily) so unusual.One problem with discussing ‘peer review’ is that people can have a very different sense of what the end-product should, ideally, look like

Naturally this has implications for the way in which a political philosopher should communicate his ideas. One of the unwelcome side effects of turning political philosophy into an academic discipline has been the rise of the journal article as the preferred means of expression. Everything about it is forbidding to the lay reader. It has a formal structure that seems designed to reassure her that there will be no surprising turns of argument. It lays out in advance the conclusion to which she will be marched. It plods dutifully through the large literature on the topic, as though to confirm that no original thought is going to be expressed. It is weighed down with footnotes—in the worst case almost every sentence has a Harvard-style reference at the end. Everything about it signals that it’s intended only for the initiated— those who’ve already mastered the fifty-five other articles it cites. In all these respects it contrasts with the essay as a form of writing designed to convey ideas to the reader in an enticing and imaginative way and with little use of formal apparatus. For several centuries before this one, the essay was the primary means of conveying political-philosophical ideas to what Hume in his essay on the subject called ‘the conversible World’. ( D. Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in D. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E. Miller (Liberty Press, 1985).

A footnote from David Miller, expressing highly recognisable reservations about the rise of the journal article.

RELX incl Elsevier reporting 'continued good underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth' at its AGM today. Shares up 20% from this time last year...

Publishing Pocock A brief summary of the experience of working with John Pocock as his publishing editor on a number of book projects, most notably Barbarism and Religion, Professor Pocock’s six-volume sequence on G...

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7KX44...

A little thing but mine own, on the singularly rewarding experience of working with John Pocock over a quarter of a century