Earlier this week we ran the CAUL Publishing-X event at UTS. This is the first time that a number of Australian university library scholarly publishers have combined to run a self-help event like this. As well as library publishers from Adelaide, ANU, Monash, Sydney and UTS universities, we had other participants who generously came to speak and share knowledge from PKP, W3C, tekReader and SOS print+media.

We will be progressively uploading the presentations given to the event’s github site (linked above).

Here’s my summary of the two days:

We heard about what each of the presses do and how they do it. There are several very different approaches but also some similarities and common challenges. I think we established at a working level that there is much valuable experience and wisdom that can and should be shared. How do we best do that now?

We had several updates and technical workshop demonstrations from the likes of PKP, Sydney University Press (re IGP) and from the tekReader folks. UTS ePRESS staff provided a revealing review of the process of accreditation (with COPE, DOAJ and OASPA) covering the basics and benefits of this. 

There were two important and revealing environmental scans/updates: on developments in Open Access (from Scott Abbott) and future trends and issues in content technologies, web development & apps and portable web publishing technology from David Wood representing W3C. 

We were appraised on some very realistic solutions to common issues by the people from eGloo and SOS. And we heard and saw some very inspiring things from Fiona Salisbury of La Trobe University re OER publications and from Michael Schultz (SOS) and Zoë Sadokierski (UTS) re the new capabilities of digital printing and print-on-demand services. These presentations were all impressive and should result in all of us doing better things with online and open access scholarly publishing. 

Hopefully there was something for everyone and I was really happy with the voluntary input from our relatively small community of scholarly publishers and our partners.