A town meeting was held at the British Library to launch the call for The Academic Book of the Future. This call, in association with the British Library, relates to the AHRC's Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities Theme. The call’s aim is to explore the future of the academic book in the context of open access publishing and the digital revolution. A single consortium will be funded through this scheme, with total project costs up to a value of £450k FEC, with AHRC providing 80% of the costs, and lasting up to 24 months from October 2014.

1. Academic Book of the Future
Anne Jarvis
University Librarian
University of Cambridge

2. Changing research environment
• New technologies mean new opportunities for research –
new resources and new tools
• Better communication means more collaboration
globally
• Information and research move faster
• Disciplines are converging and new types of partnerships
are emerging
• Knowledge is becoming more open, including
publications
• In this complex and competitive environment the scale
and quality of the UK research remains very high

3. Crisis and ‘death’ of academic book?
• Or a case of evolving change for long-form scholarly
works?
• Challenges:
o Economic model of academic book publishing as we know it not
sustainable
o Scholars, especially in arts and humanities and social sciences,
continue to see book as a key output of their research, but it is
more difficult to publish via traditional routes
• Innovation and opportunities:
o Increasing use of digital technologies in the way research is done
and disseminated

4. Experimentation
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New role for book chapters?
Embedding of visual, audio and other formats?
Collaborating on book creation on-line?
Use of digital books? Data and text mining?
New relationships between electronic PhD theses
and book publication?
• Use of social media? Relationship between blogs
and traditional publications?

5. Communities at the crossroads
• Traditional roles in scholarly chain are changing:
o New roles for university presses and learned societies?
o Dynamic between publishers and technology companies?
o Discovery channels – Google and beyond?
• Skills:
o Understanding of innovative technologies for researchers
in all disciplines
o New skills and roles for research libraries
o Non-text formats and their use in research

6. Challenges for research libraries
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Collecting and connecting
Storing and preserving
Effective discovery
Improving access
Enabling new ways in which research can be used
and re-used
• Complexity of rights management
• Rising cost and changing economic models

7. Advisory Board and its function
• Representation of four key stakeholder
constituencies – research
community, librarians, funders and publisher
• An interest group of those who wish to develop
foresight for right long-term decisions
• Practical sounding board from different stakeholder
groups
• Advisory Board to be in place at the commencement
of research project

8. Complementary projects and developments
• HEFCE – work led by Professor Geoffrey Crossick
o Gathering evidence regarding challenges and opportunities for
open-access monograph publishing
• The Wellcome Trust
o Open Access mandate and policy for academic books
• Research Libraries UK
o Programme of work on ethical and effective publishing
• Publishers’ new initiatives and business models
• Complimentary research projects:
o The Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the
Creative Economy

9. Continuing research
Academic Book of the Future
• Looking at a wide scope of scholarly communications
• Considering changing processes for a complex and
dependent web of stakeholders – funders, research
libraries, publisher, researchers
• Exploring changes in research process – adoption of
technologies, behaviours of researchers
• Considering business models and key issues such as
copyright environment
• Thinking beyond current challenges