The Future of the Scholarly Book

This event is designed to discuss the challenges, issues and trends in the modern scholarly monograph – particularly in social sciences and humanities.

Sponsored by Springer Nature and organised by the ANU Library.

Scholarly monographs are in a period of considerable change. In recent years there has been a steady move to digital publishing of monographs, new models that support open access (such s Knowledge Unlatched and Book processing charges), opening up new audiences and impact metrics.

Open access is developing strongly – for example the ANU Press model (full open access) is being adopted around the world and in 2017 the ANU Press achieved around 2.5 million downloads of the over 700 titles.

Scholarly monographs remain an area of vital debate – what do PhD graduates expect for their career – is it the traditional book as their first research product? Are scholars using blog posts and new forms of communication to replace the tradition book? Is there a crisis in peer review? Is the metrics tide sweeping over the higher education sector relevant or distracting debate of scholarly communication?

Keynote presentations

The future production and consumption of the scholarly monograph: A view from the cornfields of Illinois (PDF, 3.7MB)

Professor Stephen Downie, Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences and the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center

Contemporary Authors, Publishers and Readers in a Time of Change: 
Findings from a national project into global disruption in book publishing and implications for scholarly publishing (PDF, 6MB)

Dr Jan Zwar, Faculty Research Manager, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University

Author Panel

Dr Christine Wallace
Visiting Fellow, ADB National Centre of Biography, Research School of Social Sciences

Prof Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Australian National University

Professor Frank Bongiorno
Associate Professor of History, Australian National University

A World View

The Future of Books, eBooks, and Book Reading (PDF, 1.8MB)

Niels Peter Thomas, Chief Book Strategist at Springer Nature

Emerging authors

Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller
Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Centre for Digital Humanities Research

Dr Kylie Brass
Director, Policy and Research, Australian Academy of the Humanities

Liam Gammon
Editor, New Mandala

Perspectives from the publishers and funders

Dr John Emerson
Publisher, University of Adelaide Press

Dr Nathan Hollier
Director, Monash University Publishing

Emily Hazlewood
Acting Manager, ANU Press

Susan Murray
Manager and Publisher, Sydney University Press

Andrew Stammer
Director of CSIRO Publishing

Justin Withers
Director, Research Policy and Integrity, Australian Research Council

Wrap up

Frank Vrancken Peeters
Springer Nature Chief Commercial Officer

Closing

Roxanne Missingham
ANU University Librarian

Event program (PDF, 8.4MB)

Thanks to our sponsor Springer Nature.

Image: Johan Larsson, The future of books