Alphabet Soup: PD at TOC, AAUP, and SSP

The students of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have returned, and that can only mean one thing: summer has come to an end. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you look forward to winter (which I don’t) or if you had a bad summer (which I didn’t). I got to go home this summer to visit friends and family, got to go on a few trips, and got an iPhone, which may as well be surgically attached to my hand. In the midst of all that fun, I also had some great experiences that helped me to sink my teeth a little deeper into the world of scholarly publishing. When you move halfway across the country for a job and then that job provides you with wonderful professional development (PD) opportunities, that is a very good thing. In addition to the University of Illinois Press sending a number of people from our marketing and acquisitions department to Mini O’Reilly Tools of Change Chicago (TOC), many of us were also given the opportunity to attend the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), which, in case you don’t know, is like Mecca for university press folks.

As if those opportunities weren’t enough, I was also a recipient of an early-career professional travel grant from the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP). To understand the level of excitement that came with the news that I received the grant, you will also need to know that I had applied for an SSP annual meeting travel grant multiple times as a student. Finally, this summer, victory was mine! Attending the conference was a valuable experience: I was able to immerse myself in scholarly publishing dialogues that extended beyond university presses, I was a part of an incredible cohort of fellow grant recipients, and I was paired with a generous and kind mentor. The only thing we were asked for in return? We were asked to write a letter after the conference to discuss our experience and provide overall feedback. If you are curious to hear my expanded thoughts on the meeting, they are here for your reading pleasure.

I would like to start off by saying thank you to the Society for Scholarly Publishing for incorporating student and early career professional development grants into their yearly practice. The early career grant afforded me the opportunity to attend the conference, which I would have been unable to do otherwise, and I had a valuable, educational, and professionally fulfilling experience. I think the greatest benefit of the grant include the pairing with a mentor—my mentor, Alice Meadows, was very generous with her time and left such a positive impression that I would never hesitate to contact her in the future for mentoring and advice. The other great benefit of the grant is that the grant recipients functioned as a cohort throughout the meeting—this is an incredible bonus when you are attending a conference for the first time and you do not know anyone else. Dinner the first evening as a group was instrumental in forming ties, and it was wonderful to see familiar faces in the crowd as we attended meetings and events throughout the remainder of the meeting and discuss our thoughts and impressions of the sessions and our roles in publishing. I was even able to connect with one grant recipient and with the SSP President at AAUP in Chicago.

There were many ways in which my expectations of what I would learn at the SSP Annual Meeting differed from what I actually learned. In selecting the sessions to attend, it was obvious that the meeting was geared not only toward journals, but toward the sciences. I went into the meeting expecting to learn a great deal about journals; however, I was often surprised about how many of the topics discussed in relation to journals can be applied more broadly to scholarly publications overall—indeed, books can learn from the trials of journals in regard to open access, peer review, and using metrics. That being said, as a person who works in books in the humanities, I would have liked to see more panels on topics more related to my professional field. I was shocked to hear a gentleman in an elevator with an SSP name badge explain to a hotel guest that the meeting was about science journals—scholarly publishing is much broader than that! 

For me, a devoted reader of the Scholarly Kitchen blog, the absolute pinnacle of the meeting was meeting Kent Anderson. I got to shake the hand of the editor-in-chief of one of the best sources for scholarly news and discussion! Other highlights included the panels themselves. The session on libraries as publishers was interesting and made me think about how the University of Illinois Press can form a stronger relationship with the University of Illinois Library and perhaps utilize the strengths of the library in our projects, especially where ancillary content is involved. Perhaps the most exciting session was Publishers! What Are They Good For? This session made clear the conflict between the traditional ways of publishing and new theories and practices about activities like peer review. David Crotty of OUP and Jason Priem engaged in a lively debate about the interpretation and use of metrics in peer review. From this panel, I took away a sense that the future of publishing would never be traditional practices traded in for new technologies, but instead the future of publishing and peer review will pick methods that can enhance our foundational procedures and move them forward to be more efficient and useful to bettering scholarship. Another highlight was Making eBooks Easier. As a reader of electronic books, and as a person at a press who is moving into the ebook world, I thought this panel was fascinating, especially in how it drew attention to the benefits of having a universal but modular platform that would set standards and provide consistency for ebooks. 

As I returned to work after the meeting, I realized I was energized and full of ideas that I had been exposed to at the meeting. I was able to report to my department about the things I had learned, and although it has not led to the implementation of big ideas or changes (yet), I was able to take away from the meeting a more well-rounded view of how my sector within scholarly publishing can be more innovative, more adaptable, and to steal from the conference theme, be more social, mobile, agile, and global in how we approach some projects. In terms of professional development, I think one of the most important things I gained from the conference was the confidence to approach and engage in conversation with people in the publishing industry. As someone relatively new to the industry, this conference provided an ideal opportunity to mingle, network, connect, and trade stories about how other people do their jobs. 

So, what am I going to do next? I'm going to get back to reading some books!