12 Months of SUP
2023 has been a busy one for the Scottish Universities Press! The year started with SUP launching an open call for book proposals and ends with six titles moving forward to publication. Thanks to our Management Board, Editorial Board, authors, staff at member HEIs, and fellow OA publishers and partners for their support this year! Below are some of the highlights from 2023.
January: In November 2022 SUP launched a time-limited call for monographs that were complete or near complete. The aim of this call was to source content that we could publish relatively quickly. The deadline was in January, and we received our very first book proposals!
February: This month saw the launch of our open call for book proposals, a major milestone for SUP. We talked to Times Higher Education about the SUP model and how we are aiming to provide a more cost-effective route to OA publishing, supporting researchers at our member institutions You can read the article here (registration required to access the article).
March: The first tranche of proposals progressed through the peer review process developed by the SUP Editorial Board. This was a chance to test out the policy in practice for the first time. Some questions were raised around theses and previously published content, allowing us to refine our policies in these areas. The SUP Peer Review Network also continues to grow, and we now have 123 members. Researchers can sign up to join here.
This month also saw the first meetings of the SUP Management Board working groups. These groups focus on key areas of development for the Press, including communications, training and development, and research and policy. They meet quarterly and work on specific projects in their area. In 2024 SUP will open participation in these groups to all library staff at member institutions.
April: Dominique Walker, SUP Publishing Officer, gave a lightning talk at UKSG 2023, introducing the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA). You can watch a recording here. OIPA is a new community of practice for not-for-profit OA publishing operations at UK HEIs, looking at sharing experiences, training opportunities, and advocacy and promotion for all of the amazing OA publishing done at institutions. The association opened for membership in the summer and now has 17 members. Dominique is acting as Secretary and Gillian Daly, SUP Press Manager, is co-vice chair of the interim committee. The website launched in October and the first OIPA meeting took place in November. We are very excited that OIPA has been selected as a UKSG 2023 Innovation Award Winner and will be hosting an in-person symposium on institutional open access publishing in 2024.
May: The SUP Editorial Board met in May and made decisions on the first proposals following peer review, with two accepted for publication. This marked the next step in the development of the Press as we moved towards contracting our first titles.
We also took part in the Library Publishing Forum, connecting with other library-led publishers from across the globe, and you can watch Dominique’s presentation here. SUP was added to the Library Publishing Directory, which is a great resource highlighting the publishing activity happening at libraries around the word.
June: SUP is managed through Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL). The 2023-25 SUP business proposal was approved at the SCURL AGM in June, securing funding for a Commissioning Editor role and scope to scale up operations through a content strategy review. At the SCURL annual conference we spoke to member libraries about SUP’s move from the start-up phase to scaling up in the second phase of the Press.
Work also continued on the SUP platform, which is hosted by the University of Edinburgh library through the Open Hosting SCURL Shared Service. You can read more about the development of the platform in a guest blog post for the Open Access Books Network. Thanks to the team in Edinburgh for their support with the platform this year!
July: We know that marketing is very important to authors and this month SUP developed a detailed marketing strategy. As a not-for-profit OA press, we have an opportunity to do things a bit differently, taking a library-led approach and using our position as a collaborative press. All members are committed to promoting SUP titles regardless of author affiliation and are looking at providing venues for book launches. We will focus on the discovery and impact of the research, ensuring that the title is reaching the right audiences. This month we also set up our LinkedIn page and will look at other relevant social media channels as part of our communications plan.
August: This month we focused on finalising our production workflows, including copyediting, typesetting, and metadata and cataloguing, ensuring everything is ready for our first titles in 2024. We have been working closely with our production partner to prepare our style templates.
SUP also travelled to the Hague to take part in the IFLA WLIC 2023 Satellite meeting: The Global Impact of Library Publishing, where we presented jointly with Rebecca Wojturska from Edinburgh Diamond on the growth of OA across Scotland, and the importance of collaboration. Gillian Daly also spoke at the UKSG Practical Routes to OA Monographs - Collaboration, Innovation and Support online seminar where she highlighted practical tips and lessons learnt that will be useful for other libraries considering setting up a press.
September: We attended our first academic conference, MeCCSA 2023, held at Glasgow Caledonian University. This was a roundtable event looking at the opportunities and challenges presented by the advent of open access publishing. We enjoyed hearing feedback from researchers, especially around the importance of supporting Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and the problems with funding they can face. We came away keen to explore this area and as a first step we held mentoring sessions for the two ECR members of the SUP Editorial Board, supporting them with the review process for book proposals.
October: Over the summer a governance work track looked at establishing SUP as a legal entity, and in early October SUP became a Community Interest Company (CIC). The CIC structure replicates the existing governance of the SUP Management Board, embedding the collaborative management of the Press in the ongoing operational structure. This also allowed us to issue the contracts for our first titles!
International Open Access Week fell in October, with the ideal theme of ‘Community over Commercialisation’, and SUP had quite a busy week:
We launched the SUP Advocacy Toolkit to encourage wider engagement with open access initiatives at Scottish HEIs.
We held a training webinar for all library staff at member HEIs, providing an in depth look at SUP processes.
Gillian Daly spoke at a Swiss OA event hosted by four Zurich based university libraries who are now looking to move forward with a similar model to SUP.
We even got a mention in the International OA Week highlights blog post!
November: Outreach at our institutions is a key activity for SUP and we are keen to engage with researchers. In November we travelled to UHI’s Inverness campus to discuss SUP with the UHI Humanities and Arts Research Cluster, along with two other university presses. This year we have also spoken to researchers and library staff at many other member institutions including University of Strathclyde, Glasgow School of Art, University of Dundee, University of St Andrews and University of Glasgow. SUP has now become business as usual at institutions when speaking to researchers about their OA publishing options.
December: The year ended with another major milestone, the delivery of our first manuscript. This has now been sent for a final round of peer review which is due early next year.
We were also invited to take part in a JISC webinar on How publishers can support authors with requirements for Open Access books. UKRI’s open access policy for longform publications comes in to effect from 1 January 2024. SUP is well placed to support authors with the new policy, with an easy compliant route to OA publication and low production charges well under the UKRI maximum funding level.
Looking forward to 2024
We have lots to look forward to in 2024, not least publishing our first books! We are currently formulating plans for our launch in the summer. We will also work on our content strategy review, looking at expanding to different content types such as textbooks and journals, and we are also considering expansion to authors at all UK HEIs. We expect a decision at the SCURL AGM in June 2024. A Commissioning Editor will also start in the new year to support SUP’s scaling up plans.
These are exciting times for SUP as we move from start-up to fully fledged publisher. We believe that the model we have created is delivering a much fairer and more sustainable publishing infrastructure for Scotland’s research community. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions.
We hope you all have a wonderful festive break!