11 April 2025
Romy Beard, ChronosHub and co-Editor of UKSG eNews
People make UKSG
2025 marks my 20th anniversary of working in scholarly publishing. As I was travelling back home to Glasgow after this year’s UKSG conference in Brighton, I was reflecting on what a big part of my career the conference has played, and how my reasons for attending have changed over the years and the 13 events I have attended: from business meetings to professional development, and more and more: the people.
Over the years, my career has covered four slightly different angles. I started out in library sales, working with the Oxford University Press databases and the e-book aggregator platform ebrary, later acquired by ProQuest. I then moved into publisher relations, aggregating content from monograph publishers in the transition from print to e-books. My third phase was spent with the intermediary charity organisation EIFL in content licensing and negotiations between publishers and library consortia, which saw a transition for purely content focused discussions to the world of read & publish and other open access agreements. This again, led to my current role focused on open access and other workflow solutions with ChronosHub, where I now primarily work with publishers.
Business meetings
In my library sales role, attending UKSG was about meeting with libraries, library consortia and resellers to do business – product demos, plans for presentations, and discussing renewal deals. As a Luxembourg national and being multi-lingual, I have always covered territories outside of the UK. During my first two years with OUP there was no reason for me to attend the conference – despite living just down the road from Warwick at the time! – because it was labelled as “for UK libraries only” and thus limited to UK sales reps (and later those covering Scandinavia). 2007/2008 marked a definite shift, and with meetings with consortia in Belgium and Greece lined up, I was given the permission to attend. Over the years, I have seen more libraries and consortia from central, southern and Eastern European countries at the conference. US and this year even Canadian attendees have also increased over the recent years. Now, even for non-UK focused sales reps, UKSG has become a must, which is probably the reason why the number of publisher attendees has grown proportionally quicker over time.
The sessions
While business meetings have always remained of importance when it comes to justifying attendance to the conference, it quickly became a place for me to learn more about scholarly publishing. During my years as consultant for EIFL, which couldn’t always cover the attendance costs, I paid out of my own pocket as I considered it professional development. Attending the various plenaries and breakout session has helped me come up with new ideas, gather webinar speakers, and go back to my daily job with renewed enthusiasm and inspiration – regardless of the role I was in.
While working in e-book acquisition, although my role was focused on contracts with publishers, learning about how libraries used the products and understanding their needs and challenges with different business models (like PDA and perpetual access purchase, which sadly seem to be phasing out now!), was crucial, and something that really helped the discussions with publishers to convince them to allow libraries to use their content in a digital format. Similarly, with the advent of read & publish agreements and the more rapid transition to open access, attending sessions on how other consortia put together and analysed their deals helped me navigate my own tasks, and know what to ask for in negotiations. Some of these sessions did stick with me – just last week I was talking to someone about the 2022 session a “smooth transition model” presented by Nina Schönfelder and Anke de Looper from John Benjamins. With so much on offer in the conference programme, it’s impossible to attend every session, and each year I pick what is the most relevant to me, even if it is just a few sessions, and I always learn something useful.
Over the years, the program has definitely changed from sessions of primary interest to libraries, to content aimed at publishers, with many sessions having multi-stakeholder presenters. One example here is this years’ session “Bridge Over Troubled Water: Supporting Society Publishers in Turbulent Times” with Rob Johnson – I cannot imagine seeing this on the programme ten years ago. Similarly for Matt Kibble’s session on “End-to-end accessibility: joining the dots between publisher practice and user experience” -while focusing on what libraries should ask publishers to do this had a definite practical element for publishers themselves as well as other service providers. My favourite session of this year’s conference was “Shared responsibility (or failure)? Who should bear the burden of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record?”, a panel discussion moderated by Sara Rouhi. It was great to see a practical discussion involving different stakeholders, bringing the issue that is such a hot topic for publishers being discussed as part of a mixed stakeholder event, and bring up libraries’ and institutions’ roles in solving it.
The people
If you’d have to ask me today what the main reason is for attending the UKSG conference every year I would say: it’s the people. Dancing at the Gala Night surrounded by new and old connections – some that I have known for 20 years, others that I have just met that day – I understood that the people are what make UKSG what it is and make coming together in person every year such a success. It’s not just about doing business together and closing deals or learning from each other and having conversations in the hallways about the sessions we attended, but it’s also about meeting like-minded people, having a bit of fun, and making friends.
I don’t think there’s been a single other conference I’ve attended over the last 20 years where I have spent a good few hours on the dancefloor, creating memories that I know I won’t forget. As I think back to the 13 UKSG conferences I have attended, it’s always the Gala dinners that them memorable: the location, the theme (once we still have those – the green theme was a particularly interesting one!), the chat during the dinner and for how long and who I danced with. There was the “ruby anniversary” theme in the marquee in Harrogate, the drummers in the Merchant Square in Glasgow, and of course Telford’s best DJ at the conference venue.
And this is where things come full circle: the friendships formed on those dancefloors have never stayed just that. Instead, they have evolved over the years to discussions about industry issues, invitations to webinar talks, open doors for business opportunities, and even job offers. Those are the people I can call up and ask the awkward questions I might not put out in the open (they have seen me dance, and we’re still talking, so what is there to lose?), that have directed and shaped by career and opened doors for me. For me, UKSG is truly about the people that I call my industry friends. See you all in Glasgow next year – I can’t wait!