Well, here in the UK at least it feels as though our very short-lived summer is over, and the weather has taken a distinctly autumnal turn – and that is before most of us even manage to have our traditional summer break! But fear not, we may already be into the second half of the calendar year (and closer to Christmas 2024 that we are to Christmas 2023), but Insights is always by your side bringing you the very best articles to inform, educate and stimulate!
As ever, your editorial board, authors and reviewers have been busy behind the scenes ensuring a steady supply of informative and interesting features.
Over recent weeks we have been delighted to publish wide-ranging articles examining facets of the scholarly communications environment. Pasipanodya Ian Machingura Ruredzo and colleagues investigated the challenges (and potential solutions) being faced in supporting open publishing of public health research in Africa, while Christina Dinh Nguyen presented a thought-provoking (and somewhat worrying) perspective on the vulnerability of digital cultural heritage during times of conflict in her article, Digital cultural heritage in the crossfire of conflict : cyber threats and cybersecurity perspectives – highlighting this growing challenge in an increasingly unstable and volatile world!
At a practical level, Deni Auclair et al. explored the challenges and roadblocks to creating and utilising robust metadata throughout the scholarly communications industry. Beth Montague-Hellen challenged us to think more creatively about how we engage with and harness artificial intelligence (AI) in her article, Empowering knowledge through AI: open scholarship proactively supporting well trained generative AI.
And, very recently, we have been pleased to publish Curtis Brundy and Joel B. Thornton’s article, The paper mill crisis is a five-alarm fire for science: what can librarians do about it?, which is already garnering a lot of interest, including mention in the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) members-only newsletter, Re:Member
Our final article before we take our customary summer break from publishing was Matt Kibble’s article, In the realm of the databases: how academic users navigate the e-resourciverse, which builds on a presentation given at the 2023 UKSG Forum and presents a UX-informed insight into how users navigate search engines, discovery, VLEs and e-book platforms.
Once you’ve finished that, you’ll be able to return to your regular beach reads or poolside pot-boilers as we take our annual summer recess, before we return in the early autumn.
But it would be remiss of us to proceed any further without stopping to voice our profound thanks to our guest editors, Iryna Kuchma and Hellen Ndegwa, who worked tirelessly to curate our third thematic Insights special collection, Repositories transforming scholarly communication, which brings together many of the articles on repositories that we have published in Insights over recent years. They were also kind enough to author an introductory essay, entitled Repositories transforming scholarly communication: an Insights special collection.
‘So…’, we hear you say in frenzied excitement, ‘what have we got to look forward to over the next few months?’
When we return in the autumn, we’re looking forward to bringing you a host of fascinating articles which will delve into various corners of the scholarly communications world – including Sabina Alam on research integrity and the role of publishers, Tasha Mellins-Cohen on open access business models, Tom Grady et al. on the challenges of sustainable funding for open access, Rob Johnson and Elle Malcolmson on the changing landscape of learned society publishing, and a much-anticipated return to the world of transitional agreements in Austria with Rita Pinhasi.
As an editorial board, we continue to be amazed at the amount of creativity, innovation and invention across the sector, and we love championing that endeavour by inviting you to write and publish articles on your projects in Insights – sometimes it is even nice to stir up a bit of debate and controversy because, as we all know, out of healthy debate comes innovation and change!
So, have you got something that you want to share with the world? A new product? A new way of doing something old? A new business model that challenges current practice? If so, think about writing an article for publication in Insights.
Please send your article suggestions to: insights@uksg.org