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Tim Cross Hosts 2017 SSP Webinar Series

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Tim Cross, Westchester Publishing Services’ Business Development Manager, is the host of Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) 2017 webinar program. The first webinar in the six session schedule “Hiring the Next Generation of Publishing Professionals”, takes place Tuesday, March 14, at 11 am EST.

Moderated by Jessica Loayza, Web Publications Coordinator from the Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the webinar is geared toward early career professionals interested in identifying the skills that will serve them in their growing careers, and the managers who look to support the professional development of their young employees.

Speakers on the panel are Meredith Adinolfi (Director of Production, Cell Press), Jeff Lewandowski (Senior Publisher, IOP Publishing), and John Rodzvilla (Graduate Program Director, Masters program in Publishing and Writing, Emerson College). As hiring managers and publishing program directors, they will discuss how they make hiring decisions, encourage and influence early career professionals, and how to make more diverse and inclusive hires.

You can learn more about SSP’s webinar program here.

To learn more about the editorial and composition services Westchester Publishing Services provides to the academic and scholarly publishing community, click here, or Contact Us.

By Guest Blogger Nicole Tomassi

…From the faraway town of Danbury, Connecticut, Westchester Publishing Services will attend London Book Fair, taking place March 14-16 across the pond at the Olympia Exhibition Centre.

The London Book Fair has been around nearly as long as Westchester Publishing Services, arriving on the scene when we were still in short pants.  Similar to Westchester’s trajectory, London Book Fair has grown each year in size and importance, attracting the interest of publishers large and small across the globe.  We are excited to have the ability to meet with publishers who come from around the world to attend so we can showcase the editorial and composition services we provide to accommodate their publication programs.

If you’re attending London Book Fair, we will be at Booth 7K38, so click here to make an appointment to meet with our resident Anglophile and Director of Business Development, Tyler Carey to learn more about why many of the world’s most recognized publishers have Westchester Publishing Services as their editorial and composition provider of choice. And pssst, Tyler’s a pretty decent gent so if you play your cards right, he might give you a tip on which rugby team he’s rooting for!

If you’re remaining state-side (I understand, I wasn’t able to finagle a ticket myself), be sure to follow along with us on Twitter where updates will be regularly posted throughout each day of the show.

Cheerio!

Tyler in a Pink Chevy

Last week, I returned from the U.S. Publishing Mission to Cuba.  I was invited by the organizing committee (which included staff from Publishers Weekly and Combined Book Exhibit) to participate in a panel on the state of digital publishing trends in the U.S.  Scheduled to coincide with the Havana Book Fair, the Mission included panels hosted by U.S. and U.K. publishing professionals as well as our Cuban counterparts.  The goal of the visit, which included 30 publishing professionals from the U.S., U.K., Colombia, and Ecuador, was to share our experiences in different areas of publishing, including rights, digital production, operations, and distribution. The Book Institute of Cuba organized the presence of Cuban publishing professionals who provided a counterpoint by exploring the opportunities and challenges present in their industry, which is a combination of independent publishing houses and state run publishing operations.

As the only participating editorial/composition vendor from the United States, I was able to cover the trends of declining e-pub sales and increasing print sales in the trade market, the need for digital as a product in the academic and scholarly markets, as well as the myriad options for pre-editing content, final digital assets, online distribution, and more. My counterparts in the Cuban publishing industry provided glimpses into their own digital ecosystem, including one particularly inspiring platform – Claustrofobias. Claustrofobias is a digital platform for promoting books to readers in the Cuban market using websites and social media.  What really made the platform sing for me was that they embraced the fact that many readers in Cuba may not have consistent access – or access at all – to the internet, and engineered a way around that.  When they record a YouTube video about a book, they also take the audio of that recording and broadcast it via radio so readers without internet access can still avail themselves of Claustrofobias’ content.  Genius!

Sometime later this Spring I’ll post in this blog a condensed version of the presentation I made during the Mission which you will be able to download. Until then, you can learn more about the U.S. Publishing Mission to Cuba and its attendees in this Publishers Weekly article, as well as read about the censorship challenges which affected one Cuban author exhibiting with my traveling companions in this article. 

Cuba is an amazing country, and as the historic tensions between the U.S. and Cuba thaw, I hope you too will have a chance to visit and experience the island and its wonderful citizens.  After all, there are few places on earth where in one day you can meander through an abandoned Spanish fortress filled with publishers and 1 million attendees at the Havana Book Fair, tour a library containing the writings of José Martí, and cap off the day by taking a ride in a 1957 Chevy and seeing Hemingway’s typewriter in person at his estate.  (Pictured below.)

Today, Westchester Publishing Services is excited to share with you an update about the progress of our Client Portal initiative, along with a video demonstrating some of its expanded capabilities!

If you’re not familiar with our Client Portal, it is a tool built to allow our clients the ability to track the progress of projects they have submitted to us for editorial and production services. Our primary goal is to make the Client Portal an intuitive, easy to use tool for providing you with transparency and access into your projects at each stage while your project is at Westchester. The Client Portal is cloud-based, giving you accessibility to current information whenever you need it. Best of all, the Client Portal is a complimentary, value-added amenity to the great service you rely on from the Westchester staff who work on your projects.

We worked closely with our development team to build a system that met our clients’ needs, arriving at the prototype which many Westchester clients and prospects evaluated in late 2016. The developers have incorporated the valuable feedback we received from these evaluations, and today we are pleased to show you the updated “alpha” version of the Client Portal.

With the Client Portal, you will always know exactly where a project is in process, be able to evaluate any queries or issues with assets, easily upload and download files, and have a greater level of insight into the status of your projects with authors, our staff, and your partners. Click here to see a YouTube video demonstrating some features included in the latest version of the Client Portal.

We will continue to share additional updates with you about the full version of the Portal as early adopters go live and we prepare for a wider roll-out to our client base over the next few quarters.

Want to learn more about how the Client Portal can give you better visibility of your projects? Contact us for more information!

By Guest Blogger Tim Cross

I just returned from the PSP Conference in Washington, DC a couple of days ago. As someone who is continuously curious about the issues facing my colleagues and friends, I found it a good learning experience. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from the conference.

“Is There Life After Journals?”- This was a provocative keynote topic which stimulated good discussion. The consensus was that journals will continue to be central to scholarly communication and the research lifecycle, as they serve communities while providing necessary content filtering and validity through peer review and journal brand.

“Scholarly Collaboration Networks” – Starting with the premise, that sharing is not new or radical – it’s been at the heart of scientific research for 400 years – the idea was posited that it’s in the interest of publishers to find ways to work with the SCN movement as it moves from a broad set of principles to technical “nuts and bolts.” But some publishers in the audience wondered how  the community can embrace the spirit of this without threatening the very means by which we review, edit, and produce the content to be shared.

“Lessons from Subscriptions Trends” – One opinion on the panel was that hybrid Open Access (OA) journals are not the right choice for publishers and Gold OA is not a permanent solution. In answer to an audience question about how many subscription journals have actually flipped to OA, the idea of the “Goldilocks zone” was explained. A good candidate in the zone for flipping is a journal with:

  • High Impact Factor
  • Low or stagnant revenue
  • Lots of submissions

“Dueling Data Repositories” – Data sharing is needed to promote reproducibility and advance research by building on or analyzing existing data. What are the current issues?

  • Managing research output
  • Preparing to share
  • Meeting expectations for funders, institutions, and publishers
  • Submitting to repositories
    • Mandate alignment
    • Domain appropriateness
    • Capacity and functionality
    • Stability and permanence
  • Tracking

“Pirated Content – Why do they go there?” – Who are “they” is a topic in itself. This session was an exploration of why researchers use illegal sites and what the impact of this could be on scholarly research. It’s not just disadvantaged researchers in underfunded regions who have difficulty getting access to content, but also researchers who are frustrated with the inefficiencies of accessing content at their own institutions. There was also an interesting discussion on the moral challenge of digital piracy:

  • Conflicting worldviews
  • Making knowledge more accessible is a global good
  • We have to balance human rights with intellectual property rights

The conference was a great opportunity to see my colleagues and customers, and I hope to see you at an upcoming conference. Please visit the Westchester conference calendar blog post, and contact us if you would like to schedule time to talk at a conference or via phone.