 Before we begin and before I introduce our provocateurs, I thought I'd just say few words just to introduce the session, and to give a bit of the background and the point of departure for our provocateurs. I thought what I'd do, actually, is I went back to a proposal for this session and I thought I'd read a short section of that out just to give that background. As I said, the session is called The New Normal, reimagining the Library for Open Access Books. worthless and icariaw's policy mandating open access for books will begin on January the 21st, January the 1st 2024one. Mae gennym yr adegon dirodd yn caswch rhyw clywbodaeth hynny o'r cyd-comingio cyd-dwienf Dodd Slyiriad. Dwi'n credu i chi fel ei ei gwybod a'r cyd- culoedd yn gwahanol o'r cyd-ingor. Mewn gwahanol yn 2023 o'r llyfrgell yn ei cyfr-dweithio â'r cyd-dwyf yn llefnio'n cyd-dwyf yn ei cyfr-dweithio. Mae'r cyd-dwyf wedi'n rhoi'n cyfr-dweithio â'r cyd-dwyf yn llynllwyddoedd a'r cyd-dwyf yn meddwl â'r cyd-dwyf. The Palomera project has also just begun, which is a European-funded project dedicated to establishing why more open access policies don't currently include books and providing actionable recommendations so that they can do so. Now is the time to decide how the sector will meet the challenges of implementing these policies. If libraries no longer pay to provide direct access to content, what is their role in academic book publishing? Will libraries switch to helping authors pay to publish, bundling funds towards opaque and poorly justified book processing charges and transformative agreements, or is it possible to more radically reimagine the role of the library in an open world? How might libraries wrestle ownership of the conversation from the big publishers and, as experts in information sharing, help to shape a better scholarly publishing future? So now I'll ask our provocateurs to turn on their cameras and I will introduce them. So speaking to you today, we have Demi Vereca, who's associate professor at KU11 and head of KU11 Libraries Artist. He's responsible for library services and collections for the arts and humanities. We have Anna Clements, who is director of library services and university librarian at the University of Sheffield. Nick Plant is professor and deputy vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Leeds. And Eileen Frydenbergjoy is director of Punkton Books, which is an independent queer and scholar-led community formed and peer-reviewed diamond publisher of open access books, fostering spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion. So without further ado, I will hand over to Demi to begin the provocations. Thanks Demi. Many thanks. The role that we as panelists are expected to play is that of provocateur. And yet I am afraid that I do not consider what I'm about to say as provocative at all, quite the opposite actually. I consider my point to be remarkably conservative because I'm just asking librarians to keep doing what they have been doing for generations. Research librarians are and have, at least during the last past couple of decades, always been in the business of opening up access to scholarly communication. At first sight, it seems like a ridiculous thing to ask of librarians to keep fulfilling this traditional role of opening up access to scholarly communication in an open access context. Why would librarians need to worry about arranging access to scholarly literature when this literature is openly available? And still I believe this traditional role has at least two important aspects in an open access world as well. The first is the shift from a focus on the reader to a focus on the author because if the essence is to enable access and if this in an open access world means access to scholarly communication for both the reader and the author, then librarians should pay attention to both parties involved. Librarians are traditionally and rightfully seen as experts in scholarly publishing. In the past, this was focused on bringing publications to readers based on an understanding of the market for scholarly communication and an understanding of the local reading public. Nowadays, I believe they should take the form of bringing authors to publishers based on an equally thorough understanding of the market and the research community. Librarians should therefore know a thing or two about the real cost of publishing, various business models for open access, the underlying infrastructure, copyright issues, and the implications of these for who has control over scholarly communication and so forth. And they should see it as an integral part of their service to their local research community to provide expert and objective advice to authors looking for publisher for, for instance, their next book. Another way librarians have taken up the task of opening up access to scholarly literature is by building catalogs. Until about a decade ago, most catalogs had a clear role, namely to provide information about what publications a student or staff member of a particular institution had access to and how they could get access, either by providing details about the location of a physical copy or by providing a link to the electronic version. But what is the role of catalogs in an open access world? If it only lists what a library is paying for, then it is no longer doing its job, since students and staff members actually have access to a whole lot more than what is in the catalogue, namely all open access publications as well. If on the other hand, the catalogue lists everything that students and staff members have access to, then it becomes massive because it should incorporate all open access materials as well. And it therefore also becomes useless in a sense, because the catalogue of, let's say, Leuven would not be that different from the catalogue of, let's say, Sheffield. So why would we spend any time and energy keeping separate catalogs? Of course, if you rethink the catalogue as a curatorial instrument listing publications which librarians have selected as particularly relevant for a specific research community, regardless whether these are publications behind a paywall or not, then they still might make sense. Or maybe we need to think further and conclude that managing a catalogue is no longer the way to fulfil the traditional curatorial role of the library. I would like to conclude with a question, and my question is this. Have list programmes and libraries sufficiently changed to ensure that the traditional role of the library to open up access to scholarly communication can be continued? Are we, for instance, training the new generation of librarians to focus on authors as well as on readers? Do they learn about business models for open access, about the underlying infrastructure for scholarly communication, about copyright issues? Do we train them to develop a nuanced understanding of ownership in a digital context and how the shift from paper libraries to virtual libraries has also created a shift in the power balance in the scholarly communication ecosystem? Can we, in other words, continue to count on librarians as experts in scholarly communication? And what about our current academic libraries? Have practices, for instance, in the catalogue department changed sufficiently? Are we providing some marginal support rather than change the core of what we do? A simple example of why I worry about this is a creation of separate scholarly communication units and those specific positions for open access libraries. I believe that this was very welcome at the beginning of the change because you needed experts who could focus on these topics and support other colleagues in the library to make the transition. But these separate positions, in my opinion, are rapidly becoming obsolete if not only more than half of academic journal articles are published in open access, but also monographs are published openly more and more. Each and every library dealing with present-day materials should therefore also be an open access library. Just like dealing with open access materials should be business as usual for acquisition and cataloging departments. Just like collections and scholarly communication should not be treated as two different tasks of the library or are actually one and the same thing. So in conclusion and in my opinion, this programmes and research libraries need to adapt. Not in a margin, but in the core of what they do. If we expect librarians to continue fulfilling their traditional role of opening up access to scholarly literature. Thank you. Thanks Demi and I will hand over to Anna. Many thanks Lucy and many thanks Demi and I'm really following on from that. So what I'm going to be speaking about and perhaps challenging you is about the power of academic libraries, so RULK and beyond the power that we have to facilitate scholarly communications transformation and by power I'm talking both financially and also as leaders and influencers within our institutions. So I'll start by talking a bit about the journal situation, although obviously this session is more about the monograph, but I think there are some parallels there that perhaps we don't want to repeat on the monograph side. So first for the finance and this I'm going to talk about some figures, but this comes with a huge disclaimer. It's a very back of the envelope calculation, and I'm sure we have better figures from places like Giscord and so on. But looking at sconal stats, I would suggest that the average content budget across the RULK libraries is probably between four and five million. Some are much higher of course and some will be lower. So if you look at that across all the members excluding the National Libraries and Welcome and Specialist Libraries, so I make that 36 libraries, so we have between 144 and 180 million we spend on content. I think that's probably a conservative estimate. As it happened, I did, I was playing around with chat GPT, so I did ask chat GPT what the budget or what the library, what libraries in the UK spent on content, and it was very, very interesting actually. So it was very well formulated. The amounts spent by UK University Libraries on resources can vary widely depending on the size of the institution, the disciplines it supports and the needs of its users. However, according to the 2020 slash 2021 annual library statistics published by the by the Higher Education Statistics Agency HESA, UK University Libraries spent a total of 653 million on information resources during the academic year 2019-2020. Now it goes even further and says the breakdown of its spending was as follows. Electronic information resources 440 million, that's 67% of the total spending, printed 81 million, 12% and other information resources, including AV, microfilm, et cetera, 132 million. Now, interestingly, now I have obviously those figures are probably a little bit inflated and I'm also questioning whether HESA actually just have an annual library statistics report. So there are some questions about that, but I think it can be said that the figures are enormous. And I think if we are looking at where we within our library budgets, where we put that money at the moment, I would hazard a guess, well not really a guess actually, I would assume that all of us in who are library directors will be spending at least 50% of this on the big commercial publishers in big deals, some of us much more than that. And we of course know all about the high published profit margins of these publishers between 25, 35% et cetera. So you can calculate how much of that money is going straight into shareholder pockets. Now I'm not going to sit up here and blame the publishers, although scientific publishers, those commercial publishers because they are commercial bodies. And as such, their main priority is to maximise profit quite rightly. The problem is of course when it comes up against the priorities of universities, university libraries, the academic endeavour, those priorities are totally misaligned, I would argue. And obviously that's not to decryde the work that's been going on in the UK, switching to read and publish deals in the transformation to open access, because this does at least open up our research outputs to a wide audience. But of course it may be why allowing us to share our outputs more widely and freely, but it's not so good for sustainability and equity if we consider that the cost is prohibitive to those libraries, institutions and countries who are less wealthy than our own. So we ourselves, I would argue, are still propping up these big publishers with these wide-watering profits by effectively switching what we used to pay to read to pay to publish. And we know that the business model that these publishers are talking about with their shareholders and their prospective shareholders as continuing to pull them those profits year on year. And I suppose the argument is, or the suggestion is, and I think this was covered a little bit by Lucy in an introduction, are we going to replicate that same type of model with book processing charges in the open access monograph world? So enough about finances for now, I'm going to talk a little bit about our collective power in terms of leadership and the opportunity I would argue that we have with our institutions at this point in time. And we obviously all, I'm sure, are involved to a greater or lesser extent in the high profile negotiations with publishers, so with Elsevier last year with Spring and Nature ongoing at the moment. And obviously the outrage expressed by many of our academics and our senior leaders at the nine and a half thousand euro APC to publish one article in Nature. So these agendas are raging quite high in the priorities of our senior leaders at the moment. So I think it's an excellent opportunity for us to continue to engage with them. And I think also to be a little bit more robust in how we work with our academics. And it goes back to what Demi was saying, explaining to them the business models so that they are aware of all the facts. And of course much of this is being driven by funder requirements, but I would I do think a key thing is that we do have to be engaging with our researchers so that they can understand the choices that they make as well are really important for what the future might be. So I suppose my challenge perhaps or my provocation to the people and particularly the library directors and senior leaders in the room today is do we seize this opportunity and develop our engagement and influence further, both collectively, whether that's through RLUK through NA through international partnerships and within the institution of course, or do we I would say get back in our bunkers and continue blaming the publishers, blaming the research reward system, which is about prestige publishing rather than dissemination or knowledge. So we know that the demand for open access monograph publishing is going to increase for the reasons that Lucy stated at the start. So I think there is this question that I would put to you in the room as to what we can do about it to ensure that we don't go down that same rabbit hole as we have with articles. And let's face it, it is still where you publish that matters, not what you publish. And I think we have an opportunity to change that. And that's the end of my provocation. Thanks Anna. Nick, would you like to go next? Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, my fellow panel members. So I'm going to come at this from a slightly different angle. I'm sitting here as a senior university leader, but also as a practicing academic researcher. And the first thing I'm going to do is actually build on a lot of what Anna mentioned, and that's open access for journal articles. I couldn't agree more with Anna, and I'm sure everybody in the virtual room agrees. We have the scars from that transition. We are still being tested by it. And I think it's fair to say we still have huge residual unconscious and sometimes very much as bias that focuses on the journal and not on the article. We do have to learn from that when we come to look at the transition around the long form manuscript. We have to think about how we can make this transition in a way that puts the work at the centre rather than the conversations around the finance or the conversations around what should be published where. So my first area that I'd like to talk about really is how do we better reward and recognise working in an open manner. So my personal belief is that one of the problems that we had when it came to talking around short form outputs was we spent far too much time telling rather than listening and discussing. The biggest drivers were because we had things like the REF that forced us to report what our percentage of open access publications were. We had funders who were stipulating it. We had financial battles with publishers because of that. And all that did for an academic was make them feel embattled. They were being told what to do. And as an academic I've been saying we don't like being told what to do. We like to make our own mind up. This is why we became academics. So we have to learn from that experience and not fall into the same traps when it comes to the long form. And I think as a group, our own UK will play a really important part in being proactive and addressing this challenge. So I'm going to give two short suggestions where I think we can make some ground. So the first one is the institutional argument. I have to consider how do we better reward staff who publish an open way. That can be, we could use performance related pay type mechanisms. It could be the way I talk about our awards we give out or our promotion criteria. It could just be recognition actually going out there and putting articles about deliberately about open work rather than work that is pay to view. But I also think one of the key things that we as institutions have to do is support open publishing actively. So across the white rows consortium Yorkshire, Yorkshire, Fildon Leeds, we have White Rows University Press and that's an incredibly important vehicle for showing our absolute commitment to open access publishing for the long form. I think it's also important we've done things like last year as part of White Rows University Press. We ran an early career competition where we gave students coming to the end of their PhDs the opportunity to publish their work in an open fashion. If it was good enough it went through a full pair of viewers normal but it immediately put them into a frame of mind where they saw open access publishing as the way to go. I'd also like to sort of touch on the individual argument. So my challenge to researchers would be why do we undertake research? Is it for our vanity? Is it to get promoted? Is it so that it can be read by the three fellow scholars around the world that are interested in what I have to say? Or is it because we believe that we can honestly contribute to important conversations? I think it's the latter. I think if you ask academics, they want to make a difference. We want to create new knowledge and we want to share it. The only way to share knowledge equitably is through open access. So as part of the University of Leeds we've recently launched the Knowledge Equity Network which is a global network that is set up specifically to look how you remove financial, geopolitical, social economic barriers so that knowledge in all its forms can get to the individuals who need to use that knowledge rather than be hidden and only be seen by the fear. The second provocation I'd like to make is around digital. So if we talk about open access publishing we invariably mean digital as at least a component and I think we have to really grasp the net on this and make the most of it. We can't just turn a book from printed form into a digital form and think that's good enough now. We have to take this opportunity to make them more interactive. We should be thinking about how we embed links, how we use augmented reality and virtual reality, how we take the tools that are now available to us to make a digital open book a genuinely embracing experience that everybody wants to look at. I'd also argue if we're talking about digital could we be talking just about monographs? I'm pretty certain every university here has wonderful collections that we both curate and that we create ourselves whether that be our design creations, our dance movements, etc. As we digitise these we must also make sure that they have open access so that everybody can see them. Finally, having talked about open access I think there is one final challenge that I would set group which is that digital access brings the challenge of digital poverty. So I have a 13 year old son who spent a lot of the last few years being schooled at home due to lockdown and I remember sitting watching him in his virtual classroom doing some work and you could see his fellow students using different things. Alex has a lovely computer to work from, some were using tablets, some were having them on phones and I remember at one point where the teacher went right now we're going to do something on excel and you could you see anybody with a phone was like oh I can't do this. Suddenly we had people who were excluded from learning because they didn't have the materials to do it. That sort of digital poverty it is not something as a sector that we can solve but if we genuinely believe that open access to the knowledge we create is important and that digital is one way of creating that open access I think we have to acknowledge that challenge and I think we have to think about where we can mitigate where it is possible. So as a final provocation I'm not asking you to change the world but just a small deed to that challenge will be greatly welcomed. Thank you very much. Thanks Nick and finally Eileen. My provocation I'll begin with this is that the cost of making monographs at most and almost all university presses is cost inefficient and those inefficiencies are passed on to libraries more and more as experimental pilots around open manographs in the US at least are failures specifically because the cost point the I should say the product yeah the cost point is simply too high. I'm going to give some examples from the US and talk a little bit about why their process is inefficient and how passing that cost on to libraries is neither sustainable nor equitable and I just want to also start with a little provocation related to that. I am friends and have been for a while with people who work for commercial publishers including Paul Grave, Cambridge University Press and as far as I'm concerned CUP is like a commercial publisher and Bloomsbury and I have one friend that's worked at all those places she's now head of open books at Bloomsbury we were talking about the subject of cost efficiencies and she said the cost efficiencies at an academic commercial press are lower than any other university press now why does a university press book in the US and even in the UK charged at 15,000 pounds dollars what have you commercial presses need 15,000 pounds to publish an open book but they don't pass cost inefficiency on to readers libraries etc and the reason their books cost as much as what a university press charges on average for an open book is because they have to capture their future profits we all hate them but nevertheless they're not passing let me put it this way they have to make future profits if they make an open book they can't just say we broke even because they actually depend on profits whereas a university press says we just need to break even in some ways I think university presses are stupid in this way because they're always hemorrhaging money their institutional subsidies are shrinking the way monographs are sold means less of them are going to libraries libraries are purchasing less books because of the cereals crisis and so on and so forth I don't think these inefficient cost structures should be passed on to libraries also although we have alternative models which I will mention at the end okay I can't remember that point inefficient cost structures passed on to libraries oh and in the US because the pilot projects have kind of failed and they were cost sharing projects sharing the cost between the author the institution the library and the press um and because this hasn't worked now the university presses involved in these pilot projects are moving to a completely 100 library funded model so now the burden is completely on the libraries and they are helping to support and make open books that cost too much if you ask a university press about reducing costs they say it's impossible and those costs will probably go up they want to pass all of that on to libraries and if you say seriously you need to have productions and cost they will say to me well what do you want us to do fire people yeah actually I do why would I say such a horrible thing because most university presses spend an inordinate amount of money on acquisitions which they don't need to spend and they spend an inordinate inordinate amount of money on marketing which they don't need to spend okay one of the pilot projects in the US that was a failure by their own admission and inequitable by their own admission decided that they would have open monographs but they don't want to charge authors fees um which all pilot projects we've done in the US start with the premise no author fees and the cost of making the book will be shared between libraries academic units or departments and whatever they can scrape together afterwards on their own which I assume includes university subsidies and print sales etc. Cords and open monograph ecosystem was a really important pilot project that involved a multiplicity of presses and whose cost point was $15,000 shared between these entities first of all academic administration and the US could basically care less about open books so trying to get institutional support matched with library support and the press's own ability to have income based on print sales etc is not a very good combination because again academic administrators mainly don't care about open access with very few exceptions like MIT Press and University of Michigan Press where books cost a lot and they claim they can't reduce those costs so in the tone project cost sharing library academic administration and the press academic administration you can hardly get that they managed to get it at a handful a little bit more than a handful of various universities all privileged all universities with a lot of money that money was distributed to library administrators who paid $45,000 a year to have three books published by their own faculty and no one else who had to compete with each other to be able to publish an open book I think if you just think about that a little bit you'll understand that that is not sustainable and it is inequitable and it's premised on the idea that academic administrators will actually help support this which they won't and earlier pilot which actually became kind of successful in the case that it's still going was University of California Press's luminose program they said the cost would be shared between the author so it's partly a BPC model but with less of a price tag academic administrators sorry for laughing about this in the humanities you know they will not support this primarily so libraries the press academic administrators and the author would share the cost now I was at a presentation by Allison Muddit who was head of UC Press at that time explaining the luminose program and I said excuse me cost sharing between an author and an academic department authors in these humanities don't have this money they can't get it from their department they can't get it through grants and I said you can't have authors sharing the cost with academic departments because where do you think they get the money to begin with to actually pay for their share and Allison Muddit said sorry they go to their dean's office and I said Allison there's no money there for this and even if academic deans or provost were into open books they still wouldn't have that money and the authors don't have that money so this is kind of a failed project the current director of UC Press said recently when asked how's that project going in terms of cost that it was a mixed bag when asked what that meant by me what that meant how did costs break down were they not getting enough from authors were they giving what are called you know discounts to authors were they giving discounts to administrators I got no response someone within the press told me the luminose open books program was hemorrhaging money all of these studies depend on the idea that it cost $15,000 to make a monograph and that they can't reduce their cost that they've been reducing it and I will tell you they've been reducing it by outsourcing production outsourcing editing outsourcing metadata um hello so they outsource what I believe is for an author is a very important section of the workflow and they and it's just acquisitions is bloated and marketing is bloated there are ways they can reduce those costs they refuse to believe that they refuse to think about it now there's a new program in the US called path to open and I just want to repeat again that when these pilot projects fail these presses say we'll just get everything from libraries passing on a real burden to libraries becoming almost as if they are the administrators who fund the press so in a weird way they're also the publisher so path to open path to open is unique and I like it in some ways first of all it's a large consortium of publishers whereas most of these pilot projects it's a small number of publishers and you know it's very inequitable in terms of where the costs come from I had to open is collective which I like um it's led by John Cher at UNC Press and and Charles Watkinson at Michigan Press and these guys always get the money for every pilot project for 08 books them them over and over again so path to open goes like this libraries will give $5,000 per book I like that $5,000 per book the press will make up the rest but how are they going to do that normally they would just be like we'll never be able to do that we'll never be able to do that here's the twist $5,000 from libraries with the promise that in five years we will get a thousand books published with an average of one million dollars from all the libraries so let's pay wall those books behind JSTOR for three years thereby giving the presses more time to gather the income they need I think this is probably going to be another failed project I kind of like the inventiveness of it but I'm not sure presses will actually get that income in three years or not um I don't think they will but let's see where it goes John Cher also said I don't know if there are many UPs that will want to even be in this program because getting $5,000 per book will drive them nuts and they just won't participate but it's better for librarians it says to librarians we're not making you pay the or or pay with us $15,000 per book which is ridiculous smaller open access presses like my own coping outcomes like opening the future and the open book collective have much lower price points which they share with the presses at punkton books you know when we have $5,000 we just publish a book um obviously that's really good cost efficient efficiency or let's say price efficiency for libraries flipped to open by cambridge university press also starts with the lower price point of about $9,000 9,000 pounds and they um their model is really unique they're like whatever sales we generate per book if we have enough sales we will open a book so again you know is this a good model um at least they fill in the rest and but what i'd like to know is how much does it cost for them to make a book something that many university presses just won't tell you eileen would it be okay if you drew the provocation to a close now that is the close oh fantastic sorry that is basically the close cost inefficiency passed on to libraries unsustainable inequitable um and stupid all right that's my provocation thank you and thanks to everyone um for your provocations and just to reiterate please drop um comments in the chat questions in the chat if you'd like to or raise your hand virtually and then somebody behind the scenes will spirit you up to join us and in the meantime while people gather their thoughts um one of the things that i found interesting about um i think it sort of drew all of your provocations together was that there was um an emphasis on the library's role in educating the author around choices they might make um related to open access publishing and i'm curious about how libraries practically can do this because is your expertise often consulted about publishing choices um by authors before they sign a contract and if it isn't how might libraries begin to make a case that actually there's a lot of expertise here that authors could be making more use of demig go for it you're absolutely right it's it's i think it's the bane of our lives typically that we we consider ourselves experts in open access and then you have go for the low-hanging fruit the PG students and we make sure that people from the library are giving obligatory sessions to PG students so we have an obligatory track that all the PG students need to follow as part of their PG training and we make sure that we from the library give part of that training um and we talk about scholarly communication open access there at the very start of their career and of course my hope is that this means the next generation will be fully available they'll know the market completely i will trust the library to help them with this are we going to be successful i don't know of course we're not going to have 100 percent approval rate nair but i think this is one way we try to solve this thanks Demi Anna yeah i think that's a really good question Lucy and i agree totally with with Demi but i think also we have an opportunity as a as a library sector or a library group to actually be clear on our principles of where we want to end up if you like or should we be defining a set of principles for ethical uh well not ethical equitable i would just say sustainable publishing and it goes back a bit to what um Eileen was saying as well although i don't recognise it thinking about white rose university press i don't actually recognise it as figures your quoting but that's another discussion um so i think as as libraries yeah there's always all librarians is always this fear that we can't be telling academics where they shouldn't shouldn't publish and i agree with that no we can't but we can we can explain we can effectively say and expose the business models and give them the ammunition so they can decide what to want what they want to do it's a bit like Nick was saying being told to do stuff is not what an academic wants to hear but they they want to understand and make up their own minds so i think we can be much more robust in that and i think as a sector if we can actually agree what those principles are and not necessarily having a list of the good publishers and the bad publishers because that should be self-evident i would say and and we need to align our publishing with the principles of creating sharing uh knowledge is openly and as freely as possible yep thank you and nick i see you've got your hand raised and just before you begin we've got a comment from Jeremy Upton who says he agrees with nick that we now need to work more closely with academics however in the past we could not get engagement without the stick of funder and ref policies hopefully we're now in a better place so i don't know if you can address that as well i can indeed i was going to pick up on that and i think that i think that we're possibly we were not as we were not as effective as we could have been previously was we have the behavior change stick of funders of ref and we focused on the process rather than getting in early and going we're your friends we want you want to support you in your work i think now's a really good example of where we can start to work with with our academics because the stick is appearing and go let us support you to understand what you can do what you want to achieve so as an example if i think about the the most successful book that we have in white rose university press star card the i will get the numbers wrong and i might be able to correct me but the numbers of downloads is in the tens of thousands now most academics would bite their own arms off have a book that sells tens of thousands of copies so just talking to an apagemic and going if you want to get your work out there read by people then actually think about this approach this open approach we can show you you will get to more people more people will work with you so we've now got that in and this is the thing now we need to proactively go out and go here are the advantages of making these choices thank you thanks um Eileen what would you like to come in with this is a response to ana but it's important information to have as to why they arrived at this $15,000 price point so itica as some of you may know did a big study a few years ago to see what is the range of prices of books and they saw that it was and they surveyed all these presses and they saw that the cost of making books across these presses was anywhere from $15,000 to $129,000 i want to meet the people at that price when when costs go really high publishers will always say well we need more money for art books no you don't um so the tone project of their presses uh the average went from $3,000 to $55,000 and they decided to adopt the $15,000 price point ana because of these ranges in itica i mean they basically started with the lowest end of the itica study and because they wanted to but then in their report they said it wasn't enough uh for the presses involved in the pilot project project thanks Eileen um just to pick up on a couple of comments uh Kate Pettabridge says fully agree with Nick that it should be about the end result and what an open environment can mean for academics rather than the stick of compliance and somebody else says do we need to be applying more pressure on funders as well to help constrain prices, minimise the categories of exceptions etc um so yeah i think one of the points that um Eileen's description of costs brings out and i think it relates to what we were saying as well about um how to educate authors and not forcing authors into particular choices um is you know how do libraries uh either push back against or work around these kinds of costs because obviously for an author typically costs tend to be invisible unless they are directly being presented with a bill um and you know the libraries are then the ones that have to kind of to manage that side of things and so cost isn't necessarily always something that an author will consider when they're making a choice about their publisher so what's what's the library role then in pushing back about that or educating about it or you know providing alternatives for example i know that we were talking in the last session a bit about white rose university press um you know is there anything there that we could we could pick up on and discuss can i i come in here lucy i think that's a really good question and i think i mean we're all aware of the various alternative models aren't there so there's subscribed to open there's the open book publishers etc there's the the subscription models and so on the so called diamond models so i think there are opportunities but but everything costs and Eileen's quite right everything does cost and there are inefficiencies in the system but i think working together we need to solve some of those inefficiencies and we need going back to what i was talking about our budget so you know sheffield ballpark i've got five million pounds my content budget and if i think about if i'm spending half of that or whatever on big deals and 30% of that is going straight into shareholder pockets i don't want that to happen and i'm sure my um bosses don't want that to happen and i'm sure my academics my researchers my students don't want to happen so i think it is incumbent on us as library directors or budget holders to actually think okay well where should we be strategically putting our money um and there is a question and i agree with with Eileen on this point that um we need to look at the inefficiencies in the models um but working together surely we can we can help solve that in some way um rather than us all just trying to do our own thing so i think there is definitely a role for our UK or or other organisations to try and convene that conversation and say okay where are the inefficiencies and how is we with the if you like the spending power can actually try and um get to a point which is which is more sustainable um and i would i would love to see that happening and we're obviously at the rluk conference i would love to see that happening within the rluk community nick you've got your hand raised and then Eileen thank you so i was going to pick up on a comment in the chat around whether we need to be playing more pressure on funders uh and i think it's a really good challenge because we're talking we're talking about the cost here and if you look get a look at the short form at the moment in the UK um we have block grants from various funders for charity in the uk or i uh open access publishing i am pretty certain that both those sets of funders would rather be spending that money on funding more research than funding the publication of the research what i think they've done at the moment is more left us as a sector to solve that problem rather than applying a huge amount of pressure themselves and it might be it might be good to bring them into the conversation more i think we do then have to also bring in the conversation about efficiency because we can't just go it costs this much you have to solve the problem for us we have to meet them halfway but i do actually think having funders as part of this conversation is really important they're driving the behaviour so that it should it is in their interest to to help drive it towards a financially sustainable manner as well thank you yeah i agree with that but i think i think it's also a hard nut to crack for funders because if you're thinking you know as a funder that's funding a certain amount of research out of which is going to be particular outputs in terms of books um you know i know uk i've been saying they don't necessarily want to entrench a book processing charge model in the way that they distribute their funding but if they're only going to be funding specific books it's quite difficult for them to to find other routes and i think it would be you know one of those sort of conversations where the more brains thinking on it the better because it is a really difficult problem for them i think eili you wanted to commit i wanted to actually there's a very interesting comment in chat um that uh this person has heard a lot throughout this discussion that the overall mission of libraries um is as facilitating access to knowledge this definition is i think limiting i prefer the phrase facilitating the creation of knowledge understood as both new knowledge and new instances of knowledge in individuals and this might lead us to new roles for libraries in an open access scenario i think this is something to think about when i am asked to describe what libraries do i say they are about the creation of knowledge and exchange knowledge exchange i think we need to broaden the definition and i've always felt this of what libraries do what their purview is what happens inside the library i have also referred to as a hive mind one that is attempted to be controlled not controlled in the sense of controlling you know knowledge but in the sense of the catalog trying to capture the information but they're thinking about what denny said there will never be a catalog that captures everything that's in a library there's always stuff coming in now i mean bibliography studies there are critical bibliography scholarship which i read um you can never contain everything that's in the library you can never notate everything that's in the library you need people to come in and discover those things and then the library does become a site of creative knowledge as well as knowledge exchange and that that's just my comment thanks aileen and i think it does relate to what demmy was talking about in his provocation and so it'd be great to hear from you next demmy and just quickly before you do um we've got a couple of comments from masu coca and one of them i think relating to lobbying we might come back to but he says at the university of leeds libraries we use the language of creation dissemination application and preservation of knowledge um so demmy would you like to go yeah i actually agree with that comment and i have a very concrete example of how we're trying to do this at leaven so since 2018 we have a fund for fair open access and about a year in i punched myself in the head and said that's a bad name because it gives the impression that what we do we fund articles or we fund books while in reality what we found which we thought was only focused on community led on non-profit infrastructure initiatives and if you would now look there it's available on the website it's complete transparency if you look at what we support more than half of what we support is actually not journals or books it's infrastructure and it's like and i do see that as a role of the library that we are moving in the digital world we are moving beyond the journal and a book and we need to support other stages of the research as well and i do agree with the comments that is the task of the library yeah i think that's a really important point i think it relates to the point that i made about the funders if they're only funding outputs then it becomes very much about a single unit cost and then it's quite difficult to sort of to fund a kind of more systemic transformation that way so ana you've got your hand up yeah and i'd just like to agree about the definition and the creation of knowledge as well i think it is critical but i wanted to come back and i don't know whether you want me to at this point come back to mesud's comment about lobbying and the politics side of it i mean i think absolutely it's hugely important but i suppose what i would counter that with is that if we look at the strength of the academic community and the academic community they create the content they peer review the content they are on the editorial boards it is within their gift if you like as to where they publish that content and i've i've yet to find an academic who really cares what the government thinks so i think there is something perhaps that we can stimulate a conversation with academics and i know it's easy for me to say because perhaps my career doesn't depend on it but i think we are in a position where we can have start having those robust conversations and perhaps bringing in some of those academic voices that we know perhaps agree with us yeah i think that's an important point i think um some of these conversations are already starting to happen and i think open access publishing is quite an interesting wedge into that i was speaking at an open monographs event i think it was last week at oxford and part of the point that i was trying to make was prestige as an influencing factor in making choices about publishing necessarily rewards older presses that have got an established reputation whereas a lot of the more innovative um not all but a lot of the more innovative work that's going on with open access books is being led by for example presses like open book publishers who are relatively new and who don't necessarily have that advantage when it comes to building up kind of prestige but with you know the shift towards open access and the new ideas and the new projects like copham that are being developed by those sorts of presses this may be a moment to say actually there is a reason to look again at these structures of prestige and to reconsider how they're operating in your publishing choices and how you might think differently about what you decided to do eileen when people ask me in the us what the future is of away in terms of things like how much it costs and you know can those costs be lowered my answer is library publishing in the us at every university library most of them many of them there is some kind of digital publishing office mainly it exists to help authors with journals who are at their university they have a journal that they run they don't know how to do a lot of things to produce it and they use um they use open journals system which has been around a long time now they're saying saying to themselves what if we also did books which they usually do not punkdom has just created a consulting firm called studium to go to university libraries and help them set up book publishing operations sometimes we do it for free because they can't afford it and other times we charge because they can um and I wanted to vote a lot of time to this over the few or over the next coming years I want to see library publishing offices become important centers of knowledge dissemination and exchange that will cost a lot less I think you need at least two people at your university to be dedicated to such an operation and eventually probably three and with two to three people using a portion of their salary or all of it they can produce a lot of books but how does the library publisher brand themselves are they just going to publish books for their own faculty I want them to go beyond that and I'm talking to them about how to do it I was excited when I saw that the libraries in Scotland were going to form a press together and I was like wow because again it's about cost efficiency and you have the power of you know Scotland as some kind of brand but it's so innovative it's so innovative I've talked to people about it in the US and they said the university presses would not come together in a consortium to do this and again to me the future of OA is library publishers not university publishers thanks Eileen we've got an interesting comment from unknown which is I think addressed more to RLUK than to us but I'm going to read it out anyway would it be possible for an organisation like RLUK to lead in setting up some form of structure that would assist institutions in setting up their own university press supplying a guarantee of academic quality and possibly helping to initially find funding just a thought and I think that very much leads on from what Eileen was saying as well so if anyone has something to say on that please put your hands up otherwise we'll leave that as a challenge for RLUK and perhaps for David and we have another question which says have any of you come across pushback to open access on moral ethical or philosophical grounds rather than financial Nick so I don't I haven't personally I would say I don't think many academics published books to make money I'm a biologist so I don't want to produce short form outposts but I haven't published a couple of books and while even a relatively popular book that's sold to undergraduates it doesn't make me a fortune it might buy me a slightly nicer wine at Christmas but I am I'm not going on to the Seychelles holidays on it we publish books because we want to get our work out there and when you consider the amount of work it takes to get that book out the door the returns are not huge I think the majority of academics publish because you know it is talking about the areas that you care about it's talking about things that you're passionate about it's a way of going out and doing that the area where I have probably seen pushback is is a probably understandable concern about the way the system is currently set up for career progression for academics so if you're coming to a promotion panel or if your your grant is through a review and they're looking at your CV very still think a conscious bias I'm not even going to say an unconscious bias whereas if you've got your book published in OUP as opposed to published in A and other people think it's better in the same way as people think if it's published in nature rather than in the vino it must be better and so there are still people who will give the advice well you should go for those those mainstream publishers because it will be better for your career my argument against that is this is in our hands we can make that decision if we are the people sitting on the grant boards if we are the people sitting on the promotion panels we have the choice of how we view anything in a CV and so therefore we need to stop perpetuating that myth and look at the quality of the work not where it's published thank you thanks Nick I see that Demi's raised his hand but I also see that excitingly we've got Masoud joining us on their virtual table so Masoud would you like to to say something thank you I was going to come in on the question that was raised in the chat about can RLUK help and I raised my hand before David responded so apologies but the answer would have been yes but I also wanted to add this thing on top is that RLUK is not the only place where innovative university process will come out of there will be non-RLUK institutions who will be innovating in this area who'd be working and I think what we would love to do is start this collaboration and conversation with other organizations girl wealth scornel etc about how do we bring some of this knowledge to the wider set of institutions as much as possible I think there are some very pragmatic practical questions about how do you set up a press what kind of funding models exist how do you shift some of your resources towards this how do you redirect some of the savings that might become with some publishing negotiations and I think those are really important conversations that can help build that confidence on how this can be set up so yeah I think the short answer is yes and the longer answer is let's do it in more collaboration and provide some more pragmatic support on that the other thing I was going to highlight and I think just leads very nicely with Nick's point is I think there's a great opportunity for us to link a lot of what we are saying with research culture activities that are happening across institutions because research quality is a very important aspect of research culture but also how we publish where we publish the fears of international mobility and prestige of journals and all those things and my argument would be if none of us do it who will actually do it someone has to start and someone has to be brave enough and that might be us in the UK that might be us in UK Australasia that might be as UK US Europe and Global South we really need to start somewhere and I think some of the initiatives that are happening as as make a single knowledge equity network and other parts can really push that momentum and if we can kick start this we know other people will come because this is values driven and you'll believe in why this is important is sometimes just fear that we might be the only ones doing it and let's change that. Thanks Massid and on that note Kate Petherbridge has put a comment in the chat some of us institutional publishers are coming together to form an association more UK SG and one of the drivers is to support those planning to set up their own university press there is also a new university press toolkit from disk that supports this including advice on quality etc and I think Kate might be joining us to say a bit more about that I don't know if she's already here or she may materialise shortly if not and so while we wait oh no hang on I think she's here okay can you hear us yeah hello fantastic hi yeah sorry just on that I think it's worth flagging that there's lots of activity in the the kind of newly pressed publishing sector of us all coming together to try and be supportive as a community already so one of the things that I do in my world's white rose library's executive manager is I'm white rose university press press manager and there's been a group of us from other presses that are equivalent in terms of having institutional publishing activity formal presses not formal presses coming together to come and form a UK based association to support exactly this type of conversation because exactly the point that my suit is making we we want to reach beyond some of the other collaborations that exist across you know beyond our UK and beyond the the the kind of limits that we see already so we're trying to be as broad and as open as possible in terms of membership and the formal announcement of this will come at at UK SG in April so there'll be a lot more information coming out around then but it's definitely something that we're hoping people be open to and be involved with and one of the drivers is that we want to be supportive to new new and emerging publishing initiatives of whatever form because between us we've got lots of experience now of doing this in different formats so we want to share that. Yeah thanks Kate and just to add to that as well there's an organisation that I helped to co-organise called the open access books network and likewise we try and share resources and information we host events related to development and open access publishing and we're very open to people who want to learn more about our e-books to join that and to find out more but we've had Demi waiting very patiently and we also have Anna and Eileen so Demi would you like to go first? Oh you're muted I think Demi. Yeah I'm sorry it's actually still a comment on I thought it was a very nice question of like any other sorts of pushback rather than financial. I have an example which is actually slightly also financial but it was not the usual financial argument is actually an argument against making a textbook open access because the publisher was actually quite clear about this we can't make your textbook open access because we gain a lot of money from textbooks which pays for our other titles so if you insist that your textbook becomes an open access you're actually damaging other authors to publish co-organise monographs with us and I thought I'd never thought about it like that I see the point that you're trying to make but this is still not going to stop me because my allegiance is to my students not to my colleagues who insist on publishing a book with a publisher that works like that but so that was it's still a financial argument but a little bit of a moral one too. Thanks Demi. Anna, would you like to go next? Yeah I'll just come in on that because I think it is a moral argument because presumably your colleague is being paid a salary etc and probably being funded and so on but they're still trying to make money in a different way but that's a different conversation. Now I wanted to come back to what Massoud said about research culture and how we can take a lead and perhaps help there and I couldn't agree more the only thing I would say and this comes back to what Nick said right at the start is we need to bring the researchers with us we need to have that conversation and listen to researchers and get them on board or at least some of them on board because again otherwise it comes back to us where it's the library whether it's research services whether it's funders telling researchers what to do so I think that key and it also goes back right to actually the previous session of this morning when it was talking about the skills of librarians and us talking with students and researchers and I would say listening as well so I think there is a huge part we can play there but we have to I think have that engagement piece with with the researchers and obviously they will come at you know at different speeds but I think that is really critical. Thanks Eileen you've got your hand raised as well. Yes I just wanted to mention in line with Kate's comment about publishers coming together to form a network. What about publishers and librarians getting together to launch a press? This is happening at Edinburgh and I visited their library in September and I met the scholarly communications team sometimes that's just one person they had a whole team they now have a publishing operation that they're calling Diamond Away or Diamond Edinburgh or Edinburgh Diamond excuse me for not remembering this but they just launched this and they introduced me to a woman who they just hired who had worked at Cambridge University Press and Edinburgh University Press so they brought someone into the library with experience from within a university press and I was like wow what a great idea so what if a library hired someone who has been in publishing to collaborate with scholarly communications librarians in launching a press and they have done that and I'm watching it closely because I think it's innovative and I think it's smart and I think it's exciting to see how it turns out. Yeah thanks Eileen I think that was Edinburgh Diamond Joe and I think Rebecca Wajersko was presenting yesterday I want to say I've certainly heard her at this conference speaking about that and there are a few comments and chat some agreements from different people Massoud says plus one Anna listen learn inform and influence our critical skills in this debate and Barbara Cattle says snap Eileen Franberg Joy, SUP came immediately to mind when you were talking about library publishing. Nicky says is there a new version of the JISC University Press toolkit? I don't know about that actually the web page says the original content was archived in March 2023 I don't know if anyone from JISC is on the call and could maybe answer that in the chat and then someone says Aberdeen University Press is an OAPress in the University of Aberdeen Library yeah and I think it's really interesting you know this is what I was sort of trying to make the argument when I spoke to the University of Oxford last week was there is all this activity which is happening and you know we've seen that from Aberdeen and from I think London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently launched an OAPress and there's a lot of activity going on specifically around open access and open access books and Jeremy says thanks Eileen for the shout out you're right having someone with this kind of experience has been invaluable so again just to encourage everyone if you want to join us at the table please put your hands up or drop questions in the chat but one of the things that I was interested in when people were giving their provocations in the beginning was I think a couple of you certainly Anna and Nick and maybe Demi and Eileen too picked up on the sort of contrast or comparison between journals and books and sort of learning from what happened with the transition to OA for journals and thinking about how do we avoid some of the pitfalls and things that you know didn't go as maybe this group of people would have liked when it came to open access for journals and I think Anna in particular you made this point that we're in danger in five to ten years time of being in a similar position with books as as we currently are with journals so I'm curious if any of you have thoughts on what has sort of held libraries back from being to a position being in a position that they would like to be in with journals for open access and is there anything that can be learned when we when it comes to open access books yeah shall I come in on that first Lucy because I think your direction perhaps that means to me in the first instance and I suppose I mean it's obviously an evolution from from where we are to where we want to get to be and I suppose librarians will probably I mean we talk about publishers we talk about the reward system etc etc and I think as I said and I perhaps the time wasn't right really for us to flex our muscles should I say with our financial and our experience muscles and if you like the way that we have the expertise and have the engagement so I but I do think we are at that point because of the reasons I said earlier about the the high profile of what's going on and also the you know the more and more factors that are squeezing the finances of our universities that we can actually flex those muscles a bit more and I but I do still think the key thing is that we have to if you like get the researchers on board or as much as we can because we've all know I mean I'm sure many of us you know have lived through various uh uh say projects opportunities to try and change things but actually things haven't really changed because we need to take people with us so I think that's that's really the the key thing as I said before is the engagement um the engagement but but not not in a sort of subservient way because we do know what we're talking about we are we are the experts we have that respect so we should use those opportunities to have that conversation and and say look you published there x percent goes to the shareholder you published there actually it's all gets reinvested in in the values of the university you make the decision so that's obviously a very simplistic example but I think those are sorts of conversations we need to have thanks Anna and Nick you've got your hand up as well thank you I was I was also going to add that I think when when we went through the transition with journal articles the the open access alternatives at the time was still really in their influence so when you look at things like gloss for example was one certainly went through a phase where people saw it as being where you published when you couldn't get published anywhere else because it was open access so it would go in and then this it has matured um not only plos one but the plos library frontiers all these sorts of things now the the way that we think about those sort of open access journal families is very much different than we did five years ago so one of the things I would really ask you as a group to do is I think we've got some brilliant open access publishers and we've we've just spent an hour and a half talking about how great they are um we need you to go out there and tell academics that these options exist and that they are good and give them the data that says this is how you will reach more people this is how you will make sure that the your hard earned um research funding goes further and gets your results out to more people etc etc tell them that the alternative is as good as the current norm because when you do that it will make it so much easier to have those conversations and transition so I actually think we're in a better place with long form than we were with the short form. Thanks Nick and it will be no surprise that I heartily endorse that course of action um Eileen you've got your hand up. So I'm at University of California Santa Barbara I am not sponsored by the university but I am in an affiliation with the library um but here's what I do I'm a humanist scholar I'm on this campus I'm identifying scholars at first uh who run journals or book series and I'm going to them with political and social justice arguments and the idea which they never get is that they will get more citations they can show I mean I hate these kinds of metrics but if they care about this and as tenure and promotion committees care about this in the UK the impact factors are so messed up but they're here to stay so what but what I'm doing is I'm sitting down with faculty who specifically work in black studies feminist studies I went um to a black studies person who just took over the editorship of one of the most important journals in African American studies published by Temple University Press and I had this discussion with her did you know this is happening did you know this is happening did you know like all of this is happening and specifically if you are a black press and you care about social justice and you're not open you're living a lie and it's working this is actually working I've had several faculty members come to me and say I hear you it's wrong for us to do this so that's how I'm appealing to faculty with citation oh and it's working there are several journals I mean I know journals aren't books but we've got book series and I just work on the faculty one by one and we've been getting them to flip journals and their book series and we publish them we've published now like 15 faculty on my campus and that's having an effect so but I'm taking the approach of yeah I'm a publisher but I'm talking to them as a scholar thanks Eileen and on the topic of relating to informing that having discussions with academics we've got a few comments we need to look at a consistent lexicon how we describe things doesn't always connect with academics so while information is available they don't know what to look for or can't find it and Anna you said in the chat here agree absolutely and we need to get in early with the conversations on options for OA book publishing and Masoud says we can also highlight potential for the OA university presses to position themselves as innovative places for multimodal publishing multi-form publishing etc and Anna says agree also about flipping um so yeah Demi you've got your hand up yeah in that context like the one thing that we also should definitely be careful about is that we don't make it even more complicated by in detail our care for instance green open access gold hybrid let's try to come up with an easier lexicon and then spend yeah two years debating about that I typically have in my sessions with PG students that get about an hour I have one slide about terminology one slide about predator publishers and I say this is not a problem I don't want to spend time on this I want to talk to you about why we need to do open access and do not get confused this is not complicated at all and if you still think it's complicated of this hour come and talk to me in the Q&A but I'm not going to spend my hour talking about this terminology and about predator publishers or whatever um and I do think that I stick by that that we should not waste too much of our energy on that on that it is an issue that that's like it can be but we just need to bring it down to like it not not get bogged down in that issue yeah I think it's an important point about clear communication and also like you say not replacing one set of jargon with another um Anna you've got your hand yeah and I would agree totally with Demi because we can as librarians we can perhaps argue too much about those sorts of things and but I think it's more to do with the principles and the values that we have and we can agree on and um taking that right through to the way that we share our um uh or publish our research results so I think that's really what is the continuum that should hold us all together um all of us who work in this sector so I would think it's much more to do about values and principles than what we call something thanks and I wonder as well if this conversation is about how you know how we sort of speak to authors about open access whether it relates to the point that Nick was making about um how to bring more reward and recognition for open working and open publishing um I don't know if there's an opportunity there to kind of to think positively about open access publishing and to think about it as something which is a comprehensible and b you know as you say Anna aligns with values that the institution might have and see as Eileen was saying you know it also has benefits like much more widely read much more potentially more cited um and does all that kind of more positive messaging rather than well UK I say you've got to do this does that fit in with a kind of greater system of reward and recognition for open publishing and what might that look like I don't know if Nick you've got any thoughts yes so the simple answer is yes it does a slightly more nuanced answer is that I think we've ended up in exactly the right place which is the discussion has to be we have to trust the libraries in the sector to understand the mechanics of how to make this work and when we're talking to an academic the conversation is about why you should want to do it whether that's a moral or an ethical or a or a reach argument but it's the why you want to do it and let us worry about the nuts and bolts part of the why you want to do it should be because it aligns with your values as an individual and the values of your institution so one of the key parts of my institutions strategy is a university without walls it's quite difficult for us to say we're going to be a university without walls if one of the things we do which is generate knowledge we immediately put behind the wall so it is absolutely in the university's values that we should try and get knowledge in the hands of those that need it and that and can use it therefore I would hope that my academics when I speak to them are similarly aligned that's the way we should be having these conversations so the recognition is you this is what the university wants to do and if you're if you are working with the university as part of the university community then you will be recognised whether that's through performance related pay promotion the the ability to be part of advertising campaigns why are accessing them that's down to the individual discussion but the important thing is we are a university community and this is what we've committed to do thank you thanks Nick and Anna yeah I'm I'm realising we're getting near the end of the times but I just wanted to come back to Nick's um listening to you so so I suppose right and you talk about the library understanding the mechanics and and doing heavy lifting and getting it done but what part what part do you think we as the library community have in actually explaining the why or do you think that has to come from the academic community I think it I think it should be rooted in the libraries but I think it has to be you have to have advocates in the academic community so this has to be seen as a joint venture otherwise going right back to my provocation at the start it's not the fund telling me what to do it's now the big evil library saying you must do this this we are all one community we have to work together so it's finding that group of of like winding librarians them it's technical staff I don't mind who we're all part the same community let's all decide where we want to go and work together on doing that thanks excellent thanks Nick thanks Anna and so there is more that I could be asking this group but I'm also conscious of the time so just one final invitation if anyone has any further questions or comments they'd like to drop in the chat and this would be the moment for you to do that and assuming that we don't see anything I'm going to give it a second just in case someone's typing sometimes on these things you can see little dots when people are typing but I don't think you can on zoom so it doesn't give you a hint I'm going to guess not and so I wanted to say a really big thank you to everyone to the audience and for your comments and questions particularly to our provocateurs which isn't becoming any easier to say for the really useful and interesting and indeed provoking comments statements questions thoughts I think this is as has become clear as we've been discussing this it's a bigger conversation than we can possibly have in just an hour an hour and a half and so I really hope that some of the ideas and thoughts about sector-wide changes and potentially connections and partnerships and ways to move this conversation forward may sort of stem from this from this panel and from this discussion