 Welcome everybody, and thank you so much for being here. I'm Martin Hall for the University of Seoul Food, and it's my pleasure to be chairing this conference today and tomorrow. The organisers tell me that they had expected this to be a small in-house affair with just a few people in a room. It's completely sold out, and thank you all for making the time and trouble to come on what is a really important topic for discussion. I'd like to thank those who've made this meeting possible. They're up there on the slide as the sponsors and supporters. In particular, I'd like to thank the British Library for hosting this event at what really is itself symbolically such an important venue here in London for the future of the book. I'd like to thank OARPEN and Just Collections in particular for working so hard on putting together what is going to be a really interesting programme. I wanted to make a few opening comments before I turn, first of all, to our guest keynote speaker. To try and frame something of why this is such an important topic for us to be discussing. I want to do that partly from my own perspective as an academic in the humanities and social sciences, in my case as an archaeologist. My original speciality was in the early Iron Age of the Zulu Land Coast. You can't get more obscure than that if you try. You try publishing a book on the early Iron Age of the Zulu Land Coast, taught at probably two universities with a collection of maybe 15 or 20 colleagues. Maximum print run, if you're lucky, 300, from the publisher of full colour plates, please, and on top of that an affordable price so everybody gets access to it. The crisis in monograph publishing in one form or another has been with us as many people here will realise for certainly well over 20 years. Certainly, as far as I'm concerned, from the time that the great university presses began to lose the ability to provide the financial subsidies that made that sort of publication possible. And that, of course, was way before we had any notion of what the digital age was or would bring. Of course, publishing in these sorts of areas is crucial for the advancement of knowledge. And what I learnt in that, and many people here will have appreciated in their careers, is that in getting that sort of work out in monograph form, publishers were always our friends and our close colleagues. I've worked with a number of publishers in getting my own work out, which whom I've learnt to respect deeply, they've been passionate about the work. Without them as agents, as friends, as participants, as critics, and as professionals, we never as academics would have published anything. And I think it's particularly important to hold on to that as we look into the future and the way that we work into the future. Of course, some publishers in the course of their professions, along with authors, have taken hugely courageous decisions to publish and make work available, particularly in the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. For example, the courage shown in publishing Robert Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photography so long ago in the face of draconian censorship laws, which would have in fact stopped people having access to that art, was extraordinary and remains extraordinary, just read through the difficulties and the controversies about bringing Salman Rushdie's work into print and the complex sorts of situations that publishers had to face to make perspectives available or, of course, not to make them available to us as readers. And that's the sort of environment, I think, that we all come from in the humanities and the social sciences. And then, of course, from the early 1980s onwards, we began to see the growing momentum of the digital world and the possibilities of digital publishing. Apparently Bill Gates really did say 64K should be enough for anybody. I can remember on an early Apple II in the early 1980s being totally enthralled that if you put a six letter code before a word and a six letter code after a word, it would underline automatically. We thought that was absolutely wonderful. We had no particular notion then of exactly how that would transform our opportunities for scholarly practice. We now face a world where effectively there is no practical limit to the amounts of digital data that we can store and transmit and practice no practical limit for us as scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. The cost of that digital data storage and transmission is dropping all the time. We have bandwidth virtually everywhere, including in many parts of the developing world, which until recently were cut off from the distribution of knowledge when the price of a textbook published in America would be equivalent to the entire monthly salary, for example, of a lecturer at the University of Kenya. We are seeing the advent of what we can call thin clients, cheap affordable mobile devices that virtually everybody can have. We're getting into a situation where the vast majority of the world's population will still have students have smartphones and we are in an age of locational intelligence. Our digital devices, if we let them and it's very difficult to stop them, know we are, know where we are, know what we're doing, know what we're reading and increasingly in a very alarming way seem to know exactly what it is we want. So the challenge of this, I think, for scholarly publishing, which is what today and tomorrow are about, is to how to manage the transition. How to manage this very complicated transition from a former form of publishing, which after all, as I've said, has been in crisis for many years, into realising the possibilities of the future. Those indeed were some of the issues that we tackled on the Finch group and the next panel immediately after our guest speaker will be about Finch. But there is a point that I need to make there and that is that Finch was about something rather different. The Finch group was convened by the Department of Business, Industry and Skills primarily to look at the possibilities for the economic return from publishing and the way that the dissemination of knowledge through open access could in fact bring economic return, particularly to small and medium businesses and enterprises, in other words to get a return on investment within the British and other economic systems. The point about today's discussion is that it simultaneously is about the money, but it's not about the money. It's not about the money in the sense that there is a disproportionate relationship between the amount of funding that goes into the arts and humanities and their importance. In other words, if you look at any country's funding systems for research and you look at the amount of money that goes into the humanities, it's a very small proportion of the overall science and scholarly budget. But of course the humanities and social sciences have a significantly disproportionate effect on understanding our world and their importance in our world. Without things that are done in the humanities and social sciences, we won't know things that we have to know about the world irrespective of how little that they cost us to do in relative terms. So this is a different discussion. It's primarily a discussion about the significance and importance of monograph publishing in the arts and humanities for its own sake. But at the same time, of course, it is about the money because if the money doesn't work, it's not possible to publish at all. And if the funding can't be apportioned to the project in a way that enables that stuff to get out there, we're not going to see any publication. So it is about the viability of publication. It is about the viability of publishing in this digital age. It is about the viability of getting content out there in ways that can be exciting. And again, turning back to my background as an archaeologist, I find that particularly exciting as a set of future possibilities. One of the particular things about archaeology is we work with words which can easily be translated into digital content, but we also work with stuff. We work with masses of stuff, shedloads of stuff, garages full of stuff. Anybody who's seen what really comes out of an archaeological site would have seen the tons and tons and tons of dirty broken pottery that we have an obligation to study, preserve for perpetuity and write about. Now very, very difficult to get that sort of stuff out there in conventional analogue forms. And one of the reasons why people like archaeologists and classicists are so fascinated by the digital revolution is that it gives us new ways of disseminating our stuff. And so digital publishing is not only just a substitute for conventional analogue publishing. For disciplines like mine, it opens up huge new possibilities of sharing information in different ways, either through high resolution images that can be distributed online, or through real-time live databases that can be embedded into publication, which means that people can interact with data in different ways. It also opens up possibilities for crowdsourcing and participation in academic activities. Archaeologists are discipline that attracts a worldwide following of amateurs, who in fact are the people who go off increasingly with their GPS devices and their mobile phone cameras and find new things. Getting into a digital world of publishing opens up possibilities for that information to be embedded within our scholarly exercises. So the possibilities is in front of us for getting it right for monograph publishing and open access, and not only about substituting for the loss of the conventional book. They're also about the possibilities that come from different forms of digital representation, different forms of digital dissemination that will ultimately and are immediately make the scholarship better. We can be better at it through enabling these devices. So that's some of the background for the sorts of discussions that we are going to have today and tomorrow, and why I think they're particularly important. I would now like to hand over to our keynote speaker, Jean-Claude Gaedon, from the Comparative Literature at Montreal. But in particular, and his biography is in your pack, very distinguished by being one of the signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative back in 2002, which was certainly a formative milestone in the road towards open access that's been rightly acknowledged for its foresight and its importance in steering us on this journey, and it's a particular pleasure to have him with us this morning.