Publishers for Development updates and hold the dates!

Interest in Publishers for Development (PfD) continues to grow amongst our publishing partners and the wider community. Face-to-face networking is such an important part of our work so we have just posted information about our 2013 conference which will be held in Charles Darwin House, London on October 15th. This year the title we’ve chosen is ‘Forward Thinking: Developing a global research cycle which fully engages south and north‘ we are still finalizing the conference programme but it will have the following themes:

• The changing landscape of availability (revisited)
• Southern publishing: why we need to ensure its sustainability
• Publishers for Development in Action – Awareness, Access and Use
• What we measure matters… but what we measure isn’t all that matters
• Advocacy is everything

Advocacy is an important part of our work and we need to explore how university libraries across the region are enabling institutions to strengthen research and teaching and ensure excellence in what they do. So we were incredibly interested to read about a new SAGE research project exploring Library Value in the Developing World.  Nell McCreadie, Group Marketing Manager for the SAGE Library team, provides more information about this on the PfD website.

We are hoping to have a presentation from Nell and also a panel discussion of the report during the PfD conference. Hope to see you there!

Many of the conferences we’ve attended and discussions we’ve had recently include mention of Open Access — so we felt that this was a good time to collect some thoughts and gather some updates and present them in our first newsletter of 2013.

Finally, we are still producing PfD in Action case studies to showcase the work publishers and related organisations are doing to increase accessibility and visibility for developing country research and researchers in the global communication cycle recent publications are:

‘A user-centred approach to low bandwidth‘: David Osei, the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ Digital Communications Officer, outlines how they designed a new website that focuses on reducing bandwidth use through ease of navigation as well as page size.

‘Recognising great work‘:  Showing how the Emerald group have been trying to increase the representation of developing country research in their journals is through the Emerald Group Publishing Research Awards.

Just a reminder that you can also keep up to date with our work by following us on twitter: @pubsfordev

PfD is a joint advocacy initiative of the Association of Commonwealth Universities and INASP.