Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing

Marta Dossi appointed Managing Director of BISP

Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing / By Pink Pepper

The Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing (BISP) has appointed Marta Dossi as Managing Director. Eric Merkel-Sobotta who was Managing Director of BISP for the past two years will be taking on additional responsibilities at Taylor & Francis, but will continue to support Marta Dossi and BISP informally to ensure its continued success.

After Marta Dossi obtained her BA in Communications from the University of Verona, she attended Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich and completed her MA in Sociology and Literature with her thesis examining the relationship between language and integration. She began her career in publishing as a freelancer for Deutscher Kunstverlag and De Gruyter. Since October 2020 she has been the executive assistant for the De Gruyter Executive Management Group. In November 2020 she was also appointed Director, Operations at BISP where she worked closely with Eric Merkel-Sobotta and Arnoud de Kemp, the founder of the APE Conference.

“Marta played a significant, critical role in the organization of both APE2021 and APE2022, and without her organizational talent, her determination and her ability to get many things done at the same time – especially under the difficult circumstances that the Covid-19 pandemic thrust upon us – the conferences would not have been as successful as they were,” said Christoph Seils, Chairman of the board of trustees of the Walter de Gruyter Foundation.

Arnoud de Kemp, the founder of the conference and chair of the APE2023 program committee said: “after two years of a digital-only conference, I am delighted to work with Marta for what we all hope will be an exciting in-person event in Berlin.”

The 18^th APE Conference will take place from 10 to 11 January 2023 in Berlin.

APE Conference tackles the future of the permanent record

The 17^th APE 2022 Conference, which will once again be online-only, is tackling the vital question of the future of the permanent record of science. The APE 2022 Conference begins next week on Tuesday, 11 January 2022 at 1300 hrs CET and continues during the afternoons of Wednesday and Thursday, 12 & 13 January 2022. Tickets are still available.

The Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing (BISP) and the Program Committee of the APE 2022 Conference are pleased to confirm that the program contains a large number of outstanding speakers, panels and sessions on timely and useful subject again this year.

Dr. Caroline Sutton, the incoming CEO of the International Association of STM Publishers, will open the conference and offer her own perspective on the theme of the conference and the key roles that scholarly communication generally – and publishers specifically – play.

BISP and APE are especially fortunate that Professor Maria Leptin, PhD, the President of the European Research Council (ERC) will give the first keynote on “Quality and Equity in Academic Publishing” and the role that funders should play in this context.

Professor Leptin will be followed by Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the US National Information Standards Organization who will speak on “Building a Framework for the Future of the Record of Science”. Liz Ferguson of Wiley will introduce the keynote speakers.

Further highlights from the six panels and sessions and individual papers will cover:

the “dark side” of the publishing universe (moderated by Liz Marchant of Taylor & Francis and including, among many others, Professor Christian Behl of the University of Mainz on trust and Professor Bernard Sabel of the University of Magdeburg on paper mills)
the worth of a version of record and its role as an anchor for both upstream and downstream innovation (introduced by Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe of the University of Illinois, moderated by Anne Kitson of Cell Press/The Lancet and including Professor Ulrich Dirnagl of the Charité in Berlin, Professor Behl, Bernd Pulverer of EMBO Press and Dr. Niamh O’Connor of PLoS who will also be presenting her paper on “Publishing as a Process” later on the day),
a paper on metadata quality in a world with very diverse research outputs by Martyn Rittman of Crossref,
a panel on ensuring public access to research data and how CHORUS might support such an endeavour will be moderated by Nick Campbell of Springer Nature and includes Rick Anderson of Brigham Young University, Michael Levine-Clark of the University of Denver and Judith C. Russell of the University of Florida,
a session on how we can foster inclusion, diversity and equity in scholarly communications which will be moderated by Christene Smith of De Gruyter and will include Dr. Nicola Nugent of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Nancy Roberts of Umbrella Analytics and Ylann Schlemm of the Elsevier Foundation and Research4Life.

Dr. David Crotty of The Scholarly Kitchen and Clarke & Esposito will give the 2022 APE Lecture on “Life in a Liminal Space”.

The program also includes the ever-popular “New Dotcoms to Watch” session presented by Drs. Eefke Smit and Dr. Joris van Rossum of STM with five new and exciting start-ups in the scholarly communication space.

A further highlight of this year’s program is a panel on how we can foster entrepreneurship and innovation in scholarly communications moderated by David Worlock of Outsell and featuring Ijad Madisch of ResearchGate and Sami Benchekroun of Morressier.

The 17^th APE Conference will take place virtually from 11 to 13 January 2022 and will be “broadcast” from Berlin. Tickets are still available, including discounted tickets for academics and students.

For further information, please contact:

Marta Dossi, Director Operations, BISP, marta.dossi@berlinstitute.org
Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Managing Director, BISP, eric.merkel-sobotta@berlinstitute.org

BISP and the APE Program Committee would like to thank its sponsors (De Gruyter, Elsevier, Morressier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis Group and Wiley) and its co-sponsors (Atypon, Digital Science, MDPI and STM) for their continued support and engagement.

Visitors Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing

The Academic Publishing In Europe Conference: Conferences In The Eye Of The Storm

APE 2022, Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing / By Pink Pepper

The Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference is an international and independent conference for all stakeholders in scholarly communications and scientific publishing founded in 2006 by Arnoud de Kemp. It aims to provide a better understanding of the role of information in science, education and society, and encourage the debate about the future of value-added scientific publishing, information dissemination and access to scientific results. Forum for this open discourse has been since the beginning the Leibniz Hall of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on the famous Gendarmenmarkt in the center of Berlin.

With the start of the electronic revolution in 1996 and the introduction of ICT in production and dissemination of information, the landscape changed rapidly, and costs decreased significantly. Self-archiving and open repositories became possible. New services such as for citations and data references were introduced. The functions of certification and dissemination by journals could now be implemented by different actors. Electronic access to information changed the world in a very short time and whole new dimensions were possible: unpublished research, recent research in peer review processing, preprints and the first open-access journals and open access archives.

The Max Planck Society published the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” on 22 October 2003: this marked the start of the ‘Open Access Movement’ in Germany and elsewhere. The Max Planck Institute defined Open Access: “Open access means that scientific literature should be publicly available, free of charge on the internet so that those who are interested can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, refer to and, in any other conceivable legal way, use full texts without encountering any financial, legal or technical barriers other than those associated with Internet access itself”.

For traditional publishers of journals and books this was nothing less than a shockwave: the predicted end of prepaid subscriptions. A whole new infrastructure and new economic models would become necessary and very soon it became obvious that the transition from print to electronic would take a lot of time and energy.

It was in these days that cooperation and exchange of technological and economic experiences between the different players in the market became necessary. In the early years of the 20th century only few conferences were held, mostly in different groups: between publishers, between librarians and between subscription agencies.

It was soon felt necessary that a larger meeting would be necessary to bring all so-called stakeholders together and a day was picked: 4 April 2006, which would be the centenary of the founding of Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (AKA) in Leipzig, one of the first international STM publishers. While the historic dimension was felt to be of less and less interest to a forward-looking audience, only a banquet dinner and an after-dinner speech were planned.

The first APE Conference, strongly supported by the European Commission and the Max Planck Society, was held on 4-5 April 2006 in the Leibniz Hall of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities. From the very beginning, Arnoud de Kemp has been organizer and program coordinator, before handing over the logistics to the Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing (BISP) in 2020.

“Given APE has a tradition of setting the conversation for the year, […] thinking about how disseminating the outcomes of research should change over time to serve new and different needs of the research community.” (Dr. Liz Marchant, long-time Member of the Program Committee)

You can find a list of all past conferences HERE.

The first steps have been taken, and BISP is moving forward and is ready to bring more to the publishing and scholarly community. Stay tuned!

Woman Zoomcall Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing

How was the Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing born?

Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing / By Marta Dossi

It all started in September 2019…

Back in 2006, Arnoud de Kemp, former member of the managerial board at Springer, had started a new project, the annual conference Academic Publishing in Europe (APE), which brought together the most influential names in scientific publishing and scholarly communications.

(If you want to learn more about the story and development of APE, be sure to check out THIS article).

After fifteen years of engaging debates, deep analysis of new trends, and an under all aspects successful yearly get-together for the scientific and publishing community, Arnoud de Kemp announced that he would gradually withdraw from the APE project, watching over it from a new “chair”: while keeping his primary role as program coordinator, he would move from the role of the organizer to the one of the advisor. But who would take over the organization of the conference, and who would de Kemp advise then? The APE conference had always proven a valuable source of insights into current developments around scholarly communication and academic publishing, and de Kemp needed a suitable successor. And this was the point when the new player came to the field, willing to take over as captain under the wise direction of de Kemp: the Berlin Institute of Scholarly Publishing, short BISP. Shortly before taking over the organization of the APE conference, BISP was still only an idea: the aim was to found a non for profit company dedicated to bringing together early career researchers, publishers and stakeholders, to create a dialogue between the groups and show them how to best work together in the future. Arnoud de Kemp immediately saw the potential of the small company-to-be. He started a discussion with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, future Managing Director of BISP, on how the future of the APE conference should look like, what his role would be, and what BISP would have to guarantee. In June 2020, the Berlin Institute for Scholarly Publishing was founded, originally with the name Berlin Academy for Scholarly Publishing (BASP), shortly after renamed BISP, as the Berlin Chamber of Commerce considered the entry in the commercial register to be endangered by the addition of “Academy”.

The newly born BISP soon realized that the first APE conference under its direction would not be an easy one: following the development of the Covid19 pandemic, it got clear very fast that APE would be for the first time a digital-only conference. The Berlin Institute of Scholarly Publishing was up for the challenge, and, with hard work and the support of old and new sponsors, APE2021 was a big success, strong of its engaging program and high caliber speakers.

The first steps have been taken, and BISP is moving forward and is ready to bring more to the publishing and scholarly community. Stay tuned!