UP Redux Programme

Badge collection from the Registration Desk in the Lobby and refreshments in The Axis.

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Seemingly every day a new outrage crosses our screens. It’s hard enough to focus in the midst of the turmoil and can be even worse when the pressures directly impact publishing operations. In recent months we’ve seen book bans, financial challenges to our parent institutions, strengthening attacks on expertise and rigor, and astonishing legal challenges–though so far, we’ve (mostly) avoided tariffs.

In this plenary, the President and President-elect of the Association of University Presses, Dennis Lloyd and Stephanie Williams, will discuss the specific challenges and opportunities that we must navigate daily as we simultaneously work to manage staff and ensure that we’re publishing the best books and journals possible. AUPresses Executive Director Peter Berkery will conclude by offering insights into what the Association as well as individuals and other publishers can do to effectively advocate for university presses in these–and future–times. 

The Axis

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Sustainability has to remain a high priority for all University Presses, for ethical and existential reasons. We can be inspired by the excellent work being done by our larger counterparts in both the UP world and beyond. But what can we do in practical terms when our current resources – time, money, the capacity to make this a priority – are sorely stretched? Our speakers share experiences, including what’s worked and what’s not gone so well, to help renew our commitment to delivering sustainable practices on a shoestring.

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Chair: Alison Welsby, Editorial Director, Liverpool University Press
Speakers:
Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review & Research Integrity, IOP Publishing
Dean Smith, Director, Duke University Press

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The Axis

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Published in autumn 2025, the Publishing Futures report from Cambridge University Press & Assessment highlighted four urgent challenges facing the scholarly publishing ecosystem: rising volumes that pressure the peer review system, the financial unsustainability of current models, widening equity gaps for researchers in low- and middle-income countries, and the need to change academic reward systems that incentivize quantity over quality. This session will unpack those challenges for the conference audience and highlight the ways in which CUPA – and other publishers – can and are working to deliver radical change in academic publishing.

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Why does the ‘digital future’ perpetually remain on the horizon? For many university presses, born-digital publishing is complicated by resource constraints, legacy workflows, and a fear of failure. Bringing together expert speakers from publishing and academia, this session explores digital publishing in action. We will look at examples of new initiatives, discuss the practical challenges university presses face when developing new projects, and consider the real opportunities that lie ahead for the sector.  

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There is a lively, thriving and growing open publishing community within UK HE that links directly with university strategies focused on outreach, engagement, impact and increasing global knowledge equity.  While HE currently faces various challenges, it is vital that universities and libraries continue to show leadership in the open publishing environment, experimenting with different offers and models and championing the cultural change to open scholarship with all the benefits it brings. Institutional and library-based open access publishing is not just a ‘nice to have’ alternative to a viable commercial publishing model, but an essential – and established – element of a fit-for-purpose scholarly communications ecosystem. This panel brings together librarians and open institutional publishers to discuss why open access and institutional publishing matter more than ever.

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New generative and agentic technologies, whether on publisher platforms or through third parties, are changing user behaviours. In a world where agents can pull answers from the whole scholarly record, without a human ever visiting an article page or downloading a book, publishers and librarians are questioning how and whether AI counts as usage. COUNTER, the international standard for usage metrics, is developing new best practice guidelines to help us all tackle this question. In this session, we'll learn about how different types of AI usage interact with the existing, trusted Code of Practice; the solutions the recent community consultation defined for reporting that usage; and what you can do to ensure you're getting the full AI usage picture.

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Universities have for the most part not fundamentally changed the way they organise themselves, and therefore the way they organise knowledge, in a very long time. Yet most of our disciplinary structures grew in or out of the nineteenth century: more specifically, they were a product of the Industrial Revolution. And now we have a new technological revolution: the digital and AI revolution. In this closing keynote, Professor Marion Thain will discuss how we need to change the way we organise knowledge in response to this new context.