This year’s ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2025 was a heartening exercise in finding community and putting names to faces I’d otherwise never met in person before or might not have had the opportunity to. As I walked into the Manchester Deansgate Hotel, I bumped into a colleague from a former job, and we promptly (re)exchanged numbers to catch up after the first keynote. This set the tone for new connections and conversations over the following days.  

I chatted with many more colleagues through my working group participation with OIPA – the Open Institutional Publishing Association – of which the Press I currently work for – LSE Press – are proud members. At lunchtime, I took a random seat next to Raegen Allen, a Business Development Associate for an organisation called Repro, and we quickly connected over her journey into the industry, her recent MA in Publishing, and a shared curiosity with the independent southeast London-based publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.  

I chatted to colleagues at Open Book Publishers and Thoth Open Metadata who were nominated for the ALPSP Innovators award for their work on supporting OA books getting visible and accessible, and discussed the upcoming Frankfurt Bookfair and opportunities for OIPA collaboration and collective uplifting of member presses.   

I attended the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards in my capacity as an ALPSP Rising Star, having been also named a Rising Star by The Bookseller earlier this year. The award ceremonies were very different in nature – the first being much more trade focussed with a wider cohort of nominees networking around an open bar. By contrast, the ALPSP awards dinner was a more traditional sit-down affair with a vast community of academic publishers with different priorities and audiences congregating for a three-course dinner on the second day of the conference. The three-course vegan catering was sensational, which lifted spirits dampened by the drizzly Manchester weather! 

The conference itself was informative and rounded. The opening keynote from Max Hui Bai from the Political Belief Lab spoke through the logic and positioning of his ‘Publish or perish’ tabletop board game and the value of adaptability and responding to consumer needs and pressures.  

A thoughtful conversation chaired by Godwyns Onwuchekwa on ‘Bridging the gap: community involvement in academic publishing’ made some important points around listening and the value of community engagement through meeting people where they are – literally going to them – to tailor your product or service to their desires in a way which might not be possible otherwise. Onwuchekwa was an energetic and engaged facilitator and the panel discussions left attendees feeling eager to have necessary conversations in order to build meaningful communities. 

The lightning talks from the Innovation Award nominees were particularly AI-dominant, and whilst I applaud these creative applications, reliance on AI is something I personally find a little unnerving given the existential threat posed to creative careers. Furthermore, I was reminded of the ongoing legal case with Anthropic and despairing posts I’d seen from authors I’ve previously worked with whose work has been unlawfully pirated by the artificial intelligence company to train their chatbot Claude.  

I was particularly impressed with Frontiers for Young Minds’ initiative which used children as peer reviewers - even pairing  young minds with Nobel Prize winners - to expand their skillsets, provide an insight into academic publishing, and open up the potential of a career in STEM.  

Open access representation across the panels was better than some previous conferences I've attended, and whilst I was sad to have had to choose between panel discussions on ‘The evolving landscapes of scholarly communication’ and ‘Enabling open access book publishing for scholarly societies’ – I was lucky enough to catch Paula Kennedy and Lucy Barnes for a chat after their talk for an overview of key themes.  

In the earlier panel on scholarly communication, the speakers polled attendees to gauge the biggest challenge facing social media (Resourcing) with 76% of delegates naming LinkedIn as their primary profile, 4% naming X, 4% saying they weren’t sure, and 10% saying Bluesky. The rate of change in this sphere of scholarly publishing has been rapid in the three years since I pivoted from trade to academic publishing, and forums such as this, which drill into the contemporary issues and make sense of best practices in light of this, are essential.  

Returning down South after the conference, I reflected on the three days of the conference. The ALPSP Annual Conference was a great way to feel better connected to contemporary themes and discussions in our industry and make sense of this within the specific contexts of open publishing.  Overall, the conference was a pleasant and enriching experience.  

 

About the author

Elinor Potts manages marketing and communications at LSE Press, the open access publisher of books and journals in the social sciences. Before joining LSE Press, she edited the Polari Prize-winning Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures by Adam Zmith in her capacity as Marketing Executive for Repeater Books. Elinor is passionate about representation in publishing, and she offers mentoring to early career publishers via SYP and EvenUp. She is studying a Level 6 CIM accredited apprenticeship in Marketing Management and she holds an NCTJ in News Reporting from PA Media, a MA (Hons) in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s College London, and a BA (Hons) in English & Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths University of London. Elinor was also named a Rising Star by The Bookseller Magazine in 2025.