This event is designed to discuss the challenges, issues and trends in the modern scholarly monograph – particularly in social sciences and humanities.

Sponsored by Springer Nature and organised by the ANU Library.

Scholarly monographs are in a period of considerable change. In recent years there has been a steady move to digital publishing of monographs, new models that support open access (such s Knowledge Unlatched and Book processing charges), opening up new audiences and impact metrics.

Open access is developing strongly – for example the ANU Press model (full open access) is being adopted around the world and in 2017 the ANU Press achieved around 2.5 million downloads of the over 700 titles.

Scholarly monographs remain an area of vital debate – what do PhD graduates expect for their career – is it the traditional book as their first research product? Are scholars using blog posts and new forms of communication to replace the tradition book? Is there a crisis in peer review? Is the metrics tide sweeping over the higher education sector relevant or distracting debate of scholarly communication?

Do come and contribute to the debate.

Speakers include:

• Prof J. Stephen Downie, Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences, and the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center;

• Dr Niels Peter Thomas, Chief Book Strategist at Springer Nature;

• Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley FAHA, Macquarie University;

• Professor Frank Bongiorno, ANU;

• Dr Jan Zwar, Macquarie University who will report on the findings and issues identified through the ARC funded project the Australian Book Industry;

• Australian Scholarly Press Managers;

• A senior official from the Australian Research Council and other scholars.

Audience: Academics, scholarly authors (including independent scholars), funders, librarians, the academies.

Thanks to our sponsor Springer Nature.

Image: Johan Larsson, The future of books