We’re standing up for publishingOxford to host national summit Activists from the NUJ and Unite chapels at seven leading academic and educational publishers will gather together for the first time ever to look at how they can work together to a common purpose.
Hosted in Oxford Town hall, on September 24th, this initiative will focus on how outsourcing and the globalisation of publishing is affecting the quality of the books and journals we produce and the job security and job satisfaction of publishing workers. It will also give a long-overdue opportunity for staff from across the industry to get together to swap stories and experiences.
The meeting is backed by activists at Cambridge University Press, Lexis Nexis, Macmillan Education Oxford, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education Harlow, Pearson Education Oxford, Scholastic Leamington and Taylor & Francis (Informa).
The organisers hope it will attract an attendance from further afield, including Blackwell (now part of Wiley) and Elsevier Science, Kidlington, as well as from among the army of freelances who now carry out much of the work for these publishing
houses.
Steve Ball, Field Chair at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, at Oxford Brookes, will lead a discussion about what is happening to traditional publishing skills and quality in the face of remotely set budgets and routine large-scale outsourcing of entire projects that often degrades in-house roles to project management and progress chasing.
The hope is that the meeting can draw out experiences that are common across the field of academic and educational publishing, and offer pointers to areas in which activists can work together to stand up for the quality of the publications we work on and the jobs that we do.
AW 2008-09-01
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