We were so impressed by the work that the students on our spring micro-internships produced that we decided to host two more placements this summer! Once again, we were incredibly lucky and had two brilliant teams, each carrying out a 4-day project.

Briony Arnott and Hei Laam Wong looked at society publishing and open access models for academic publishing, while Chloe Jiang and Rowan Harris investigated the provision of green skills training in the heritage sector.

HB&P produces a members-only, academic, annual Journal, formerly known as Transactions; this has been a key benefit of membership and one of the core ways the organisation has disseminated knowledge about heritage and conservation since 1953. There are a number of ways that organisations like us publish their academic work and we wanted to find out more about the options available.
Briony identified four main ways that societies publish their work:

• In-house self-publication
• Third party distribution
• Society publishing
• Commercial publishing

Each method has its pros and cons, with some offering greater support and publishing expertise, others offering a more cost-effective service, and some requiring the organisation to relinquish a greater or lesser level of control over their work.

We were particularly interested to learn more about society publishing, which involves a more tailored partnership between the organisation and the publisher, who can also offer expertise in editing, marketing, distribution and more. Key players in this field are well-established, with strong reputations, and include Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and Taylor and Francis, among others. Their services come at a cost, but a key benefit would be the increased awareness and greater reach that HB&P could achieve for the Journal – an important consideration when we want to make the research in the Journal as useful and accessible as possible.
Which brings us on to Hei’s work on Open Access. There is a move within the academic publishing field to make research more widely accessible, and many journals are doing this via the open access model. This makes research instantly available online, although there are a variety of models of funding and access – for example, some models require either the article author or the publishing organisation to pay an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC), while under other models researchers may need a subscription to the publisher’s website to access the variety of articles available in their database. Copyright licensing may also present a challenge. While the ease of access to information via Open Access makes it very attractive, the challenges and the costs would need very careful consideration.

HB&P has always published via third party distribution, so exploring these other options has been enlightening and has given us much to think about. It was also a great pleasure to work with Briony and Hei, who went the extra mile on this project and really impressed us with their passion and hard work!

Words by:

Christina Avramakis, HB&P Operations and Development Manager