Discussion and insights from the London Book Fair

The three-day event returned to Kensington Olympia for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a packed schedule of talks and panels. 

Helping those fleeing conflict 

Jane Mann, Managing Director of the Cambridge Partnership for Education, joined a discussion on the role of publishing and culture during global conflict, organised by the UK Publishers Association (PA). 

Joining chair, Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of the PA, and fellow panellists, Bodour Al Qasimi, President of the International Publishers Association, and Cortina Butler, the Deputy Director Arts at the British Council, Jane stressed the importance of helping children displaced by conflict to continue learning. Half of those fleeing Ukraine are children, who join the 75 million children worldwide whose education is interrupted each year because of conflict, emergency and disaster.

Jane also highlighted that education can help to reduce global conflict in the future, while access to research and education materials can combat disinformation in times of crisis. She said:

...perhaps one of the greatest responsibilities is supporting the prevention of conflict in the first place. One simple way of doing this would be to ensure all the materials we create not only challenge the sort of bias that can lie at the roots of conflict, but also that we deliberately mainstream peace education and conflict resolution in everything we create.

Cambridge is taking practical steps to provide continuity of education for refugee children fleeing conflict in Ukraine and other parts of the world. These include mapping the Ukrainian school curriculum on to those used in countries receiving Ukrainian refugees and on to our own Cambridge curriculum. This will help teachers smooth the transition of Ukrainian pupils into their education systems and allow Cambridge to make translations of relevant learning materials freely available online. 

Jane also spoke about the power of partnerships, and Cambridge’s work with the charity UNICEF to provide a teaching and learning programme for Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh, and its work on the curriculum frameworks that underpin the Learning Passport. Jane said: "An example of partnership has been the Learning Passport, which is about providing quality education to children who for one reason or another are unable to access formal education, which means it has been largely used in countries where conflict has occurred."

This technology platform and solution hosts learning materials that teachers can access along with support to deliver them effectively. It also tracks what has been learned, so that children have a digital record of their progress that is accessible anywhere in the world.

The panel closed with a recorded message from Oleksandr Afonin, President of the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association, who shared shocking information about the impact of the war on this sector: “It is extremely difficult for the Ukrainian publishing business today. More than two-thirds of the country’s main publishing capacity is in the war zone, as well as warehouses with finished productions, most of which were either destroyed by bombing or not accessible.” He added that the international community could support through donating money, paper, buying rights to publish works by Ukrainian authors, or printing Ukrainian books.
 

Research publishing looks to the future 

Both Dr Fiona Hutton, Head of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) Open Access Publishing at Cambridge University Press and Dr Monica Moniz, Programme Manager for Open Access Journals, were part of a panel looking at the evolution of the research article. 

Despite the innovations made possible by digital publishing, most research still has to fit the format of a traditional journal article in order to get published. Fiona and Monica showcased two new publishing models – Experimental Results and Research Directions – which better reflect the way research is carried out. 

Fiona explained that most of the results from laboratory experiments never see the light of day, despite being potentially useful to other researchers, because they’re not deemed worthy of publishing as a traditional journal article. She said: “Only part of the scientific record is being mapped and research that funders have invested in is wasted.” 

Experimental Results addresses this by giving researchers a place to publish valid, standalone experimental results, regardless of whether they are novel, inconclusive, negative or supplementary to other published work. 

According to Monica, Research Directions grew out of the question ‘How would we reinvent the research journal if we started from scratch?’ In response to that question, each journal in the new series will bring researchers from different fields together around fundamental questions that cut across traditional disciplines. They will also more closely mirror the research lifecycle, with results, analysis and impact reviews all published as separate, open access, peer-reviewed and citable outputs. 

The Cambridge pair were joined on stage by Rebecca Hill from Open Research publishing platform, F1000; and by Maria Guerreiro from the not-for-profit research publisher and open source technology developer, eLife, who also spoke about the ways in which they are trying to change the way research is published. All the panellists agreed on the need to open up research to collaboration and review at an earlier stage to increase openness and transparency and to speed discovery. They also agreed that there was more to do in harnessing the full potential of digital publishing.