A brace of heather-tufted Eds gearing up to hit the dance-floor after the Conference Dinner

Well, while writing this, the sun is blazing down and the UK is basking in temperatures higher than in Ibiza. So, what better time to turn our thoughts to summer reading – and what better reading could there be when you're sitting out in the sunshine with your glass of Pimm's or a G&T than another bumper issue of Insights!

We kick off this issue with something a little different. Having introduced some of our editorial team to you over the last few issues, we decided that, as the time was right, it would be nice to feature short pieces written by the outgoing and incoming Chairs of UKSG. So, in his farewell piece Tony Kidd shares some thoughts on his time as Chair, while Ross MacIntyre looks forward to the exciting challenges associated with taking the helm.

But, UKSG is not the only organization with a new person at the helm. Martyn Harrow has recently taken over as the new Head of JISC, the organization which drives innovation in UK education and research, and we were fortunate enough to get his agreement to being featured in our ‘People in the News’ feature before his other commitments became too great. Alongside him, we have also been lucky enough to secure a ‘Profile’ of Frances Pinter, who is well known in the information industry through her past experience in publishing, library consortia and the innovation of new business models for scholarly monographs.

And we shouldn't forget the success of this year's record-breaking Annual Conference on the sunny banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow. In this issue, we take a peek into the diaries of the four sponsored students who attended the Conference on places generously sponsored by Elsevier to get their impressions of the three-day event. Also, in the ‘A day in the life of …’ feature, we catch up with Emma Anderson, herself a former sponsored student, who is now running her own publishing business. Some of you may have been fortunate enough to attend the session presented by Professor Carol Tenopir, but, for those who were not, we are publishing a write-up of her very interesting presentation which looked at reading and the role of the library. We also include a write-up of Martin Paul Eve's presentation on ‘autosubvertive practices in academic publishing’, and a pair of papers from the ‘Evolving Library’ plenary session at the Conference in which Ben Showers and Kevin Ashley take critical, and slightly opposing, views on data curation and data re-use. Are we mammals or dandelions? Read the articles to find out more!

We spared Marshall Breeding (who also spoke in the ‘Evolving Library’ plenary session at the Conference alongside Ben and Kevin) the pressure of writing up his Conference presentation as he has been busy working on a major review of knowledge bases and link resolvers, which was sponsored by the National Library of Sweden, and we are extremely grateful to be able to publish his article summarizing the key findings of that piece of research. We're sure this will prove an extremely interesting and informative read for many of our members.

UKSG has a proud tradition of challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries, so in this issue we are fortunate in being able to publish an article by respected academic and now independent consultant, Professor Charles Oppenheim, in which he asks whether the very concept of intellectual property should be rethought. Martyn Jansen's article takes a fresh look at licensing models for online resources, while Rooven Pakkiri's article challenges how traditional organizational structures can benefit from the use of social business platforms. Also, Caren Milloy and Ellen Collins present an overview of the interesting work being undertaken on open access scholarly monographs by the OAPEN-UK project, and Rick Lugg proposes a new data-driven approach to sustainable collection development and management. Completing our summer offering, we have Torsten Reimer's ‘Key Issue’ looking at the growing area of text and data mining.

We hope you'll agree that we're getting your summer off to a great start with plenty to read and stimulate your minds. Enjoy your reading and have a great summer. We'll be back in the autumn with plenty more quality reading to occupy you as the nights start to draw in.