And so, another year has dawned, and the first issue of a new volume of Insights hits the presses (metaphorically, if not literally). Since taking the helm of UKSG's journal, Lorraine and I (pictured above) have been in the very fortunate position of being able to mark quite a number of significant milestones – the final issue of Serials, the rebirth of the journal as Insights, the move to e-only format – and once more we find ourselves with something exciting to celebrate, our first fully open access (OA) issue and the start of a new chapter in the life of the journal. For those of you who missed the earlier announcements, from 2014 Insights will be freely available to the world, which means that the UKSG brand will be available to millions of people in the knowledge community around the world. Knowledge is a global asset, and we are pleased to be playing our part in disseminating it.

So we begin by welcoming all those new readers who previously were not able to access Insights (and previously, Serials). We hope you will enjoy reading Insights and find it both interesting and informative.

Perhaps not surprisingly, open access forms one of the major themes in our first fully OA issue, beginning with write-ups of a selection of the presentations from the very successful UKSG One-Day Conference, ‘Open Access Realities’, held last November. Michael Jubb kicks us off with a review of progress since the publication of the Finch Report in 2012. Then we have three differing, but equally interesting perspectives on OA – for researchers, for universities and for subscription-based publishers – from Caroline Edwards, Jill Russell, and Victoria Gardner and David Green, respectively. Finally, rounding off the conference presentations, Damian Pattinson and Catriona MacCallum take a look at what opportunities OA offers for publishers and institutions.

China is a growth economy in terms of scholarly output, so we are very fortunate in being able to bring you an article on OA in China by Xiaolin Zhang (who will also be speaking at this year's annual Conference in Harrogate). Peter Binfield takes a look at PeerJ, an OA publisher which offers researchers both a peer-reviewed academic journal and a ‘preprint server’ in the fields of biological and medical sciences. And, to complete our OA strand, we have two articles – by David Sweeney and Ben Johnson, and Simon Kerridge and Phil Ward – examining how OA will impact on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment of research outputs in the UK in 2020.

Our minds may be ‘open’, but we are not completely focused on open access. We also bring you a broad selection of articles on topics of wider interest to the community , leading off with articles on the broad theme of scholarly research and communication. Howard Ratner, Fred Dylla and David Crotty look at how the CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) initiative is helping to improve public access to federally funded scholarly research. In the ‘Key Issue’, Megan Beech looks at techniques for sharing research more successfully online, and in our regular ‘a day in the life of …’ feature, we spend a day with Ina Smith, the Scholarly Communications Manager at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Elsewhere, Jane Harvell and Audrey Marshall pick up on the thorny issue of how library schools ensure that what they teach remains relevant to the professional environment their students will be entering, looking at how UKSG is working with the University of Sussex to bring the practitioner perspective to information studies students. Andrew Walsh takes a look at how gaming technologies are being used to improve information literacy in his article on SEEK!, a game-based open educational resource (OER), and we are pleased to welcome back two familiar names (and former co-editors of Serials), Hazel Woodward and Helen Henderson, who present the findings of research they have been conducting recently on e-book consortial purchasing.

And, as if that were not enough, all this is ‘topped and tailed’ by our regular features. The ‘Profile’ this time features an interview with the current Chair of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), Stella Butler, while the headline grabber interviewed in the ‘People In The News’ feature this time is Bryn Geffert of Amherst College Library in the USA, who has been making waves by setting up a new and innovative university press. Then, bringing everything to a close, we of course have our ever-popular ‘People’ pages, edited by John Jardine, in which we catch up with the comings and goings of people within the community. (If you move, retire, or take up a new role, don't forget to let us know, folks! Mail to: jjardine@uk.swets.com)

Finally, don't forget (readers old and new) that Insights welcomes submission of scholarly articles on topics of interest to the global knowledge community. Please contact the Editors (details below). And, look out for the OA monograph supplement coming later in the Spring.

Steve & Lorraine

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Insights: the UKSG journal is e-only, open access and published three times a year. Back issues of Serials (the former name of the UKSG journal, comprising Volumes 1–24) are now archived and can still be accessed at http://www.uksg.org/serials. All issues of Insights can be accessed at http://uksg.metapress.com/content/122388.

Click through to the relevant pages on the UKSG website for a list of the members of our international editorial board and for information on how to submit articles to Insights.

Articles herein do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the journal, its editors or UKSG. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of content that is not the copyright of authors or UKSG.