In this issue we bring you many of the highlights from the 37th UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition, which was held in April in the beautiful spa town of Harrogate. This year SAGE and Springer Science+Business Media sponsored places for six students and early career professionals. One of the students, Gareth J Johnson, brilliantly sums up the mood of the conference in his article ‘Diversity, collaboration and renewal’. The other winners of the sponsored places provide evocative snapshots of the conference with their reports on the plenary sessions, breakout sessions and social events. We also bring you a montage of actual snapshots of the delegates, exhibitors and speakers enjoying the conference.

One promised plenary speaker we were sorry to miss because he was ill and unable to attend was Geoffrey Boulton from the University of Edinburgh, speaking about open data. However, we are delighted that he has instead written up the presentation as an article for Insights. Guilhem Chalancon's plenary presentation, about the workflows he uses as a young researcher, captivated the conference audience. His article is an essential read for all information professionals who wish to understand about new approaches to knowledge management.

This issue also brings you articles based on conference breakout sessions which highlighted some innovative projects. Ben Showers from Jisc explains how the use of library analytics could improve outcomes for students. Suzanne Enright and Ken Chad report on their work to introduce a virtual research environment at the University of Westminster. Jo-Anne Murray from the University of Edinburgh shares her findings of a study examining the perceptions of a group of participants registered on her massive open online course (MOOC) in equine nutrition, which attracted 24,000 students to register.

Other articles in this issue include the view from Rick Anderson of the University of Utah and contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen, who asks if a rational discussion of open access is possible. Peter Mandler, of the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Historical Society, writes about the mismatch between the protocols of the open access mandates and the practices of the humanities. Also on the subject of open access, John MacColl of the University of St Andrews, in our Key Issue feature, makes the case for a national repository of open content.

Two articles in this issue report on how libraries are collaborating with others in the university to publish open content. Charles Watkinson from Purdue University explains how the university publishing programme and institutional repository are united within the remit of the library. Carina Ahlberg from Karolinska Institutet University explains how the library is working with MOOCs. Martha Fogg from Adam Matthews also discusses collaboration in her article on how partnerships between publishers and archives can help the latter face the challenges of getting content digitized.

Those with an interest in e-books will find Antony Groves' report on user research carried out at the University of Sussex fascinating, not least that cross reference with the library discovery tool and Google revealed that e-books available from the web were cited more than those from library collections. Finally, Phillip Wood, Head of the Department of Security and Resilience at Buckinghamshire New University, discusses the disparity between higher education's need to conduct and communicate research activity and the need to guard against cyberattack.

We bring you a profile on the career of Sven Fund from De Gruyter, and his views on what needs to be achieved to make open access work as a mainstream business model. Our popular ‘People in the News’ features Emily Gore from the Digital Public Library of America, and Amy Buckland tells us about a day in her busy life as Co-ordinator, Scholarly Communications at McGill University Library. As always, John Jardine brings us his ‘People’ feature, so that we can keep up with the latest moves in the publishing, library and intermediary worlds.

We hope that this July issue of Insights continues the conference themes of diversity, collaboration and renewal. We very much look forward to hearing your views on the articles, and welcome your submissions if you would like to share your views or news about your projects.

Lorraine & Steve

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.

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