Well, summer seems to be over for another year (at least here in the UK), but, as you'll see from the photographs, your Editors managed to get out and enjoy the great British weather. It has been a tumultuous summer too, with the referendum in Scotland threatening to break up the United Kingdom and the very sad news about Swets going into administration. It goes to show what a volatile world we live in nowadays, and how change can happen so quickly. Swets have long been great friends and supporters of UKSG, so our thoughts go out to all the staff who will inevitably be affected by the continuing uncertainties.

Despite all the huge changes occurring elsewhere, the editorial team at Insights have been busy throughout the summer putting together what we hope you will enjoy and think of as another great issue. We are pleased to be able to bring you a selection of articles derived from some of the excellent presentations at this year's annual Conference. To these we have added a couple of write-ups of presentations from this year's incredibly successful UKSG Managing Open Access seminar, and, of course, there are a number of articles highlighting some of the developments and issues from the wider information community.

We begin, as always, with our regular People in the News feature, this time focusing on Susanna Lob, who is currently leading major projects in her role as Manager of Special Projects for EIFL. Our Profile this issue turns the spotlight on Danny Kingsley, up until very recently the Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG). Your Editor spoke to her just before she left her post for pastures new, but her profile still throws a lot of light on the OA movement in Australia.

Within the other articles, we bring together a selection that look, in various ways, at the future of libraries and scholarly communication. Bill Thompson takes a look at the challenges facing the open library, while David De Roure explores the future of scholarly communications. John Rogers leads us through the world of open scholarship and research management, and the theme of ‘openness’ is continued by Janet Aucock, who looks at how OA workflows are being introduced at the University of St Andrews, and by Susan Ashworth and her colleagues, Valerie McCutcheon and Laura Roy, who talk about their experiences of managing OA at the University of Glasgow Library. Finally, Anna França paints a picture of how King's College London is seeking to open up online access to its alumni.

‘Discovery’ is the other major theme represented by our remaining articles. John McDonald, Michael Levine-Clark and Jason S Price investigate the effect of discovery systems on online journal usage, while Roën Janyk takes a totally different perspective – looking at how data derived from discovery systems can help libraries to better understand their user behaviours, based on recent experience in Canada. Completing this loose group of articles, Simone Kortekaas and Bianca Kramer outline their ground-breaking move at the University of Utrecht to do away with a discovery system and OPAC completely. That one is sure to get many readers excited, intrigued or, possibly, worried!

To complete our general articles, again with an international flavour, André Dazy outlines the progress and achievements of the ISTEX initiative, which is seeking to make available online scientific archives for the scholarly community throughout France.

And, in traditional fashion, we round off the issue as a whole with not one, but two, ‘A day in the life of…’ features. Julie Walker, Programme Manager (Publishing Support) at INASP takes us through a typical day in what seems to be an extremely interesting job, and, if you've ever wondered what happens to information professionals after they retire, we give you a sneak peek inside the life of retired librarian, Diana Leitch. To keep up with other news of industry colleagues, check out our People page, edited by John Jardine.

We hope this issue will give you plenty of reading for those long, cold (and probably wet) autumn and winter evenings. We've certainly enjoyed reading all the contributions as we've edited them. If you think you have something that would be of interest to other readers in future issues, don't forget that we welcome submission of articles for editorial consideration. Although now fully open access, Insights does not make an APC charge to authors; these charges are funded by UKSG. In the first instance, please contact Ally Souster, UKSG Publications Associate (ally@uksg.org), for details of our online submission process, which we are planning to introduce before the next issue.

Steve & Lorraine

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.

Click through to the relevant pages on the UKSG website for a list of the members of our international editorial board.

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.