After another successful annual conference, this year in sunny Bournemouth, the team here have been busy pulling together the latest exciting issue of Insights to keep you going through the summer. We bring you a mix of new research articles alongside a number of write-ups of presentations from the conference itself, including the enlightening ‘first-timer’ perspective from the sponsored student and early career professional delegates. We are delighted to feature an absolutely absorbing interview with the new Chief Executive of Jisc, Paul Feldman, in which he explores both his own role and his strategy for developing this key UK organization to facilitate better relationships between libraries and publishers. This theme is developed further by Ann Rossiter, Executive Director of SCONUL, who also takes a very insightful look at the relationship between publishers and libraries and how it could be enhanced to increase impact.

On the theme of publishing, we are delighted to feature an interview with Anthony Cond, Director of Liverpool University Press, in which he looks at his own role and at the resurgence of the university press. Alongside this, Sarah Kalikman Lippincott brings us an interesting article looking at the Library Publishing Coalition and how it is helping to organize libraries to enhance scholarly publishing.

For those working in libraries, this year’s conference presented some stimulating papers, and we were fortunate in getting some of the conference speakers to agree to develop and write up their presentations for those readers unable to attend the conference itself or, indeed, those who were in Bournemouth but who wish to revisit what they heard in the sessions. Karen Carden and her colleagues present a case study looking at how they designed an accessible discovery interface at the University of the Arts London, while Joanna Ball of the University of Sussex examines the issues and challenges faced in delivering content in academic libraries. Finally, in this strand, Sarah Bull and Amanda Quimby delve into the world of metadata and the importance of community collaboration in a digital world.

E-books are not forgotten, of course. Caroline Gale, Library Liaison Manager at the University of Exeter, looks at innovative ways of working with customers to help inform e-book purchasing strategies through engagement with student library champions. And, rounding off this section, Sarah Rayner and Desmond Coyle of the University of Manchester give an overview of their customer-led ‘Books Right Here Right Now’ campaign, which involved both print and e-books.

Summer is always a time for reflection, especially for those of us working in higher education. Most of the students have headed off for the summer vacation, and library staff have time to look back over the year and to take stock. It is also a great opportunity to reassess what you have achieved, and how it benefits the scholarly community. Two thought-provoking articles pick up this theme. Linda Bennett and Dimity Flanagan explain how the LSE undertook work to better measure the impact of digitized theses on research, while Jill Emery and Alison Bobal evaluate the impact of gold open access (GOA) content on traditional subscription journals in their article ‘Gathering the needles’.

Just in case you were thinking that OA had otherwise been ignored in this issue, you can rest easy. We have three encouraging articles looking at varying aspects of OA and demonstrating just how much innovative work around OA is going on across the community. Chris Awre and his colleagues present an overview of the HHuLOA (Hull, Huddersfield, Lincoln Open Access) project which seeks to identify how OA support mechanisms can be used to assist with the development of research. Paul Walk takes a different look at standards in his article on RIOXX, a metadata profile designed to help institutions adopt a standard way of describing their OA papers. And, finally, Hannah DeGroff presents her reflections on the outputs of the nine Jisc-funded Pathfinder projects and Open Access Good Practice initiative, which have produced a wide range of outputs to endorse and encourage best practice when implementing OA across institutions.

Completing our bumper summer issue, we introduce two new members of the Publications and Editorial Board, Joanna Ball and Nikesh Gosalia, and bring you a snapshot of the working day of serials librarian, James Kay, and the Cambridge-based TDM team, ContentMine, led by Peter Murray-Rust.

We hope that you will find this issue as enlightening and fascinating as we do, but, don’t forget, Insights is always looking for articles from those working across the scholarly communications community. UKSG and Insights are here to facilitate rewarding communications across our industry, so your contributions are very welcome!

Steve and Lorraine