Tena koutou katoa.

I am going to try to make this as long and tedious as possible, so do feel free to stop reading now – you might just save yourself 20 minutes of mind-numbing nothingness. Take action immediately to avoid this diatribe of jargonic gibberish.

Right, now that I have your attention, let me assure you that I am acutely aware that your time is precious. So let us embark on a mysterious and wonderous journey into the known and the unknown. And also the known-unknown and the unknown-unknowable. A journey of promise and opportunity, and also challenge and familiarity.

Actually, scrap that, I’ll just tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been helping with lately:

1. 1. The Editors’ Symposium was held last Thursday. This was a day for journal editors, potential editors, and those who want to think about academic publishing. Anton and Fiona came up with the idea for this after talking to a number of UC academics who edit journals but never got to share their experiences and issues with other editors.
      The day was very successful. Helen kicked it off with an excellent and thought-provoking overview of the state of academic publishing. There were presentations from senior academics about editing existing and new journals, how to use editing to enhance your academic career, what’s coming next in academic publishing, and new authoring software. Brian spoke about the Library’s implementation of PubPub, and that was very well received.
      But more than the presentations, the questions and discussion were rich and, at times, provocative.
      Big thanks to the Library team who organised this and made it a fruitful day!
   2. We have two PowerBI dashboards ready to publish, following a series of workshops with Doug Muller from Digital Services and Pip Hawkes from R&I. Kiera, Brian and Anton have been working on these. Expect to see them online soon.
   3. He Kupenga Horopounamu, the NZLPP-funded project, is powering ahead now that Jess is on board. Our colleagues from Auckland Council Libraries and Christchurch City Libraries joined us for a hui last Thursday. Next step is to get the ethics submission approved, and to finalise our research participants.
   4. A small team has been looking at how we can get journals that UC academics publish in indexed by Scopus. Most journals are already Scopus-indexed, but there are a small group of journals that are significant to UC researchers that aren’t. We’ve looked at the Scopus requirements, and will work out our next steps soon.

I’ll leave it there. If you got this far – well done!

Ngā mihi, Stuart