If there hasn't been a burning platform yet, AI might be it.
Hello and welcome to Trend in Academic Publishing with me, Patrick Shafe. I'm Commercial Director of the publishing solutions company, Deanta. And every year I survey academic publishers and write a report with the same title as his podcast, Trends in Academic Publishing. Whilst our report is full of data, it's also based on conversations I have with leading figures in the academic publishing world. I've been amazed at how freely I could talk to people, and they would share the challenges they face.
Most of our content stolen probably from university libraries we hosted in countries where copyright isn't enforceable.
How they're dealing with them.
I couldn't hang around. It was like, right, I'm in and I've got to get going with it.
And if things are going well, the secrets of their success and the innovations that they're bringing in. We want technology as a way to keep things in-house, to leapfrog those big publishers that are outsourcing and offshoring everything. So, I thought, why not share some of those conversations in the form of a podcast? And academic publishing being the lovely collaborative industry that it is, everyone so far said yes. So, in each episode of Trends in Academic Publishing, I'll be talking to a different leading figure in the industry and getting the inside story of their business. For this episode, I talk to Nicky Ramsey, CEO of Edinburgh University Press.

So, Nicky is a much-admired figure in the industry. She's chair of the IPG, the Independent Publishers Guild. and I've found her to be insightful and a great communicator. So here we go, Trends and Academic Publishing Podcast with me, Patrick Shafe, and my guest, Nicky Ramsey, CEO of Edinburgh University Press. Thank you very much for doing this today and welcome.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's very kind and it's an absolute pleasure.
So, before we come on to finding out a bit more about you and the current challenges at EUP, I wanted to go back to the middle of the pandemic 2021, because that's when you took over as CEO of Edinburgh University Press. What was it like coming into that post at that time?
So I did a staff meeting, a sort of state of the nation speech, and I sort of talked about what I wanted to do, all those little faces on the screen, sort of thinking, I know there was a sense of, well, but nothing's going to change because she's been at EUP all her career. She knows how it's done. She knows who we are. She knows what we do. It will probably just be more of the same. And that's not what I wanted at all because I felt as though there was so much. potential within the EUP that we perhaps weren't realising. We'd got ourselves to a very good place. We were on a kind of a strong business footing. You know, we had, we'd been profitable for several years. We had money in the bank. So, we were able to sort of start thinking about how we might do things differently, but I think it needed that impetus for change. And so, I thought that as my challenge, just because you put somebody into that position who has been there a long time, it doesn't just mean it will be more of the same. So, I was in a position perhaps to deliver more change than someone from the outside coming in might have done, who might have been a bit fearful of treading on toes and all that kind of stuff. I feel like I knew where we were, and I knew what was good about us, and I knew where we could kind of push on and be better.
Were there things that you were seeing that you wanted to change?
It's almost hard to remember now, and it's not that long ago. But yeah, I think it was the sense that everything was fine. Things were fine. We were making money. We were selling our books. We were selling our journals. There weren't any problems. But we had a new head of finance, new head of production. And so there was a lot of change at the top. So the management team suddenly was quite new. And so I think that helped. It helped us stop and look at things and think, are there better ways of doing things? You know, yeah, we were, all the communication through e-mail, all the schedules that were on spreadsheets. Yes, our head of finance came in and basically said, I want to burn all your spreadsheets and I don't think she's succeeded yet, but we definitely have fewer than we used to do. So yeah, it was just, there hadn't really been the impetus for change that needed to happen.
So sometimes organisations that hire from within, it can be a recipe for stagnation, but you kind of saw it in the reverse in that way.
Yeah, absolutely. And that came from within me, but I was also, we had a group of non-exec directors who were also demanding that of me, and I think, were holding me to account. And I knew that, and I knew that I'd, you know, I'd gone in, I interviewed for that post, saying all the things I wanted to do. You have to deliver on that. I was given the position initially as an interim host, so I think there was a bit of added pressure there, but in a good way. It meant I couldn't hang around and sort of wait and see and maybe take my time. It was like, right, I'm in, and I've got to kind of get going with this.
Yeah. I've reported in the Trends Report in previous years, the fact that I think that some in the industry perhaps are making good margins, very kind of nice businesses, subscription-based businesses, and doing very nicely. Therefore, the impetus to change isn't necessarily there. Now, I wouldn't put Edinburgh in that camp. I think because you're mission-driven, there are other factors at play in there. But you have kind of brought change into what's a quite traditional organisation. How have you built that culture? How have you encouraged people to accept change? Because I think that's probably the hardest part, isn't it? You know, aside from choosing what you're going to do.
Yeah. We talk about it like, you know, very, very explicitly. When I became chief exec, and one of the things I did say was that, yeah, I think we need to work on the culture. We almost need to build it from scratch because at that point, We hadn't been in the office together for nearly 18 months. It was going to be another at least six months before we started to come back. So it's like, OK, we're kind of past the initial shock of COVID and lockdown and all of this. We're in at the moment what feels like a new normal, but what does that mean and how do we make that work when we come back? And we had sessions where we sat and we said, OK, what does that mean to you? What does collaboration look like? What does community look like? And so we were really purposeful in it. I think it'd be interesting, and I should do this, to speak to people who have joined EUP since, who weren't in this, do they get that? Do they think, oh yeah, this is, I hope they do think it's a very collaborative culture and so on.
We've seen as a business in dealing with you the last few years that you do allow collaboration. And I think happily, many people in senior positions do this within this industry, which makes it a lovely business to be in, but I do recognize that you allow your staff to be the experts that they are and form their own opinions. I don't see anything kind of dictatorial about the old management style.
Oh, gosh, no, no. I feel like I'm always learning. And I learn from the people who are around me. And yeah, you hire brilliant people. Why wouldn't you want them to, you know, excel and be their best? And yeah, so we do try and place a lot of emphasis on that learning from one another, sharing, yeah, letting people take the lead on things. We're having a staff meeting next week where we're sort of going to bring together some of the people that have been doing a lot of kind of experimentation with AI and they're going to sort of share what they've learned. And the intention then is that others can kind of pick up on the things that have worked and avoid things that haven't. And those kind of knowledge sharing sessions are really important. But yeah, I always recognise there's a lot I don't know. And so I'm very lucky. I'm surrounded by experts. And I think you choose to work for University Press because the mission matters, the purpose matters. And the culture and the values are important. I mean, I'm sure people at EUP would say there are decisions that are made that are made and then they're communicated because there's some stuff you have to decide. But we try where we can and we recognise, you know, we've got the senior management team and then we have sort of a layer of people who are line managers, so sort of senior within their teams and we're trying to be better at communicating with them so that one, because they give us brilliant feedback and they tell us where we've got things wrong and so we can reshape things in response to that. But also that's about making sure they've understood where the decision has come from. And that's something we're definitely working on at the moment and I know we can be better.
Have you had any help in terms of how to bring in change management programmes? I mean, in some larger organisations, there's people whose whose job that is, whose title that is, it's quite a tough thing to navigate on your own, isn't it?
It is. I mean, I think we have the tremendous benefit of our non-exec directors who, you know, have all come from generally, you know, larger academic publishers, either university presses or commercial, and have a vast range of experience. And I've sort of worked with kind of two sets of NEDs now since I've been in post, because there were some sort of coming to the end of their term. But they, you know, every one of them has been brilliant on all sorts of things, but particularly on the change piece. And then also it's the benefit of being networked into the university. We have our board of trustees from the university and there are people within that group who are very strong in that area as well. So no shortage of support.
Yeah, when I came into this industry, I found it remarkable how open it was and how people share real insights into their business. Did you get some assistance with that when you stepped into the post with other university press directors?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, people so generous with their time and their expertise. And so, specifically people from Bristol and Manchester and Liverpool University Press, but also Helen Kogan from Kogan Page, Tim Williams from Edward Elgar. Yeah, I felt like no matter who I reached out to say, I'm grappling with this particular problem or this issue or thinking about this thing. people so willing, as I say, to give their time and to say, this is what we did. Really crucially, this is what we did, which we got wrong. So these are the pitfalls to avoid. And here's where we've been successful. And yeah, I love that about this industry. I think I can't imagine working in an industry where your competitors were truly rivals. And yeah, it's not that at all.
Yeah. So I wonder if we can set the scene about Edinburgh University Press for a little bit. Could you tell us a bit about the specialisms, for instance, what subject matters do you specialise in?
Sure, yeah, so we're very clear on that and have been, and that was one of the things that when I was editorial director that I kind of really sort of wanted to implement is that strength and depth. So we have 10 key subject areas in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The biggest list is literary studies, and then we have Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, which is big and growing, film studies, philosophy, Catholic and ancient history, law, language and linguistics, Scottish studies, it's getting one and that's terrible. Politics, politics. I should remember that I commissioned on my list when I started commissioning. So yeah, so within our books programme particularly, we only publish in those areas. In journals, we're trying to move in that direction as well. So we do have journals in other subject areas too. They're still within arts, humanities and social sciences. But we see the real benefits in having synergies between the books and journals lists in terms of people that we want to work with, and also the people that we're selling our content to, they're the same people. So if we've got collections of books and journals in the same subject areas, reaching the same audience, that just makes sense.
Okay, that makes sense. And what resources do you have internally? What kind of team?
So in total, we're 50 full-time equivalents, but there are some part-time staff. So I think we're probably closer to 60 people who are actually in the EUP team. The biggest teams are editorial and then production. And then we've got marketing team, sales and finance operations. So yeah, I think we have maybe 8 commissioning editors now. So yeah, and then five, five people who work in support of those.
And so you sort of take the approach of some other publishers, some of which you've mentioned there, who manage the publishing process yourselves largely, yet rather than outsourcing to a big commercial publisher.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah, we do. We do all of that ourselves.
And is that particularly important to you? Can I ask why that's important to you when you could go another route?
I think because we want to own it, our brand and our profile are incredibly important to us. Edinburgh University Press carries a level of prestige around the world and we take that very seriously. And so we want to really closely control what is published under that name and the quality of it has to be world class and Yeah, I don't think we've trusted anyone else to do that. Does that sound bad? I don't know. We know we do it really well ourselves. So yeah, we want to retain that skill in-house.
And our trends report this year said that I think it's around 61% of publishers saw economic sustainability as the key factor that's driving their strategy. I'm wondering, do you recognise that and how is the health of EUP?
No, absolutely recognise that. We put a new strategic plan in place a year after I've been in post as chief exec. It was a plan that was meant to last us five years, but we're at the three-year point now when we are revising it in light of market conditions. But that is built completely on the twin pillars, as we call them, of mission as a university press and business sustainability. And we just know that if you don't have the business sustainability, you can't do the mission piece. And I think everybody at EUP understands that. And so we have to get that bit right. We get that in place and then we're able to do that mission piece. How are things for EUP? It's been a tough year. We're coming to the end of our financial year at the end of July. It's actually improving. There is definitely an improving picture at the moment. So the hope is that we will end the year in a much better place than we had thought. at the start of the year and certainly by the start of this calendar year when we were really quite concerned about whether, we could cover our costs and what we might have to do about that. So we've been careful with our costs this year and our spending and we've all gone all out on the sales piece, you know, to try and get that balance right. And as I say, with a bit of luck, we will get to the year end and be able to reflect on it have been a better year than we had thought at the beginning, which is good news.
And Obviously, you're quite reliant on the US as a market. I believe that's more than 50% of your revenues come from the States.
It's not quite, but it's not far off. Yeah, certainly by some way, our biggest market.
And can I ask how that's impacted? impacting your current situation has obviously been to a few conferences recently. You and I have both been there where university presses have taught from both sides of the Atlantic about how the current administration is impacting. Are you seeing that as well for yourselves?
We think we are. Although interestingly, I just had a conversation with someone who's based in the US and he was saying, I don't know that there are, there are libraries that are, their budgets are growing next year. And so it's hard to tell. I don't think it's completely clear yet. For our part, our print sales in North America are in much better shape this year than they were last, which I think is to do with our distributor in the US and a new relationship that they have in place with a library purchaser. So we're just reaching the market more effectively. So that was good news. Our digital sales are doing okay in the US, journal sales are up a bit. So that market's doing okay for us at the moment. It's always, where is always next year, isn't it? And that lack of predictability.
I suppose coming as an outsider into this industry, I've been looking for and haven't yet found what I would call a kind of burning platform, a reason why publishers might have a strong impetus to change. And I wonder whether you recognize that within this industry?
I think maybe so. I think because it sort of feels like change is often incremental, although I can think of a couple of burning platforms now. And one very specific to academic publishers is probably around the e-book aggregation piece, which doesn't feel sustainable in its current format. But changing that, will require a lot of energy and a lot of impetus and a lot of people coming together to make that a fairer system. And then the other people is AI, which I think definitely has the potential to be a burning platform.
You're listening to Trends in Academic Publishing with me, Patrick Shafe, and my guest, Nicky Ramsey, CEO of Edinburgh University Press. When Nicky mentioned AI there, I thought back to some of my first conferences that I had in the year that AI was launched when this industry seemed to take quite a defensive position with lawyers invited into the room to try and help publishers understand how they might protect themselves, especially with things like copyright laws. And maybe that's no surprise given that publishers had only recently learned that much of their content had been used to train large language models, LLMs, without compensation or their permission. I was particularly interested to ask Nicky whether in her role as chair of the Independent Publishers Guild, she was seeing the industry change their attitudes towards AI and maybe start to consider some of the opportunities that it was offering publishers as opposed to more of a protective stance.
I think it's probably split right down the middle, and that's certainly where we are, and I'm sure it's where most people are, is that, yeah, and in fact, in our revised strategy, I've got it under opportunity and under threat, because it is both. Yeah, it's, I could say it's infuriating. It's more than infuriating, the thought that all of our content has already almost certainly been taken and fed into the machines and that's not right. And I think, every publisher would say that's theft and that needs to be dealt with. And there are also worries around will people need publishing in future if they can find everything they want by, typing their research question or whatever it is into ChatGPT or whichever platform they want to use and they get their answers that way, particularly if they get their citations and, you know, as it becomes better and better. I mean, my feeling is, well, surely not, because you'll still need the research to have been done and written to feed the machine, but it's whether the machine then starts to do that itself. And then we get into existential concerns. On the opportunity side as well, if we can license our content so that it is used legally, then that is something that we're willing to do. And we're right now in the process of writing to all of our authors to ask them if we can do that. So we're giving them the opportunity to opt in because we think it's really important that they understand what it is we're asking them to do and they can choose yes or no. So we're doing that piece of work at the moment. And then it's around all the bits in our day-to-day work and how it might help with creating alt text or we're in the process of digitizing our very deep backlist at the moment. So all of our publications pre-2000, which, you know, the majority of which are unavailable at the moment, they will become available in digital form and print on demand. We're going to need the metadata for 1,600 titles and keywords and blurbs. And yeah, that is the job for AI because it might not be as brilliant as a blurb would be if it was carefully crafted by someone in our editorial marketing team, but it will be sufficient to let people know what that book is about from deep on our backlist. So there are opportunities there. And also related to our mission, so we have a translation fund, so that's about paying for either content that we want to translate into English to publish, or if we have authors whose first language isn't English, and so that type of script needs a much heavier language edit, which is more expensive, we can cover that cost through this fund. But I think there, I'm assuming there were going to be opportunities for AI to help there. So the author who's in, I don't know, Mexico, is much more comfortable writing their typescript in Spanish, and then they run it through to get the English translation, which then is delivered to us. We have it reviewed and edited in the usual way, and we would be very transparent about the process that had gone through to our readers. But I think that would allow somebody who maybe finds it harder to convey the quality of their research in a language which isn't their own, could maybe get to that much more easily and, you know, with little to no cost. So I think there are tremendous opportunities there for kind of widening our author base.
Yeah, that's really interesting. Again, I've been to a couple of conferences where we've had representatives from the global south talking about inherent kind of biases in lots of academia. And I think it's a really interesting observation that allowing AI to kind of help with copy editing and so on to kind of bring that voice to market is really important. I think it's a genuine opportunity. And perhaps something that a commercial publisher might not be so interested in. Again, going back to your mission.
Yeah, I think so, because for us it is about making sure that a diverse range of voices are heard. And that is a challenge for us because, number one, if they're not as well known, maybe their book won't sell as well yet. We think it's an important thing to publish. So we would do that. But to Is it going to cost us more because you've got to get it into its best possible state? So again, if AI can help there, I don't see the downside of that. I'm sure someone will tell me there's a downside and we'll have to consider that. But on the face of it, that seemed like a good use of AI to me.
You mentioned something earlier, which again, I'd like to pick up on, which I think is a fascinating question, which is if, as and when AI becomes more competent at both joining the dots, not necessarily creating content, but certainly filtering it, creating better discovery and so on. In a few years' time, what is the role of a publisher?
Yeah, that's a good question. Are we still there curating that content, but it's content produced by a machine? Yeah, I'm not sure. And these are big questions to grapple with. And obviously, you can tell it's not making me feel very comfortable, the sort of it. Maybe I'll just be retired, Patrick.
I mean, I've always seen it that with this sort of rosy coloured glasses in that this industry and the people in it seem to very much believe in their role as truthsayers, you know, and if that's not too romantic a term. But I suppose if you're using AI as a tool to do that, then maybe that's what you do rather than worrying about how the thing gets done or how it gets received.
Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And it is, it's about that being the source of trusted content. And hopefully, you know, university presses remain the shorthand. You know, if it's university press, you know that it's been peer reviewed, you know that it's been through several hoops to get published. One of my favorite anecdotes for when I was a commissioning editor was overhearing one of my authors at an academic conference saying to another academic, oh, you should publish with the EUP. It's really hard to get through their review process. I was thinking, oh, he’s saying this as a positive thing because, you know, we're quite tough. But yeah, they see the value in that. And so, yeah, what comes out the other end is something that is going to be researched and written.
Again, something you mentioned earlier, hope you don't mind me asking you this, but asking authors for permission to use their content if you're in a commercial deal for any future commercial deal is quite, what's the right term, forward thinking and gracious, I suppose, when some publishers haven't done that. We won't name them, they know who they are. And I imagine that your lawyers probably looked at your contracts with your authors and said, well, we probably could bypass this.
Yeah, we went all around the houses on the pros and cons of both approaches. In the end, we're back to our values and our mission and who we are as a university press and the importance of our authors to that. And yeah, put some very bluntly, it was sort of, could you look yourself in the mirror if you just went and did that? It's not who we are. And honestly, we took our lead from Cambridge University Press who have taken this approach and have been really helpful to us in advising on what kind of approach to take, which authors to start with. They were saying, you know, there are certain subject areas where you'll get a more positive response and somewhere it might be more concerned. And that is what we're seeing, you know, so we started perhaps at the social science end of our publishing and we will end up very much at the art of publishing and we'll see. But to date, the authors who have responded, it's been overwhelmingly, yes, sign me in.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, and those who have said no, it's been very reasoned. And I think because we asked permission, they're not annoyed with us. Whereas, yeah, I think the repercussions and, you know, we can't afford that. It would break the trust, which is important to us.
Yeah. One last topic, if I may. Now that you've innovated, you've built a digital foundation for the business, what's next? Without trying to feed you an answer, I've always been interested in delivery opportunities, new ways of communicating with markets. Is that something that's on your mind?
That's exactly what's next. So that's another kind of strand of this revised plan is thinking very carefully about our digital publishing piece. what that looks like. As I say, at the moment, we don't have a platform. We sell entirely to our aggregators. Should that change? I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. You know, should we be in control of our own destiny there? Because the situation is when you're selling through aggregators, your control over pricing and discount is minimal and you're often being sold, you know, within huge collections alongside a lot of other publishers. And yeah, so. That's a big question that we're considering. And I genuinely don't know where that lands. The other piece is around the digital product. And we don't do, we have EPUBs and PDFs and that's really it. And so it's thinking about what more we might want to do in that regard. So our head of publishing and one of our senior commissioning editors are starting to look at that and pulling together some ideas and some proposals that we can build on because there's obviously potential there. I mean, what's interesting, I think, is how much our audience wants that, because we don't get the strong sense from our author base that they're clamouring to write content that would be received in anything other than inside a book or inside a journal. But we don't know what the audience in five years time might be wanting. And we have to start thinking about that. So we need to be speaking to, you know, the current PhD students who are going to be our authors in however many years time. And understanding what they want. So I think there are opportunities there. And so we're just at the beginning of exploring that. Also, our revenue split for our books, it's still more print than digital. And I think we're a bit of an outlier there. And we would like that to change because better margin on e-book sales, basically. But nonetheless, the demand for our content in a print format remains really quite strong.
Nicky, thank you ever so much for your time. It's been fascinating. I wanted to talk to you to sort of share the insights that we know of Edinburgh University Press and I think you've done that brilliantly. So again, thanks ever so much for your time and for coming today.
Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you.
So that was Nicky Ramsey, CEO of Edinburgh University Press and Chair of the Independent Publishers Guild. And you've been listening to Trends in Academic Publishing with me, Patrick Shafe. If you've enjoyed this episode, please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or whichever platform you listen on. And please rate and review us. It gives us useful feedback and it helps other people discover the podcast. And if you've got something you'd like to hear, a topic or a guest, please get in touch. And don't feel shy, you can suggest yourself. just e-mail me at pshafe@deanta.com. That's Deanta, D-E-A-N-T-A. And finally, if you want to read the annual report of Industry Intelligence, which inspired this podcast, it's free to anyone who registers for it. Like this podcast, it's called Trends in Academic Publishing, and it's published by Deanta. Just Google Trends in Academic Publishing or visit our website. I've put a link on the show notes to the report, and I hope you find it useful along with this podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.