At the end of June 2018 we held an event here in Huddersfield which aimed to bring together university presses, or those considering launching a press, to discuss the challenges we face as a community, and hopefully find some useful and innovative ways to share best practices and experiences.

Thank you for coming!

I would first like to thank everyone who attended that day – we had 18 people come, representing 15 different institutions, all of whom brought an amazing amount of experience and knowledge to the sessions that day. It was rewarding to be part of some really engaging and innovative discussions, and you all got really stuck into the different activities we had planned, so thank you. Also a big thank you to Graham Stone from Jisc , who came to chat about all the work they are doing around developing resources and frameworks for university presses to use when setting up and approaching third parties. Since then, I have been working (with my colleague Kathrine Jensen), behind the scenes at pulling together all the information we gathered that day, with the aim of collating some themes and potential recommendations that can be used by the university press community.

Initial summary of findings

We have carried out some thematic qualitative analysis of the data gathered from each session, and have grouped our findings into three main categories:

• Key considerations for a university press launch/development
• Identifying and building strategic stakeholder relationships
• Designing and implementing a sustainable publishing process

We are also planning to do some reflection work around the methods used for gathering data in the sessions. We tried out a number of techniques and thought the majority worked really well. We will be sharing some of these experiences in a future piece of research, potentially focusing on our use of the reflection river, based on the Kawa river model .

University press strategy infographic

An additional output of this research is going to be an infographic to visually convey the findings and recommendations mentioned above, in a format which we hope is accessible and highly shareable via social media and other online networks.

What comes next?

We have plenty more work to do on writing up our findings and the community recommendation you all came up with under each of these headings, but I wanted to share with you this initial summary to create a chance for your input on where we are so far. Please do get in touch if you have questions or feedback: Megan Taylor , University of Huddersfield Press Manager m.taylor2@hud.ac.uk Kathrine S.H. Jensen , Independent Researcher, kathrineshjensen@gmail.com

We hope to have the infographic ready over the next month, but in the meantime, if you have any feedback or would like to know more about our progress with this research, please let me know.

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open access research publishing Events publishing events publishing processes; Jisc sharing practice staff development strategy university press