Sage announces travel grant to ALPSP

Sage has announced a new travel grant, offering a free place to a librarian to attend the 2011 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) International conference. The annual event takes place from 14-16th September at Heythrop Park near Oxford (UK).

SAGE has supported the ALPSP conference as silver sponsor since its launch in 2008. It offers a relaxed but productive environment for society publishers to meet with other industry partners to review and discuss issues and updates. This new travel grant will offer a free place at the conference for a librarian or information professional, including entry to the ALPSP awards dinner, travel within the UK and accommodation for one person. We decided to make this place available having discussed with the few librarians who attended the event in 2010 how useful it was for them.

Ian Russell, Chief Executive, ALPSP said: "The ALPSP conference has quickly become a major fixture in the publishing calendar, providing a great opportunity to meet and network. Librarians who have attended this conference in the past have added greatly to the formal and informal discussions and we feel that it is vital for there to be constructive dialogue between publishers and librarians."

Steven Sharp, Resource Acquisition Team Leader at University of Leeds was an attendee of the 2010 conference. He said, "I was a speaker at the 2010 ALPSP Annual Conference. It was a great opportunity to engage with publishers on a face-to-face basis, to share ideas and concerns, and to explore ways of moving the scholarly publishing agenda forward in a mutually beneficial way during difficult economic times."

We are running a competition to win the sponsored place, with entries submitted either via Twitter or email. To enter, librarians must answer the following question in 140 characters or less:

Question: Why should librarians be talking to publishers in 2011?

In the current economic climate it is more important than ever that publishers and librarians have open dialogue on how we can work together, and we are delighted to be working with ALPSP to facilitate this place.

Completed answers should be sent to @SAGElibraryNews tagged with #SAGEALPSP or email to events@sagepub.co.uk by the 27th May 2011. Further terms and conditions can be found at www.sagepub.co.uk/alpsp2011.

We will be posting a selection of the responses we receive on SAGE Connection later in the year!

To find out more about this year's Conference, visit the ALPSP website