On August the 22th 2017 a meeting of 34 rectors of Latin American and Spanish Universities took place in the framework of the International University Book Fair, in the UNAM Convention and Exhibition Centre, Mexico City. The meeting addressed issues such as the evaluation, indexation and rank of university publishing and its future.
This is the first time that an International Book Fair brings together the heads of university management with publishers and researchers on scholarly publishing. At the meeting, the Rectors’ Manifesto in support of University Publishing was announced after discussing and generating proposals oriented towards an increase of the visibility, positioning and reach of university presses.
The academic event was chaired by the Rector of UNAM (Mexico), Enrique Graue Wiechers and the Rector of University of Salamanca (Spain), Daniel Hernández Ruipérez. It was promoted by Joaquín Díez Canedo, General Director of Publications and Publishing Promotion of UNAM and moderated by Jorge Volpi Escalante, Coordinator of Cultural Dissemination of UNAM. The expert panel was composed by Sayri Karp, President of the Association of University Presses of Latin America and the Caribbean (EULAC); Emir Suaiden, researcher at Brasilia University; Imanol Ordorika from the Directorate General of Institutional Evaluation of UNAM and Elea Giménez Toledo researcher at CSIC (Spain) and member of the management committee of the COST action RESSH (Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities). During her intervention she referred to the need for a joint reflection on the scientific policies and the scholarly publishing sector in Spanish in which the strength, consolidation, prestige, professionalization and strategies of large publishing groups leading the publishing sector worldwide are taken into account. Science policy and research evaluation should support the efforts of the publishing sector and the research on the field identifying the best practices in academic publishing. It is also relevant to coordinate the efforts and address the international discussions on the evaluation of scholarly books developed in international actions such as RESSH (Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities).
Short video of the rectors’ meeting (in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SiIxXJsupQ