The second in a series of posts from our global team on how they have changed how they communicate with our authors, readers and customers during the pandemic and how virtual solutions have opened up new opportunities.

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected all aspects of our lives – personal, professional and social. It has presented us with unforeseen and unprecedented challenges. Like all other businesses and industries, it also significantly impacted the functioning of higher education institutions worldwide, most of which continue to remain shut, and those who did start their operations, are functioning in the new normal cautiously.

India, the world’s largest higher education system with over 1,000 universities and over 40,000 institutions was severely impacted as the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns brought functions to a complete halt.

Teaching and learning were affected and so was research, as most of the labs remained out of bounds for researchers. But like most of the business organisations including Cambridge University Press, higher educational institutions adapted to new ways of operating with almost all institutions switching to virtual classrooms.

As we continue to drive research article submissions from India to our journals, it became imperative for us at the Press to keep our institutional customers and more importantly, our authors and researchers engaged. As a company, we didn’t want to stop being there for our customers and knew effective customer engagement – through meaningful and relevant content-driven webinars was the way forward.

Making the most of the lockdown amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and converting the challenge into an opportunity we rolled-out engagement-cum-awareness webinars for post-graduate students, research scholars, librarians, and faculty members. The idea was to blend an awareness session on our digital products and Open Access initiatives with author-cum-publishing workshop in collaboration with our Editorial colleagues.

The Content and Coverage

These webinars were divided into two sessions with the first covering the Press’ Open Access and Open Research initiatives including Read & Publish and Cambridge Open Engage. It also touched upon our digital platforms: Cambridge Core (highlighting our OA journals) and recently launched Cambridge Higher Education which supports the teaching and learning journeys in today’s rapidly changing educational environment.

The second session presented by our editorial colleagues focused on the norms of academic publishing and guided the audience through the nuances of academic writing and submitting for publication – for both journal research articles and book manuscripts. It elaborated on selecting and assessing a journal, the publishing process including Peer-Review and plagiarism.

So far we have organised 12 such webinars in collaboration with leading institutions and have engaged more than 2,000 researchers/faculty members and librarians. Building upon the successes, we also organised author webinars wherein we invited our existing authors to speak on a relevant topic or subject area, which included:

“Reviving the Indian Economy in a post-COVID World” by Prof Charan Singh, author of “Debt Management in India” (2018)

“Engaging UG Physics Students in Pedagogical and Research Projects” by Prof P C Deshmukh (IIT Tirupati), author of “Foundations of Classical Mechanics”

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Feedback and Response

I can confidently say, that these webinars have been widely accepted and the response has been quite encouraging, for example:

MANLIBNET (Management Libraries Network) expresses its sincere gratitude to Cambridge University Press for the wonderful support extended to the Author Workshop which was brilliantly conducted and excellently rated. Our special thanks to the entire CUP India team, especially, Mr. Gunjan Hajela and Ms. Qudsiya Ahmed.

Dr M.G. Sreekumar President, MANLIBNET and Chief Librarian – Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (post workshop feedback attended by 340 librarians)

A very well structured and informative session. Congratulations to the resource persons from Cambridge University Press

Dr. Nabi Hassan, Librarian & Head, Central Library, IIT Delhi (post webinar feedback attended by 390 researchers/faculty members and library staff)

These webinars helped us in myriad ways. One, it strengthened our existing relationships with our institutional customers, who clearly felt our presence and support during the crisis. Two, it helped in building awareness of Press’ product portfolio and Open Access initiatives thereby creating future opportunities. Three, it will help (if not already) in driving the usage statistics of our journals. Finally and I believe most importantly, it will help to increase submissions from India and extend our author base.

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