In Frankfurter Buchmesse’s Hall 3.1, a shot from 2018. In October, this hall will be the setting for the Forum Bildung (Education Forum) at D12, the main stage for academic events from Frankfurt Book Fair in association with Verband Bildungsmedien. Image: FBM, Niklas Görke
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Academic and Scholarly Programming
In the run-up to Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 18 to 22), a look at events shows that while the sold-out Literary Agents and Scouts Center (LitAg) and much of the programming across Messe Frankfurt may be focused on world book publishing’s trade industry, academic, research, and scholarly publishing also have a substantial presence in the 75th edition of the show.
A specific link, branding these elements under the phrase “Frankfurt Academic,” parses out this topical area for professional visitors, indicating that academic exhibitors will be concentrated in Hall 4.0, the show’s main space for international participants, thus bringing Publishing Perspectives’ internationalist readership into close proximity to scholarly and academic publishing’s presence at the show.
Academic publishers and service providers from Asia are reported by organizers to be returning to Buchmesse, following the pandemic years’ impact on travel.
The Scholarly Kitchen blog run by the Society for Scholarly Publishing is to host a discussion at 12 p.m. on Frankfurt Thursday, October 19, on the topic AI and Its Impact on Open Access and Research Integrity at Frankfurt Studio (in the foyer of Hall 4.0).
This is a program that first looks at questions of open-access content used to train artificial intelligence models, then at generative models able to “create papers or images that might be used in scholarly communications. That second point has to do with questions of how reliable neural network tools may be in discerning fraudulent submissions.
Then on Frankfurt Friday, October 20, the Publishing Perspectives Forum will welcome guests to a two-hour academic publishing program developed by Charleston Conference.
Discussions include Research Integrity: Technology, Trust, and Transparency and Sustainability and The Future of Scholarly Communication: Looking Forward at Business Models, SDGs, and Beyond.
The program that morning starts at 9:30 a.m. with a networking breakfast and runs to 12 p.m. Speakers include Peter Brantley, Rachel Martin, Vivian Berghahn, Stuart Whayman, Sven Fund, Heather Staines, Rafael Ball, Richard Gallagher, and Leah Hinds, the Charleston Hub executive director.
All Publishing Perspectives Forum events are set again this year in Room Spektrum on the second level of the Congress Center, and are free of charge for all registered Frankfurt Book Fair attendees.
During the week, a stand organized in Hall 4.0 at H76 by the German trade association BIB—Berufsverband Bibliothek Information—and Frankfurt’s Stauffenberg School will serve as a point of contact for current and next-generation professionals from the library and information sectors.
International exhibitors specialized in academic publishing, STM, and content services will be located in Hall 4.0 and in Hall 5.1. Trade visitors will be able to participate in a program explicitly designed to appeal to professionals from the library and information sector, among others.
German-Language Offerings
German-language educational media along with specialist and academic publishers will be located in Hall 3.1, with the Forum Bildung (Education Forum) serving as the main stage for events at Hall 3.1 D12. This is where Buchmesse and the educational association Verband Bildungsmedien will again have a presentation area for talks and discussions on teaching and learning.
For the first time, Germany’s Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs will serve as the forum’s patron. Katharina Günther-Wünsch—president of the standing conference and Berlin’s senator for education, youth and family affairs—is scheduled to speak at a panel discussion on Frankfurt Wednesday about improving cooperation between the country’s federal and state governments.
Publishers will also be organizing programs at their stands, among them the Haufe Group with its own stage at Hall 3.1 D32.
This is the venue for institutions including Germany’s federal agency for civic education and the learning center Bildungsstätte Anne Frank. Events on the days reserved for trade visitors will be geared toward teachers, other educational professionals and the publishing industry, and will generally take place in German.
Weekend Elements
At the 2016 iteration of Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: FBM, Alexander Heimann
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, Frankfurt Book Fair is a professional trade show on its weekdays, becoming a public-facing book fair on its weekend. This year, a re-establishment of the fair’s “Campus Weekend” will take place on the days when the fair is open to the public, Frankfurt Saturday and Sunday, October 21 and 22.
Many of the events organized by exhibitors from the educational sector at this point will be geared toward a general audience, including those at LitCam’s Kulturstadion at Hall 4.1 G29, which will feature a program of topics related to literature, football, and society.
This Campus Weekend programming is devised in association with the Berlin Institute of Scholarly Publishing, and will be back in place at Frankfurt for the first time since 2019. Overnight, the Springer Nature stand is to be converted for weekend use into an events area.
Also during the weekend, LitCam’s Kulturstadion will welcome football and literature fans for a program that combines issues of football, society, culture, and integration—a mix of topics is expected to be presented by high-profile personalities.
LitCam is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting educational equality and integration. Kulturstadion is sponsored by DFB-Kulturstiftung, the German Football Association’s cultural foundation, and by Claudia Roth, the federal minister for culture and media, who is again this year, serving as patron. More information on the Kulturstadion is to be available shortly in Frankfurter Buchmesse’s Calendar of Events.
More from Publishing Perspectives on academic, scholarly, and research publishing is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, and more on trade shows and book fairs is here.