Organization

In line with decisions taken at the 2007 International Assembly on Independent Publishers in Paris, the language network Coordinators and the Board of the Alliance have been meeting on an annual basis since 2009 (please see our November 2009 Communiqué).

On 11 October 2010, the Coordinators and the Board of the Alliance met in Paris and decided jointly to create “The International Committee of Independent Publishers” (ICIP) [...].

Because the publisher members – Allies – are the primary players in the Alliance, the members of the ICIP and the Board of the Alliance are submitting the creation of the International Committee of Independent Publishers (ICIP) to your approval.

To facilitate communication between the Alliance’s language networks, set up as “one of the Alliance’s working practices” pursuant to a decision adopted in Dakar, each language network has a coordinator (elected by its particular members). The role of these coordinators is : to check that their network members and the Paris team members receive all relevant information ; to liaise with the Paris team ; to monitor the progress of projects that the network wants to carry out (co-publishing, sharing of expertise) ; to examine and give an opinion on applications to join their network and to liaise with the Paris team to organise network meetings. The language network coordinators have been members of the International Committee of Independent Publishers (ICIP) since March 2011.

Presentation of the Alliance’s language network coordinators and vice-coordinators :

* Nouri Abid, Tunisia (Med Ali), coordinator of Arabic-language network ;

* Araken Gomes Ribeiro, Brazil (Contra Capa), coordinator of Portuguese-language network ;

* Mariana Warth, Brazil (Pallas Editora), vice-coordinator of Portuguese-language network ;

* Susan Hawthorne, Australia (Spinifex Press), coordinator of English-language network ;

* Müge Sokmen Gursoy, Turkey (Metis Publishers), vice-coordinator of English-language network ;

* Guido Indij, Argentina (la marca editora), coordinator of Spanish-language network ;

* Serge D. Kouam, Cameroon (Presses universitaires d’Afrique), coordinator of French-language network ;

* Isabelle Pivert, France (éditions du Sextant), vice-coordinator of French-language network ;

* Hamid Mehdipour, Germany/Iran (Forough Publications), coordinator of the Persian-language network.

On Monday, 12 October 2009, the Alliance met with its 5 linguistic networks coordinators and 6 committee members. This meeting, organised by the permanent task team, provided the opportunity to tackle various topics of vital importance to our initiative. The full report – including the minutes of this long and exciting day of work– was sent in French to participants. The latter nevertheless requested that a communiqué detailing the main issues discussed and decisions taken collectively be compiled in the three working languages, for distribution to all members of the Alliance.