Someone will correct me, I’m sure, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a skit at a UK scholarly publishing conference before — at least not in the linear passage of time that I’ve occupied. I’m aware of skits at Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), Charleston, Council of Science Editors (CSE) and various other US conferences but have never managed to see one, so I was intrigued to see “Scholarly Communication — The Eras Tour: A Time Travel Musical” on the agenda for this week’s ALPSP Conference.

The piece was written by Delta Think’s Heather Staines — one of those people you bump into at so many meetings that you’re already wondering how she fits a day job in, before you find out that she also writes and produces musicals. It was perhaps more accurately a ‘revue’ than a ‘musical’, in the grand tradition of schools and universities parodying themselves and the popular music of the day. I make the distinction as that might have clued me in to the fact that all the songs were in fact by Taylor Swift (albeit with Heather’s words); I marveled throughout, thinking Heather had actually written them all. (I have a history with this. Watching the Christmas revue at my University hall of residence, I thought my fellow students had written the Queen classic “Don’t Stop Me Now”.)

Now, I was late to the session (ironic for a piece about time travel) and I hadn’t quite got to grips with the conference app so I arrived with no concept of what I was about to see, and likely missed any opening exposition. But I think the overarching plot was thus: Josie (ChronosHub’s Romy Beard) is a scholarly communication student traveling back in time to see why people seem so pessimistic about publishing. She has the help of a university librarian (Access Innovations’ Heather Kotula) — librarians being the ones who control time travel, because they can be trusted to handle it ethically. One of those Josie meets on her travels is her distant ancestor and lifelong hero Scott (Wiley’s Jude Perera) who asks plaintively, “I’m an editorial director at a University Press — what have I done to achieve hero status?” (the characters of Scott and Josie are inspired T. Scott Plutchak’s blog post imagining his daughter Josie in the future). Staines’ first cameo is as the 17th century bookseller Bertrand, earning laughs as she pushes a cart of “large volumes” down the street calling “Bring out your books!”

Later, she’s a publishing operations assistant in 2007, describing “the 13 digit ISBN transition” as “the new Y2K”. When you’re the kind of person who comes up with your own weak publishing-related jokes, there’s nothing to make you feel like you’ve found your tribe than people making ISBN jokes. Or perhaps more accurately, people laughing at ISBN jokes. Another good one came from Taimu, the time-travelling robot of knowledge (Kriyadocs’ Ravi Venkataramani), casting his mind back to 2007 and suggesting “you’ve reached peak format”. Hollow laugh from 2024.

The biggest laugh of the night was in honor of Ed Pentz (2007 character: “Oh, I met a guy from Crossref — the Executive Director — his name was Ed Pentz. Who’s director of Crossref in your time?” 2124 characters: “Ed Pentz”). (And yes, Staines had cleared the rights to his image first as any good publishing professional would.) But the plenty-enthusiastic yet under-rehearsed actors also earned laughs with their ad libs and physical comedy. My own bittersweet favorite joke was the University Press director’s astonishment: “You’ve managed to change how research assessment works?” A future without publish or perish, where open access is a vaguely remembered historical term, though with our only clue as to how that had been achieved being that “people realized the pursuit of knowledge was the most important thing”. Towards the end we learn why the UP director is the 2124 student’s hero — it’s because he goes on to publish the first primer of time travel (and a joke is made about that being a monograph with a particularly niche audience).

It was clever, it was fun, it was enjoyably slapstick and haphazard (Staines hadn’t allowed enough time for costume changes for her cameos, so had to pile each era’s costume on top of the last — a good metaphor, actually, for the passage of time.) And it was a good reminder that however much our constituent parts (libraries, publishers, researchers–and, increasingly, robots) differ, we all have a common need to preserve the scholarly record. And a niche love of identifiers.