Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 6 - Reaching out to (new) audiences

Alistair McNaught of Jisc TechDis on accessibility

This is the sixth and final in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, make sure you save the date for the 2014 conference on 10-12 September, Park Inn Hotel Heathrow.

Reaching out to (new) audiences

Listening to our audience is an oft-repeated demand; this conference broke new ground in identifying two types specifically: vision-impaired scholars, and early career researchers and teachers.

“RNIB wants to open up greater access to published materials for all across all sectors” Anna Jones

It is estimated that one in eight people in the UK have some sort of ‘print impairment’, i.e. need help with access to written material. There is a moral case for providing this help and also a legal requirement in the form of the Equality Act 2010. The numbers also suggest that there is a commercial case, which is why Huw Alexander’s session was called ‘Accessibility: are you missing a strong market for your content?’ Rachel Thornton, Leeds Beckett University, gave a number of case studies illustrating how time-consuming and frustrating the experience of getting accessible versions of books on the reading list can be. For the staff assisting students the administrative effort can be severe. Publishers can help by providing clear information about file availability, rapid turn-around, fully accessible files, simple licence agreements and re-use by other students. Files that arrive four months after request are useless. Academics, too, need to be aware of difficulties when they put titles on reading lists.

“More disabled people are aspiring to do more” Alistair McNaught

Anna Jones of RNIB, Alistair McNaught of Jisc TechDis and Sarah Hilderley of EDItEUR filled in the technical background. EPUB 3.0 is now the most flexible platform for accessible e-book versions, and incorporates MathML as an integral part. How to write image descriptions remains one of the biggest challenges. An increasing range of e-readers, tablets and smartphones give varying degrees of accessibility with larger ‘print’, synthetic speech, electronic braille, as Anna Jones demonstrated with the help of her iPad with voice-over technology. So did James Scholes, a sightless computing student at Leeds Metropolitan, who led us through screen menus and simulated text, skilfully and at breakneck speed.

Sarah Hilderley of EDItEUR

The field is very collaborative. The Accessibility Action Group in 2012 issued a joint statement on accessibility and e-books (see www.publishers.org.uk). EDItEUR, supported by publisher organizations and others, has published Accessible Publishing: Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers.

Jisc’s TechDis initiative provides support for publishers in creating accessible PDF documents, efficient alternative format request mechanisms as well as supporting publisher training. For publishers the message is: understand the issues, encourage awareness in house and extend this to all internal processes and then roll it out through the whole supply chain.

The ‘born-digital generation’ may be a cliché but these people are very much with us and so it was fitting that the penultimate session of the conference ‘How soon is now? Discovering what your readers expect now and in the future’ listened to representatives of that cohort emerging into academia. The chair of the session, Bernie Folan, is a marketing professional and student, two of the speakers, Sabina Michnowicz and Thomas Lewis are graduate students and the third, Janine Swail is an early-career lecturer at Birmingham. Their backgrounds, disciplines and aspirations may differ but there are some common threads that link their perceptions of the publishing industry and how it could make their lives easier:

“Publishing is critical: an academic’s route to market. Papers are our currency”
Janine Swail

For the PhD student or the starting academic, publishing your work is critical. If you aim for an academic career you have to be conscious of the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework and this will govern your submission patterns: start with the top journals; in Janine Swail’s case follow the International Guide to Academic Journal Quality of the Association of Business Schools and don’t waste your time with non-rated journals.

Everyone suffers from information overload; PubMed Central is said to add one new article a minute. The tools for assessing relevance and quality need further development. Impact factors are becoming dated, better search techniques are needed, the development of alternative impact measures such as Altmetric is welcomed and researchers are looking to social media and two-way communication to seek reassurance.

Bernie Folan (left) talks early career research with a delegate

Mobility is critical, especially with subject areas and projects that require travelling. Access is needed 24/7, speed is of the essence, mobile journal apps and more mobile friendly websites would be welcomed.

Authoring and submission tools need further development but preferably they should be publisher independent. Help with resubmission is encouraged. Budding authors would like to share both pre- and post-publication.

Cost is a serious factor for early career scholars. Pay walls are not only an irritant but may be a game stopper unless the searcher has deep enough personal pockets. Short term paper loans might be considered. Author processing charges are too high; consider student rates. Plus OPEN ACCESS!

“Make interacting with your customers a habit” Bernie Folan

Finally, and all participants in the session agreed on this: ‘Come and talk to us.’ Just as budding academics must learn to understand publishing rationales and processes, so publishers must learn more about the specific needs and irritations of this particular group of customers. One size does not fit all.

End note

One overarching impression, for one who has been to many ALPSP events, is the high standard of the talks, not only in the quality of their content but also their confident presentation, streets ahead of what it was in the days of the Learned Journals Seminars. Refreshing, too, the gender and age balance, with young professionals, deservedly, getting to the podium earlier than ever. It seems a long time to wait until the next conference. Preparations are well in hand we are told. Dates confirmed are Wednesday 10 to Friday 12 September at the Park Inn Heathrow London, UK.

The winners line up after the ALPSP Award ceremony

The annual ALPSP awards were announced at the conference but here they are again for completeness: Out of 15 submissions for best new journal the judging panel selected Faculty Dental Journal from the Royal College of Surgeons of England as the winner. Even more coveted was the publishing innovation award, with 32 entries. Drama Online from Bloomsbury Publishing, with Faber and Faber, was highly commended, and PeerJ, launched last year by Jason Hoyt and Peter Binfield topped the poll. Risk talking and innovation, it seems, are still prevalent within the industry!

His many friends will have been pleased that the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was given to Anthony Watkinson, rarely absent from these refreshing conferences.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 5 - How to keep up with the parallel sessions

David Smith from The IET

This is the fifth in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, save the date for the 2014 conference on 10-12 September at Park Inn Hotel Heathrow.

How to keep up with the parallel sessions

It is only when I come to write up the conference that I wish I was ubiquitous, able to listen to three sessions simultaneously or at least make better choices about which session to attend, as the geography of the venue made it difficult to flit from one to the other. Parallel sessions of course are useful in that they cram a great deal of diverse material into a compact time frame, and fortunately you can glean at least some of what you missed from the ALPSP website later.

The ‘Publishing practicalities’ session for example, chaired by David Smith of The IET, looked at Creative Commons BY licenses, so central to the discussion of developing Open Access. It explained the reasoning behind PeerJ, an open access journal based on a ‘lifetime membership’ rather than APC model that sees itself as a ‘technology first’ publisher, opting for outsourcing to ‘the cloud’ from the outset rather than starting off by hosting and maintaining the technical infrastructure. Finally the session gave space to the use of Google Analytics, described as the most popular and widely used web traffic analytical tool to help make scientific, data driven decisions on the development of one’s website.

Alan Hyndman fro Digital Science

“Source: Wikipedia, so it must be true!” Alan Hyndman

The familiar ‘Industry updates’ session chaired by Toni Tracy gave opportunities to learn about the Copyright Hub, designed to help overcome some of the difficulties experienced in copyright licensing. ‘Force11: The future of research communication and e-scholarship’ is described as a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing; perhaps we can look forward to its being lifted out of the relative obscurity of parallel into one of the plenary sessions.

In the same update session, Heather Staines of SIPX talked about ‘The MOOC craze: what’s in it for publishers?’ MOOCs are massive open online courses aimed at large-scale participation and open (free) access via the internet. Those publishers interested in the freemium approach might be open to these opportunities. Finally Steve Pettifer of University of Manchester told how he “stopped worrying and learned to love the PDF”.

"While licensing content for use in [MOOC] courses challenges every existing model, there is a place for your content, whether it is OA, subscription or ownership based” Heather Ruland Staines

Fiona Murphy from Wiley

Apart from the session on accessibility, of which more in the final post to follow, I did seek out the parallel session on data chaired by Fiona Murphy of Wiley. Access to the data underlying reported research assists verifiability and reproducibility, and can help advance scholarly progress through evaluation and data mining. Questions arise such as which data, e.g. raw, reduced or structural as in crystallography (Simon Hodson).

To be fit for re-use or development, data must be discoverable, openly accessible, safe and useful (Kerstin Lehnert). There is a need for data provenance and standards for incorporation into metadata, and stewardship of data repositories. Steps towards consolidating such needs include the DRYAD repository, a nonprofit membership organization that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable and citable, and IEDA, or Integrated Earth Data Applications, a community-based data facility funded by the US National Science Foundation to support, sustain and advance the geosciences by providing data services for observational solid earth data from the ocean, earth and polar sciences.

“Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because it’s just a ride” Bill Hicks

A somewhat contrary view was provided by Anthony Brookes of Leicester University, who suggested not the sharing of data but the exploitation of knowledge. In biomedical, clinical, genetic and similar research areas there are privacy and ethical barriers to unfiltered sharing and access. That does not undermine the idea of sharing ‘data’ at various levels, and indeed the more abstracted data that can be shared under such circumstances might be richer, and fuller of ‘knowledge’. He foresaw a hierarchy where ‘safe data’ can be openly shared, ‘mildly risky’ data are accessible in an automated, ID-assisted fashion and personal data for which there is managed or no access. A prototype for this approach is Café Variome which seeks to provide the framework for such access/sharing management.

The discussion following this session suggested that there is room at future conferences for the wider issues to be debated: value added by linking across datasets, knowledge engineering from datasets demanding all the metadata and all the provenance, publishing models that facilitate all this and the role of scientists, editorial boards and learned societies in defining the issues of data quality, description, metadata, identifiers, seen as matters of some urgency.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 4 - Communication - why, what and how?

Audrey McCulloch and the 'Was it something we said?' panel

This is the fourth in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, save the date for the 2014 conference on 10-12 September at Park Inn Hotel Heathrow.

Communication: why, what and how?

Eric Merkel-Sobotta’s plea for publishers to explain themselves, to themselves and others, is not new but becomes more urgent if there is a risk that the initiative might slip out of publishers’ hands. It therefore made sense to devote a whole session to the topic, chaired by Linda Dylla of the American Institute of Physics with Grace Baynes of Nature and Helen Bray of Wiley as speakers, who addressed more the how than the why. Clearly there are many things to be communicated: the rationale of scholarly publishing, the brand of a single publisher, the nature and benefits of a particular project.

Helen Bray from Wiley

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds that on the inside, the end is near” 

Helen Bray

Communication is used to manage change, and the more rapid the change the more effective the communication must be. The modes of getting the message across – e-mail, press release, publisher blogs, conference presentations, social media, direct dialogue – all have their place provided they convey clear uncomplicated messages that sound convincing wherever they come from within the organization. That means, for example:

Making all employees the company’s spokespeople. Thinking communication from the start. Finding respected external advocates. Knowing your audience and learning their language. Being part of the conversation and listening. Keeping the message simple and saying it again and again.

The discussion after the presentations revealed an unease about our ability as communicators: it should not be that complicated to explain yourself but we appear not to have been too successful in doing so, nor in creating a publisher-wide consensus that can form the basis of effective lobbying.

“Homework: try to explain what publishing is, to your mother or a taxi driver” Audrey McCulloch, ALPSP Chief Executive

What is the publisher now? panel

Part of the difficulty of communicating messages about publishing internally or externally is that every time you turn your head, publishing has changed. Some change agents, such as funders and governments, have become more proactive and in response some, such as learned societies have had to up their game.

The technologies we use to publish have changed almost out of recognition and continue to evolve rapidly. The parallel session ‘What is the publisher now?’ chaired by Jane Tappuni of Publishing Technology addressed some of these issues, with the key focus on the role of publishers and how they can stay relevant: should publishers become IT providers and, if not, how should they partner with technology companies to drive the publishing process most effectively?

Interactive discussions on publishing skills

The role that the publisher decides to adopt must be communicated and absorbed throughout the organization. The choice also has implications for skill development and training, discussed in a further parallel session on ‘Publishing skills: the changing landscape’ chaired by Margie Jarvis of OUP.

This interactive session looked at changes to the way we work, the core skills we need to retain and the new ones we need to foster and the opportunities this represents.

Further details on these sessions are available on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon 

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 3 - State of play for journals open access

Fred Dylla from the American Institute of Physics

This is the third in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, make sure you save the date for this year's conference on 10-12 September 2014.

State of play for journals open access

So you thought journals open access was all sorted? Not if you attended the session on negotiating with governments chaired by Fred Dylla of AIP. Fred has been closely involved in negotiations about open access models in the USA, Steve Hall of IOPP, as a member of the Finch working group is similarly placed in the UK and Eric Merkel-Sobotta of Springer filled in the picture for the European Union. The aspiration is familiar: everyone wants research results to reach the widest possible audience, and even increasingly acknowledges that this wish has to be paid for in a viable way. The contention is over the How?

In quick succession in the UK in mid 2012, the Finch Report recommended Gold open access as the preferred long-term option, agreed by all stakeholders with Green as the route to this destination. It also made recommendations about funding mechanisms, ways to increase access to the 96% of research published overseas, and experimentation on open access to monographs. The government accepted the report in principle, with Gold as the aim, but no extra money. Job done? Not so fast. Research Councils UK initially, though it is said with inadequate consultation, supported Gold and payment of APCs, but had to retreat, being out of step with what appeared to be happening in other countries, and was criticised by Parliament’s Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, though the latter did not escape criticism itself.

“Throwing things against the wall and hoping you’ll be able to clean up the mess later on seems a poor substitute for evidence-based reasoning” David Crotty, Scholarly Kitchen

The Higher Education Funding Council for England is consulting and appears to be veering towards Green. University policies are still evolving and there is no consistency within the Russell Group of universities, with Gold being favoured by only a very small minority. Most publishers are offering Gold as an option but a pragmatic approach seems the order of the day.

“Status of implementation in UK: Green is the new Gold” Steve Hall

Steve Hall from Institute of Physics Publishing

Let’s go to Brussels then: the Commission’s Horizon 2020 aims to optimize the impact of publicly funded scientific research on economic growth, better and more efficient science and improved transparency, with open access as the general principle, and a mix of Gold and Green: all principles but no practical implementation so far.

In Germany an initial 18-month consultation came out for Gold but an alliance of small publishers, Börsenverein (organizer of Frankfurt Book Fair) and large funders scuppered the initiative. There has been some progress in other countries but it has been difficult to approach the momentum achieved in the UK and USA.

There is some urgency at the European Union level as there will be a new Commission within about a year, and the work may have to start all over again if no solid consensus emerges before then. Eric Merkel-Sobotta urged all his listeners and their associations – ALPSP, STM and others – to build up much more of a presence in Brussels and articulate a coherent argument for the place of publishers in the value-added chain, to defeat the still current cliché of the greedy, rip-off publisher.

“Continue to engage constructively in the debate and increase the volume” 
Eric Merkel-Sobotta

By now the atmosphere in the great marquee was perhaps a little subdued: here we are all ready for new business models for journal publishing, but why is it so difficult? Fred Dylla’s review of the US experience was perhaps a little more positive. There is a clear policy on the part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy for increasing access to the results of federally funded research. Funding agencies have been asked to come up with proposals for achieving this, due about now. Most agencies have not yet publicly responded though the National Institutes for Health are ahead of the game with the offer to open up PubMedCentral to other agencies.

Eric Merkel-Sobotta from Springer

About 70 publishers together with CrossRef have offered the option of CHORUS, a multi-agency, multi-publisher portal and information bridge that identifies articles and provides access, enhances search capabilities and long-term preservation, with no cost to the funding agencies. The universities have offered SHARE, an approach scaled up from existing repositories. This offers potential for collaboration with CHORUS.

Fluid is perhaps the best word to describe the state of play in respect of public access policy, with a fairly systematic approach in the USA, some hope in the UK and head scratching in the rest of the EU. Expect another session at this conference a year from now. Meanwhile, keep up to date with posts on the Scholarly Kitchen and elsewhere.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 2 - So what about books?

The Belfry, location of the ALPSP 2013 conference

This is the second in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite,save the date for the 2014 conference.

So what about books?

Debates during the last couple of decades have been driven largely by journals and journal-related innovations, with books seeming more like an afterthought at times. They are of course a core component of scholarly publishing, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and it seemed this year that thinking and experimenting about them has shifted more to centre stage. Not only have e-books firmly arrived but so has exploration of open access for books, about a decade after journal publishers first started worrying about it.

After Huw Alexander of Sage entertainingly showed us that the science fiction writers were way ahead of us in their thinking – of course they don’t need to slavishly follow business models – he led us through some of the uncharted territory. The threats of piracy, Amazon, open access are there but we are learning quickly about platforms, pricing models, advertising and mixed media, though we lack standards for sales data that should inform our thinking. However, the ‘age of convergence’ is upon us: devices will align, formats will standardize and new approaches, e.g. selling through content hubs, will emerge.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” William Gibson

Despite the ‘terrorism of short termism’ – what to do on Monday, the pressure of the bottom line – some signposts are becoming clearer. Is one sold copy preferable to 10 usages, is ownership preferable to access, is there mileage in subscription or usage based models? What about the partners of the future, not just our current peers but Amazon, Google or even coffee shops as digital outlets (look around you next time you pop out for a cuppa).

What is a book, anyway, asked Hazel Newton of Palgrave Macmillan? The current terminologies were coined in the age when print technologies were dominant. Digital content does not discriminate by number of pages or screens or total length, especially when memory is cheap. It is also far less limited by the time constraints that print technologies impose in the form of publication delays and it allows publishers to stay ahead of the game in rapidly moving fields.

“Constantly question why things are the way they are” Hazel Newton (NB: some quotations are paraphrased though close to the original!)

Breaking the rules, Palgrave’s Pivot series positions itself squarely between the journal article and the full-scale monograph. It's publishing within 12 weeks of acceptance and offers itself as digital collections for libraries, individual ebooks for personal use or digitally-produced print editions. Despite the perceived conservatism of academia, Pivot has so far published more than 100 titles; Hazel considers HEFCE now to be more flexible in what formats it will accept as evidence for the Research Excellence Framework.

This way for open access

But open access for books?

I thought you’d never ask; well Caren Milloy, head of projects at JISC Collections, is questioning editors, sales and marketing and systems people in about 10 humanities and social science publishers about their views and concerns over open access publishing.

The OAPEN-UK project is still under way and it is clear that a lot of internal corporate education will be necessary, all current processes will need to be reviewed, publisher project teams need to start work now and involve all parts of the business. Don’t wait for standards to be developed but think about them now, don’t assume OA for books will follow the journal model and develop a clear idea of what success would look like.

“Open access is here: the need is to invent and develop sustainable business models” Catherine Candea

Three speakers in a session on ‘Making open pay’ chaired by Catherine Candea of OECD gave three different approaches designed primarily for books in the social sciences and humanities. Frances Pinter, founder of Knowledge Unlatched, had no doubt that open access business models will be prominent for books albeit it will take time for these to take root. The model for Knowledge Unlatched is one of upfront funding of origination costs complemented by income from usage, licensing, mandates, value-added services and other options yet to emerge.

Unlike the Author Processing Charge (APC) of the journal Gold OA model, the fixed cost in Knowledge Unlatched would be covered by title fees paid by members of a consortium of libraries, thus ‘unlatching’ publication of titles by members of a publisher consortium in a Creative Commons licensed PDF version. Publishers will then be free to exploit other versions of the title, or subsidiary rights for profit. Knowledge Unlatched provides the link between the library and publisher consortia. A pilot is about to be launched, with 17 publishers so far taking part and a target of 200 libraries to ensure that the title fee is capped at $1,800 per library.

“It’s a numbers game, so look at the margins: lots of little contributions, not just one big one” Pierre Mounier

‘Freemium’ is the model for the platform Open Edition Books outlined by its associate director Pierre Mounier. The platform is run by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing, Paris and financed by the French national research agency in partnership with, so far, some 30 international publishers. Books are published open access in HTML, but value-added premium services are charged for. These may include other versions such as PDF or ePub, data supplies, dashboard and so on, licensed to libraries. The mix between free and premium may change as library needs change; the most important thing is to keep in touch with the libraries to understand their changing requirements. So far 800 books are included and there is an ambitious annual launch programme. Currently over 60 libraries are subscribers. One-third of revenues goes to the platform and two-thirds to the publisher.

It's a book, but not as you know it.

Also Gold OA in concept, but in a different context, is the publishing of the Nordic Council of Ministers described by Niels Stern. The Council’s publishing model is already OA in the sense that the Council commissions research and is then invoiced for publishing services. That income, however, is not secured for eternity and may be subject to political constraints, so Niels and his colleagues went through a classical business analysis.

They concluded that digital distribution provides most opportunities for change. It also has the potential to offer most value to its customers - politicians, researchers and government officials - ensuring the impact of public money, visibility through flexible access and accountability for money spent.. Open Access was the key to unlocking these benefits, ensuring future loyalty from the customer base and hence future revenue streams.

The conclusions from their approach will be familiar from different contexts:

• Keep an open mind: stop copying previous behaviours. 
• Revisit your arenas constantly. 
• Zoom in on your target audiences and find new needs by listening. 
• But don’t cogitate forever; take the courage to act!

The model is true Gold. It pays because it is building an organizational asset, with your customers solidly behind you.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 1 - setting the scene

Setting the scene at the ALPSP conference

This is the first in a series of reflections on the 2013 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, save the date for the 2014 conference, 10-12 September, Park Inn Heathrow London.

"Page fright: where to begin? Six plenaries and six parallel sessions in this sixth ALPSP International Conference, with six x six papers presented in all. How to make sense of all this in a number of screens small enough to entice anyone to venture beyond screen one? We shall see. Suffice to say that the 250 or so registrants had a varied, instructive and enjoyable time in the big marquee outside, and other facilities inside The Belfry near Birmingham and each will have carried away new insights, contacts and friendships, repaying the three days spent away from the office.

Inevitably this account of the conference is but a sketch. Detailed presentations can be viewed on the ALPSP website and YouTube channel. Early accounts were posted on the ALPSP blog.

Unsurprisingly this conference was all about change – technical change, changing customer profiles, changing participants in the great scholarly publishing endeavour, changing needs. Nothing new then, as the predecessor conferences and seminars have also been about change, albeit at a slower pace, and change and uncertainty will continue to be with us. One reason for the success of these conferences is that they allow us to take comfort from the support of our fellow publishing professionals and their willingness to share their experiences with us.

Setting the scene

‘Waving – or drowning?’ was how Tim Brooks, CEO of BMJ, headed his keynote talk opening the conference, adapting the title from a poetry collection by Stevie Smith. From his experience of the newspaper industry and his membership of the Cabinet Office’s digital advisory board he was able to draw lessons from other fields.

Waving - or drowning? asked Tim Brooks.
Other Belfry visitors may agree.

Modern life is very complex and change is not always predictable.

While leadership may have a vested interest in stability and the status quo (cultural obstacles to change), change requires agile responses: multi-level, high-speed, self-correcting.

“Doubt is not a pleasant state, but certainty is a ridiculous one” Voltaire

The newspaper industry has been and still is responding to the digital revolution and different publishers are coming up with different business models: the traditional, paper-based one is still durable but not eternal, and it is not yet entirely clear whether pay walls (The Times) or free access (The Guardian) will be the best approach. Nor is it clear which of the available structural options will be most viable. Even the metrics can fool you: new services will not outperform established ones on old-service metrics like profit, at least initially.

Some “surfing tips for the digital breakers”:

• Ensure those who know, have a voice – the Inuit have known about climate change since the 1960s but nobody listened.
• Get all publishing functions involved and enthused and get them to imagine the future.
• Get people in with outside experience.
• Treat staff as volunteers: explain what they do and why they do it and celebrate outcomes. Look after the team and yourself!
• Keep talking and listening, especially when things go wrong: the good news culture is unhelpful.
• Honour the rule of five: Five positives against one negatives is a good indicator of success.

Some of these tips recurred in other sessions."

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Making open pay

OECD's Catherine Candea

The final session at the ALPSP International Conference was chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD. The panel reflected on the constant pressures on publishers to make content free and asked how can publishers survive and even thrive?

Frances Pinter, interim CEO of Manchester University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched considered sustainable pathways for open access scholarly books. Getting to open access is going to be harder. Income to publishers for the kind of books we are talking about is going to be a mixture.

We don't know yet, where in the continuum we should be looking for up-front funding ('someone pays' model). We need to know as we move forward what the trade-offs will be to find funding for the costs and satisfying expectations of users who access content, and to pay for the added value that publishers can deliver and want to be recompensed for.

In the social sciences and humanities lots of people still want to read printed books. What will people want? We really don't know yet as it is too early in the process to know what does and doesn't work.

'Digital is riding railroads through disciplines in different ways.'

Third party permissions present major challenges which need to be looked at. Books in long form are an important part of research output in the humanities. Should that remain closed just because it doesn't work for books? If it does, it will shoot the discipline in the foot. If the content remains closed, how are you going to measure impact?

There are a number of open monograph models including the open access edition and sales from print and/or ebooks (NAP, Bloomsbury Academic), institutional support for press (World Bank, Amherst) and library press collaboration (Mpublishing/Michigan).

Pinter's own Knowledge Unlatched is about to launch in pilot form. It is not-for-profit and aims to help publishers recover origination costs for monographs while helping lbiraries from around the world share the costs of making books open access. They use CC BY-NC licence and include front list titles. Their goals are to make open access for the humanities and social sciences sustainable so these disciplines don't get left behind.

Libraries can choose to jointly make a title fee payment to publishers by pledging to unlatch a collection via Knowledge Unlatched. In return, publishers make a flag PDF version of unlatched titles available on an open access licence. Hosting and preservation is done via HathiTrust and OAPEN.

There are 14 publishers in the forthcoming pilot with approximately 100 titles in 4 subject areas. In order to unlatch a 30-title collection, 200 libraries will each pay a maximum of $1800 each. Knowledge Unlatched will take 5% to cover costs. Who benefits? Pinter believes readers, libraries, authors, independent researchers and publishers, amongst others.

Pierre Mounier

Pierre Mounier, Associate Director of the Center for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo), reflected on how policy has changed recently from activism to policy, from green to gold.

There is a 'gold' rush with a growing market for gold publishing. But every gold rush has its drawbacks, often leaving gold rush ghost towns. Is it a sustainable model in the long term? Publishing in this model relies on only one source of funding.

Mounier counselled that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater: the bathwater is the old clunky access to information that we want to throw away, the baby is the reader themselves and their needs. Publishers need feedback from readers.

The traditional model is a cycle of income-to-publication-to-usage-to-sales-to-income. With the gold model it is replaced by funding-to-publication-to-usage.

Another alternative is to consider the freemium model. They use HTML and produce PDF, ePub for restricted access and an Amazon version for Kindle. It is a combination of free open access and premium services and licensing. They develop premium services for libraries and their patrons which is then licensed to libraries. There is premium access to books and articles with a dashboard, data supplies and services, information, support and training, branding and customisation. But this is not a static offering: they will evolve and add to the service, with more to come in 2014 and 2015.

Open Edition has 100 journals, 800+ books (16,000 anticipated in 2020) and 60+ subscribing libraries.

'Bust out your Excel spread sheet. It's all about finding things in the margins.' 

- Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox

The keyword for Mounier is diversification for sustainable business models. Consider funding (gold), crowd-funding, in-kind institutional support, premium services income and print (on demand) sales.

Niels Stern, Publisher for the Nordic Council of Ministers, closed the session by outlining the five step process they went through to digitise and broaden access to content. These deceptively simple steps include:

1. What is our winning aspiration (visibility and impact)
2. Where will we play? (researchers politicians, government officials)
3. How will we win? (digital distribution)
4. What capabilities must we have? (formats, channels, production tools)
5. What management systems are required (outsourcing partnerships)

Digital distribution was introduced as an open access project, streamlining and modernising the organisation. They are building a repository and policy which has created value for them, and they did this through listening to their target groups.

Keep an open mind. Openness is a very necessary thing when you feel you have a problem. Confront problems in an open way otherwise you won't solve the problem. His suggestions for making the transition included: 

• Stop copying your previous behaviour
• Revisit your arenas
• Zoom in on your target audiences
• Listen
• Identify new needs
• Finally, act and make new solutions!

Best practice is not always the best solution. Open did pay for them, and it can pay in most cases. It's about finding the right balance.

Negotiating with governments: in search of pragmatic public access policy

Fred Dylla

Fred Dylla from the American Institute of Physics introduced the final session on day 2 of the ALPSP International Conference: Negotiating with governments. It provided an invaluable overview of policy around Europe and in the US.

Steven Hall, Managing Director of IOP Publishing, outlined the recent history of open access policy in the UK. Hall continues to be involved in the Finch group and was on the original committee, so has unrivalled insight into the process. The recommendations from Finch were endorsed by publishers, BIS and RCUK were included in the quid pro quo of 12 months embargo in order to make gold open access viable. There has since been criticism of RCUK by research institutions and the House of Lords over their implementation.

Meanwhile, implementation by HEFCE is running apace. Their public consultation on open access policy in relation to submissions post-2014 REF closes on 30 October 2013. Key proposals include outputs (journal articles and conference proceedings) should be accessible through a UK higher education institution repository, immediately upon either acceptance on publication, though the repository may provide access in a way that respects agreed embargo periods.

With the implementation by universities, policies are still evolving and guidance to authors is changing. There is no consistent policy across Russell Group universities. The majority explicitly favour green over gold, e.g. Bristol, Cambridge, Imperial, Oxford. Most of these are allowing 12 or 24 month embargoes, but some are stipulating green with a 6 or 12 month embargo. Some institutions are neutral, in different degrees, between gold and green, leaving the choice to authors, e.g. Exeter, UCL. The latter is also supplementing the RCUK block grant with additional funding. A very small minority are favouring gold over green e.g. Reading.

Generally, there is a pragmatic and practical approach from universities that publishers can work with. But when you consider why universities are going for green, it is primarily because of concerns over cost. There is growing demand for offsetting of APC costs against subscription and licence fees and a lack of data on numbers of RCUK-funded articles to inform budgeting. Policies and processes are still in development including how block grants should be allocated to researchers, processes for managing payments and compliance monitoring, payment of publication charges for collaborative publications.

SHERPA/FACT is a funder and author compliance tool from University of Nottingham's SHERPA service. It is funded by RCUK and Wellcome with links to SHERPA RoMEO for information on embargo policies. Its aim is to be a one-stop-shop for researchers wishing to find out about funding and open access policies.

What have we learned so far? Universities and researchers are nervous about this. We need close consultation and cooperation with all stakeholders - this is critical. Clear, consistent, unambiguous and actionable guidance for researchers is required from funders, universities and publishers. More work is required on forms of licence for gold and green. Policy needs to reflect the journey, not the destination.

Eric Merkel-Sobotta from Springer Science+Business Media reflected on whether Brussels think publishers add value? Don't forget that the EU is also a research funder. Horizon 2020 begins in 2014 and provides €70 billion over 6 years. They have implemented it primarily for economic growth, to build better and more efficient science that builds on previous results and avoids duplication and to improve transparency (involving citizens/society). Horizon 2020 makes open accesss the general principle for research funded by the EU (mixed green and gold open access). Gold APCs are eligible for reimbursement and the green embargo is for 6 months. 

Merkel-Sobata believes the UK has the most far reaching policy, that used a constructive process, with probably the best results for all stakeholders. In Germany, there was good progress during an 18 month dialogue on open access, but after grand-standing by both sides, it collapsed. Spain encourages open access repositories for research, however there is a lot of lobbying going on. In France, there is nothing concrete so far, but a government working group is discussing the options.

There will be more news to come from the EU. Currently, the three responsible Commissioners can't agree on potential objectives around Copyright reform. There are complex text and data mining working groups, but not all stakeholders are involved and the key work group for publishers may be disbanded, which could disrupt the process further. There is a sense that other industries and interest groups have far greater lobbying power in Brussels. The scholarly publishing community needs to raise its profile and influence in Europe and they must continue to engage with all stakeholders constructively.

Fred Dylla closed the session with an overview of US open access policy. In 2009 US House sponsored Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. March 2012 saw the publication of the OSTP report Interagency Public Access Coordination. The FundRef pilot program was announced by CrossRef in May of the same year and in June the Finch report was published in the UK. In February of this year the OSTP Memo was released - a short, but very nuanced report - increasing access to the results of federally funded research. It suggested 12 months as a guideline with a get-out clause that agencies can exercise flexibility to address challenges and public interests. It also stated the benefit and value of a successful publishing industry.

Overall, agency plans must provide for free public access to a full-text version of publications resulting from publicly funded research (after an embargo), contain a strategy for leveraging existing resources, fostering public-private partnerships, provide for archiving and long-term stewardship and identify resources within existing agency budgets for implementation.

Dylla outlined current projects and initiatives. PubMedCentral (PMC) database has for a decade been the public repository for articles resulting from NIH sponsored research. NIH will expand PMC to encompass the articles from research paid for by other federal agencies. This requires an investment of federal funds to expand PMC. Many publishers object to how PMC is operated because it duplicates functions of publishers.

The recently launched CHORUS Project's key objectives include:

• public access (publishers provide and host, using FundRef for front-end identification and CrossRef linking to the version of record or author's accepted manuscript)
• compliance: publishers ensure using FundRef, agencies, authors and research institutions can easily confirm
• archival preservation: multi-level solution, publishers archives with trusted third party back-ups (Portico, CLOCKSS)
• bibliographic search and discovery - FundRef, commercial search engines, library tools, and API support for agency-specific portals
• to be low cost or no cost for agency participation except for staff time on the CHORUS committees.

The American Association of Universities,  Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and Association of Research Libraries has developed an offer called SHARE. There are 3 things in common with CHORUS. Both agree they need persistent identifiers, the development of metrics and preservation.

What happens next? CHORUS is about to launch a pilot and there is hope that agencies will take it up. Some agencies will partner with PMC, but will need funds. All plans have to be reviewed and approved by OSTP/OMB and returned to agencies for full development and implementation in 2014-15. 

Data: not the why, but the how (and then, what?)

Simon Hodson introduces CODATA

It is now old news that data - its production, management and re-use potential - is of growing significance to all the key stakeholders within the scholarly communication ecosystem. Publishers need to navigate the emerging landscape of technology, researcher and industry needs, and funders’ and policy-makers’ priorities in order to continue supporting the growth and discoverability of knowledge.

Wiley's Fiona Murphy chaired a panel discussion that provided publishers with insights on how – and by whom – the roadmap is being written, as well as its challenges and potential opportunities from researchers, funders and industry perspectives.

Simon Hodson, Executive Director at CODATA, provided an overview of their work. Their focus is on strengthening international science for the benefits of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use. It is an international community and network of expertise on data issues. Their key areas of activity are policy frameworks for data, frontiers in data science and technology and data strategies. They develop data citation, standards and practices. September sees the release of their major report Out of Cite, Out of Mind.

Hodson provided an overview of relevant data policy including the Royal Society Science as an Open Enterprise Report from 2012. Examples of projects relating to data policy include the Dryad Joint Data Archiving Policy and Dryad Sustainability.

Kerstin Lehnert, Director of the Integrated Earth Data Applications Research Group (IEDA), provided a view of data from the researcher's perspective. Why open access to data? There are two main reasons: to allow verification of research results and to make data accessible for re-use.

Kerstin Leynert on useful data

Data must be fit for re-use: it must be discoverable, be openly accessible, be safe and it must be useful. One example of useful data is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It contains 2000 articles with over 70,000 citations, and a lot of useful science has come out of it. Another example is Earthchem Synthesis. Within 2 minutes you can explore the whole literature and create a map with different composition of different areas. It has seamless integration within the discipline.

There are a number of guiding principles. Quality of data makes it useful to include complete documentation of provenance. Domain-specific data stewardship provides development, maintenance and promotion of domain-specific, community based standards for data and metadata. Domain-specific repositories are best positioned to ensure 'fitness for re-use'. However, they must ensure professional data curation services and integrate with the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Lehnert outlined the IEDA development of standards. They had requirements for the reporting of geochemical data. Steps were taken to move from a suite of databases to become a repository to ensure better sustainability. They improved policies and procedures using DOI, IGSN and long term archiving agreements with NGDC and Columbia University libraries. They also sought accreditation with membership in the world data system and as a publication agent of DataCite.

Lehnert closes with a number of questions. Many data types have no home or standards. Where should these go? How can we help other domains to establish repositories and best practices? Who decides which repository data should be submitted to? Are there recommendations from societies? The sustainability of repositories is still not solved, so what are the business models to ensure longevity? How can we streamline the link between repositories and journals? Do we need a centralised solution?

The final speaker was Tony Brookes from the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. He urged data sharing as it is important, but acknowledged it is problematic. Prioritise IDs and risk categorisation, improve data discovery and consider setting up database journals. In essence, don't just  tweak the current model. The elephant in the room is the real reason data sharing isn't happening as quickly as we might like. No one wants to, whether they are researchers, institutions or companies.

Publishing practicalities: Google Analytics and the cloud

David Smith from the IET chaired an insightful publishing practicalities session on day two of the ALPSP International Conference where Jason Hoyt from PeerJ expounded the benefits of being in the cloud and Alan Hyndman from Digital Science outlined how you have to use Google Analytics to improve your marketing.

Why love Google Analytcis?
It’s free. It’s comprehensive. It's the most commonly used analytics tool. As a result, there is an expert online community (blogs, training forums, etc). Google being Google they constantly upgrade it so it is constantly evolving. It is easy to use - you don’t need SQL or excel skills to use the data - and easy to implement.

Key elements of Google Analytics include the audience overview. This provides overarching information and indicates whether your traffic is going up or down and why, are the visitors staying, and helps assess whether you get quality traffic?

Location provides breakdown of geographical spread of visitors. The technology section includes browsers – essential if you are developing a site which tells you what to test on and how to build best structured site for optimal performance. Traffic sources will tell you where people find you and therefore which part of marketing channel is most successful.

Within the content and conversions function, a common mistake that people make is that they don’t set up goals. When defining conversion you can look at macro conversions (sign up for an account, buy a product, buy a subscription) and micro conversions (stay for more than 5 minutes, view different pages,  share with social media, etc). You don’t get data retrospectively so set up goals at the start. You will then be able to drill down into (e.g. conversions or sales and find out how/where people found your site) and focus marketing on the most effective ones.

Goal funnels show drop off points that you can use to spot and solve problems. Another key thing is to do is campaign tracking. Don't forget about multi channel attribution. If you look at the end then you might attribute something to Facebook, but actually people don’t use the web in that way. They might sign up via Google for a newsletter, receive email communications. You need to take a step back and consider all channels and how they influence customer behaviour.

Recognise you can outsource to specialists
Jason Hoyt from PeerJ explained the benefits of moving to the cloud. He suggested that you need to go through a period of introspection and throw out (outsource) anything that is not core or where you aren’t experts.

Identify your customer and their top needs. Throw out anything that your customers don’t care about. The modern organization is SaaS-supprted (software as a service). PeerJ started out with SCALR cloud management solution (open source solution). There are a variety of pricing models (monthly, pay per use, etc). They have back-up with Amazon whose servers are global and regional so there are multiple back-ups. The (Amazon) cloud is for organisations both big and small (e.g. Netflix and Dropbox).

Using the cloud has a psychological bonus – of being on the cutting edge of technology. There are exceptions to these rules, but for the most part you’d be served well to follow these tips.

Tim Brooks Keynote: Drowning - or Waving?

We are delighted to welcome delegates to our annual International Conference and Awards. This year we will provide coverage of the event on Twitter so follow the #alpsp13 hash tag. We'll also provide summaries here on the blog.

The day kicked off with a keynote from Tim Brooks, CEO of BMJ who reflected on the struggle that every organisation has with technology driving change.

Who am I to talk?
Brooks is a journalist by training, but has experience of working at The Guardian, IPC Media, Time Inc and Emap amongst others. He was a Visiting Fellow at London Business School before joining BMJ, which provided a different perspective of how people learn. He has seen first hand the challenges traditional media companies face. At BMJ, they have over 60% of revenue now derived from digital, up from 10% in just a few years, and they are seeing growth from international markets.

Modern life: bloody complicated
Brooks observed that it is impossible to talk to anyone who is not facing an increase in the speed of activity, greater need for flexibility, an increasing number of variables, ever more complex interdependencies and an increasing range of novel - or unpredictable - phenomena. Fast is the new slow. Being a manager today is a lot like ongoing agile development.

'Doubt is not a pleasant state: but certainty is a ridiculous one.' - Voltaire

Why is change so hard?
There are cultural obstacles that are easy to overlook. Good news culture can be corrosive: issues that are causing difficulty get filtered out as it goes up the organisation, so that those with senior, strategic responsibility aren't getting the full picture.

Skills and decision making are key, but corporate leadership were/are not digital natives. Leadership by definition has vested interest in the status quo. And digital natives are not naturally drawn to legacy environments. Marrying digital skills to an enterprise's established skills or vice versa challenging and time consuming.

Do those who know have a voice?
Brooks drew on the example of Emap in the 80s. They noticed that classified regional newspaper sales were falling across the board. Rather than fire the sales team, they talked to them - as highly skills professionals - to find out why. The message was clear: local radio was taking sales. The solution? They sold their regional titles and bought into local radio.

There are a number of structural options an organisation can adopt. The prevailing wisdom is if you are going to make a transition to the new you have to keep it separate. But there are a lot of different options for company structures and it is difficult to predict which is the right one.

Make sure you use the right metrics. Don't get trapped by your own perception of what your business is: the customers' perception is more important.

Looking for answers: the newspaper industry
The UK has the most competitive newspaper market in the world because it was the first into the market in Victorian times. Shrinking, dying industries start doing strange things, but when you look at The Times and The Guardian, they have strong readership and there is healthy rivalry.

Agility, agility, agility
Sky has been brilliantly agile. They have portfolio agility and strategic agility. When LoveFilm came along they untethered their content so it can be watched on mobile devices.  This was a massive change to their business model and one that was full of risk. They structure their businesses for different markets - keeping film and print differently.

'There are always two parties, the party of the past and the party of the future; the establishment and the movement.' Strategy as Revolution - Gary Hamel

What's in it for me?
While Brooks was at The Guardian, they opened up weekly open meetings for all staff to come along to discuss a digital related issue. It was amazing how they gained fresh insight into issues from unlikely sources. He stressed the importance of remembering what's in it for the people you work with. Treat staff as volunteers. Talk and listen. Honour the rule of 5 (in marriages if there are five or more positives to every negative the marriage will last). Treat your staff the same way. Look after your team. Tell people what you want them to do, why you want them to and thank them for it. And don't forget you. The balance between self, loved ones and work crucial.

ALPSP Plenary Interview: Bernie Folan on publishing for the born-digital community

We are delighted that Semantico are gold sponsors at the ALPSP International Conference and Awards 2013.

With the conference just a couple of days away, their Business Development Director Terry Hulbert spoke to one of our key plenary speakers, Bernie Folan, and asked her what organisational restructure she anticipates companies responding to meet the demands of the born-digital community will make.

This is an extract from the interview. You can read the full article on the Semantico blog.

"I don’t think there is one right or optimal structure, so I’ll talk instead about qualities. I think looking out and making real time for learning about the world of research is vital and I’m coming around to thinking that the only way to make it happen in busy working lives is to build in that time in some formal way. I like the thinking behind Google’s 20% time although I wouldn’t suggest it’s the only way and read recently that it is dying out as work levels increase. Nevertheless some research has shown we are most creative when at rest or play.

I think it’s important to have the right people in the right roles so the innovators are not stuck in reports and spreadsheets whilst the detail people are not trying to come up with the next big thing. However, I think there should be some simple mechanism for gathering ideas from all employees. We all live in the world and whether we do it within a university or not, we are all learners.

Organisations need to be agile too. Do we really still need all of those people over there whilst we are hiring over here? Matching skills to roles and getting the numbers right overall as business changes are important and mean that companies need to invest in and develop strong leadership and prioritise honest, open discussion and brave decision-making over short-term comfort."

The ALPSP International Conference and Awards starts on Wednesday 11 September at The Belfry, near Birmingham. Follow the action via the Twitter hashtag #alpsp13 and bookmark this blog for updates.

ALPSP Plenary Interview: Semantico's Terry Hulbert talks to Fred Dylla

We are delighted that Semantico are gold sponsors at the ALPSP International Conference and Awards 2013. In the run-up to the conference, their Business Development Director Terry Hulbert spoke to one of our key plenary speakers, Fred Dylla, about trends and insights in the policy arena. This is an extract of the interview. You can read the full article on the Semantico blog.

Fred Dylla

"We do not need a revolution to achieve open access, and in fact, we are already evolving toward a model of publishing where the public enjoys reasonable free access to federally funded research while journals continue to play a central role in science by publishing peer-reviewed research and maintaining the highest standards.

A similar evolution in publishing has already occurred over the last generation. Just 20 years ago, the business model of all academic publishers centered on print journals, and virtually none had any sort of online presence. Today the publishing industry has largely evolved into business models centered on the web. This didn’t happen overnight. There were many experiments and forays into digital archiving that came up short. But today researchers everywhere enjoy easy access to archives that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

I think that public access policies will similarly evolve in the next five–10 years, and scientific publishers will be evolving alongside. There are plenty of examples in nature of creatures that co-evolve—like Darwin’s flowers and finches on those isolated Pacific islands. Co-evolution is the healthiest way forward for public access and scientific publishing. Kill off the finches, and the flowers may whither on the vine."

The ALPSP International Conference and Awards starts on Wednesday 11 September at The Belfry, near Birmingham. Follow the action via the Twitter hashtag #alpsp13 and bookmark this blog for updates.