Does innovation help smaller publishers?

These are exciting times in scholarly publishing, as ALPSP 2014 so amply demonstrated. But is technical innovation leaving the smaller publisher trailing behind better-resourced and larger competitors and the big technology companies? It ain’t necessarily so…

The early ‘electronic’ decades were characterized by high entry costs, modest technical skill levels, uncertainties and risk aversion. Only the larger publishers would venture to take the first cautious steps. Now the pace of technical change is almost dizzying, innovation is rampant, entry costs have fallen, skill levels are higher and, despite some apprehension, even small publishers are more comfortable with taking risks.

The fundamental elements of scholarly publishing haven’t changed that much. Authors still want to publish in the ‘best’ journals representing their community, with fast, reliable and responsive peer review. Libraries and readers still want affordability, timeliness, responsiveness to their needs. Price is important but quality and impact weigh heavily. None of these criteria are barriers to the smaller scholarly publisher.

Despite the rapidity of change, technical innovation has lowered the entry barriers, making it easier and less risky for smaller publishers and start-ups to provide new products and services: think of Peerage of Science for peer review, figshare for managing and sharing research output, DeepDyve for low-cost full-text preview, PACKT using Google to monitor technology trends and turning them into publishing opportunities, and many more initiatives reported at ALPSP 2014. Vast collaborative effort is going into standardization, data structuring, interoperability to level the playing field and make it easier for players to concentrate on their own USPs. A whole industry of service providers and outsourcers ensure that small scale is not an obstacle: intermediaries, hosts, discovery services, technology partners, CCC, CrossRef, COUNTER and more.

With all this help, small operators have the additional advantage that they can be more nimble and exploit opportunities more quickly than larger organizations. The proviso is that they understand their role, that they stay in close touch and work with their chosen academic communities, respond to their needs and constantly reinvent themselves (Coco Chanel: “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different”). Even the big beasts in the field can be helpful: Google does offer well-used, free discovery services and is responsive to complaints about the negative impact of search algorithm changes. There were calls for more lobbying of services like Google, but the question of their market dominance is perhaps best left to the competition authorities.

‘Bells and whistles’ was the somewhat pejorative term used for service characteristics that are nice to have but miss what is really important to authors. For example publishers and librarians care deeply about version control, but researchers don’t. There are a fair number of ‘predatory’ journals that offer little or no peer review even though the research community still values it highly. Impact factors are important for publishers but researchers, particularly younger ones, care more about the societal impact of their work, also reflected in the changing criteria of the Research Excellence Framework. Small publishers need to have these conversations with the research community and understand what matters to them.

It is to the credit of ALPSP that it has always been aware of the special concerns of niche publishers. It has done its best to foster skill building, provide networking opportunities, encourage standards and service provision and bring the different parts of the scholarly publishing universe together. No wonder its international conferences have been so successful!

Kurt Paulus
kurtpaulus@hotmail.co.uk

Big data: mining or minefield? Kurt Paulus reflects...

Who's Afraid of Big Data? Not this panel...

"Data are the stuff of research: collection, manipulation, analysis, more data… They are also the stuff of contemporary life: surveillance data, customer data, medical data… Some are defined and manageable: a researcher’s base collection from which the paper draws conclusions. Some are big: police data, NHS data, GCHQ data, accumulated published data in particular fields. Two Plenaries and several other papers at ALPSP 2014 addressed the issues, options, opportunities and some threats around them.

There have long been calls for authors’ underlying research data to be made accessible, so as to substantiate research conclusions, suggest further work and so on. The main Plenaries concerned themselves with Big Data, usually unstructured sets of elements of unprecedented scale and scope, such as the whole of Wikipedia, accumulated Google searches, the biomedical literature, the visible galaxies in the universe. The challenge of ‘mining’ these datasets is to bring structure to them so that new insights emerge beyond those arising from limited or sampled data. This requires automation, big computing resources and appropriate but speeded-up human intervention and sometimes crowd sourcing.

Gemma Hersh from Elsevier on TDM

Text and data mining has some kinship with information discovery where usually structured datasets are queried, but goes well beyond it by seeking to add structure to very large sets of data where there is no or little structure, so that information can be clustered, trends identified and concepts linked together to lead to new hypotheses. The intelligence services provide a prime, albeit hidden example. So does the functional characterization of proteins, the mining of the UK Biobank for trends and new insights or the crowd-sourced classification of galaxy types to test cosmological theories.

Inevitably there are barriers and issues. The data themselves are often inadequate; for example not all drug trials are published and negative or non-results are frequently excluded from papers. Research data are not always structured and standardized and authors are often untutored in databases and ontologies. The default policy, it was recommended, should be openness in the availability of authors’ published and underlying data, standardized with full metadata and unique identifiers, to make data usable and mitigate the need for sophisticated mining.

CrossRef's Rachael Lammey

Because of copyright and licensing, not all data are easily accessed for retrieval and mining. Increasingly licensing for ‘non-commercial purposes’ is permitted but exactly what is non-commercial is ill-defined, particularly in pharmaceuticals. Organizations like CrossRef, CCC, PLS and others are beginning to offer services that support the textual, licensing and royalty gathering processes for both research and commercial data mining.

Rejecting the name tag Cassandra, Paul Uhlir of the National Academies urged a note of caution. Big Data is changing the public and academic landscape, harbouring threats of disintermediation, complexity, luddism and inequality and exposing weaknesses in reproducibility, scientific method, data policy, metrics and human resources, amongst others.

Paul F. Uhlir urges caution

Judging by the remainder of these sessions and the audience reaction, excitement was more noticeable than apprehension.

ALPSP of course is on the ball and has just issued a Member Briefing on Text and Data Mining (member login required) and will publish a special online-only issue of Learned Publishing before the end of this month."





Kurt Paulus
kurtpaulus@hotmail.co.uk

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

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.

Nature ENCODE: a new concept in the publishing and dissemination of scientific information

Nature ENCODE cover

Nature ENCODE has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation 2013. Here in a guest post, Christian Manco reflects on the inception of the project and how they hope to develop this approach in the future.

"ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, is a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute to identify all functional elements in the human genome, in an effort to understand how a human cell interprets the genetic information within its nuclear DNA.

The scale of the project and the discoveries and data it generated required the dissemination of its results to be coordinated across multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals. The main results, representing one of the most important collections of scientific publications in the domain of life sciences in recent years, were published in over 30 scientific papers on September 5th 2012. The collection of articles was published jointly by four scientific journals: Nature, Genome Research, Genome Biology and BMC Genetics.

With the publication of the ENCODE package, Nature introduced a new concept in the publishing and dissemination of scientific information: the ‘threads’. The 13 online threads complement the papers by highlighting topics that are otherwise covered only in subsections of individual papers, and by providing a tool for exploring the information through a different lens. Each of them contains no original material but consists of relevant paragraphs, figures and tables from across the 30 papers, united around a specific theme, to offer to the scientific community, as a response to the increasing complexity of modern research, an enhanced and enriched way of exploring scientific publications.

Nature ENCODE explorer; an interactive guide

At the same time, to help the reader navigate through the research papers and to introduce the concept of threads to the scientific community in an intuitive, visual way, Nature created an interactive guide: the Nature ENCODE explorer, the main feature of the purpose-built website.

Nature ENCODE: the iPad app

The same concept applies to the Nature ENCODE app for the iPad, through which the user is able to access not only the full content of all the articles across the different publishers, but also other relevant information such as news, comments and videos.

Mindful of the fact that analyses of such vast amounts of data can be hard to reproduce because analyses parameters can be hard to track, Nature included virtual machines with a subset of the papers which faithfully recapitulate a given set of analyses on a given subset of data. To the best of our knowledge this was the first instance of harnessing virtual machines to safeguard transparency of data analysis and to maximize reproducibility.

Nature ENCODE team

As both transparency and reproducibility have arisen as important issues in science publishing, we intend to expand on our ENCODE experience, especially in the realm of ‘big data’ publications. Thus it is our hope that future publications of similar scope can benefit from dynamic thread generating facility, as well as sophisticated ways of ensuring transparency and reproducibility."


Christian Manco is Publishing Project Manager at Nature Publishing Group.

The ALPSP Awards finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their journal or innovation in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP International Conference on Wednesday 11 September.

The winners will be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September. Book now to secure your place.

figshare: making research articles come to life

figshare has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation 2013. Here, in a guest post, they write about how the project was born, and plans for the future.

"figshare was born out of the frustration of founder Mark Hahnel who after finishing his PhD in Stem Cell Biology had no way of getting credit for all of his academic research. After three years of intensive work his 9GB of figures, datasets and media had been reduced to four papers and 250kb of static images. 99.9% of his outputs were destined to lay dormant and largely undiscovered in his institute’s repository. Mark saw this as something that was broken in academia and set about building a solution with figshare. 

figshare started as an open online repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, sharable and discoverable manner. Academics and researchers can upload up to 1GB of private data and unlimited public data, it accepts all file types and visualises them in the browser which removes the dependency on third party software to view files. All research outputs published on figshare are given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) making them citable, whilst gamification metrics encourage the sharing of data with the wider community, which in turn makes the research data easier to discover.

figshare has rapidly evolved since its launch in January 2012 and now works with publishers to aid visualisation, interactivity and discoverability of research outputs.

Partnership with PLoS

Notable examples include a partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) whereby all supplementary material in all PLoS journals is now visualisable in the browser thanks to widgets provided by figshare. F1000 Research, a novel open publishing platform, also uses figshare technology to allow authors to embed large amounts of data within the articles.

As part of the publisher offering, figshare has also built portals for publishers whereby the content can be filtered based on specific journals and content within that journal. Breaking the articles into their smallest citable units allows the content to be linked and filtered upon, making the outputs more discoverable. As publishers move to disseminate different types of content other than just text and PDF documents, there needs to be new ways to visualise and navigate the content. The publisher portals demonstrate an innovative way of doing this so the potential value of all research is truly unlocked."

The ALPSP Awards finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their journal or innovation in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP International Conference on Wednesday 11 September.

The winners will be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September. Book now to secure your place.

Altmetric: Solving the Impact Puzzle

Figure 1. Altmetric Explorer's Interface

Altmetric has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation 2013. Here in a guest post, their data curator and blog editor Jean Liu, outlines the issues that drove its development.

"At Altmetric, our mission is to track and analyse the online attention that surrounds individual scholarly articles, in order to provide new ways for authors, publishers, and institutions to demonstrate research impact. The rationale behind this was simple: a growing number of scholarly conversations involving both academics and non-academics have been taking place online. Moreover, these conversations are centred on individual articles, rather than journals. As a result, traditional citation-based measures of journal impact are no longer suited to reflect the signals of impact that result from the new digital methods of scholarly discourse.

In some situations, the use of citation counts alone cannot demonstrate the wider impact that a research paper had on society. For instance, a paper that describes a life-saving public health intervention might have great societal impact, but few citations, perhaps due to the fact that the nurses at the front lines don’t have the time to write many peer-reviewed publications. In this case, the lack of citations might give the impression that the paper had little impact. However, metrics at the article level that measure the social web could help fill in the missing piece of this impact puzzle. For example, many healthcare practitioners are involved in the medical blogosphere and are active on social media, and might readily post about their experiences with the intervention described in the paper. As such, attention from blogs and social media could be better at telling the story of the paper’s true societal impact.

Altmetric aims to complement traditional metrics by measuring and quantifying the constellation of factors that can also be indicative of impact, not only in academia but also in society. Instead of focusing on journals, we provide article-level metrics that are based on attention from a variety of sources, including social media, blogs, news outlets, and reference managers. Through these alternative metrics (“altmetrics”), Altmetric is able to rapidly capture the impact of published research in a way that is better suited for the new age of digital scholarship.

All of Altmetric’s data can be easily browsed, filtered, and analysed using our flagship product, the Altmetric Explorer (Figure 1). Figure 1. above shows a screenshot of the Altmetric Explorer’s interface. Individual articles are represented by “donut” visualisations, which include Altmetric scores of attention. The colours of the donuts indicate the diversity of sources that have mentioned the articles. The video below provides a 'walk-through' of the Almetric Explorer tool.

Introduction to the Altmetric Explorer from Altmetric.com on Vimeo.

For each paper, the number of mentions from each source are displayed in “article details pages” (Figure 2), along with the actual mentions themselves. By revealing the quantitative and qualitative data, users have the freedom to make their own assessments about the true impact of individual papers.

Figure 2. to the left shows a screenshot of an Altmetric details page. The left-hand side shows the donut visualization, Altmetric score, and breakdown of metrics. The main screen contains tabs that display the actual mentions that make up the metrics."



Jean Liu, MSc is the data curator and blog editor for Altmetric LLP. Her interest in altmetrics developed from her science blogging work and academic roots in neuroscience and pharmacology. She researches and writes about altmetrics for the Altmetric blog.

The ALPSP Awards finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their journal or innovation in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP International Conference on Wednesday 11 September.

The winners will be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September. Book now to secure your place.

What do the US Open and ALPSP Annual Conference have in common?

This September will see a hive of scholarly publishers converge on The Belfry, 'the spiritual home of The Ryder Cup', for the ALPSP International Conference. Once again, the ALPSP Ringgold Golf Tournament will take place on the final afternoon.

If you love golf AND scholarly publishing, it seems appropriate to highlight two major events this week: the US Open kicks off today and the ALPSP conference early bird rate ends tomorrow. Make sure you take advantage of both.

Richard Fidczuk from SAGE Publications wrote a summary of last year's tournament:

"The now traditional ALSP Ringgold Golf Tournament took place on the Belfry Derby course after the conference finished, on Thursday afternoon. After worries that the weather would be like Wednesday afternoon, when it was hard to hear the conference speakers as the rain was so heavy on the roof of the hall, Thursday afternoon proved to be a beautifully sunny autumn day. There were thirteen participants in four teams, of all standards – and I do mean all, from handicaps as low as 6 to a clutch of high-handicappers , some of whom had only played golf a handful of times. And truly international, with players from The US, South Africa, and the Netherlands, as well as the UK. The Stableford scoring format, which gives players extra shots depending on their handicap, meant that everyone, regardless of ability, had a chance to score points for their team.

It was a closely fought contest, with two teams tying for first place at the end of the 18 holes, and after a tense count back process to decide the winner, the team comprised of Arend Welmers (Quantum90), Mark Carden (Metapress) and Phil Roberts (IET) came out on top. The individual winner was Chris Fell (CUP), who despite his rather ordinary putting (he won’t mind my saying that – I hope!) scored a total of 33 points to win. All winners received a magnificent trophy which cost, literally, pounds.

Thanks to Laura Cox from Ringgold for sponsoring the event again and providing refreshments at the 19th hole; and for Lesley at ALPSP for organizing with the conference venue. We will of course be playing again this year and will be looking for more participants (of all standards)."

Further information on the conference programme is available on the website.
Book your place at the early bird rate until Friday 14 June.