Not Your Teenager’s Social Network: What Academic Societies Can Learn from Facebook about Making Money—and Making Members Happy

We are delighted to share this blog by Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures at the Copyright Clearance Center  which draws some interesting parallels between learned societies and social networks and highlights what we can learn from their example.

Social networking a la Facebook and Twitter may seem to be a product of the Internet age, but it is actually nothing new. If you think about it, learned societies - which aim to bring together people in a given field or area of professional interest - are actually built on the original idea of a social network, to wit: a network of social interactions and personal relationships, as Webster’s defines it.

Yet today’s academic societies, charged with connecting individuals who share professional interests and providing a forum for communication and collaboration, continuing education, and career opportunities, are facing declines in membership, particularly among people under age 30. Fewer than half (48%) of all millennials belong to a society compared with 83% of baby boomer researchers, according to Wiley’s recent survey of nearly 14,000 research professionals.

Facebook and Twitter (and more researcher-focused sites such as Mendeley) have something to do with that age discrepancy; they are favorites for early-career researchers who want to actively network in both their professional and personal life. With so many online opportunities for making contacts and interacting, societies are tasked with finding new ways to provide meaningful benefits that will attract and retain members, as well as keep their revenues growing.

Perhaps scholarly and professional societies can learn something from Facebook, too. Just as that online social network continues to expand (and gobble up money) by using member data in ever more ingenious ways (linking all those Likes, learning from them, and tailoring content to members accordingly), so societies can use technology to better serve their members and become more relevant and profitable in the process.

From disconnected data to smart data

Fully leveraging data they already have is an often-overlooked way for societies to grow their membership and keep current members engaged enough to renew year after year. Take the example of researchers who submit an article to a society journal. It is a good bet that the article will contain the names and contact information of multiple coauthors. Wouldn’t it make sense if, instead of isolating those names within the editorial system, societies could use them to their advantage, connecting them with other data points throughout the organization?

That process could start at article submission by determining the needs of corresponding authors and co-authors, simply by asking questions like the following:

• Are the authors already members of the society?
• If yes, are their memberships up for renewal?
• If no, will a special offering (such as an APC discount or free author reprints) entice them to join?
• If they have an .edu address, are they taking advantage of institutional arrangements for payment of open access fees?
• Are they registered to attend the next society conference?
• Do they need continuing education credits?
• Do they even know about these benefits?

Chances are, members and would-be members don’t know all the benefits of membership. In the Wiley survey, 15% of respondents said they’d never been invited to join an academic society; 12% said they didn’t know what offerings were available, and another 12% said that joining had never occurred to them. As the folks at Wiley put it, “This means that 37% of non-members are either waiting to be asked to join, or might be persuaded to join…With so many non-members just waiting to be asked, societies may find they are often pushing at an open door.”

But societies are not yet pushing on that door. One reason is that in many learned societies, different departments, and the data they house, are “siloed,” cut off from one another and not communicating effectively. “When a member interacts with an organization, they’re interacting with education, or a group that does grants,” says Ann Michael, DeltaThink CEO and former president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, who moderated a recent webinar on society membership by the Copyright Clearance Center. Silos, says Michael, make it difficult for members to see the organization as a whole, which makes it hard for organizations to serve members’ needs effectively.

In the same webinar, Alex Taylor, head of communities and events at the Institution for Engineering and Technology, admitted that for a long time, the IET was “lost in a labyrinth of our own making .…We offer so many different things, [there are] so many different teams and departments…that there’s most definitely a [silo] culture, a lack of joined-up collaborative thinking.”

The key, then, is for members and societies to come together, to increase satisfaction and engagement on one side and revenues on the other. That starts with knowing what members and potential members want and need.  For example, in Wiley’s survey findings, 26% of respondents said their strongest reason for joining a society was to take advantage of opportunities for continuing education. But the continuing education platforms seldom, if ever, talk with the editorial ones.

The bottom line: If the membership, continuing education, and conference departments are not connected with each other or linked up with the editorial department, opportunities for generating new members and retaining existing ones will be missed. Think about the benefits to all involved if these systems talked to one another. In that scenario, it would be easy to notify an individual who recently submitted an article on a particular topic about an upcoming workshop on the same subject. Or, having just published that article, to let the author know that his society membership renewal comes with the benefit of 25 free article reprints.

What all of this requires is a smart network of links among databases that enables societies to target their marketing to specific individuals with personalized messages and offerings, at opportune times (when you already have their attention, for example, at article acceptance or other key points in the editorial workflow). That is the difference between blasting members with renewal notices three days after they’ve renewed and instead telling them something they truly want to know (i.e. that they are due for CME credits). Rather than putting off members and would-be members with more junk mail, suddenly, you are providing them with a higher level of service.

One way to make the data connection easy is with an enterprise content management system that does the sorting and linking of member information automatically. An investment in an ECM system is worth it, because it allows societies to provide a higher level of service.  Knowing what members need and offering it to them when they need it will bring in higher revenues in the form of new and renewing members, who can now avail themselves of services they were previously unaware of. Or, to put it another way, societies will be able to maximize revenue sources already at their disposal, and members will understand the value proposition that comes from joining and engaging with a learned society. Talk about pushing an open door.

Adopt some standards

Besides enterprise content management systems, another crucial step toward connecting data and better serving members is to adopt standards such as ORCID IDs, Ringgold names, IP addresses from Publisher Solutions International, and identifiers from FundRef. Once employed, societies can identify institutional affiliations, funding agencies, geographical locations, and membership status, and then launch relevant messaging.  You might, by ORCID ID, identify an author member as hailing from a particular institution and take it from there, reaching out to let a Harvard-based author know that she’s eligible for an institutional discount on open access charges. Combine these standards with the member data derived from your enterprise content management system, and suddenly, you get to the nirvana of data connection, without having to reinvent the wheel, and without having to bother the author.

Create new businesses to keep members happy

To keep growing, societies also need to consider new sources of revenue. It makes sense that the first thing a membership-driven society should consider when it thinks about growing its bottom line is the needs of its members. For example, the Wiley survey asks members what they value.  Some key services mentioned in the Wiley survey are continuing education (64%), keeping up to date with the latest research (50%) and job openings (32%). Once societies have this information in hand, they should ask: Do I have a business around this? If the answer is no, the next question might be: Should I have a business around this? If learning is a key reason members renew, a society may want to look at whether they have adequate continuing education offerings. If career networking is a top priority, a society might send out alerts when jobs open up in members’ areas of interest. That’s known as data driven messaging, whether a society tells a researcher who has just submitted an article on kidney cancer about an opening in the nephrology department of a major research hospital, or reminds her to register for the upcoming American Society of Nephrology Conference.

Attracting and retaining members - even millennials - is not rocket science, and we can learn from the companies who do it well. It is about figuring out why people join, and asking: Have I done enough here? Because sometimes, by asking relatively simple questions, offering opportunities vis-à-vis the needs of members, and doing some obvious things like adopting standards, it is possible to create the building blocks that raise a society to the next level - and make it go viral. 

Roy Kaufman is Copyright Clearance Center's Managing Director of New Ventures. Prior to CCC, Roy served as Legal Director, Wiley-Blackwell, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. He is a member of, among other things, the Bar of the State of New York, the Copyright and Legal Affairs Committee of the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers. He was the founding corporate Secretary of Crossref, and formerly chaired its legal working group. He has lectured extensively on the subjects of copyright, licensing, open access, text/data mining, new media, artists’ rights, and art law. Roy is Editor-in-Chief of Art Law Handbook: From Antiquities to the Internet, and author of two books on publishing contract law. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and Columbia Law School.

Make sure you get the most out of your ALPSP membership? Visit our Membership Benefits page to keep up to date on all our services on offer. For any queries please contact Lesley Ogg at events@alpsp.org 

Why Publishers Need to Know the Difference between Search and Text Mining

Haralambos “Babis” Marmanis CTO and VP, Engineering & Product Development at the Copyright Clearance Center looks at the concepts behind search and text mining and highlights why publishers need to understand the differences in order to make the best use of each.

As the author of works on search and the lead architect of a product which enables text mining of scientific journal articles, I am often asked about the difference between Search and Text Mining, and have observed that the two are sometimes conflated. Unless you work with technology every day, this confusion is certainly understandable. Knowing the differences, however, can open new business opportunities for publishers. Both functions deal with the application of algorithms to natural language text, and both need to cope with the fact that, as compared with “pure data,” text is messy. Text is unstructured, amorphous, and difficult to deal with algorithmically.

While the challenges associated with text are common to both search and text mining, the details with respect to inputs, analytical techniques, outputs, and use cases differ greatly. For years, publishers have been engaged in search engine optimization, designed to make their works more discoverable to users. As publishers are increasingly asked to enable text mining of their content, they enter into new territory – a territory that is different than that of public search engines. Thus, it is more important than ever to understand the difference between these two distinct mechanisms of processing content, so that optimal business and licensing strategies are chosen for each.

To begin with, let me describe the key concepts for each area. "Search" means the retrieval of documents based on certain search terms. Think, for example, of your usual web search on well-known search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. In search, the typical actions performed by a software system are index-based and designed for the retrieval of documents. The indexing process therefore aims to build a look-up table that organizes the documents based on the words they contain. The output is typically a hyper-link to text/information residing elsewhere, along with a small amount of text which describes what is to be found at the other end of the link. In these systems, no “net new” information is derived from the documents through the processes that are employed to create the search index. The purpose is to find the existing work so that its content can be used.

On the other hand, "text mining" is a less widely understood but well-developed field that deals with analyzing (not finding) text. That is, while text mining can sometimes look at meta-textual issues – for example, tracking the history of science by counting the instances of a specific phrase (e.g., “avian flu”) in articles – more often the goal is to extract expressed information that is useful for particular purposes, not just to find, link to, and retrieve documents that contain specific facts.

Text mining tools accomplish this by allowing computers to rapidly process thousands of articles and integrate a wealth of information. Some tools rely on parsing the text contained in the documents and apply simple algorithms that effectively count the words of interest. Other tools dig deeper and extract basic language structure and meaning (such as identifying noun phrases or genes) or even analyze the complete grammatical structure of millions of sentences in order to gain insights from the textual expression of the authors. By extracting facts along with authors’ interpretations and opinions over a broad corpus of text, this more sophisticated approach can deliver precise and comprehensive information, and in the commercial setting, provides more value than simple word counts.

Unlike with search, the output of text mining will vary depending on the use to which the researcher wishes to apply the results. In some contexts, the output is digital and designed for machines to process. In other examples, such as using text mining to drive marketing of products and services, the ultimate output will be human-readable text. In other words, even when text mining is performed, sometimes the user needs and receives the full article.

Although both search and text mining involve the parsing and lexical analysis of documents, there are important differences that should drive a publisher’s decisions about investments in text mining and search.

1. In text mining, the processing and analysis is often done on a project by project basis. Unlike the search functionality provided by search engines, the “how, why, and what” are infinitely variable, and it is difficult to accurately anticipate the inputs, processes, and outputs required. For example, depending on a text miner’s use case, the output may be facts, data, links, or full expression, as opposed to the simple links that are the output of search.
2. Search is about finding a set of relevant documents, each of which is considered independently by the algorithm; if applied to a single document the process will yield the same result for that document. On the other hand, text mining is mostly about discovering and using information that lives in the fabric of a corpus of documents. Change one document and the fabric of the corpus changes. Mining is usually (but not always) consumptive of the content. So, the “search” process is document-by-document specific, while the “mining” process involves sets of documents and how these documents relate to each other.
3. Lastly, the mining process aims at extracting “higher-order” information that involves first-, second-, and higher-order correlations that may occur among any combination of the terms, data, or expressions appearing in the corpus of documents that is processed.

In summary, search and text mining should be considered as two quite distinct processing mechanisms, with often different inputs and outputs. While publishers need to engage with both, by conflating them, one loses the unique opportunities and strengths that each provides. With search, it’s all about helping users find the specific content that they are looking for. Text mining goes well beyond search, to find multiple meanings in a publisher’s content in order to derive new value therefrom. Hence, one would expect that, just as the processes themselves differ, publishers’ licenses for the search and text mining processes will differ too.

ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… RightFind™ XML for Mining from Copyright Clearance Center

In this second of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists' posts,
Jake Kelleher, Senior Director, Licensing and Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) talks about RightFind™ XML for Mining, a solution which facilitates copyright-compliant access to full-text article content for text and data mining.

ALPSP: Tell us a bit about your company

CCC was founded over 35 years ago at the suggestion of the United States Congress to provide an efficient market for the clearing of photocopy rights. Today, CCC is a global leader in content and licensing solutions for publishers, businesses and academic institutions. Located near Boston, we have more than 380 employees dedicated to serving the needs of over 12,000 publishers and providing innovative content and rights-licensing technology solutions for more than 35,000 customers around the globe.

In the mid-90s, when publishers were struggling with how to best protect copyrighted material in a new online world, they worked closely with CCC to create RightsLink®, which made it easy for visitors to a publisher’s website to purchase permissions and other services. Years later, we collaborated with our publisher customers again to use RightsLink’s advanced ecommerce capabilities to manage article processing charges (APCs) and other author fees for journal articles. As a result, we launched our RightsLink for Open Access platform with a range of new capabilities developed with input from customers and partners. This summer, we introduced our new RightFind XML for Mining Service in partnership with six major publishers.

ALPSP: What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted our latest advance, RightFind XML for Mining, a great example of CCC’s culture of innovation offering new revenue opportunities for life science publishers.

ALPSP: Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

XML for Mining is built on the RightFind platform, CCC’s unique suite of cloud-based corporate workflow solutions that offer immediate access to a full range of STM peer-reviewed journal content.

XML for Mining launches from this platform and contains normalized, full-text articles from multiple rightsholders, allowing researchers to create a corpus of articles relevant to their research. Once the corpus has been created, researchers download these articles into their text mining solutions. XML for Mining almost eliminates the weeks, or even months, of work it takes to prepare scientific content for use in text mining solutions, thus accelerating research and discovery.

In fact, we recently received some very positive feedback from a leading international pharmaceutical company that they love the full-text search and can’t get it anywhere else. As always with CCC, feedback and ideas from our customers guide everything we do.   We developed RightFind XML for Mining with input from text mining researchers and publishers looking for a voluntary, market-based licensing solution.  And we will continue to listen to the market, add new publisher content and develop new features, and explore ways to collaborate with technology partners.

ALPSP: Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

RightFind XML for Mining represents a huge step forward for publishers navigating text and data mining waters. For these publishers, the solution has several key advantages. It enables end users to have access to aggregated article content from multiple rightsholders in a single service with normalized metadata, and that has never been done before. It offers a web-based, user-friendly interface, as well as a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API), so that researchers can easily identify and download, in full-text XML format, relevant articles for mining within their workflow.

It also reduces the necessity for time-consuming one-off licensing negotiations with publishers, along with the associated costs to administer, format and deliver custom content feeds to individual customers.  Moreover, our robust API enables integration with leading text and data mining software platforms.  Thus, publishers gain a new channel for their content along with valuable usage data, while users can reduce the number of operational steps involved with finding a needle in the haystack.

ALPSP: What are your plans for the future?

We create content workflow and licensing solutions that make copyright work for everyone. That means identifying and reducing pain points for publishers and their customers. RightFind XML for Mining reaffirms CCC’s role as an independent intermediary between content providers and users that can identify inefficiencies and create bridges between the two groups.  As publisher and market needs evolve, we will evolve our services, as well.

Jake Kelleher is Senior Director, Licensing and Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center. RightFind™ XML for Mining – Copyright Clearance Center’s text mining solution lets life sciences researchers move to a deeper level of discovery– beyond abstracts to direct access to full-text articles in XML format. XML for Mining saves time usually spent acquiring, licensing, and converting articles from individual publishers. Now, researchers can identify and download article collections from multiple publishers through a single, normalized source that is copyright-compliant.

The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.

High Value Content: Big Data Meets Mega Text

ALPSP recently updated the Text and Data Mining Member Briefing (member login required). As part of the update, Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center, provided an overview of the potential of TDM, outlined below.

"Big data may be making headlines, but numbers don’t always tell the whole story. Experts estimate that at least 80 percent of all data in any organization—not to mention in the World Wide Web at large— is what’s known as unstructured data. Examples include email, blogs, journals, Power Point presentations, and social media, all of which are primarily made up of text. It’s no surprise, then, that data mining, the computerized process of identifying relationships in huge sets of numbers to uncover new information, is rapidly morphing into text and data mining (TDM), which is creating novel uses for old- fashioned content and bringing new value to it. Why? Text-based resources like news feeds or scientific journals provide crucial information that can guide predictions about whether the stock market will rise or fall, can gauge consumers’ feelings about a particular product or company, or can uncover connections between various protein interactions that lead to the development of a new drug.

For example, a 2010 study at Indiana University in Bloomington found a correlation between the overall mood of the 500 million tweets released on a given day and the trending of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Specifically, measurements of the collective public mood derived from millions of tweets predicted the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to a week in advance with an accuracy approaching 90 percent, according to study author Johan Bollen, Ph.D., an associate professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. At the time, Dr. Bollen predicted, with uncanny accuracy, where he felt TDM was going, from the imprecise, quirky world of Facebook and Twitter to high-value content. He said, "We are hopeful to find equal or better improvements for more sophisticated market models that may in fact include other information derived from news sources and a variety of relevant economic indicators."

In other words, structured data alone is not enough, nor is text mined from the wilds of social media. Wall Street and marketers, eager to predict the right moment to hit buy or sell or to launch an ad campaign, have already moved from mining Facebook and Twitter to licensing high-value content, such as raw newsfeeds from Thomson Reuters and the Associated Press, as well as scientific journal articles reformatted in machine- readable XML. In fact, a 2014 study by Seth Grimes of Alta Plana concludes that the text mining market already exceeds 2 billion dollars per year, with a CAGR of at least 25%.

Far from being irrelevant in our digital age, high-value content is about to have its moment, and not just to improve the odds in the financial world or help marketers sell soap. It represents a new revenue stream for publishers and their thousands of scientific journals as well. For example, in 2003, immunologist Marc Weeber and his associates used text mining tools to search for scientific papers on thalidomide and then targeted those papers that contained concepts related to immunology. They ultimately discovered three possible new uses for the banned drug. “Type in thalidomide and you get between 2,000 and 3,000 hits. Type in disease and you get 40,000 hits,” writes Weeber in his report in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. “With automated text mining tools, we only had to read 100-200 abstracts and 20 or 30 full papers to create viable hypotheses that others could follow up on, saving countless steps and years of research.”

The potential of computer-generated, text-driven insight is only increasing. In his 2014 TedX Talk, Charles Stryker, CEO of the Venture Development Center, points out that the average oncologist, after scouring journals the usual way, reading them one by one, might be able to keep track of six or eight similar cancer cases at a time, recalling details that might help him or her go back, re-read one of two of those articles, and determine the best course of care for a patient with an intractable cancer. The data banks of the two major cancer institutes, on the other hand, hold searchable records of cancer cases that can be reviewed in conjunction with 3 billion DNA base pairs and 20,000 genes contained within each. So using that data would mean a vast improvement in the odds of finding clues to help treat a tricky case or target the best clinical trial for someone with a rare disease. This information might otherwise have been difficult, if not impossible, for even the most plugged-in oncologist to find, let alone read, see patterns, or retain the information for a period of time.

Think, then, of the possibilities of improving healthcare outcomes if the best biomedical research were aggregated in just a few, easily accessible repositories. That’s about to happen. My employer, Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), is coming to market with a new service designed to make it easier to mine high-value journal content. Scientific, technical and medical publishers are opting into the program, and CCC will aggregate and license content to users in XML for text mining. Although the service has not yet fully launched, CCC already has publishers representing thousands of journals and millions of articles participating.

Consider the difficulties of researchers, doctors, or pharmaceutical companies wishing to use text mining to see if cancer patients on a certain diabetes drug might have a better outcome than patients not on the drug. They must go to each publisher, negotiate a price for the rights, get a feed of the journals, and convert that feed into a single useable format. If the top 20 companies did this with the top 20 publishers, it would take 400 agreements, 400 feeds, and 400 XML conversions. The effort would be overwhelming.

Instead, envision a world where users can avail themselves of an aggregate of all relevant journals in their field of interest. Instead of 400 agreements and feeds to navigate and instead of 400 documents to convert to XML, there would be maybe 40 agreements: 20 between the publishers and CCC and 20 with users. There would be no need for customers to convert the text. In other words, researchers could get their hands on the high-value information they need to move research and healthcare forward, in less time, with less effort. And that’s only the beginning. As Stryker said about the promise of TDM, “We are in the first inning of a nine-inning game. It’s all coming together at this moment in time.”

ALPSP Members can login to the website to view the Briefing here.

Roy Kaufman is Managing Director of New Ventures at the Copyright Clearance Center. He is responsible for expanding service capabilities as CCC moves into new markets and services. Prior to CCC, Kaufman served as Legal Director, Wiley-Blackwell, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. He is a member of the Bar of the State of New York and a member of, among other things, the Copyright Committee of the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers and the UK's Gold Open Access Infrastructure Program. He formerly chaired the legal working group of CrossRef, which he helped to form, and also worked on the launch of ORCID. He has lectured extensively on the subjects of copyright, licensing, new media, artists' rights, and art law. Roy is Editor-in-Chief of ‘Art Law Handbook: From Antiquities to the Internet’ and author of two books on publishing contract law. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and Columbia Law School.

Managing Author Fees – Resolving the “Build vs. Buy” Dilemma

In a guest post, Jennifer Goodrich from CCC reflects on the "Build vs. Buy" dilemma when managing author fees for gold open access.

"In its 2014 article, “Digitizing the Consumer Decision Journey,” McKinsey & Company warns that “tools and standards are changing faster than companies can react,” and nowhere is this more true than in the field of Open Access. Open Access publishing requires new business models from publishers, new activities and expertise from authors when paying article processing charges (APCs), new relationships with institutions and funders, and enhanced systems to support all parties. It’s no surprise, then, that publishers are examining their author programs with a particular focus on creating an integrated workflow between the editorial process and the payment of APCs. As a result, many publishers are facing the choice: can they deliver what’s needed with their existing systems or should they instead be working with an outsourced partner?

The “build versus buy dilemma,” of which this is but one example, is a perennial topic of debate in the field of software development – perhaps why InfoWorld described it as “a question of Shakespearean proportions.” Conventional wisdom suggests that building your own solution may be the right decision in areas of key competitive advantage, or where there is no suitable commercial product to deliver your core business requirements. By contrast, buying is often a more cost-effective way to automate and standardize core business processes, and allows the organization to manage risk by transferring the burden of software development and maintenance onto a third party. But which of these scenarios applies in the case of the management of author fees? The answer will depend on the needs of each organization, but when faced with a rapidly changing environment like Open Access publishing, McKinsey suggests many organizations need to adopt a different approach to managing the consumer decision journey—one that embraces the speed that digitization brings and focuses on capabilities in three areas: Discover, Design and Deliver.

Here is how each of these can be applied to the challenge of managing author fees, and what the implications might be when considering a systems solution.

Discover

In the context of Open Access, the Discover phase means drawing upon information about the author (including reviewer or editorial status), the manuscript and publication, the author’s institution, the author’s funding sources, the author’s membership status and more to develop a full customer portrait. Publishers are under growing pressure to capture and share industry standard metadata such as ORCIDs, ISNIs, DOIs, FundRef IDs and Ringgold IDs. They must therefore invest in the interoperability of their existing systems that contain data about authors and their institutions, and also find ways to allow external systems to draw on this information.

Unfortunately, for most publishers, the information in question resides in disparate legacy systems that are not currently integrated and which rely on proprietary identifiers rather than external data standards. Further, with the growth of OA journals and now books, the volume of author transactions is escalating rapidly, and publishers are managing these transactions on systems that were designed for annual subscription fees, rather than for high-volume real-time transactions. As a result, in order to develop a robust author-centric solution, publishers typically have to dedicate significant resources to both unifying legacy systems and building a new transaction system that can evolve with the marketplace and be ready for numerous emerging standards. A fully unified set of internal systems might be the ultimate goal, but it is likely to come at a high price in terms of development costs and management time. For this reason, an outsourced solution can often make more sense in a resource-constrained environment or where there is a need to deliver a solution within a shorter timeframe.

Design

The design phase is about creating a frictionless experience that uses the data gathered in the discovery phase to ensure interactions are expressly tailored to an author’s stage in his or her publication journey. Publishers have rightly identified that maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction among authors is critical in an Open Access model. A recent report by Forrester Consulting for the Technology Business Management Council called “The Business Technology Scorecard” highlighted that companies now live in the “Age of the Customer.” For publishers, this global trend is already apparent in the move from annually billing institutions for subscriptions to daily collection of APCs from authors.

In this new paradigm, authors cannot be kept at arm’s length from billing and payment processes, which now form an integral part of the author experience. This requires publishers to dramatically shift how their organizations operate – from a business-to-business (B2B) model centered on selling subscriptions to a business-to-consumer (B2C) model centered on managing an exponentially greater number of micro transactions for APCs.

Furthermore, authors’ expectations of online payment solutions are very high. We all live in the digital world of online service providers such as Amazon, Google and Apple, which develop convenient, easy-to-use applications to which we have become accustomed. The pricing of an APC is often dependent on a far larger range of variables than an iTunes download or an Amazon eBook, but these services set the benchmark for a seamless user experience. Rightly or wrongly, manual, slow or partially automated payment solutions that seem clunky and antiquated negatively impact an author’s perception of a publisher. Instead, authors expect intuitive user interfaces (UIs) and robust workflows when they submit manuscripts and pay author charges. Any system used for this purpose is likely to need some sophisticated algorithms “under the hood” in order to meet these expectations.

Deliver

Finally, the Deliver phase requires the creation of a more agile organization with the right people, tools, and processes. McKinsey highlights the need for cross-functional teams with "strong collaborative and communication skills and a relentless commitment to iterative testing, learning, and scaling—at a pace that many companies may find challenging.” For publishers, this means developing closer links among editorial, production, finance and operations teams who may have had relatively little contact under a subscription model. To make it easy to support these cross-functional teams, a robust APC solution must offer simple management of complex pricing, discounting and compliance reporting. It should also be robust enough to test and implement promotional codes and discounts based on factors such as location of the author, institutional affiliation, subscription status of the institution, and membership status of the author, allowing publishers to iterate quickly in response to market demand. Flexibility is the key in this phase of activity, and any solution needs to accommodate this or risk undermining the organization’s capacity to evolve and develop.

Reaching a Decision

Having discussed some of the main characteristics of, and challenges to, efficient APC payment processes, we still have to resolve the build versus buy dilemma. In some cases this will come down to an evaluation of the likely return on investment from each of the two options, meaning needing to develop a good understanding of the potential costs and benefits in each case. This needs careful thought, both in testing the market for outsourced solutions and in being realistic about the costs of in-house development and ongoing maintenance, which are frequently under-estimated. Even for the very largest publishers, it‘s difficult to make the case to support the upfront investment needed in development of their own systems. It is often a cost-benefit decision, and the ability to share some of the risk with a third party can be a decisive factor.

Consistency and predictability will be crucial considerations in your decision – errors and unscheduled downtime in this area can quickly cost money, not to mention the risk of reputational damage. However, as Tom DeMarco, principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild has noted: “The more important goal is transformation – creating software that changes the world or that transforms a company or how it does business.” If your chosen author fee management solution can deliver this, you really will have resolved the build versus buy dilemma.

About the Author

Jennifer Goodrich is Director of Product Management at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). She is responsible for driving the development and evolution of CCC’s RightsLink® for Open Access platform. The platform, built on ten years of experience assisting publishers in collecting author charges, is CCC’s next-generation service designed to simplify the collection and management of article processing charges or APCs. She and the RightsLink team work closely with publishers, authors, manuscript management systems, standards organizations, as well as academic and funding institutions, to ensure the platform meets the needs of the Open Access community.

If you are going to the London Book Fair, CCC will be hosting a panel discussion, “You Made the Move to Open Access: What’s Next for Your Business?” on Tuesday, 14 April, 16:00 – 17:00 in The Faculty. CCC is located at Stand 7C16.

What societies need to know about Creative Commons (CC) Licensing - free webinar

Want to know what a CC license is and what all the different types mean?
Which CC license is best for your journal’s authors and the future of your journal(s)?

What societies need to know about Creative Commons (CC) licensing
Tuesday, September 30th, 8-9am PDT/11am-12pm EDT/4-5pm BST

With new mandates being announced by funders globally for Open Access archiving of their funded research, societies need to understand what the different CC article licensing options mean, both for their journals’ and their members’ needs.  This webinar will provide society executives with an overview of what they need to know about CC licences. Do you know your CC BY from your CC BY-NC-ND?  What are the pros and cons of different CC licenses for society journals? What options should you give your authors?

With speakers from Creative Commons, Copyright Clearance Centre and Wiley.

To register your place, visit http://goto.copyright.com/LP=981

This webinar is organised by Wiley in conjunction with the Copyright Clearance Center

ALPSP Awards spotlight on... RightsLink for Open Access, a solution for cost-effective Open Access fee management

RightsLink for Open Access

It's less than two weeks before the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are announced at the conference. In the latest in a series of blogs profiling the finalists, we asked Bill O’Brien, Business Development Director at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to tell us more about RightsLink for Open Access, a solution for cost-effective Open Access fee management for scholarly publishers.

ALPSP: Tell us a bit about your company.

BO: CCC was founded over 30 years ago at the suggestion of the United States Congress to provide an efficient market for the clearing of photocopy rights. Located near Boston, CCC now has more than 350 employees dedicated to serving the needs of over 12,000 publishers and providing innovative content and rights-licensing technology solutions for more than 35,000 customers around the globe.

In the mid-90s, when publishers were struggling with how to best protect copyrighted material in a new online world, they worked closely with CCC to create RightsLink. RightsLink made it easy for visitors to a publisher’s website to purchase permissions and other services. Years later, we collaborated with our publisher customers again to leverage RightsLink’s advanced ecommerce capabilities to manage article processing charges (APC) and other author fees for journal articles. This summer, we released a completely new and more powerful RightsLink for Open Access platform, with a range of new capabilities developed with input from customers and partners.

ALPSP: What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

BO: We were proud to submit our latest advance, RightsLink for Open Access, which offers advantages to both publishers and their authors. Its flexible and powerful features enable authors to quickly and easily submit APCs and other fees, while also supporting any pricing and discount model chosen by a publisher. Because it tightly integrates with virtually any manuscript editorial system, it ensures a seamless author experience. RightsLink for Open Access is a fine example of CCC’s culture of innovation.

ALPSP: Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

BO: There’s no doubt about it: Open Access (OA) is dramatically changing the business of scholarly publishing. Publishers, authors, universities, librarians, funders and customers everywhere feel its impact. By carefully listening to stakeholders in the editorial and publication workflow, CCC has developed a powerful OA platform that enables publishers to more easily collect and manage APCs and other publication-related fees. And because it’s been designed to be deployed by multiple publishers, yet customized for each publisher’s unique needs, it’s an effective way to serve the OA ecosystem. RightsLink for Open Access – a market-driven platform informed by user groups, roundtables, thought leadership panels, and discussions – maintains the proven advantages of the flexible RightsLink permissions solution while delivering distinctly new strengths.

As always with CCC, our team starts with our customer. Input and ideas from our customers guide everything we do. Based on customer input, our goal was to create a simple user interface on top of a powerful rules and pricing engine that would help publishers deliver a common ecommerce experience for authors and institutions; provide publisher-specific messaging and branding; leverage metadata standards to support rich downstream reporting; and, ultimately, create a streamlined and satisfying author experience.

ALPSP: Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

BO:  At every step, RightsLink for Open Access ensures that critical research gets published as quickly as possible. The platform enables publishers to maintain contact with their authors, implement their business rules, and reinforce their brand experience. In addition, RightsLink for Open Access provides publishers with the data they require to run their businesses more effectively and more efficiently.

RightsLink for Open Access also provides publishers the flexibility to integrate directly into the publishing workflow through standard APIs. The rich metadata collected from the various systems in the workflow allow our sophisticated rules and pricing engine to tailor each transaction to the specific author and type of publication. RightsLink for Open Access uses standard APIs for ingesting manuscript and author metadata and for sharing manuscript and payment status information as authors move through the workflow.  These APIs make it easy for RightsLink for Open Access to integrate with Aries Editorial Manager and other manuscript and production systems.

Through the system's e-commerce capability, the author can pay by credit card or choose to be invoiced in a variety of currencies. Publishers specify pricing and are able to offer waivers and discounts, allowing them to experiment with different promotional models. Sophisticated tax software seamlessly handles sales tax, VAT, and the like, according to the publisher's tax rules. A real time reporting tool within the platform collects all transaction activity and metadata. CCC handles all billing, collections and distribution of funds in a scalable fashion.

Using RightsLink for Open Access, publishers and their partners are able to store and associate manuscripts with new standards like ORCID, FundRef, Creative Commons License types, and Ringgold institutional IDs, which persist throughout the workflow.

Moreover, at CCC, we understand the importance of standing with the publisher throughout the life of our product. Our consultative relationship does not end at '‘go live.” A Business Development representative continues to work with the publisher team to enhance and evolve the solution, and a Strategic Account Manager ensures personalized support. Success is measured by publisher growth, operational efficiency, and removal of friction from the workflow process, each of which is supported by world-class customer service.

The new RightsLink for Open Access platform represents a huge step forward for publishers navigating Open Access waters. We’re excited to earn this nomination.

ALPSP: What are your plans for the future?

BO: Over time, CCC will deliver incremental layers of functionality to simplify author workflows, starting with metadata-driven institutional pricing rules, and then leading to more sophisticated self-service tools and usage data relative to OA spending. As publisher and market needs continue to evolve, we pledge to evolve our services in kind to meet market needs.
To help our customers stay on top of the dynamic OA market, we developed a free OA webinar series, which has so far drawn over 2,000 registrants. Our Open Access Resources Center, a joint effort with ALPSP, has attracted over 40,000 visitors in 2014, and provides links to a host of content addressing OA issues.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are sponsored by Publishing Technology.

The winners will be announced at the ALPSP International Conference Wednesday 10 - Friday 12 September, Park Inn Heathrow, London. Follow the conversation via #alpsp14 and #alpspawards on Twitter.