2018 ALPSP Conference Report - From Adventures in Publishing to #MeToo

In this blog, Alastair Horne, Press Futurist and social media correspondent at this year's ALPSP Conference reports on a packed few days in Windsor hearing from the scholarly publishing community.

This year’s conference once again offered a range of perspectives from across the scholarly publishing ecosystem on the key issues that affect us.

Keynote - Professor Chris Jackson

Thursday’s opening keynote was given by Professor Chris Jackson, who shared his own experiences as a researcher who has engaged deeply with the industry, publishing more than 150 articles, acting as editor for three journals, and co-founding the EarthArXiv preprint server. In a wide-ranging talk, Jackson offered some advice for publishers drawn from his experience: to be transparent about APC pricing; to offer strongly reduced APCs to early career researchers in order to build an affinity with new authors; and to be clear about their views on metrics. On open access, though generally enthusiastic, he suggested that Plan S had caused concerns among academics and might create challenges for societies who relied on income from subscription or hybrid journals to fund their other activities.

Open access was, inevitably, a theme that persisted throughout the conference. The panel that followed Jackson’s talk asked how societies and publishers should ‘accelerate the transition’. Kamram Naim shared details of the ‘subscribe to open’ model used by non-profit publisher Annual Reviews, which addressed the twin problems of library policies on ‘donations’ often preventing the support of open access initiatives, and the fact that APCs don’t work for journals that publish invited contributions from scholars, rather than receiving submissions. Their ‘Subscribe to Open’ model, which bears some similarities to Knowledge Unlatched’s, sees libraries receive a discount on their journal subscriptions if they choose to participate in unlocking initiatives: if enough do so, then that volume’s issues of the journal become available through open access; if not, then only subscribing institutions have access. Naim’s fellow panellist Steven Hill, Director of Research at Research England, and architect of the new REF, insisted that the new requirement for open access monographs would not mandate any particular model. His position was strongly challenged, though, by the panel’s third speaker, Goldsmiths Press’ Sarah Kember, who asked why the transition to open access for monographs was happening at all, and called for a deceleration to allow time for more consideration of differences across the sector. Plan S, she suggested, totally disregarded the humanities and monographs, and posed a considerable threat to academic freedom by restricting where researchers could publish.

Panel debate on Open Access

The following day, a further session considered the impact of open access on library sales, strategies, and solutions, as library directors from Europe and the US shared some insights into their institutions’ recent cancellations of big deals. Wilhelm Widmark, Library Director of Stockholm University, suggested that the Swedish universities’ decision to reject what he described as a ‘good’ proposed deal with Elsevier was because it didn’t offer a sustainable route to full open access; the money saved is being redirected towards fully open access journals. Jean François Lutz, Head of the Digital Library at the University of Lorraine, and Adrian Alexander, Dean of the Library at the University of Tulsa, added that their own institutions’ decision to cancel some of their big deal contracts were prompted by budget constraints and unsustainable pricing increases.

Friday’s opening session considered another increasingly hot topic: customer data. Chris Leonard from Emerald shared insights from their work in mapping user journeys in accessing their content, and one key finding – that though a high proportion of people who visit their site discover it through Google, the majority of those people don’t have institutional access and so leave; people who come to the site via library discovery services are far more likely to continue their journey further. Lettie Conrad of Maverick Consulting spoke of the wealth of data available to publishers, both internal – customer service records, sales reports, customer data, market research findings, product testing and user studies – and external – competitor analysis, discovery journeys, and usage analytics. Transforming such data into usable information required strategic thinking and some investment, she suggested, but it wasn’t rocket science. The third panel member, David Hutcheson, told how BMJ had developed a strategy for using data to inform their decisions, drive user engagement and deepen user understanding. Working with consultants and stakeholders to create an overall plan, they started by deepening their understanding of their existing technology and resources and testing them to see what worked. Integrating their different platforms to connect their data, and developing partnerships with suppliers, the BMJ set up a small six-person data team to serve as a specialist centre of excellence, supporting the rest of the business, automating processes and delivering self-service reporting to enable and empower colleagues to make use of the data produced.

The parallel sessions offered the usual dilemma of which to attend, and though there’s too little space to describe them all here, a personal highlight was a fascinating panel on the digital humanities. Peter Berkery of the Association of University Presses, Paul Spence of King’s College London, and Etienne Posthumus of Brill all discussed recent experiments in finding modes of publishing that would support the complex needs of this growing sector. Spence spoke of the need to fix a common terminology for the different types of publications produced, while Berkery talked through four marquee digital projects by university presses: Rotunda at Virginia, Manifold at Minnesota, Fulcrum at Michigan, and .supDigital at Stanford; Posthumus spoke on Brill’s own initiatives in labs and data.

Revenues from rights formed the focus of the day’s final session, sponsored by Publishers’ Licensing Services: Rebecca Cook of Wiley emphasised the need for thorough documentation governing what can be done with content, while Clare Hodder urged publishers to invest in metadata.

Code Ocean wins the ALPSP Awards for Innovation 2018

Then, at the evening’s gala dinner, the winners of two prestigious ALPSP Awards were announced: Richard Fisher was honoured for his Contribution to Scholarly Publishing over a long career, both at Cambridge University Press and in his retirement, busier than many people’s main careers; then the cloud-based computational reproducibility platform Code Ocean was named the winner of the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing.

The final day of the conference was dominated by ethical questions. Professor Graham Crow of the University of Edinburgh explored issues in research and publishing ethics, before the closing panel session addressed ‘The #MeToo Era in Academic Publishing: Tackling harassment and the roots of gender bias’. Femi Otitoju of the Challenge Consultancy shared some lessons drawn from thirty years of experience working in this area, emphasising the need to create the right working culture by focusing on positive outcomes rather than problems – having a ‘dignity at work’ policy rather than one on harassment, for instance – and prominently highlighting such policies through posters rather than pages buried on the company intranet. Karen Phillips of SAGE spoke of the need for publishers to learn from each other, while Eric Merkel-Sobotta of De Gruyter emphasised the importance of economic arguments in convincing management of the need to address such problems. Dr Afroditi Pina shared the results of her research into sexual harassment and successful strategies for addressing it: the need to agree appropriate sanctions for unacceptable behaviour, the role that public apologies can play in such sanctions, and the importance of listening un-defensively to those reporting harassment.

The Beaumont Estate

If you would like to hear more about this year's ALPSP Conference, you can find video footage, audio and speaker presentations at:

 

https://www.alpsp.org/2018-Programme

The ALPSP Conference and Awards 2019 will be held at Beaumont Estate, Old Windsor, UK on 11-13 September. Please save the date!

Spotlight on Delta Think - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

In the second of our series of interviews with our ALPSP awards finalists we talk to Ann Michael, President of Delta Think.

·         Tell us a bit about your company

Delta Think is a business and technology consulting firm focused on innovation and growth in scholarly publishers and membership organizations. Founded at the height of the transition from print to digital, our core purpose is helping organizations to manage change. We live at the intersection of content, technology and user experience, and help our clients through the many changes impacting scholarly publishers and membership organizations.

·         What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

The Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool  (OA DAT) is a living compilation of industry data, anonymized private data and analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the OA market.

The idea originated with questions arising during consulting engagements. We found commonality in questions clients asked about OA, with no clear consolidated, reliable data source to address them. We saw an opportunity to serve the industry more effectively by curating such a data set, and supplementing it with analysis, commentary, and visualizations.

·         Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

The OA DAT includes several levels of analysis and data access to accommodate any organization’s available bandwidth, comfort level with data analytics, and budget. We’ve worked hard to build a consistent view of the market and to make existing silos of data interoperate to deliver new insights, supplementing them with publisher confidential data (de-identified and aggregated).

The tool includes interactive visualizations so users can extract meaning for real-world decision-making, while providing a quick way to tailor the tool to areas of interest with a few mouse clicks. There is a sample interactive visualization and a brief video on our website , and a few static images below.

Additionally, we curate and aggregate OA industry news and combine it with a short analysis to publish Delta Think’s OA News & Views, which is available free of charge with registration.

We launched the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool in beta to pre-launch subscribers in December of 2016, with our full launch in January of 2017. The tool is continually updated. To keep the product current and the user base growing, we work with two core data analysts (one with deep database experience), a research associate, product manager, project manager, marketer, and a business development resource

© 2017 Delta Think, Inc. All rights reserved. May not be reused without permission

·         Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

We had two key motivations in developing the tool: generally increasing industry data proficiency, and specifically supporting organizations as they make data driven strategic and ongoing decisions around Open Access. While several organizations have the bandwidth and budget to develop data analytics expertise, most find using data in decision making aspirational and, at best, episodic. It is not a part of their normal workflow.

On one level, our innovation is pulling disparate information together and continually updating it to provide benchmarks and genuinely novel insights into the Open Access market.

But the innovation goes much deeper: In a single product, we have created the means for any organization to use data in OA decision making on an ongoing basis.

·       Organizations not equipped to interact with the underlying data can read the analysis and benefit from its regular updates. They don’t have to wait a year or two for an analyst report to be refreshed.

·       Organizations looking to interact with the data can manipulate visualizations, narrowing in on elements important to them (e.g., geographic region, subspecialty, year, etc.).

·       Organizations equipped to gather, normalize, and analyze data and knowing the questions they want answered can export OA DAT data, combine it with proprietary data, and complete their own analyses. They can also use OA DAT to save time and effort in data collection, allowing them to focus more on their proprietary analysis.

·        For any of the above, our consulting resources support targeted research or produce custom reports.

The tool is valuable and accessible to the expert or the novice.

·         What are your plans for the future?

We currently focus on STM + Social Science, OA, Journals, as well as not-for-profit and commercial publishers. We plan to extend product coverage to books, open data, and even overall scholarly output (overlaying analytics on top of the usual indexes). We also plan to extend to institutional markets (both librarians and research departments) and other industry players interested in Open Access. Additionally, we are in confidential discussions with many potential data and tech partners.

Our bigger picture goal is to create extensions to the Delta Think Open Access Data Analytics Tool and develop other products or services supporting scholarly publishers, membership organizations, and the multitude of players in the scholarly communications ecosystem to build data and business analytics into their culture and their workflows.

Ann Michael is President of Delta Think, a business and technology consulting and advisory firm focused on innovation and growth in membership organizations and scholarly publishers. Ann is a Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), an NFAIS board member, a Board Director at Joule (a Canadian Medical Association company), a frequent organizer and speaker at industry conferences, and is a contributor to the SSP’s blog, The Scholarly Kitchen. 

Website: https://deltathink.com

Twitter: @deltathink @annmichael
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annmichael
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/delta-think
Facebook:  facebook.com/deltathink

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

Navigating the safe passage through the minefield of predatory publishing

Philip J Purnell and Mohamad Mostafa, Knowledge E

Like many of the world’s scholars, young researchers at Al-Nahrain University in Iraq have been told they need to publish research articles in academic journals in order to progress in their careers. Aware of the low acceptance rates and lengthy publication delays in traditional journals, many turn to relatively recently launched open access journals that market their quick turn-around and low publishing charges. Dr. Haider Sabah Kadhim, head of Microbiology at the university says these young researchers are being duped into paying 100 – 200 USD on the promise of fast-track publication within one week. He has seen countless academics proudly show their published papers only to be told they won’t count because the journal isn’t on an approved list. Dr. Haider expressed his worry about the long term harm this publishing practice could cause to their careers.

The same pressure is felt by the research community across the region, Egyptian Assistant Prof. Hossam El Sayed Donya teaches medical physics at faculty of science King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. He sees similar challenges and says that some publishers boast of being indexed the top databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and MEDLINE, having Journal Impact Factors and that they assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to all published articles. Often these promises turn into disappointment when the researcher realises their article cannot be found in the databases, the journal doesn’t really have an impact factor or that the DOI is not deposited in the Crossref database. Prof. Hossam said there is a need for information and guidance in both English and Arabic for early career researchers that teach them the signs to look for in a good journal/publisher and those to avoid.

The dilemma

Modern scholars are coming under increasing pressure to demonstrate their academic productivity, by which their output is determined by the number of research papers they have published and their impact is determined by counting the citations to each researcher’s articles. Indeed, universities and promotion committees often set targets and thresholds for academic progression based on publications and citations. Universities do this because they also operate in an increasingly competitive space and are themselves responding to pressure for a good performance in the international university rankings such as Shanghai, Times Higher Education, QS and others that count publications and citations to the articles published by the entire university faculty.

One enviable mark of a high-quality journal is being indexed in a renowned database such as the Web of Science, Scopus or MEDLINE. An even more elite group of around 10,000 high impact journals are given Journal Impact Factors which are listed each year in the Journal Citation Reports – the JIF is calculated as the ratio of the journal’s citation impact to the volume of research papers it publishes. Millions of researchers are incentivised to publish in ‘Impact Factor journals’ and ambitious scholars are easily enticed into sending their manuscripts to journals that prominently display their Impact Factor. The problem here is that many questionable journals state that they are indexed in such databases when they’re not. Or they announce their ‘Impact Factor’ even when it has not been provided by Clarivate Analytics (formerly ISI and Thomson Reuters), the owner of the Journal Citation Reports and provider of the Journal Impact Factor. Most young academics don’t realise that many of these questions can easily be checked online:

Is the journal indexed in Web of Science?

Is the journal indexed in Scopus?

Is the journal indexed in Medline?

Likewise, once an article has been published in a journal, it is easy to check that the publisher has deposited the digital object identifiers (DOIs) in the Crossref database. Once the DOI has been correctly deposited, then it officially exists and people all over the world can find the article through search engines like Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, and even more importantly they can accurately cite it pointing fellow academics to the DOI link. Again, a quick check for DOIs is freely available here:

Is this DOI deposited in the Crossref database?

Open Access

The frustration of the academic community by rising subscription prices and a feeling of having to pay twice when research has been funded by public money and then published behind a subscription wall led to the open access movement by which the reader pays no charge to access the results. However, once an article is accepted, the author is usually asked to pay an article processing (or publishing) charge (APC) which often costs hundreds, and can easily run into thousands of dollars, a fee which in many developing countries is covered by the researchers themselves. Under pressure to publish and with little guidance on journal choice, some academics are falling prey to unscrupulous publishers who charge APCs but do not provide a professional publishing service, these have been termed ‘predatory publishers’.

Predatory publishing

Such publishers may exaggerate or misrepresent their services by claiming to be based in a traditional publishing hub while hiding their real location, claiming to provide rigorous peer review but publishing far too quickly for that to be possible or presenting editorial boards of academics who do not know or agree to be listed. Defining a publisher or publication as ‘predatory’ however, is no simple matter and sometimes there is a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, e.g. at what point do repeated calls for papers become ‘spam’? Some publishers have found their journals on a predatory publishers blacklist while at the same time being indexed in one of the prestigious databases assumed to be whitelists. One university librarian, Jeffrey Beall maintained a list of ‘probable, possible and potential predatory publishers’ since 2008 (no longer available) and which most recently listed more than 12,000 titles and publishers each included for questionable publication practice based on a list of over 50 criteria.

There is no universally agreed definition of a predatory journal or publisher, indeed nor is there a standard for a ‘high quality journal’. Most people who provide advice on identifying predatory journals start by warning people to watch out for spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors on a journal’s website or submission instructions. But equating imperfect English with questionable publication ethics in regions where millions of non-native English speakers are engaged in education and research is itself, an assumption that should be taken in context. Native-level English should not be a pre-requisite for publishing quality research in quality journals, there must be other ways to ensure safe submission of manuscripts and evaluation of journals and publishers.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and now boasts more than 10,000 members. It has produced a code of conduct and a range of guidelines for authors, editors and peer reviewers. Most serious publishers now adhere to the COPE Code of Conduct and guidelines and this is one of the first things authors should check for.

Think, Check, Submit

Researchers need to be routinely trained on how to conduct a rudimentary evaluation of a journal. They need to be trained on what to look for and what are the tell-tale signs that should set alarm bells ringing. So, what can the busy researcher do to distinguish good journals from bad?

Several international publishing associations have pooled their resources and launched the Think. Check. Submit. campaign – this was launched during the 2015 meeting of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, ALPSP. It leads the researcher through the three main steps and includes a check list for researchers to look through before they submit their manuscript to any journal. In the Arab region, we believe that following the Think. Check. Submit. campaign will help the regional research community avoid these pitfalls and publish safely, to view the initiative click here:

Think. Check. Submit: http://thinkchecksubmit.org/

Think. Check. Submit (Arabic): http://knowledgee.com/thinkchecksubmit-ar/

This post was first published on the KnE Blog on 28 February 2017.

'Just do it': highlights from the ALPSP Open Access seminar

Martyn Lawrence attended last month's ALPSP seminar How to build a Successful Open Access Books Programme which was chaired by Frances Pinter.

He offers his thoughts on the day.

This one day seminar on Open Access monographs brought together a mixed – and refreshingly perky – group of publishers, librarians, funders and authors.

On the heels of the R2R conference, held on the preceding days, chair Frances Pinter set the scene in a room full of industry heavyweights, traditional presses, societies and start-ups. She had briefed the wide range of speakers to talk about challenges overcome and how their offer could be scaled up, not just to showcase their companies.

Here, rather than a blow-by-blow account of each presentation, I’m offering the top ten takeaways from a thoroughly enjoyable day.

1. Monographs are important

The tone was set from the outset. There’s an intangible thing with books: even though you can read on a device, there’s something about a printed book that provokes different emotions from a printed journal. Yes, chapters in edited collections are akin to journal articles (scholarly ‘stuff’ to use the language preferred by Toby Green and Tom Clark) but monographs, by and large, arouse different responses. That’s partly because of their dominance in the humanities and social sciences: because HSS research is so often about the idea, rather than the data, the venue for that idea is venerated – as is the means of expressing it. As the Crossick Report stated: ‘The writing of the long-form publication IS the research process’.

2. Books are under pressure

The problems are hardly new: low sales, declining library budgets, tough distribution, pressure to make publicly-funded work freely available and a changing environment in a platform-led world.

For some disciplines, it’s a relevancy issue in the fake-news, barriers-first world of Trump and Brexit. If STM creates new drugs and builds planes, HSS needs to explain what it offers. Indeed, as Rupert Gatty so eloquently said in favour of Open Book Publishers, it’s time to re-evaluate the entire publishing model. If access to your title results to a 300:1 success in favour of the open version (based on data from his presentation), it takes a lot of effort to justify prioritising the single digit. We should be able to communicate in more ways, not fewer.

3. HEFCE monograph policy

Funder attention and OA policies have hitherto focused on journals publishing, because of the desire to kick-start innovation and drive new business models. It’s also been driven by academic priorities in the big-money STM areas.

Ben Johnson (HEFCE) explained why HEFCE is interested in OA for all published outputs:

• it leads to greater efficiency when university finances are stretched
• it improves quality of research
• it leads to impact and reach outside big institutions

A diverse system means that people can choose how they communicate. In STM, 98% of REF returns were journal articles. In HSS, by contrast, the monograph dominated.

The REF after next will require OA monographs, and pilots are being put into place for that. In ten years, there will be a significant percentage of OA books. The equivalent REF value isn’t yet given to e-monographs but that will change.

4. We’re going to play nice

The journey to OA for journals was heated and not always constructive. HEFCE hopes to avoid a repeat for monographs (which, given the expected length of the journey, is a blessing), and it’s worth emphasising that the atmosphere in the room was considerably different from the ALPSP OA event in June 2016 which focused predominantly on journals. There was precious little mention here of ‘drive your APCs’ or ‘milk the P&L’. HEFCE set the tone and subsequent speakers reinforced it: all parties should respect that the pace of change will be up for debate.

5. University presses may be the future melting pot for OA

Perhaps the most interesting news was that initiative for change is less likely to come from the legacy publishers, nor yet the start-ups, but from the growing cohort of university presses. Often housed within university libraries (and therefore with a strong mandate to champion OA), they are often far less reactive than the legacy publishers. Two careful presentations from CUP and Taylor & Francis bore this out: progress is cautious in the global publishing houses, partly because agitation from the author community is not high, and partly because of varying geographical and disciplinary opinions about open research.

In the UPs, by contrast, commissioning can be driven by ‘what’s the story?’ not ‘where’s the money?’. The rationale for editorial excellence is as strong as ever, but removing the pressure of profit margins means OA books can be more eclectic, more interesting, more exciting than ever before. ‘The value to the university is in profile and reputation, not in income’, said Sue White of University of Huddersfield Press. No one is going half-measures on this, either. As Lara Speicher (UCL Press) noted, authors are watching closely and they’ll quiz publishers over their sales and marketing plans for a title. Having said all of that, the (small) list of OA books published by CUP was notable for its breadth and quality: there’s no indication that OA diminishes the value proposition for readers.

6. Systems really stink

Publishers don’t build systems to give away books for free. OK, so there’s a wisecrack hiding there, but try as you might, it’s really difficult to convince a legacy e-commerce system to offer an article or an entire book with a zero price tag. They simply weren’t built with OA in mind, and rescaffolding sites is one of these things that everyone assumes is easy until they try it. Time and again, this issue emerged as a remarkable stumbling block.

7. Discoverability ain’t great either

Three kinds of metadata are needed to make an OA monograph fully discoverable, and they are non-negotiable, functional essentials:

• content (eg keywords and BIC codes)
• digital (eg DOIs, ORCiDs, ISBNs)
• OA-specific (eg specific CC license for both articles and images, embargo period, funders, location of Version of Record)

Without this, scalability of OA programmes will prove tricky. It doesn’t help if third-party vendors don’t make it clear that a print book is digitally OA, or if elements of the metadata drop out on the book’s journey through the post-publication environment. (I was reminded at this point of a recent Scholarly Kitchen piece by Jill O’Neill, in which she described the convoluted process of tracking down what she called ‘an OA monograph in the wild’.)

Simon Bains, Head of Research Services at the University of Manchester reinforced this point. Unless metadata is strong, Manchester doesn’t give OA books the same priority. In Bains’ view, JSTOR discoverability is good; OAPEN and DOAB are poor; Hathi Trust and Internet Archive are non-existent. They also prioritise reading list books.

As Euan Adie said, ‘metadata is a love-letter to the future’. Without it, OA founders.

8. OA encourages audience-first publishing

Some of the most fascinating presentations came from researchers. Vanesa Castán Broto, Senior Lecturer at UCL, made the forceful point that if academics are not inspired to produce something, they will drag their heels. Broto was adamant that she didn’t want to produce something held only by an elite group in the English-speaking global north. Her OA research on Mozambique, published by UCL Press in English and Portuguese, has seen downloads in 152 countries: ‘it’s a massive incentive for me to publish open and in a language other than English’, she said. This motivation, she said, trumped any accusations about OA vanity publishing.

Broto’s conviction raised an important issue. The bigger publishers are ploughing time and money into an OA monograph programme as a business need: they’re packaging it as part of a wider author services offer. By contrast, the authors are taking risks because they are in the business of communicating their research discoveries to the widest possible audience. In one sense, these factors are symbiotic: authors need publications to be widely available, and publishers are in the business of making that happen. But it’s intriguing to see how these two different rationales will converge, given the issues of scalability and sustainability. For the most part, publishing ‘closed’ in the right journals is still more important than publishing ‘open’ in smaller journals.

9. OA enables innovation

Book launches kill budgets, but authors love them. So in a platform-driven world, what’s the alternative? Online parties, says Xinyuang Wang at UCL, who reported on a campaign supporting her OA book with a MOOC and YouTube videos translated into multiple languages. The greatest impact of this was the means of attracting new and wider audiences to the work. It’s an audience-first model that legacy publishers will struggle to match.

The larger point seemed to be that OA publishers, particularly those without legacy models to protect, are potential incubators of innovation. Without a cumbersome legacy model to restrict format or dictate price, they can engage more fully with the long tail of high quality titles. Diversity, said Andrew Lockett of University of Westminster Press, has much greater value once you’re not obsessed with the US library market.

10. Print isn’t going away

Despite everything, physical books still make a difference. Ultimately, that’s why the transition to OA monographs has taken so much longer than journals. Lots of university presses are offering books as short-run PODs (often 100 copies) to ensure they cover demand, and OA isn’t replacing print. This was the funding message too: academic choice is a big part of the HEFCE approach. Data from Brill and UCL suggests that print sales are not decimated by OA (it’s the effect on ebooks that is more notable).

And this is what’s so interesting – the mix keeps us going. When it comes to OA monographs, what do we want? Everything.

Martyn Lawrence is Publishing Manager at the Royal Armouries Museum, with oversight of the books programme at the museum's three sites (Leeds, the Tower of London and Fort Nelson). He is a frequent contributor to international publishing workshops and training events, including seminars for ALPSP and London Book Fair, and he has chaired numerous conference sessions around the world.
@martynlawrence

ALPSP organises a full professional development programme of seminars, training workshops and webinars. See www.alpsp.org for details.

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.