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 

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.

Roy Kaufman: Shifting Revenues from Post-Publication to Pre-Publication: The Impact of Open Access

Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), writes here in a guest post about the shift of revenue to pre-publication and what that means to publishers.

'Open Access (OA) is changing the way scholarly, scientific and academic journal publishers are managing their businesses fiscally. While revenue has traditionally been earned by publishers after publication through subscriptions, site licenses, pay-per-view, permissions, advertising and licensing channels, OA is slowly, but dramatically shifting the model so that revenue is earned pre-publication.

Under the OA model, publisher earnings come from author charges, including open access charges, page and color charges, author reprints, and other services. The sources of revenue are also changing. In the traditional customer-pays-the-distributor model, publishers were compensated by libraries, advertisers and aggregators. But now, publishers receive these revenues pre-publication from funders, institutions and authors. In this new paradigm, publishers must focus on usability and developing convenient services they can offer these new buyers to streamline fee management processes, retain high-value authors, serve new stakeholders, and maintain – or increase – revenues. Put simply, publishers are gaining new customers with a new set of needs to serve.

Authors as Customers

Traditionally, scholarly publishers have seen authors as sources of content and as researchers. However, in the gold road open access model, authors, backed by funding organizations, also represent a source of revenue. Under many OA models, authors will pay an Open Access charge to make an article freely available. They may also pay submission fees, page and color charges, article reprint fees, or some combination of these. Thus, publishers need to (re)focus on authors as customers.

To meet these new author needs, publishers must automate, providing authors with an intuitive, web-based workflow with clear explanations of publishing options and their downstream licensing and compliance implications. At a more granular level, publishers need the capability to provide customized pricing based on factors such as user type, funder, license type, author affiliation, author location and membership status. Publishers must be able to execute business rules that balance the needs of their authors, their institutional subscribers and funding agency mandates.

To help publishers deliver the best user experience, CCC’s RightsLink® is now integrated into the manuscript management workflow, providing a streamlined, web-based payment workflow – driven off of a sophisticated pricing engine – dedicated customer service, multi-currency payment options, conditional payment guarantees, and real-time reporting for all transactions. Whether publishers use RightsLink® or their own bespoke services, it is important to get the author, institution and funding experience right.

Funding Organizations as Customers

Publishers who are able to best collaborate with multiple funding organizations and process their unique requirements are going to gain the greatest traction in the Open Access market. These organizations fund the publication of OA articles, either directly through publishers or indirectly through block grants to institutions. Not surprisingly, funders want to be able to track the content that they finance. This means they want verification that Open Access charges have been paid, as well as confirmation that publishers are complying with their policies and licensing requirements.

Universities and Other Institutions as Customers

As Open Access publishing increases in volume and becomes a more prominent part of the research community, universities will need to educate their staff and refine their policies and procedures. At the same time, publishers will need to offer a streamlined OA charge submission process that addresses the needs of universities and of their funders. Universities as “readers” have traditionally been, and continue today to be, a significant revenue source for publishers through subscriptions to journals. Now, however, as the number of OA journals (including hybrid journals) increases, universities also serve as managers of OA funding, typically from the block grants of funding agencies, and sometimes from their own reserves. Funders provide institutions with significant research grants from which they expect universities to pay Open Access charges. By failing to comply with funders’ publishing and licensing policies, a university may be putting future research grants at risk. For that reason, universities must be able to provide funders with itemized accounts of how they have spent their funding, making publishers’ reporting capabilities very important. Academic institutions also have their own requirements for recording and reporting on individual items of expenditure, adding to the demand on publishers to offer robust reporting to multiple constituents.

The Changing Role of Content Users

Reuse of an article that is readily available on a publisher’s website is not always free, as is recounted in "Open Access Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Free,” a recent article from CCC. Thus, content users can represent yet another source of revenue, even when a journal is publishing content openly. Depending on the model under which a journal or an article is published, a content user may be expected to pay for reuse, particularly when the content is reused in a commercial context. (One Creative Commons License, CC-BY-NC, requires a specific license for commercial reuse. This license is used by many publishers, especially in so-called “hybrid” journals). Since navigating the nuanced licenses, exceptions and rules can be challenging for content users, publishers will have to make the process of purchasing content and/or rights both easy and accessible. The task will certainly include promoting the rights available, educating users about the differences in policy and pricing, and developing systems to automate transactions and new data/metadata standards.

What's Next?

While traditional measures of a journal’s impact, such as rejection rates and ISI Impact Factors, remain important for some journals, for others simplicity of transactions and ease of compliance with funder mandates are even more critical. Further market segmentation based on OA polices is inevitable. A journal's success will hinge on making smart segmentation decisions, meeting the needs of new constituencies, and keeping the user experience as simple as possible. The model will mature and be maximized only after a period of disruption and experimentation. Hold on for a wild ride.'

Roy Kaufman, March 2014

CCC offers ALPSP members a special discount off the RightsLink suite of licensing tools. Review information about their open access solution on their website.

Going to the London Book Fair? See Roy Kaufman speak on “Consideration for Publishers Develop Open Access Business Models” on 9 April 2014, 16:00-17:00. The Faculty, EC1.

You can find a wealth of resources, white papers, news and policy information on the Open Access Resource Center hosted by CCC in partnership with ALPSP.

Roy Kaufman: Open Access Doesn't Necessarily Mean Free

Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), writes here in a guest post about the real cost of open access.

"There is a popular opinion in the publishing market - that open access means free. However, the truth is far more complex and dependent on the licensing options a publishers offers. We recently produced a white paper to explain where exactly the costs of open access occur and their impact on scholarly and scientific publishing.

Publishers incur costs
Regardless of the open access model, there are still costs of publication. These include recruiting authors, maintaining the peer review system, print and/or digital production, sales, marketing, tagging and linking articles, as well as archiving and making the "version of record" available.

Some users may still need to pay to reuse content
Publishers use a variety of licenses for open access content. Often, they choose those designed by Creative Commons, which provides a range of nuanced licenses. For example, a CC BY-NC license allows derivative works to be made for non-commercial use without an additional license or fee. However, a permissions fee is required to use an article designated as CC BY-NC for commercial purposes. Ultimately, the terms of commercial reuse may be set by the publisher, the author, the author's institution or the funding agency.

Creative Commons licenses and the impact of funding agencies
Many publishers are currently using – or considering – a range of standard licenses provided by Creative Commons. There are several factors to consider when choosing the license type, including the author's goals, the policy of the publishing society or company, the academic institution and the funding organization. This can influence the terms of the license under which an article is published.

In any case, publishers need to recoup the costs of publication to maintain a going concern. In a traditional publishing paradigm, revenue often originates from subscriptions, single article sales, secondary licensing and more. For many Open Access articles, publishers offset costs by securing article processing charges from funding organizations, authors, and / or academic institutions.

What does this mean for publishers?
Clearly, open access presents new opportunities for publishers to serve their customers and authors, and creates an outlet for the publication of ever-increasing submissions. However, it also generates administrative and business burdens that challenge publishers' typical subscription-based business models. There are opportunities to generate revenue with open access such as license fees for commercial use when an article is covered by a CC BY-NC license, and opportunities to provide other services to authors as well.

When exploring licensing options, publishers should consider the following questions:

• Who typically requests reuse permissions and for what purpose?
• Under which open access model was the article published?
• Are there special funder requirements for the author?
• What are the various revenue components of a journal? How will each model of open access affect them?
• What is the competitive landscape for the journal as compared with open access options offered by competing journals?

Open access policies present challenges and opportunities for publishers to better serve authors as well as consumers of open access content. A strong licensing framework, communicated clearly to authors and the community, is essential to ensure both quality and sustainability.

These thoughts are drawn from a white paper CCC developed earlier this year to help our publisher clients when considering open access. The full version can be downloaded here."

CCC offers ALPSP members a special discount off the RightsLink suite of licensing tools. Review information about their open access solution on their website at www.copyright.com/alpsp.

Roy Kaufman is Managing Director, New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) where, since 2012, he has been responsible for expanding capabilities as the business develops new services for authors, publishers and other rights holders. Prior to CCC, Kaufman served as lead counsel for the Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., working in all areas of licensing, contracts, strategic alliances and online publishing.

Roy Kaufman on Five Considerations for Publishers Developing Open Access Business Models

Roy Kaufman is Managing Director, New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) where, since 2012, he has been responsible for expanding capabilities as the business develops new services for authors, publishers and other rights holders. Prior to CCC, Kaufman served as lead counsel for the Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., working in all areas of licensing, contracts, strategic alliances and online publishing.

Here, Roy highlights considerations publishers should take into account when developing open access models.

“CCC has been providing services around open access since 2006. Through our on-going work with publishers, authors, agents and institutions around OA, we know several things. Publishers are testing different business models to determine what will work best for their organizations. This means taking into account the needs of various stakeholders, effectively collecting fees from authors and funders, managing a whole range of licensing rules at article level, and measuring and testing. 

Five considerations for publishers to take into account when developing an open access business model include:

1. Open access doesn’t necessarily mean free
There are costs involved in publication, and these can be offset in a variety of ways including through collecting of article processing charges, licensing fees for commercial use and others.

2. There are diversified sources of revenue
Open access challenges publishers’ traditional subscription-based business models.

3. There is a new focus on both pre-publication and post-publication transactions
Streamlined transactions are required for authors at pre-publication, and clear communication of licensing options are required post-publication to ensure compliance with funder guidelines.

4. Increased role for intermediaries
The increased complexity of licensing and access requires better technology and scope for trusted, specialist industry partners to deliver an improved customer experience.

5. Measurement, measurement, measurement
As with all new or emerging business models, publishers need to measure and track the impact of pricing to help develop and improve usage and support clear reporting to authors and funding agents.

These five considerations are drawn from a white paper CCC developed earlier this year to help our publisher clients when considering open access. The full version can be downloaded here."

CCC offers ALPSP members 10% off the RightsLink suite of licensing tools. Review information about their open access solution on their website at www.copyright.com/openaccess.