Laura Ceballos from CEDRO reflects on the future of scholarly communications and a little thing called Brexit...

At the recent ALPSP Conference we caught up with Laura Ceballos, from the Spanish RRO CEDRO, who chaired the Digital Business Models session. We asked her about the latest developments in scholalry communications and her reaction to that little matter of the Brexit vote. Here's what she said...

What is the most exciting opportunity for scholarly communications in the next two to three years?

In the last five years, we’ve seen a burst of digital innovation across the scholarly sector with hundreds of digital initiatives aiming to transform and enrich the publishing sector. It’s extremely positive to see that many young entrepreneurs believe that there’s a promising future for scholarly publishing related businesses in the digital age. A closer relationship with future entrepreneurs of the 21st century will allow long-established publishers to gain access to new and innovative products and services and provide them with a fuller knowledge of the advantages of business models in the digital economy

And what is the biggest challenge?

There is no doubt that open content is the biggest challenge for the scholarly sector. We are entering a change of era that is radically transforming the publishing sector. We are currently in the midst of a major transformation of cultural habits that is dramatically altering people’s behaviour in acquiring and consuming all kinds of academic and professional content.

Book industry professionals will have to accept that the main channels of growth will not involve mainly the sale of print books, but rather the sale of new kinds of digital content (audiobooks, transmedia books, fragmented eBooks, etc.) via yet unimagined new business models. Like it or not, the way culture is being created, accessed, and consumed is itself going through a historical transformation. In the next few years, consumers will have never-before-seen access to staggering amounts of user-generated information and knowledge which will require a reorganization of the scholarly sector.

What were your thoughts when the results of the UK referendum on the EU were announced?

It is in the interest of all parties (UK and EU) that the UK exit of the EU is managed in a gradual and orderly way to avoid a bigger disruption between both of them. Both sides have to come to terms and understand that they are destined to get along.

Laura Ceballos is Business Development Manager for CEDRO. She chaired the Digital Business Models panel discussion at the ALPSP Conference in 2016. You can watch the full session on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

All Change in Scholarly Communications: How are the Players – Veterans and Newbies – Adapting?

Fiona Murphy reports from #APE2016

Last month, in characteristically bracing January Berlin weather, around 250 intrepid speakers and delegates attended the 11th Academic Publishing in Europe (APE – pronounced “Ahhhpay”) meeting. Keep an eye on Twitter #ape2016 as all of the presentations were recorded and so should become available in the near future.

A number of familiar characters – large publishers, established platform providers, and so forth – whose language seems to have evolved over the past few years – spoke about ‘openness’ and ‘sharing’ rather than preserving business models. Todd Toler of Wiley, for instance, expressed the “publisher’s value proposition” as having shifted from content provision – basically “moving stuff about” to “strengthening knowledge connections”. This feels like a real turning of tides; such players are now actively aiding and abetting our efforts to garner significant knowledge from our scholarly ecosystem.

In point of fact, there was a general theme around intelligence rather than simply the power of data. Barend Mons bemoaned the existence of “a Christmas tree of hyperlinks and the malpractice of supplementary material’”, instead calling for the training of experts to really understand how machine learning and human interrogation of data can be meshed together to form a powerful whole – “Open Science as a Social Machine” (keep an eye on the IDCC programme in Amsterdam later this month, as he’ll be expanding on the topic there). Meanwhile, Emma Green, of Zapnito – a start-up that aids knowledge-based companies to maximise the impact of their associated experts spoke of growing the ‘knowledge economy’ by reducing the noise and chatter, thereby freeing up the collective intelligence.

John Sack of Highwire’s approach was to examine frictions in the workflow. If workflow is ‘a way of getting things done,’ then instances of friction – with the possible exception of a review stage – largely involve the loss of efficiency. Currently most journal workflows are still based on the original print journal format, but with the version of record shifting online, the resulting misalignments between what is desired and what is produced are causing delays, and infringements of established rules (such as copyright). Friction-reducing tools that can support and simplify the generation, finding, and attribution of scholarly outputs are needed. This can be enabled by standards such as e.g. ORCID or ResearcherID for people, and by initiatives such as openRIF/VIVO for connecting people and their roles to their works and activities. This connectivity will surely boost quality, productivity, and the need for improved garnering of knowledge from our research landscape that generally arose as a theme across APE in general. This connectedness, according to Sack, is about a supported conversation amongst collaborators who are enabled by tools that sift, pre-curate and – potentially – publish their scholarly outputs.

Opportunities for new business models are appearing in a number of points in the workflow – Publons acknowledges and badges peer review activities, Overleaf provides templated support to write journal articles, and Elsevier is leveraging the new Mendeley Data service to enable authors to publish their data and link it immediately with journal articles.

At the same time, policy (=funding) is also moving in the same direction. Stephan Kuster, Head of Policy Affairs for Science Europe explained its function and mission. Science Europe is a think tank set up to support and advise EU National Research Funding Councils around on EU R&D policy issues. Open Access is one of nine key priorities, including enabling authors to hold copyright, supporting sustainable archiving, and publication and dissemination are integral part of research process and should be funded as such.

There was a thoughtful debate about Scholarly Communications Networks and whether they add value, which would not have been possible even a few years ago. Fred Dylla, Emeritus Executive Director of the American Institute of Physics, made the salient point that reputation of the journal still needs to be fundamentally challenged for the landscape to be really disrupted. Currently, the people and institutions making the key decisions about funding, tenure and promotion, are still fixated on journal reputations and impact factors. So, despite feeling as though there has been a lot of progress in the last few years, it also seems there’s still a lot to do.

Luckily there are several opportunities coming up to extend and develop our understanding of and strategies for adapting to this changing landscape. As well as the aforementioned IDCC later this month. And look out for the ALPSP Seminar on research data, digital preservation and innovation in March. Standing on the Digits of Giants is co-organised with the Digital Preservation Coalition and is designed to orientate and empower publishers, research managers and researchers to navigate and flourish in the new landscape.

Another key space to continue these discussions is in the context of the Force11 community, which aims to bring together many of the stakeholders needed at the table to effect change: policy makers, funders, researchers, technologists, publishers, informaticists, lawyers, etc. Force16 promises to be an exciting venue where we’ll be pushing scholarly communications into uncharted territory. Hope to see you there too.

Fiona Murphy, February 2016

Now associated with the Maverick Publishing Specialists, Fiona Murphy has held a range of production and editorial roles at Wiley, Oxford University Press, Random House and Bloomsbury Academic. She specializes in emerging scholarly communications (including Open Science and Open Data) and works to raise expertise and activity levels across the wider research and publications communities. Fiona has written and presented extensively on the research landscape, data and publishing. She is Co-Chair of the World Data System—Research Data Alliance Publishing Data Workflows Working Group, an Editorial Board Member of the Data Science Journal and enjoys organizing meetings. orcid.org/0000-0003-1693-1240

This post was written by Fiona Murphy with the support of Melissa Haendel.

Does ‘Yes’ really mean Yes?

Laxmi Chaudhry is co-tutor of ALPSP's new Outsourcing training course. She took part in our London Book Fair panel yesterday and spoke at last year's Outsourcing seminar. Here, she reflects on some of the key cultural issues that influence vendor relationships in a guest post.

Why is yes such a powerful word  when working with International Suppliers?

'In our globalised and outsourced/off shored world we are now working across different cultures and communication styles. This has given rise to a number of cultural challenges, further exacerbated by working remotely across distance and time zones. So what we may take for granted in terms of working style and communication in the UK, for example, can be very different in other cultures, giving rise to misunderstandings, time delays and poor business relationships. This of course impacts the bottom line!
  
The short but very powerful word “yes” encapsulates and reflects cultural differences and is one of the biggest sources of frustration and loss of trust. How is this so?

In the UK, “yes” generally means that we agree or accept and are committed to performing the necessary actions in achieving a desired result. If we are not able to do so or have difficulty in understanding the instruction, we usually ask further questions to gain clearer understanding or else we may speak up later if we come across difficulty.

However, in many cultures, such as in India and China, the word “yes” encompasses multitude of meanings besides the one we generally understand. Hence the room for giving rise to a host of difficulties when dealing with international suppliers, not least getting projects completed in time, instructions not being followed, not checking for clarification until the deadline date, and at times poorly executed work. Other examples of potential problem are ongoing business relationships suffering, opaque communication, and a culture of blame developing.  

What does ‘Yes’ mean in some cultures?

For example when a supplier in India says “yes” to a request or instruction from you, what it could really mean is any of the following:

• I am hearing you
• I hear you but I don’t understand you and won’t admit it
• I acknowledge I have received your request
• I recognise your status
• I am being polite
• I will do it if nothing else happens that’s more important
• I will deliver something but...

This list is by no means exhaustive. These differences in connotations and the understanding of the word “yes” arise due to differing underlying cultural values such as the importance of hierarchy, relationships, harmony etc.

However, it is very possible as a company to bridge the cultural and communication gaps and there are many examples of companies doing so thorough proactive cultural awareness training. This applies for both parties being involved and buying into this. One can get to a real understanding of what “yes” means in an outsourcing scenario and achieve effective working and relationships.'

Laxmi Chaudhry is a cross cultural consultant and trainer, specialising in business effectiveness across international cultures, working with global organisations in many sectors including publishing. She has spoken at ALPSP events on Outsourcing and is co-tutor of the Managing Quality from Outsourced Services training course in July 2014. You can contact Laxmi at laxmi@1stophr.com or www.1stophr.com.

Access to Research pilot launched

Minister for Universities & Science,
David Willetts, addresses the audience

Last night saw the launch of the Access to Research pilot at The Library at Deptford Lounge in Lewisham, South London. The pilot, a two year project in the UK to provide free access to research via computers in public libraries, was launched by the Publishers Licensing Society with guest speaker, the Rt Hon David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science.

The two year pilot has over 1.5 million articles from 8,400 scholarly and academic journals available in 79 local authority libraries. The initiative is supported by trade bodies the Publishers Association and the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as well as the Society of Chief Librarians and technical partner ProQuest.

Janene Cox, President of the Society
of Chief Librarians

The project will allow users to search and read scholarly research articles while in the library. It is anticipated it will be of particular relevance to small business, students and special interests, where the person doesn't have access to an institutional library.

Libraries and publishers are being encouraged to sign up to boost the number of articles that included and to increase the number of locations where the content can be accessed.

'The government believes in open access, but understands there is a cost to publication.' David Willetts

David Willetts was joined by PLS Chief Executive Sarah Faulder, President, Society of Chief Librarians, Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association and Phill Hall, project contact at technical partner ProQuest.

Sarah Faulder, PLS Chief Executive

'This is an important initiative and working across organisations in a partnership effort has involved compromise and risks to make this pilot launch.' Janene Cox

ALPSP is delighted to support the project through promoting participation to our members as well as access to our journal Learned Publishing. Further information about the initiative is available on the Access to Research microsite.

News coverage to date includes articles on the BBC, The Bookseller, PR Newswire,

 

Why 'author pays' publishing might be a good idea...

It may surprise some people to learn that I am supportive of the notion of 'author pays' publishing (or more correctly, of publishing models supported by author-side payments since the actual cash often comes from funding bodies or other sources).

It won't surprise anyone to know that I have some caveats:

Firstly, publishers should be left alone to determine their own business models - those that are best for them and for the communities that they serve - and this means being free of, for example, interference from governments which pushes them in one direction or another.

Secondly, the actual level of fees that journals would need to charge is likely to be very much higher than the typical fees currently seen in the marketplace. My [wholly unscientific, so you'll have to trust me on this] experience would suggest that fees would need to be many thousands of dollars (but more research like that undertaken by the Research Information Network is needed).

Thirdly, it is pretty clear that as things stand adequate funds are not yet available to cover these costs for all disciplines. It may be possible in time to divert funds away from library acquisition budgets to pay author-side publication charges (no, I'm afraid that any monies 'saved' from cancelled journal subscriptions won't get used for all of those books you've been wanting to buy...') but that's not going to happen overnight...

Fourthly, and related to my third point, there is the issue of the differences in funding from one discipline of academic endeavour to the next and the impact that this has on the affordability of 'author pays'. Whilst I admire greatly the clarity of the Wellcome Trust's statement that they see dissemination as part of the research and are therefore willing to pay 1-2 per cent of their research budget to fund that dissemination, that only holds for well-funded subjects where research grants are relatively large. The absolute cost of dissemination is likely to be broadly the same irrespective of discipline but in subjects with modest research grants like mathematics or ecology the percentage cost of dissemination will be much higher than 1 or 2 per cent - perhaps even exceeding 100 per cent. So the dissemination could well cost more than the entire research budget.

Fifth, it is very important to ensure that the mechanism of publishing is accessible to everyone and that means that in an 'author pays' publishing system those that can afford to pay have to subsidize those that cannot (this happens in the subscription world through organizations like INASP).

Sixth, it is not a sin for publishers to make a profit (surplus, call it what you will...). Profit is an incentive for good publishing, results in innovation, and means that publishers have funds available to invest in the future of scholarly communication (journal publishing is a model industry in terms of adoption of new technologies and it is just grossly and ludicrously wrong to suggest that they have been slow to embrace the Internet, for example).

Now, before this turns into a version of Monty Python's 'What have the Romans ever done for us' in reverse, let me explain why I think 'author pays' publishing could be a good thing for some publishers.

A) Benefit to the advancement of knowledge
I don't think you can argue against the fact that Open Access could bring benefits to some disciplines for example if the whole corpus of literature was open to interrogation by data and text mining tools. If you want a compelling case for this, talk to Peter Murray-Rust (or let him talk at you!) and find out about the interesting stuff the chemists are doing...

B) Scalability of income
I've been involved with running a couple of journal publishing businesses in my time and one of the problems we had was that we couldn't raise the price of the journal fast enough to cover the costs of the extra papers we were publishing. We managed to increase the quality, and kept increasing the rejection rates of the journals, but there were still more and more high-quality papers to be published. A model where the income scales more or less directly with the number of papers you are publishing therefore seems like a good thing (I also think that submission, rather than acceptance, fees are an interesting concept but that will have to be the subject of a future post...)

C) Small publishers with no sales force
Again referring to my own experience of running a smallish publishing house, there was no way that I could deploy an international sales force trotting around the globe polishing the doorknobs of librarians and selling our wares. Our relationship with the librarian community was therefore pretty much non-existent. However, we had great visibility among, and relationships with, the authoring community who really appreciated what we were doing for them... so if they paid the bills (as long as they had the money, of course) I would have been quite happy.

D) Eliminates motives for piracy
This, I think, is a big issue and one which is only going to get bigger. In-copyright academic content is increasingly appearing illegally on peer-to-peer file sharing sites and it is virtually impossible for the publishing industry to police this. At the very least it is very expensive. Open access does eliminate the motive for piracy and may, in the very long way, be a pragmatic approach to stopping piracy. I bet the music industry wishes it had the equivalent of an 'author pays' option.

Incidentally, there are a number of less-than-ideal artefacts that are shared by both the subscription and 'author pays' model. In both publishers expend time and money dealing with articles that are rejected and so the higher your rejection rate, the higher your costs. I don't believe that this is an incentive to publish poor articles and the quality of a publication and its brand are going to continue to be very important.