The Evolution of Subscription Industry 1970-2014: Subscription Agents and Consortia-New Roles and Opportunities

Dan Tonkery: a short history of subscription agents

Dan Tonkery, President and CEO of Content Strategies, an international information services consulting company working with STM publishers, kicked off the afternoon session at the ASA conference. In a previous life he has been a subscription agent and librarian and has an encyclopaedic memory of the history of subscription agents.

The agent years of milk and honey 1970-1985
The market was filled with multiple agents (such as Faxon, ESBSCO, Readmore, Blackwell, Majors, Swets, Harassowitz, Turner, Boley, McGregor, SMS and others). There was a low average selling price. Main frame computers were introduced to support processing. Agents dominated in the sense that you couldn't find a library around the world that wasn't using an agent.

Agents were essential to both libraries and publishers with 99% of libraries using agents. They become experts at processing individual orders and supporting each other. They built comprehensive title databases (c. 400k titles) and developed new reporting and analysis tools for librarians. They also developed interfaces with ILS vendors (so you could automatically load invoices and reports).

Years of mergers and rapid growth 1986-1996
This was the era when many of the smaller agents were acquired by larger agents. Faxon and EBSCO dominated the US market and Swets in Europe. Agents were building related services such as SC-10, ROSS, Microlinx, REMO, EBSCOnet. Gross margins continued to drop from 12.4% to 8.1% in 1999. Agents attempted to build new business systems, but Faxon collapsed on business system failure in 1994 and Dawson Plc bought Faxon in October of that year. In summary, subscription agents were growing and they were important to libraries and publishers. Bear in mind that hardly any of the publishers had a sales team at this time.

The golden age of library consortia 1996-2006
There were over 200 active consortia that were usually regionally (sometimes nationally) based. Publishers moved from print to electronic formats. A number of major consortia formed as resource-sharing agents serving their member libraries. Publishers turned to consortia as a new sales channel and direct deals were negotiated. Publishers began selling Big Deals or Custom Deals and began thinking of database deals instead of individual titles. You could argue that agents were caught flatfooted. Consortia examples from the US include:

• NERL: 1996 28 core members and 80 affiliates. Bought $102 million in 2013, most of it handled direct.
• GWLA: 1996 33 research libraries in Central and Westtern US, bought $37 million in 2012.
• SCELC: 111 members and 120 affiliates. Bought $38 million in 2013.

This is close to $500 million business of subscription agents that now goes direct: a major problem for many companies.

Agents respond with new tools and services
In response, agents developed tools to help libraries manage publisher packages, expanded services and built knowledge and license databases to support A to Z services. However, consortia managed to capture market share from subscription agents: the market shrank from 98% in 1996 to less than 60% now.

Subscription Agent rebirth
Agents continue to evolve into new or expanded products and services. There is an opportunity for rebirth and growth through databases and distribution services amongst other areas. The most important factor to look for is having someone come from outside our industry and invent a new product service. Tonkery closed with a call to constantly look outside the box.

@dantonkery notes that agent world based on individual titles. That's why they are so well placed 2 reinvent themselves for APCs #asaconf14
— Chris Banks (@ChrisBanks) February 24, 2014

ASA 2013: Lorraine Estelle on Be Careful What You Wish For

Lorraine Estelle address the ASA conference audience

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections gave us a clear reminder: this isn't about quality, this is about cost. We have to consider potential unintended consequences of new models so we don't end up recalling the 'golden age of the big deal.'

In the beginning, we had the 'big deal' and this is still the predominant model for journals. It is not without its critics, notably, a number of mild-mannered people are very critical of it. The big deal causes so much inflexibility in library budgets it impacts particularly on arts and humanities for collections.

The major problem with the big deal is the underlying pricing model. It was based on print concept and subscribed and non-subscribed model. When introduced, university libraries were required to to maintain payments to print journal subscriptions and pay an extra charge for e-access to gain access to all the non-subscribed titles. It is hard to believe that the base cost of subscribed journal perpetuates in many big deals today - almost 20 years later. This forced maintenance of the base cost (historic print spend) is what makes the big deal so inflexible. To compound the issue, she has yet to find a publisher that can provide the metadata that upholds the value.

What are the alternatives?

1. value based pricing: you pay for what you use
2. gold open access: you pay for what you publish (at article level)

Value based pricing is a new digital pricing model directly linked to usage. This model is supposed to enable the move away from the historic print spend. Estelle cites the American Chemical Society who have had a good go at implementing value based pricing. They show a price-per-article on their website of 26 cent compared to $3-4 from Elsevier, Wiley and other commercial publishers. But what happens on an institutional basis when implemented? The Benedictine University (Source: Inside Higher Ed 2011) reported a whopping 1,816 percent price jump for 2011 due to increased usage.

While they probably had a really good deal to begin with, this highlights the real problem of winners and losers: the more an institution reads the more it pays. In essence, the best customers are the ones that will have to pay much more.

With gold open access, it's a model where you pay for what you publish. It avoids the difficulties of top slicing (where librarians aren't involved in purchasing decisions). In June 2012, the Finch Group estimated that the additional cost per annum for the UK to move to gold open access is £38 million per year. In April 2013, RCUK is introducing block payments to pay for APCs for universities and eligible research institutions.

There is an interesting dilemma about winners and losers. UK institutions will be expected to pay for the processing charge so that papers by authors in their instituions are freely available around the world. However, those same institutions will still be required (for the time being) to pay for subscriptions to papers published by authors in the rest of the world (c. 94% of all other articles). Funds for APCs are most likely to come from existing research budgets - not library budgets that will need to be maintained at current levels.

Essentially, the more the institutions within the UK publishes, the more it pays! They are looking for recognition from UK publishers that there is a need to consider the issue at a local (UK) or instituional level. It is certainly not sustainable in the future.

The unintended consequences and part of the problem is that an increase in article downloads is associated with an increase in articles authored. This is associated with increases in PHDs granted and an increase in grants won. Value based pricing and gold open access are both models directly linked to usage. To control costs an institution may need to control use by:

• restricting the number of articles downloaded
• restricting the  number of articles published.

The argument that those research intensive universities can afford it no longer stands up to scrutiny. University capital budgets have been impacted by cuts and this impacts on what is available for research. Estelle closed with a stark statistics: the total BIS grant for 2012/2013 is £5,311 million, compared to £6,507 million for 2011.12 - an 18.4% cut.

Be careful what you wish for: the 'big deal' may be remembered as the golden age.

ASA 2013: Laura Cox on Pulling Together - Information Flow Throughout the Scholarly Supply Chain

Laura Cox with a messy and complex supply chain

Laura Cox, Chief Marketing Officer at Ringgold Inc, talked through the problems of information flow throughout the scholarly supply chain. If only publishers would use the right identifiers with their content, then there is a huge opportunity to improve information, insight and cost efficiencies.

What are the things that go wrong? Records are unconnected through the supply chain. Links fail between entities, between internal systems, and between external systems. Renewals are mishandled. Journal transfers, access and authentication is mishandled. Authors and individuals are not linked to their institution. Open access fees have to be checked manually. Authors are not linked to their research and funders are not linked to the research they fund.

We need to find a path to using standardized data. Identifiers can help. They can provide a proper understanding of customers, whether author, reader or institution. They also provide a simple basis for wider data governance (that is data governance defined as processes, policies, standards, organization, technology required to organize, maintain and access/interpret data) through:

• ongoing data maintenance 
• identifiers enforce uniqueness
• enable ongoing data governance
• ensure systems work
• help with cleansing data for future use.

Cox cited research from Mark Ware and Michael Mabe (The STM Report, 2012) for the wider context:

• Journals are increasing by 3.5% per annum 
• There is an increase in the number of articles by 3% per annum
• The number of researchers is increasing by 3% per annum
• Growth in China is in double digits
• There is increasing demand for any time, any where access
• Library budgets are frozen.

There are a number of identifiers available. For people, there is the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) which can apply to authors, playwrights, artists - any creator - which is a bridge identifier. The Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) links research to their authors. It disambiguates names looking at the different manner in which they can be recorded and can help remove problems with name changes. They can embed IDs into research workflows and the supply chain, can link to altmetrics and to integrate systems.

Institutional identifiers include Ringgold and ISNI, which map institutions and link data together. This ensures you can identify institutional customers so you can give correct content, and it disambiguates institutional naming conventions.

If you put institutional and author IDs together you gain genuine market intelligence:

• who's working with whom and where
• impact of research output on a particular institution - the contribution of their faculty
• subscription sales or lack thereof
• where reseach funding is concentrated
• ability to track open access charges (APCs) to fee structure.

Use internal linking in your systems, you can use identifiers to connect:

• customer master file
• financial system
• CRM/sales database
• authentication system
• fulfilment
• usage statistics
• submissions system
• author information.

This enables you to access information from multiple systems in one place, reducing time and cost in locating information, and enabling you to use information to make decisions and inform strategy.

A nice and tidy supply chain

External linking using identifiers will enable you to:

• ensure accuracy of information
• speed up data transactions
• reduce queries
• reduce costs
• open data up to new uses
• provide seamless supply chain where data flows from one org to next
• ensures that authors receive credit for the work they produce
• provide a good service to the community.

We need a forum to discuss and pull together: to engage with the problems in data transfer, generate an industry wide policy on using identifiers, break down the data silo mentality, and use universal identifiers to enable our systems to communicate with each other accurately on an ongoing basis. This will help serve the author and reader more effectively and strengthen the links in the supply chain.

ASA 2013: Ed Pentz on CrossMark - A New Era for Metadata

Horse burger, anyone?

Ed Pentz, Executive Director at CrossRef, provided an overview of how CrossMark provides information on enhancements and changes to an article - even if it is downloaded as a PDF to your computer.

With a slide showing a horse-shaped burger, Pentz observed no one knew what was happening in the supply chain and ingredients were mis-labelled. As a consumer it's hard to know what's verified. Third party certification such as Fairtrade or the Soil Association mark have arisen to help consumers. This is an important lesson for the scholarly publishing community.

Pentz is not talking about bibliographic metadata. This is about some of the things that are changing in broader descriptive metadata - what are users starting to ask? They are interested in the status of the content. What's been done to this content? And what can I do with this content?

Good quality metadata drives discovery, however, there are problems with metadata and identification. This is a challenge for primary and secondary publishers as the existing bibliographic supply chain hasn't been sorted, new things being added in, and this could potentially lead to big problems.

NISO announced two weeks ago standards for open access metadata and indicators. The detail is still to follow which will include things like: licensing; has an APC been paid?; if so, how much and who pays it? These factors will be particularly important to help identify open access articles in hybrid journals.

There are a number of new measures that have to be captured via the workflow. These include:

The FundRef Workflow

• CrossRef has launched the FundRef pilot to provide a standard way of reporting funding sources. 
• Altmetrics allow you to look at what happens after publication, looks at aspects of usage, post-publication peer review, capturing social buzz and getting beyond impact factors. 
• PLOS has article level metrics - available via APIs.

What about content changes? Historically, the final version of the record has been viewed as something set in stone. We need to get away from this idea because it doesn't recognise the ongoing stewardship publishers have for the content.

Many things happen to the status of content - post-publication - including:

• errata
• updates
• corrigenda
• enhancements
• retractions
• protocol updates.

As we have heard throughout the conference, the number of retractions are on the rise. Pentz referred back to an article in Nature 478 (2011) on the trouble with science publishing retractions. The case is clear: when content changes, readers need to know, but there is no real system to do this.

In a digital world, notification of changes can be done more effectively, and that's what CrossRef is all about. Another challenge is the use of PDF: there is no way of knowing whether the status has changed. When online, the correction is often listed below the fold, even on a Google search. The whole issue of institutional repositories is also a factor.

What is CrossMark? It is a logo that identifies a publisher maintained copy of a piece of content. When you click on the logo it tells you whether there have been updates, is the copy being maintained by the publishers, where is it publisher maintained, what version is it and other important publication record information.

Taking the example of the PDF sitting on a researcher's hard drive, the document has the CrossMark logo. Click on it for an update on whether the PDF version is current. You can then link through to the clarification if it is there. It includes a status tab and publication record tab. The record tab is a flexible area where publishers can add lots of non-bibliographic information that is useful to reader, for example, peer review, copyright and licensing, FundRef data, location of repository, open access standards, etc.

Lots of things can be enabled by this such as Mendeley. Pentz showed a demo of how a plugin for Google might be written that flags CrossMark when you search. It was launched in April 2012 and has been developing slowly with 50,000 CrossMark pilot deposits since launch, with 400+ updates. They are working with 20+ publishers on CrossMark implementation.

ASA 2013: David Myers on Buying and Selling Content - Don't Forget the Small Publisher

David Myers of DMedia Associates focused on buying and selling content, but from a small publisher perspective. He provided some general industry statistics to provide context:

• worldwide there are 25,000 scholarly journal titles from approximately 2,000 publishers
• only 60% or so are indexed by some database
• 3% are open access journals, but this will grow
• historically, small range of well-respected content
• now, ability to have a comprehensive search experience.

New(er) trends include:

1. CLOCKSS/PORTICO, others - need to participate in a digital preservation initiative
2. tablets, mobile - pay attention
• 112.5m US adults own a tablet by 2016 - >third of US
• Tablet adoption up by 400% (source: Nielsen)
• Majority use for reading information
• spend 14 hours per week with their tablets
3. ebooks
• 2011 $90billion global market
• by 2016 - grow by 18.9%
• but in certain parts of the world and certain customers - budget for ebooks is not even in the same part of institution - need to understand arbitrariness of where money comes from with some customers.

He believes that using grass roots direct marketing, that then lead to trials, still remains the primary vehicle for adoptions. Co-marketing of titles with a particular focus, thereby creating a certain level of critical mass, works. Novel or targeted offerings help you to stand out. Bespoke collections where the user chooses are also popular.

Myers advice to small publishers to thrive is to look at:

• commissions and margins
• pay attention to small details, figure it out and give it to the customer
• help those who help you
• be responsive
• invest for the future
• let renewals be handled by experts.

The key take-away points for publishers are about flexibility and remember who you are dealing with as personal relationships matter. External and political issues dictate the environment. Administrative issues are important. Last, but not least, focus on the biggest opportunities.

ASA 2013: Janet Peters on Order out of Chaos? Trends and Forecasts in the Scholarly Acquisitions Landscape

Janet Peters, Director of Libraries and University Librarian, at Cardiff University reflected on whether or not there would be order out of the current chaos for libraries.

She asked the question: how predictable are students and researchers?

• Will numbers of applicants to universities continue to fall? December 2012 shows that applications are another 6.3% down: hitting universities hard in terms of income.
• Will there be more demand for distance learning and part time courses - delivered globally?
• Will research funding be focussed in a smaller number of centres?
• How well will UK HE compete with global and/or private educational providers?

The market place for quality is changing. With student funding there has been a shift from government/tax payer to the student. There is no more money overall. Student choice is more evidence based with the use of Key Information Sets and the National Student Survey. The Research Excellence Framework will have significant levels of funding attached.

Library purchasing trends of note are:

• more than two thirds of information provision expenditure is now on electronic resources compared to less than half five years ago
• the average number of books added per FTE user was 1.1 in 2010-2011, which represents 2.0% of total stock, compared to 2.8% in 2000-2001
• library expenditure as a proportion of total institutional income is going down
• purchasing trends in Cardiff ebooks has risen
• they bought 27,500 books in 2004-05, this was down to 15,000 2011-12
• expenditure only dipping a bit, but the number buying is much lower.

So how do librarians keep everyone happy? They are adopting a 'just in time', not 'just in case' approach. Purchasing is based on evidence. The decision to retain (subscriptions or books) has to be justified. Statistics are essential: how much is x used by whom.

Anytime, anywhere access, for any number of readers is a priority. Ebooks or scanned articles and chapters for reading lists mean they are increasingly spoon-feeding students (particularly for first years) and disaggregating material. They are also exploring new models such as patron driven acquisition.

They are innovating through new services including federated search (LibrarySearch@Cardiff), rare books management, using social management, while looking at a rebuild, refresh and promote approach.

At the same time they are trying to improve the value from supply chain through various channels:

• resistance to price increases
• RLUK campaign
• JISC Collections
• Consortial purchasing (SHEDL, WHEEL) direct purchase from publishers (OUP has made good progress with country wide access while existing institutional subscribers still pay approximately what they did before)
• Shared services
• Consortial storage of journals UKRR
• Licensing information - KnowledgeBase+
• Cataloguing? Shelf ready: specialist hubs; master record
• Library Management Systems?

Meanwhile, changes in publishing continue apace with open access, including The Finch Report with green self-archiving route and gold article payment charges (APCs). Peters made a plea to publisher to make it as easy as possible to access the transitional funding by getting invoices out as quickly as they can. She noted that the RCUK funding in April should make it easier. There is a growing marketplace for APCs, although this is dependent on author behaviour and national negotiations and Cross sectoral licensing (e.g HE/NHS).

So what is next? There are challenges around disaggregated and linked data. Students see separate bits of knowledge already and are not aware of the historic wrapper. This changes the whole issue of guaranteeing quality so they are having to train students to check provenance, etc. Is there a future of a journal as an entity? Is the future of bundles secure? And what about the future of metadata? Will that be open too? They also need to consider who provides access to research data.

Peters closed by considering how subscription agents can help bring order out of chaos:

• They can broker APCs as an intermediary (see OAIG report)
• Join Open Access Key (OAK)
• Develop standards for data transfer between universities/funders/publishers on APCs
• Create new business models and provide access to articles for library purchase (find the value-add compared to Google Scholar or the British Library) and curate and provide access to data.

ASA 2013: Robert Kiley on Scholarly Communication - A Funder's Perspective

Robert Kiley, Wellcome Trust

Robert Kiley is Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Trust. They are a key advocate and funder of open access communication, and as Kiley wryly observed, open access is a topic that just keeps on giving.

The Trust has had an open access policy for several years. Each month they check compliance, currently running at 55%. As open access is not an option, but a grant requirement, they introduced sanctions last summer. From 1 April 2013, their policy requires CC-BY which he believes has created an awful lot of noise, some of it misinformed, some of it mischievous. If that is not offered, the research won't be able to go down the gold route, and will have to go the green self-archived route, which is not their preferred route.

Open access has become mainstream with support at the highest level of government. HEFCE will launch a consultation on how to measure OA for the REF 2020 (announcement here). There are developments in the EU and US. FASTR has maximum six month embargo and re-use requirements. He noted that with the announcement on Friday the US has gone for a 12 month embargo, which he believed was a step in the right direction. Kiley is a strong supporter of PLoS One and eLife, but was less enthusiastic about the publisher 'me-too' efforts.

There is a growing recognition that allowing everyone to read 'stuff' is important, but allowing computers to read 'stuff' is even more important. He noted that 48% of content added to PubMed Central in 2011 was included in open access subset.

He discussed the rise of intermediaries and noted that other than funding, one of the biggest problems researchers face when opting for open access is paying the APC. Providers are now stepping in to plug this gap including Open Access Key, Copyright Clearance Center, EBSCO and others.

The University of Edinburgh identified that c. £1741 is the average cost of an APC while the Wellcome Trust has found that c. £1797 is the average cost of APCs from the trust funded model. They are investing money in their own publishing activities, currently at 1.2% of their total spend, but they expect this to rise to 1.5% in the future.

Kiley refuted the assertion that gold is a UK-only phenomenon with the data that 22% of articles published in PLoS One were NIH funded. Hybrid articles are also being funded - 48% of articles routed through ACS "Author Choices" option were NIH funded. In 2012, the majority of published authors in PLOS were (in order of uptake) from US, China, Germany and UK.

One strength of the 'gold' model is around transparency. He believes there is a risk if we move from 'big deal subscriptions' to 'big deal APCs', the transparency benefits will be lost. He also suggested that the 'funder provides funding / researcher is not bothered by cost / publisher sets price' might be a dysfunctional market. He senses that authors need to be aware of price and they need to explore other funding models (e.g. COPE) while subscriptions need to take account of APC, perhaps with differential pricing.

Kiley closed by outlining how they still believe dissemination costs are research costs. The cost of 100% open access is probably around 1.5% of their research spend. The move to open access continues to gain momentum through policies, publishing ventures and intermediaries. Gold open access is not just taking hold in the UK and funders need to ensure that the APC model remains competitive.

ASA 2013: Herman Pabbruwe - Authoring and Publishing - It's Getting Better

Gabriella Karger introducing Herman Pabbruwe, CEO of Brill

Herman Pabbruwe, CEO of Brill, gave a talk that was optimistically titled 'I've got to admit it's getting better.' He provided a view from humanities publishing to contrast with earlier scientific sessions.

He believes that publishers are coming to grips with destructive technology. They are taking stock and thinking about whether people appreciate their roles including how sustainability. They are starting to take advantage of technology and the richer environment and mobility, while developing multiple business models (some of which have are revived from before).

There is a growing international demand and revival of unique library collections. There is increasing value in data so they have to reflect on how to bring all the necessary information together to enable appropraite validation. This is increasingly difficult and expensive to achieve and you need provenance and context: an essential step, otherwise it is just a collection of items. This is the challenge of publication at source.

They are trying to coach a younger generation of researchers, but there is a huge problem with sharing notebooks as people don't want to share something that isn't right (reflecting what Jeremy Frey represented in his talk before).

Pabbruwe reflected that some things don't change so much in research publishing. There is still tenure. The attitude of publish or perish still prevails and you need to build in twigging or developing new researchers. The costs of publication are still there as is sourcing for the user.

Some things still need to work: the perception and acceptance of a 'new generation' of products; workflow and efficiency; copyright (green) and definition of patrons; access rather than ownership and the effects of pick and choose (i.e. Patron-Driven Acquisition); across broad digitisation; and library and open access budgets.

Issues in publishing abound: from the chicken and egg scenario for e-product to archiving (open access, open data, MOOC). There are technical hurdles (e.g. Unicode bandwidth) to publishers' public image. And copyright concepts continue to present challenges.

A possible direction to focus on might be:

• focus on key subject areas
• have a balanced portfolio of journals, books, reference works and primary sources
• be platform independent (consider price differentiation?)
• have more empowered commissioning staff working with a bigger and stronger sales force
• re-enforce the relationship with end user communities
• focus more on Asia.

Publishers need to have an increased technical focus on standards, proven technology (also outside industry) and XML work flow for rich digital products (e.g. e-humanities). They should consider selected areas of software development (thesauri, proper names, pattern recognition) and think about how to enrich the author experience through services and direct links. Brill have created a proprietary typeface based on Unicode.

He hopes it will get better all the time, that publishers will use resources to create and make a difference and develop a multi-faceted and direct relationship with key institutes of higher education. Publishers need a flexible attitude towards copyright, and also be loyal to partners, but professional.

ASA 2013: Jeremy Frey on Reputation, Responsibility, Reproducability and Reuse - A Scientist's Perspective on the Role of Publications

Jeremy Frey addresses the ASA conference audience

Jeremy Frey is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Southampton. He covered a scientist's perspective on the role of publications and pointed out that the open access debate is actually an issue about the economics of who pays, as someone has to. However, he believes that there are different consequences around accessibility when you consider who does.

The consequences of not having open data is that your work cannot be checked by someone as bright as you. This could be an error made in good faith. There are ways of validating data, but they are dependent on having access to the data and a willingness to host that data. In his opinion, the Royal Society report has come up with the best phrase so far: 'intelligent open access to data'. It's not just access to the data, but it's also critical to record somewhere how to get use out of the data.

Some projects need large amounts of data from the literature. Access can be an issue. A digital repository is one answer, but does this lead to subversive and furtive sharing and exploitation of data in a virtual space? Can people understand how to use it?

One of the issues is that people in the scientific community put all emphasis on the answer, not the working out. And yet the process of coming to an answer is the most important part: 'methods are as important as the data'. The BBC 'Climategate' campaign is a good example of the benefit of doing this. Even Faraday in his notebooks included a huge amount of detail about how he went about his experiments.

What are researchers trying to get out of the whole publication process? Dissemination, reputation, and advancement. The scientific information supply helix was historically from researcher to literature to abstraction/search to literature. Currently you can add open notebook science. This makes the flow go from researcher to the web(?) to search to researcher, but this is rarely the only dissemination route.

There is a need for validation, traceability and accountability for recognition, promotion and future funding.

There are some journals that would limit the number of references within article as they are constrained by page size. This is a real problem in the interdisciplinary world. However, this is shifting as online removes space restriction. 

There are a number of problems with interdisciplinary research and dissemination. The methods and emphases varies with discipline:

• journal versus conference
• pure versus applied
• research versus application
• authorship and acknowledgements
• who goes on the paper?
• who is mentioned in the press release?
• do you acknowledge the technician?
• e.g. maths is like humanities - student works on their own while science is team work.

He believes that researchers also need to reflect on how they communicate the data. The Smart Tea Project was a way to create a harness to record data as you go along, but it was a bit overbearing for students. Then they moved to LabTrove which has more of a blog style with a highly interlinked system. Other issues to consider are diversity and disability. Another example is the BlogMyData Project. This type of project has an impact on researchers, can lead to a higher quality record, easier collaboration, improved planning, better proactive interaction and can run in a completely open or closed way.

Access to the discussion and the means of reproducibility of the analysis is really important to the way the community will be working in the future. Things have to change and at pace.

ASA 2013: Fiona Godlee on Who is an author and why does it matter?

In the first session at the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries conference in London, Fiona Godlee, Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal discussed the challenges of authorship credit and the move towards contributorship. Who is an author and why does it matter?

Life and research is far more complicated than it was. We now have multi-centre/author/function research going on. There are questions around who did text, the statistics and the lab work. Research has always been, but is even more so today, competitive with researchers fighting for first author place. Then there is the commercial interest, use of journals for marketing by medical/pharmacy industry

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has guidelines on authorship credit and have added to these to try and tackle some of the emergent issues. The idea of contributorship revolves around credit and responsibility, being explicit about roles and contributions and revisiting responsibility for complex studies with guarantor role.

The things that bother editors are:

• bias
• data manipulation or suppression
• dupliate publication or salami publication
• fabriation of data
• falsification of data
• gift authorship
• plagiarism
• self delusion
• undeclared conflict of interest
• wrong observations, analysis or references.

Source: Stephen Lock, BMJ

You can map these across to what constitutes errors in good faith, 'trimming and cooking' or fraud. Stephen Lock at the BMJ mapped these issues (see Fiona's slide, right).

The reality is that the lack of open data is creating major problems with verifying research. Questions around Tamiflu are a case in point, with contradictory statements confusing the picture, which was compounded by the lack of data available for checking.

Concealment of data is a very serious offence. In the US you have to register your trial and publish data within a year of the end of the trial by law. Yet a large proportion do not. The BMJ are trying to do their bit by insisting that clinical trial data must be available to be published alongside the article. 

With the BMJ open data campaign, Tamiflu is the test case. However, industry funded trials are not the only transgressors. Non-commerical trials are just as guilty. But there are signs of compliance. The UK HTA programme is an exemplar - they badger authors, withhold funding and publish on an open access website. This approach has resulted in near 100% compliance.