The Plymouth textbook project... paradise lost?

Phil Gee, Plymouth University

What are the challenges in providing 80% of your undergraduate student intake a full set of core e-texts? Phil Gee, Associate Professor in Psychology at Plymouth University outlined how they tackled this challenge in 2014 with the Plymouth eBooks Project.

Gee observed that it seems strange that often there are many barriers to students accessing ebooks. You should ideally teach knowing ALL students have access to the texts, anywhere they need them. There is a need to level the playing field to ensure universal access. Perhaps one day, there won't be any text books, but online resources.

At Plymouth, they have focused on note sharing. Students can subscribe to access the tutor's notes. His course book is covered in criticism and rants about the text, viewpoint or bias. Now, there is potential to build into the book so it is all there. You could potentially include interactive graphs, quizzes etc.

His focus has been on first year textbooks. They wanted to free up library resources. What they have tried to achieve with their project is to make sure the university funds the texts from a different budget. This should allow the library to focus on the core function: to cater to journals and specialist books (as well as nice comfortable places to chat).

The project started in 2011. They began by giving all first year students a set of 12 textbooks. They were given a code to download personal copies of all texts. It was so successful they decided to extend to second year students as well as six other programmes in the faculty. In 2013, they added a few more programmes. All this was funded from School, not library budgets.

In September 2014 they covered 4,062 students rising to c. 7000 including Plymouth Business School (reaching every student on every level of their course). There are 192 modules, 109 Programmes and 25,931 books (from c.600 titles) covered, plus the Business School. It's interesting to note that both Geography and the Business School have pulled back from it, primarily due to cost.

They post links to each of the books on the course website. The student clicks on the book link to open the online version to browse or set up an account to download (once authenticated through usual systems). The students download the books in perpetuity. If they don't set up an account they won't be able to access the books after they leave the university. Crucially, the books can be accessed offline e.g. when they are on their mobile and the signal is patchy (quite common in the South West).

It has been very successful, but there some issues when you come to scaling. He felt they didn't do as good a job of implementing it as he would like, so was pleased to see a student and staff approval level of over 90%. It's unusual to persuade a lecturer that change is a good thing, so the high staff approval was a real success!

Even more encouraging was the 38% who said they were influenced to come to Plymouth when making their course choice. It was a factor that helped with the cost, but also as an innovative approach to finding a way to help students succeed.

They have focused in on evidence of ways to improve performance on a course and have found this to be the case. It is good for them, the lecturers, to help them do their job more effectively, but also for the university, who have happy students.

Unsurprisingly, there have been challenges. Libraries are learning to negotiate with publishers in this way: negotiating from a point of view of 'this is all the money I have.' They also prefer ePub format as it is a better experience for multi-devices.

Gee believes this is good for publishers as income is much more predictable. Students are used to getting content for free, so dealing with institutions is a more reliable deal. Multi-year deals have cost and market advantages. Inertia can set in and universities are less likely to pirate content.

They have buy-in at a senior institutional level who are keen to continue. The biggest barrier to this is getting the right price. Gee believes price is a key deciding factor for universities to buy in to this if the price is low enough (talking c.£50 for an entire student list). He feels the sales will come. He also sees this as a way to halt declining student sales - 58% of first years buy a book. The mean number of books = 2.2, median = 1. the mean spend per student = £62.33 retail.

However, he feels this is a window of opportunity that is closing. Many institutions have now ended all their incentives such as free iPads. People are less worried about recruitment now the higher fees are established. There is more interest in the university as publisher and in alternatives to textbooks. A lot of publishers are investing in adaptive learning systems, but these won't get beyond the niche. PLEASE put the technology in ePub3!

Gee closed by saying they want to develop new partnership and ways of thinking about content and the best way to do this is via collaborative partnerships. But be warned, the moment may be passing.

Phil Gee spoke at the Personalised Learning and Publishing Partnerships seminar.

The institution as e-textbook publisher

Hazel Woodward (L) and Lorraine Estelle (R)

All students expect access to the core text that will support their studies whether they study on campus or via online distance learning. While e-books have been a qualified success across further and higher education, how can librarians meet this expectation in an effective and sustainable way?

Lorraine Estelle, Executive Director for Content and Discovery and Divisional CEO at Jisc Collections, outlined a number of institutional initiatives that are trying to tackle this dilemma at the Personalised Learning and Publishing Partnerships seminar.

The national ebooks observatory project 2007-10 was established to see what would happen when all UK students had access to 36 core textbooks for 18 months. Within this limited timeframe, there was no conclusive negative impact on UK print sales. In one or two cases, print exceeded. The findings come with the usual caveats. The resulting report encouraged publishers to make all their course texts available to libraries electronically.

The economist Mark Perry on the American Enterprise Institute blog in 2012 calculated the price of primary college textbooks from 812 per cent since 1972.

A recent report published in Insights UKSG's journal by S Duan and C Grace identified what librarians like including multi-concurrent access option, clear and easy to understand options for printing multiple pages, no personal login needed, books downloaded to mobile devices, clear options for purchasing additional copies when usage limits reached, ePub format, fully accessible platform and content, excellent MARC records and data available in Open URL resolve and discovery. When these requirements aren't met, it is deeply frustrating.

Joshua Harding in a 2013 issue of Insights asked for a ebook 'study buddy' to help him with his work. Student expectation have changed enormously with advent of £9,000 per year fees. Not only students, but also parents as well. Coventry University tried to become a 'no hidden extras' university. There are a number of challenges around physical distribution. They are still persevering and exploring more e-texts.

What do librarians really really want?

UCL Press has just been launched again with a particular call for textbooks for their open access business model. Open SUNY Textbooks is another open access text publishing initiative established by the State University of New York. Their associate provost, Carey Hatch, identified the annual cost for core texts ($1,200) as a driver. Their aim was to bring this down and save students money.

Inspired by some of these projects, Jisc Collections set up the HEI as e-text book publisher project. It's aim is to provide evidence for higher education institution to assess the feasibility and economic benefits (if any) of the HEI as an e-text book publisher and to assess the impact on authors' and students' satisfaction. It will run for several years and includes the University of Liverpool, Nottingham University, University of Highlands and Islands and Napier University, and University College London.

It's not specifically about open access, but a variety of business models are being explored including OA, freemium, Amazon self publish etc.

London 2015 Digital Book Printing Forum

Organised annually since 2010, the London Digital Book Printing Forum provides an update on key trends and issues in the book market, in the evolution of the supply chain and book manufacturing, as well as the status and inroads of digital printing.

Once again, we are delighted that the Forum's organisers, INTERQUEST, are offering ten free places to ALPSP publisher members on a first come, first served basis. If you would like to save the £235 registration fee, please contact Sabia Morrison (info@alpsp.org) no later than Thursday 4 June.

The Forum will be held on 25 June at The Royal Society in London. Registration opens at 8 am and the programme runs until just after 5 pm. Full details available online.

This year the event will focus on three major areas:

International trends and success stories: U.K. and international printers and publishers will gather to share their experiences and success stories in digital book manufacturing, discuss challenges, and express their vision of the future.

Streamlining the supply chain: leading players (publishers, distributors, and printers) will provide an update on the progress of their initiatives in this area.

New opportunities generated by innovation and technology developments, evolution in terms of communication, changes in consumer habits and needs, environmental protection, etc.—for both printers and publishers.

The following topics will be covered:

• Market trends and forecast
• Printed books and eBooks
• Supply chain evolution
• Impact of self publishing
• Move towards POD
• Adoption of colour and personalisation
• Distribute-and-print developments
• New applications and opportunities
• Status of inkjet presses
• Drivers and barriers
• Trends in workflow, finishing, inks, and paper
• Publishers' perspectives
• Recent technology developments
• Key players and solutions

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.

Eleven Top Tips on Content Marketing You Can't Live Without

Kate Smith, far right, and the content marketing panel

Kate Smith, Associate Marketing Director at Wiley, chaired the Turning scholarly research into content marketing gold panel in The Faculty at The London Book Fair. She deftly drew out the key issues surrounding the myths and magic of content marketing from a panel of industry experts including Laura Finn, Content Marketing Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Amy Nicholson, Managing Editor at Sticky Content, and Lynne Miller, Associate Director at TBI Communications.

Read the Storify from TBI Communications here and ALPSP here.

In the spirit of all good content marketers, Kate has created a list of eleven top tips drawn from the session.

1. Start small, pick something easy 
2. Map out everything in your content ‘universe’ 
3. Identify the drivers of your funnel and audience journey 
4. Don’t get too bogged down with personas 
5. Audience is 1st, Story 2nd, Content 3rd 
6. Provide some easy guidelines – like making the first sentence of your content 140 characters 
7. Use other events like a survey someone else in your company has done and repurpose it into a short form content asset (or two, or three, or four…) 
8. Top and tail other people’s content 
9. There are different ways to consume content so repurpose the same content in different forms (a list, an infographic, a blog post etc) 
10. Check out ‘1 post Wonders’ on Tumblr 
11. Get Amy from Sticky Content’s stakeholder guide

Disagree? Add your own to the comments field below.

Kate Smith is Associate Marketing Director, John Wiley & Sons. She is a seasoned marketer and has led community marketing teams, and more recently Channel teams and B2B marketing at Wiley for the last 12 years. As a content marketing advocate Kate has been helping to change the mindset around marketing in Wiley so that that marketers are better equipped to connect and engage with customers and end-users.

Is there a single project management solution that works for all projects? We spoke to Jim Russell to find out.

Project management remains a core skill that publishers need. We spoke to Jim Russell, tutor on the ALPSP Project Management for Publishing training course, about the different ways of handling this essential function.

Why is it that project management is so important to publishing?

Projects are vital to every publishing organization. They are the means by which most change is implemented. Think about new and enhanced products and services, changes to workflows, systems and processes. What about rebranding, sales and marketing campaigns? Acquisitions, restructuring, strategy development and suppliers changes are all project-based activities. I could go on, but you get the picture.

What typically goes wrong when managing projects?

As projects, they all have inherent risks and under the pressures of high workloads or when individuals are inexperienced in managing them, projects often fail to match expectations. Project management is meant to help! But sometimes it doesn't.

Why do you think this is the case?

Over many years, traditional project management methods have been based on experience from large projects. Whilst there is still a place for some of these methods on major infrastructure developments, they can cause delay and add too much bureaucracy to smaller and medium sized projects. Add in a lack of training or experience, plus an expectation of fitting this in to your day job, and you have a recipe for disaster.

So how has project management methodology evolved to tackle these issues?

Most projects now involve web-based solutions that need a more flexible approach to project management, and businesses need shorter implementation time scales. ‘Agile’ methods can be highly effective for incremental web development and can work very well.

Sounds like a great solution, are there any drawbacks?

These methods are not appropriate for all projects and the conditions for the successful application of Agile methods do not always exist. There is no single project management solution that works for all projects!

So what what would you advise to those starting a project?

I always recommend taking a flexible approach to project management. Review the type of project you are working on and take the best parts of different methods to suit your circumstances and business goals. This will enable you to apply a scalable, tailored approach for different types and sizes of project.

Jim Russell is a project management consultant who runs his own training and consultancy company. He has worked with a broad range of organizations within the publishing sector and continues to be a practising project manager.

Jim is co-tutor on ALPSP’s Project Management for Publishing course along with Ruth Wilson from Nature Publishing Group. The next course will run in May 2015.  Further information and booking available on the ALPSP website.

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.