Welcome to the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers blog. It includes helpful posts to connect, inform, develop and represent the scholarly publishing community.
Thursday, 15 September 2016
Industry Updates: RedLink, PaperHive, COUNTER, Crossref, Coko and OA Mega-Journals
The 2016 ALPSP Conference Industry Updates session provided a round up of the latest new developments, major project and industry standards updates. Chaired by Louise Russell from Tutton Russell Consulting, here's a round-up of the projects that were covered.
Are Your Rights in Order? 7 risks and 7 ways of avoiding them
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| Sarah Faulder |
They recently worked with the other collecting bodies to re-negotiate what is paid to rights holders. The outcome from the valuation last year based on journals 76% to publishers, 23% to authors and 1% to visual artists. This will be reviewed in 2019 and it is hoped that it will be increased for publishers. However, this is dependent on getting tighter documentation demonstrating rights. Faulder urged the publishers in the room to get into good practice now by ensuring you have the right rights as it will be key to a successful negotiation. They have also launched PLSclear: a new permission clearing service to help with the identification of rights holders. Rights are very important, but they come with obligations: to use and enforce them.
Obtaining appropriate rights, understanding the rights you have and fulfilling your obligations in respect of those rights for each of your content assets is vital. You should look at every aspect of your content and cover every copyright base. When you are acquiring rights you should think about what you might do further down the line.
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| Clare Hodder |
Clare Hodder of Rights2 Consultancy and Natalina Bertoli from Bertoli Mitchell outlined seven commercial risks of poor rights management.
- Lost income: good rights management practice results in increased revenues.
- Stifling innovation: good rights management enables you to innovate and move swiftly to market with new products.
- Hard to combat piracy: good rights management enables you to combat piracy and unauthorised use, protecting your business.
- Infringement: means you mitigate the risk of infringing copyright, and dealing with costly legal bills
- Reputational damage: good rights management enhances your reputation amongst the author community and your market
- Erosion of copyright: good rights management means that publishers and users of our content can work with in an efficient copyright framework, without the threat of broadening exceptions to copyright which undermine business models
- Increase costs and risks for mergers and acquisitions: good rights management enables mergers and acquisitions to be completed swiftly and at the right price.
The panel then discussed ways to avoid these risks. Put rights management at the heart of your business from the top down. It has to be recognised and you need to train all staff, not just editorial. You need systems and documentation. Rights management often gets sidelined. Risk of short term inconvenience not worth risk of lost income or rights. Don't leave it solely to those who have targets.
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| Natalina Bertoli |
Should publishers invest in rights management? Absolutely. Often rights are low down on the scale of things to invest in. You can caution or scare with big numbers of what it might cost. But even for smaller publishers you can do a lot with very little. Have a centralised filing place and a very good naming convention. It is preferable to do it digitally, but you can still do this with filing cabinets! Have someone in the organization who has responsibility for it. And regularly check and remind this needs to do. Conduct regular audits on your systems and that systems are being adhered to.
In addition to every bit of content you should think about how the content might be used for in different ways. Big publishers might aim to get all rights from the beginning, but rights holder often push back. If you don't get what you wanted, you can go back to renegotiate or rethink what you can do. Don't proceed as if you had them!
Recording what you have in terms of rights is key. Asset management systems are needed. What you need is information about the rights you have. Until we get to databases holding rights metadata you have to find a way to slice and dice content agreements so you can identify different aspects. If you have a relatively small list you could use Excel. If a little larger you could get someone to put an Access database together. It doesn't have to be an all singing and dancing rights.
When dealing with reversions (where a publisher or creator requests rights revert back to them) make sure you give them the same paper trail and structure as you would a new rights agreement. Be VERY explicit in your wording: title, authors, formats, etc. Use a template format so nothing is missed.
Often rights acquisition is delegated to a junior member of staff with limited experience. It is vital to build in training programmes on rights management to ensure this doesn't end up being a problem.
Sarah Faulder is Chief Executive of the Publishers Licensing Society. Natalina Bertoli is Owner of Bertoli Mitchell. Clare Hodder is co-founder of Rights2 consultancy. They spoke on the PLS Gold+ Sponsor session on rights management at the 2016 ALPSP Conference.
Shifting Sands: What's affecting your business?
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| Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust |
Rober Kiley from the Wellcome Trust outlined their plans for opening up access to the research outputs. It helps to accelerate discovery and its application for health benefit, but also provides great return on investment. Challenges include tackling infrastructure and changing culture and incentives. There are issues around having the right skills and capacity to do this.
The publisher requirements have come about to simplify the whole process and ensure they get what they pay for. There are still instances where articles have been funded and published as open access, but still behind paywalls on publisher sites.
Their key requirements for deposit are that the final version of peer reviewed articles should be available in XML and PDF and deposited in PMC. Material changes must be made to PMC and include Crossmark where available. The Licence must be made available via CC-BY and the statement must be included in XML and be human and machine readable. The invoice must include the title of the articles and publishers must have a refund policy. They have been in contact with a number of the larger publishers and see trade bodies such as ALPSP as being key to reaching out to other organizations.
Other Wellcome developments include Wellcome Open Research. Researchers will be able to get their research published quickly and it will include all research outputs. It fulfils all their open access requirements and the data is published alongside so the research is reproducible. It is transparent - open, author drive, peer review. Finally, it is easy as the costs are met directly by Wellcome.
Wellcome is also looking at preprints. It reflects the growing interest in this area as they provide researchers with a fast way to disseminate their work, establish priority of their discoveries and obtain feedback. They also offer a more current understanding of an investigator's work. They are working within Wellcome to amend grant application EoG forms so preprints can be cited. They are developing grant reviewers and are working with ASAPbio. They are keen to change the culture by encouraging researchers to publish preprints.
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| Alex Hardy from Harbottle & Lewis |
What the referendum DIDN'T ask is when and how we should leave the EU as well as what kind of relationship should the UK and EU continue to have.
Article 50 is the legal mechanism by which to serve notice. But it has never been invoked before so it is unknown territory.
The short term impact involves currency fluctuations as well as changes in the trade relationships outlook. We are proceeding with caution with refocussed lobbying and campaigning. Alternative models are being explored including European Economic Area, European Free Trade Area or a more bespoke arrangement.
For intellectual property rights including copyright, departure from the EU would leave national law and international treaties largely as it is. For EU harmonisation, the UK has been heavily involved and very influential. But there is a risk the UK will lose it's influence. For the EU, there's a risk they will lose UK content. It is possible the UK will leave the EU during the EU Digital Single Market. There is still an opportunity to continue to engage, comment and contribute to discussions.
EU trade marks will continue in the short term, but you may need to move to a UK trade mark. It might be worth registering both in short term to minimise risk if you can afford it.
For contracts, consider reviewing the territorial scope, trade and IPR licences. You should also take into consideration governing law and jurisdiction. EU courts are likely to continue to respect English law contracts. Arbitration is likely to be more popular. You should consider alternative dispute resolution. You should think about termination rights. Does the EU constitute a force majeure that mean you can review pricing or service terms review? There might be opportunities for renegotiation.
Consumer contracts are heavily shaped by EU law. There may be a post-Brexit review, but if you want to do business with the EU you will need to continue to comply. The EU General Data Protection Regulation is automatically and equally enforceable in all member states to have a single EU law. It provides stronger rights for consumers and stricter obligations for companies. Penalties are harsh with 4% of turnover or 20 million euros. It has been four years in the making and comes into force in May 2018. Brexit is no excuse for not complying for the UK as they will still be in the EU when it comes into force. It also applies to anyone outside EU processing data to offer goods/services to EU citizens. There also needs to be adequacy of law required for data protection. The UK will likely fully adopt the GDPR regardless of Brexit. Act now before it is too late. May 2018 is not far away.
With employment law, free movement of people is a key political issue. There is no clarity on the post-Brexit position. Businesses are starting to audit and assess opportunities for claiming rights to work in the UK and EU. Companies might want to consider diversifying recruitment policy and must be aware of discrimination. Review your policies and make sure you remain compliant with existing UK law. She closed asking how can you survive the shifting sands of Brexit? Her answer is to take stock, be prepared and try to influence.
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| Andrew Tein from Wiley |
There are some fundamental principles. Research stakeholders should advance sustainable open access and open science policies that ensure flexibility aligned with needs of discipline communities avoiding imposing unnecessary burdens on researchers. Brussels is a slow, steady and confusing place. In May 2013 Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) was launched with general principles on OA and Open Data. In May 2015 'A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe' was released which acknowledged the importance of science and research to boost innovation. In May 2016 the Competitiveness Council Conclusions on the Transition Towards an Open Science System were published.
The OSPP process is design to advise the commission on policy development and implementation. It will serve as the primary mechanism for stakeholder engagement. It has five policy action areas: incentives for open science, removing legal barriers, making OA policies mainstream, develop research infrastructure for open science and particularly open data, and to embed open science in society as a socio-economic driver. They have broken this out into eight work streams:
- Fair open data
- European Open Science Cloud
- Altmetrics
- New business models for scholarly communication
- Rewards
- Research integrity
- Open science skills
- Citizen science
It is expected there will be three different mechanisms for consultation: digital consultation, working and steering groups and the Commission has clear goals they want everyone to work towards. As ever, there will be a number of opportunities and challenges around these areas.
Wednesday, 14 September 2016
Plenary 1: The Conversation: Research and Scholarly Publishing in the Age of Big Data
Is big data hype and nonsense - just an exciting term that let's an agency sell their services? Fran Bennett believes there are some fundamental things that have changed that mean it is so much more than that. It can help companies open up new insights, generate additional income and lower barriers to technology entry. As the technology gets better it can do different applications. There is more data and cheaper processing.
Big data challenges for #socialscience - is there a role for #publishers to better serve scholars "drenched in data"? @ZiyadMarar #alpsp16— Lettie Conrad (@lyconrad) September 14, 2016
Mastodon C are working with the UK Government department responsible for animals and farming. They are collecting all the data of dead livestock. They don't have enough staff so sometimes patterns get missed. They use computers to identify any of these threads to analyse post mortem. They can take messy structural data and sorts it out so expert humans can use their time more effectively and in a targeted way.
Ian Mulvany thinks high quality content is what we do as an industry, but it's all digitally mediated content. All publishing organizations need to be technologically competent. We're in a mixed world of software solutions that are beginning to be commodified. But the variety of the services around them are living in a handwritten world: a dilemma he is endlessly fascinated by.
Corporate applications of big data can transfer to publishing in market projections, customer retention, internal SWOT analysis and with hiring. Mulvany asks how many publishers have tried to re-analyse their entire corpus using big data techniques? Not many hands went up... there are lots of opportunities here. Bennett observed that a good data scientist is a statistician who can code and understand the context of their data and warned against tracking things purely because you can: the risk is you create 'data exhaust' that you can't do anything with.#alpsp16 Mulvany: The crucial thing is how you wrangle data ... the industry has been doing it for many years, but in different ways— Research Information (@researchinfo) September 14, 2016
Mulvany noted that some fields have long worked with big data and have good standards and procedures to deal with it. He is particularly interested in working with researchers that have realised they have a whole load of data and don't know what to do with it. There is a 'data under the desk' problem. Data is collected sporadically, is not necessarily kept well, and isn't large scale.Here is the essay "Why software is eating the world" by Andreessen to which @IanMulvany just referred to: https://t.co/AxAencXIOJ #alpsp16— Jasmin Lange (@JasminLange) September 14, 2016
Caution was called for by delegates in the audience and on Twitter when using algorithms for peer review: it can and will be exploited by researchers. The panellists all agreed that machines can do the dirty work for us, but not all the work.
Marar outlined the work of the Berkeley sociologist, Nick Adams, who is using crowdsourcing and algorithms to look at reports on the Occupy movements in nine cities. Analysis that would normally have taken 15 years has actually taken one year, and is finding interesting patterns. He also cited the work of Gary King, a Harvard social scientist who is developing and applying empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span statistical theory to practical application.
Social researchers are coming more slowly to big data analysis, but are doing some unusual work with it. SAGE Publishing has conducted a massive survey into the area of data and social science with over 13,000 responses. It's something they are focusing on as a priority.
An interesting side issues when looking at social data is sometimes, when you look at the data, you find that the quality of it is not what it might be, with potential to lead to data protection breaches on a grand scale. There are differences between ethical and legal behaviour concerning datasets. it may be cheap to capture and hold data, but expensive to extract, clean and deliver it.
Mulvany closed with the observation that there are researcher needs, potential development tools, but why should the industry care about these things? Because at our heart we are about democratising knowledge and finding the right solutions and people around that knowledge. If we look purely at their purpose it will give us the realisation on how we make it happen. Those tools are becoming cheaper to experiment and innovate with. So we should do so.
Ziyad Marar is Global Publishing Director at SAGE Publishing where Ian Mulvany is Head of Product Innovation. Fran Bennett is CEO and Co-Founder of Mastodon C. They took part in a panel discussion at the ALPSP Conference 2016.
Zoe Harris, Trinity Mirror on Embracing Disruption in the #alpsp16 Keynote
Trinity Mirror have learned that the local, regional and national press can no longer be suspicious of each other. Tabloid newspapers have a bad reputation, but The Mirror is passionate about being different. Yes, they want to entertain, but they also want to inform, investigate and campaign.
In such a challenged market revenues with 10% year on year readership decline 20% year on year advertising decline, with digital revenues slow to make up shortfall, how do they adapt?
They have looked outside and inside for inspiration. They have learnt to have a thick skin and be resilient. Disruption is everywhere. Netflix is disrupting pay TV. Airbnb has in five years become the main hotel chain rival selling more rooms than the whole Hilton group worldwide. Uber has totally changed the taxi business forever. You no longer give an address, you give a postcode: a fundamental change in behaviour. Online estate agents like Rightmove hit Trinity Mirror hard. Five years ago they had £150m revenue in this area. It dropped to around £30m in 2015. There has been an explosion of disruptive news brands including: HuffPost Buzzed and Facebook.
For Trinity Mirror, they have skilled journalists, trusted brands, scale and reach, experienced commercial teams as well as strong branding nationwide. It's easy to get stuck in a rut becoming afraid to change anything from the past.
Audi asked their engineers how could they win a race if our car could go no faster than anyone else? By phrasing it that way, they looked at other areas of development. The answer was fuel efficiency. They won the next three years.
Newspapers often look at problems the wrong way. The decline in The Mirror readership isn't a recent trend. It's been happening over decades driven by digital, behavioural trends and competitor activity. Crucially, the demographics of the UK have changed. it has gone from a pyramid upper class, middle class, working class to a diamond shaped elite, bulging middle classes and breadline existence.
The three forces of change they face are the recession as a social leveller, connectedness available to all, and a post-industrial workforce. Today, their readership have inherited values, achievable aspirations, and a tighter network. In addition, traditional news is less valuable than before. The main issues lapsed readers have with current offerings have:
- not enough breadth in content
- people don't define themselves as working class anymore
- in a time when we are less defined by political bias we switch political allegiances
- newspapers that are perceived to be written for and by men means a disconnect with readers can happen
- newspapers haven't changed approach in many years
- also an issue of journalists as part of the establishment, chummy with politicians and big business alike.
There are a number of initiatives they have tried. You need to have a thick skin, fail fast, and work fast to adapt to disruption and change. One part of their response was to launch a national newspaper - New Day - which shut two months after launch. They always had a plan to have a go and if they were going to fail, to fail fast.
With data journalism they have built a specialist team that monitor, scrape, analyse and use Freedom of Information laws to research and find new stories. Looking through data to create news stories for their titles. They also create engaging and interactive gadgets to make the news personal to the audience. By making data personally relevant to them they can make them care about issues that should matter to them all as well as hold councils and governments to account.
They have also used content curation. Clipboard, News 360 and other services have built big markets quickly. New and different opinions rarely get seen where we have our filter bubbles of online services that use algorithms to find content you will like. Trinity Mirror launched a new app - Perspecs - a curated news application. It offers three different perspectives on each news story from other sources. It adds diverse opinion and transparency. It also facilitates the discovery of new sources.
The fast reproduction of content is a real challenge and the speed and breadth of local coverage. For their regional titles, being part of that local life is what they've always done. Now they're doing it differently, because that's what readers want. They work with police forces, local courts and sport clubs reporting on their own matches. They have seen huge increases in local traffic. They have set about doing this by focusing on local knowledge and building a connect with local readers who want to reach out to them. This also builds a strong local advertising platform for sustainability.
How? They've focused on audience data. While page views are their primary metric, they listen to others such as time spent on page, bounce rate and percentage of readers who are local. While journalists have strong gut instinct about the local audience wants, but it's important to get out to meet people combined with understanding the audience.
They have also doubled down on audience analytics, finding out what they know works and ask themselves what else might. It is passion and belief that will give you determination to meet changing needs of your communities. But it is the ability to expect the unexpected and adapt that will see you through.
Zoe Harris is Group Marketing Director at Trinity Mirror Plc. She provided the opening keynote address at the 2016 ALPSP Conference.
Monday, 12 September 2016
Are Your Rights in Order? Clare Hodder reflects on what happens if not...
What are the cost of getting rights wrong?
There are a few things...missing out on revenue from subsidiary rights, because you don't know what rights you have to licence, not being able to digitise your backlist because you don't know if you have the rights, not being able to enforce infringement action because you have no documentation to prove you are the rights holder (as in the Georgia State University case). And that's just the start.In one instance, a publishing company had to pulp an entire first print run, because they realised too late in the day, that the licence they thought they had acquired for the picture on a book cover, didn't come with an image release from the people pictured. The people in the picture objected to the use of their image and insisted the book was pulped. The publisher had to foot the bill for destroying their stock, finding an alternative image and reprinting the book and of course valuable sales opportunities were missed and marketing effort wasted, due to the delay to publication.
Some rights holders, particularly photographers are getting really hot at looking for unauthorised uses of their work on-line. Publishers who have acquired licences for a certain number of years or to cover a certain number of copies have been finding themselves on the receiving end of lawsuits when they have exceeded those terms unknowingly. In most cases settlement is reached relatively quickly but its time-consuming and expensive - damages awarded for such infringement, particularly in the US courts are high.
What are the benefits of getting it right?
If you have comprehensive rights data on all of your assets, the world is your oyster. You can endlessly re-publish, slice and dice, and licence those assets in infinite combinations, broadening the reach of your content and generating lots of additional revenue. Without that data, you don't know what it is possible to sell or licence so you either miss out on those opportunities or become a copyright infringer - risking large financial and reputational penalties in so doing. It makes so much sense to put your rights in order first and set yourself up to fully exploit the content you have invested in.Which of the 7 ways to avoid risks can you share in advance of the conference?
Make sure you have a rights acquisition policy that is widely known within your organization (and complied with!) getting the right rights in the first place saves you a whole world of pain later on! Guard against the raft of infringement claims now facing publishers by ensuring you can manage licence compliance. Adapt systems and processes to alert you when you are about to exceed licence terms and give you time to re-licence or remove content to avoid infringing.Clare Hodder is a Rights Consultant with Rights2 consultancy. She has been working with the Publishers Licensing Society to develop PLSclear and delivering Straightforward Permissions and Rights Management workshops. Clare will take part in the Are Your Rights in Order? 7 risks and 7 ways of avoiding them at the ALPSP Conference 2016 at 2pm on Thursday 15 September.
Friday, 26 August 2016
Spotlight on Wiley ChemPlanner - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing
Tell us a bit about your company.
Wiley is a global provider of knowledge and knowledge-enabled services that improve outcomes in areas of research, professional practice and education. We partner with over 800 societies representing two million members. We’ve been around for more than 200 years, and you probably know us for our high-quality books and journals. In chemistry, we publish books, journals, and databases, including databases of chemical reactions and different kinds of spectroscopy.What is the project you submitted for the Awards?
Wiley ChemPlanner. ChemPlanner is a tool organic chemists can use to plan the synthesis of a new molecule. You draw a molecule, and ChemPlanner uses its state-of-the-art cheminformatics and high-quality data to predict the shortest, fastest, cheapest route to your target.You can think of ChemPlanner as being analogous to IBM’s chess playing computer Deep Blue. Deep Blue learned all the potential moves in chess by parsing historical chess matches move-by-move and extracting rules that would help it win any game of chess. ChemPlanner has “learned” organic chemistry from the last 30 years of chemical reactions.
In this example, the user has drawn a target molecule (far left). ChemPlanner has predicted a two-step synthesis. Starting from the right, the first step has been predicted by ChemPlanner based on what it has “learned” about organic chemistry (light bulb icon). The second step is through a known, literature reaction (book icon). Prices under the molecules come from linked databases from commercial providers, giving you an idea of how much the synthesis will cost.
This is important because ChemPlanner can help speed up the process of making new molecules. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, teams of organic chemists synthesize thousands of molecules that could potentially become a drug. But, most of the candidates will fail in pre-clinical or clinical testing, so a team might have to synthesize up to 10,000 candidate molecules to find the one that will eventually become an FDA-approved drug. Cutting synthesis time out of the process means drug candidates get off the whiteboard and into the clinic faster.
Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.
Today, chemists rely on a combination of their own chemistry knowledge and searching the literature for reactions similar to what they think they need. But, this can be inefficient: database search tools require that a chemist have an idea of what they are looking for. And then, the chemist needs to piece the individual steps in a synthetic route together manually, trying to keep track of lots of variables like the availability of starting materials, the number of steps in the route, how common or exotic the individual reactions are, the yields of each reaction, and the overall synthetic strategy.
When we uncovered this in our workflow research, we saw an opportunity. We could accelerate the process with an easy-to-use tool that used promising cheminformatics technology to design optimized overall routes, including through novel molecules and reactions that are not indexed in any databases. Rather than searching the literature for similar molecules, the chemist could instead use a software application that automatically designs the optimal route for any molecule. The chemist could then fine-tune the route and decide on a solution in a matter of minutes instead of hours; this is computer-aided synthesis design.
In this approach, the software helps the chemist be more creative, by suggesting routes and reactions they may not have thought of on their own, and be more productive, by keeping track of all the variables (yield, cost, number of steps, literature support, etc.) that the chemist would have to keep track of in their head.
Delivering a sophisticated product like ChemPlanner has been the work of a talented team. Colleagues in Technology, Product Management, Marketing, Editorial, Sales, and more from multiple Wiley locations around the world have contributed to the development of ChemPlanner.
Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?
We’re seeing the evolution of publishing, from the distribution of results in books and journals, to indexing those results in databases, to now being able to make predictions based on machine learning from those databases. It’s a real workflow tool in that a chemist working at the bench can input a question and get an answer to their problem, a real actionable answer that measurably helps our users be more creative and efficient.What are your plans for the future?
We have a robust product roadmap for ChemPlanner with some exciting features planned for later this year. We’re not quite ready to talk about them publically yet, but if your readers are interested in what we have coming up or would like to schedule a demo, please get in touch by visiting ChemPlanner.com.Dave Flanagan is Director, Lab Solutions at Wiley. He will present at the ALPSP Conference session for Awards finalists. The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing will be announced at the conference dinner on Thursday 15 September. www.alpspconference.org
The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Limited.
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