Planning for the unknowable: Sue Thorn gets to grips with scenario planning and the future of journals

Sue was CEO of the Society for Endocrinology for 20 years and set up its trading subsidiary, BioScientifica, which provided secretariat and publishing services for a range of other societies in the UK, Europe and USA.

She has been using her combined publishing and society management experience to identify the key variables that will affect journal income and sustainability in the future, and to establish a range of potential scenarios, which can then be modelled quantitatively and followed over time.

Sue says:

“I've been using scenario planning techniques for many years to aid strategic planning by quantifying uncertain variables. The advent of the financial crisis led me to use the technique to develop a spreadsheet to track the effects of changes in key financial variables at the touch of a key. So, if the value of the society’s investments went down, or journal attrition varied from budget, I could put this in the spreadsheet and immediately see the effect on the society’s surplus and total value over a two-year period.  It became clear that only a relatively small number of variables really made a difference, and I am now using a similar technique to model society publishing incomes for STM and AHSS journals. 

The results are really interesting and occasionally counter-intuitive. Some scenarios that seem quite worrying actually make little difference to net income, although most of these scenarios are likely to represent an interim point, not an endpoint, so this apparent steady state may well be illusory. Changing one variable can then make a difference of 20%.”

ALPSP is delighted to be working with Sue Thorn Consulting on the Open Access: Scenario Planning for Societies seminar on 20 March at the Royal College of Pathologists in London. It is an opportunity for our society members to share in Sue's expertise as she introduces delegates to the concept of using scenario planning to model potential changes to journal income.

Sue will be joined on the day by ALPSP Chief Executive, Audrey McCulloch, Caroline Black from The Biochemical Society at Portland Press, Victoria Gardner from Taylor & Francis, Judith Willetts, CEO of the British Society of Immunology, and Jane Winters from the Institute for Historical Research, for panel discussions that will explore what societies may be able to do to deal with any potential drop in their income.

The day will be held under Chatham House rules and will be interactive, with delegates encouraged to bring forward particular issues for discussion. Book now on the ALPSP website where full details are available.

The Handbook of Journal Publishing: Sally Morris reflects on the birth of a book

Photograph: John Morris

Sally Morris is co-author of The Handbook of Journal Publishing. After a successful career in scholarly publishing, Sally was Chief Executive of ALPSP from 1998 to 2006. Here, she reflects on the process of writing a new edition of a much-valued industry handbook.

"I had been in the books side of publishing for more than a decade when I was offered the opportunity to move over to journals. I jumped at the chance – I could see that there were all sorts of differences from books, which seemed both interesting and exciting. It wasn't just the way the money flowed (at least for an established journal) – first in from subscriptions and then out issue by issue, rather than the other way round for books, with editing and production costs coming in first and sales income afterwards. Even more, it was the way that a journal has a continuing life; you can monitor what's happening, make small or large changes as you go along, and see the results.

But I knew I had a lot to learn. Luckily, a book soon came along which answered all my questions – Journal Publishing, by Page, Campbell and Meadows.  I read it avidly and kept it to hand for frequent consultation.  And when CUP published an updated version ten years later, I devoured that too, even though I now had a fair bit of journals experience under my belt.

But a lot has changed since the late 1990s. That was the very beginning of the e-journals revolution, which changed almost everything about journals – not just their delivery, but their processing, their functionality, their sales, and even the available business models. The book was in urgent need of updating or replacement.

Friends had said to me, when I retired, 'You should write a book'. So I talked to Bob Campbell about collaborating on a new edition. However, as discussions progressed it became increasingly clear that just about everything in the book would need to be updated, and that it made more sense to start afresh. The original authors didn't want to participate in writing a completely new book, and I certainly didn't know enough to cover all the angles myself. So I need to find one or more co-authors.

This is harder than it sounds! Many attempts fell by the wayside. But eventually I was delighted to enlist the help of three good friends from the USA – which made excellent sense, since there are many more journals published from there than anywhere else - Ed Barnas, Doug LaFrenier and Margaret Reich. Between us, we encompassed experience of all types of publisher: learned society, university press, commercial. We had worked in a wide gamut of subject areas, from the sciences to the humanities. And we covered most aspects of the business: editing, production, marketing and sales, distribution, finance, copyright. Even so, we needed to enlist the help of many of our friends and colleagues who were more knowledgeable than us about specific aspects, such as distribution and metrics.

Gathering and writing up the information was a marathon exercise – we all needed to scour existing sources to supplement what we thought we knew, and to provide useful references for readers who wanted to delve deeper. We wanted to provide a really practical, 'how-to' book with lots of checklists, worked examples, a glossary, and lists of useful resources. It was no longer appropriate to deal with e-journals as a separate topic – they are now fundamental to every aspect of journal publishing. And neither did we feel it was appropriate to cover Open Access (in all its flavours) as a separate topic – it has become part of the range of options that are available to all publishers.

Simply project-managing the status of all the different chapters and appendices was a challenge in itself. And we all had questions for each other, and comments on each other's sections. And we kept finding things we needed to add or update, right up to the page proof deadline!

The stages between delivery of the finished script and publication seemed to take forever, although in reality it was only a matter of months – but we were impatient to see the finished product! And now it has arrived – it's exciting to see our 'baby' in the flesh (and to know that an e-book version will be available soon), but what we will find most satisfying will be to find out that journal publishers, particularly those who are relatively new to the field, are using it and finding it helpful. So please let us know what you think!"

Sally Morris, March 2013.

Cambridge University Press is running a special offer for ALPSP members.
Order now to get 20% discount.

Steve Pettifer's break-up letter: Dear Publisher...

Pettifer: with a break-up letter to the journal

Steve Pettifer, from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, offered a break-up letter to the journal for the audience of Ignore Your Authors at Your Peril seminar today. Pettifer believes that there's a simple equation for his career:

Ability to do science = funding x cleverness

Likelihood of funding =
(previous ideas x prestige) + new idea

Is it about ego? Possibly. This is where scholarly communications come in. As an academic and researcher he has to convince funders that he is a good person to take an idea forward that will help change the world. When he started as a researcher, it was the end of the old style of publishing, a time when it felt weird when things started to go online.

The challenge now is that researchers operate in a landscape of goodness or importance and managing the transition from one to another without dropping your research status is tough. Every now and again, something comes along that changes the environment, that enables them to get to their goal. Open access might just be that disruptive force (for publishers) that works (for researchers).

So what are the things that publishers tell him that they do for him?

• peer review
• copyediting
• typesetting
• visibility
• legal support.

Yet for each of these valuable services, there are poor examples that undermine the statement. A recent study into peer review demonstrated that only one third agreed on the science with one third signal to two thirds noise. That is itself not a bad thing, but it's not compelling evidence of the value and efficacy of peer review for the scientific record. (Source: Peer Review: Welch, Ivo. 12 October 2012 Referree Recommendations, Social Science Research)

Pettifer quoted Kent Anderson from a recent post on Scholarly Kitchen that asked how science can maintain integrity if papers are buried in 'mega journals' and don't have full peer review? In reality, Pettifer says, he has never cited a paper because of its peer reviewed status. He then went on to mention Alan Singleton in a recent Learned Publishing article. In it, Singleton had paraphrased feedback during peer review, as the essence of its definition. It was something along the lines of: 'the methods are OK, I don't agree with the result, so it should be published for others to repeat or test the experiment.'

Pettifer went on to discuss copyediting: it's not always great, there are numerous examples available of poor grammar in headings from great and good publications. There are some fundamental errors that are made in typesetting, for example, the confusion of German ß rather than β. These things stand out and undermine claims of a valuable, quality service to authors.

He asked publishers to be clear about the relationship between them both. Understand that sometimes it is almost impossible for authors to comply with even the most basic requirements (with ebooks or epapers, it is impossible to comply with making only one copy, as soon as you download, your devices will sync).

He asked publishers to embrace new things. He called for them to move on from the journal impact factor. Many think it is rubbish. And there are lots of other exciting things coming along that are great measures for a researcher including: Impact Story, DataONE, figshare, Altmetric, ORCID, using DOI, and Dryad, that aim to make papers more readable.

He also stated that the object of record is for machines. While he is nerdy, and it matters a lot to him, it is not for humans. Make it available for machines to reference and search.

Pettifer wants publishers to recognise he is an individual and author, reader, editor and reviewer. Help him communicate his work, and help him to make his work better. He believes that BioMedCentral has not moved on much; PLOS is still quite traditional; eLife is too, but is aiming for higher quality. PeerJ is exciting, and arXiv - while just a way to put pre-published papers online - works for physicists. PeerJ and eLife have set the bar high in technology (readability and downloadable objects) with a combination of good technology and presentation.

What do all publishers need to do? Make publishing a service, not an ordeal.

Authors: The Publisher's Perspective by Timo Hannay

Hannay: authors have more economic power now

Timo Hannay, Managing Director at Digital Science believes the relationship with authors is a complicated issue with numerous opinions. His view? The economic power is shifting to the author, having historically been with the reader, and publishers should be in the business of getting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors.

What is a publisher? Hannay doesn't feel like one. He sees himself as scientist who is passionate about technology, who runs a software company within a publishing business. It's interesting to note his company has a portfolio of technology companies that are run like start-ups. This is unusual for publishing.

One of the major purposes of journals is to help researchers learn about discoveries. So the nature of the (traditional) relationship has been between readers and institutions with:

• a reader service
• highly filtered content, but inefficient (high rejection rate and editorial input, peer review adds a lot of value, but takes a lot of time and resource for all involved)
• the reader has little economic power - beyond subscription, very few ways of getting hold of the content other than asking author for copy of paper.

Open access delivers the concept of author as a customer for publishing discoveries. PLOS, BioMedCentral and Scientific Reports are examples of organisations that have pioneered this approach. They have much more of an author service and recognise the need of the author to publish, rather than know what is in the fields. They use lighter peer review (which is still inefficient) and the author has more economic power. For Hannay: it is about supply and demand: an increase in the demand to publish, and a decrease in the demand to read.

However, the author experience sucks. Publishers provide a clunky interface, opaque processes, are slow, slow, slow, and create Sisyphean experience for their authors. The publishing industry and the people in it, are not without innovation, but there is not enough of it and it tends to come from large, established players.

We are starting to see new entrants who display different relationships. Examples of new start-ups where innovation comes from outside the industry include:

• f1000 Research
• Rubriq
• Frontiers - developed different model of peer review
• PeerJ

There are two perspectives to take into account: publishing discoveries (author relationship) and learning about discoveries (reader relationship).

For authors its about career path and development of reputation. Journal publishing isn't everything to this. Metrics also help. Getting information isn't everything, it's about exposing your institution and peers about what you are doing. The different stages are:

• Gaining a reputation
• Finding collaborators
• Finding a job
• Obtaining funds
• Planning experiments
• Learning about discoveries

One of the challenges in the past is that the act of publication is the only thing you can measure. However, companies are now providing tools to show what you are doing. When developing tools online, they are more accurate and can be measured so credit can be given where due. Examples include: Altmetric, Symplectic, and Thomson Reuters. Finding collaborators has also changed with projects such as Research Gate and Frontiers facilitating this.

For the researcher, the cycle is:

• learning about discoveries
• planning experiments
• conducting experiments
• evaluating results
• sharing results
• publishing discoveries

Publishers should be in the business of putting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors. In a networked digital world, much more that can be done if we think about it in the right way. Publishers also need to get skilled up in the right way. If researchers are your main market there is so much more that can be done.

Publishers are in fear of Google, Apple and Amazon and lump them all together. They are all very different business: one is a retailer, one is an advertising network and one is a hardware company. Their common success factor is that they are amazing at technology. There is a direct correlation to mastering technology and success.

Publishers should own their technical development for their markets.

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.