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The State of Risk in Scholarly Communications
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The State of Risk in Scholarly Communications
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Segment:0 .
So Hi, everyone. We'll get started in just a few moments as we. Let folks gather. Hello, everyone. We'll give it a couple of more seconds here, a few seconds, and then we will get underway as we allow folks to gather and join the webinar.
OK, we'll get underway. Folks are still gathering, but I think we can start. So thank you and welcome to today's Scholarly Kitchen webinar. The Scholarly Kitchen the state of risk in scholarly communications. Before we start, I want to thank our 2025 education sponsors, access innovations and Silverchair.
We are grateful for your support, as always. My name is Lori Carlin. I am the chief Commercial Officer at Delta. Thank and the SSP education committee's webinar lead. Before we get started, I have just a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists.
You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with other participants and the organizers. To send chat messages to everyone in the session, select everyone from the two dropped down instead of the all panelists. Closed captions have been enabled. If you don't see the CC icon on your toolbar, you can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing show captions in the dropdown menu.
This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event. Registered attendees will be sent an email when the recording is available. A quick note on SSPs code of conduct in today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. Now I'll pass the mic, so to speak, to our moderator for today's session, David Crotty, editor in chief of the Scholarly Kitchen and Sr. Consultant at Clark and Esposito. All right. Thanks, Lori.
And Thanks to everyone for joining us today. It's a quick sort of introduction. I recently I was writing an introduction to a report for a client, and I started with one of my sort of stock phrases, the statement that scholarly publishing is undergoing an unprecedented period of rapid change. And at that point, I realized I've been using this same statement pretty much for the last at least 10 years.
So it occurs to me that at some point, this sort of unprecedented period just really became our new normal. And volatility is just sort of the way things are now. We're seeing often contradictory shifts in the environment, some rapid, some longer term. We have a US government that seems to pivot its policies towards research funding and universities every 10 minutes or so.
Although the overall proposed direction of travel is pretty clear. We saw European and private funders give something like plan s about a five year runway, before seeming to largely abandon it without much available to replace it. So with all this uncertainty comes risk. Every organization, whether you're a publisher, a Research Society, a library or a supplier to the community needs to understand the risks that it's facing and builds build plans for adapting to and, where possible, countering those risks.
We're not talking about a zero sum game. And there, you know, there are trade offs that come with every strategy, both for the short and the long term. Risk also can come from overreacting to the moment. For example, if you think of publishing programs that shifted their portfolios to meet, you know, just the latest funder policy and then seeing the funder change their minds and pull the plug on that approach causes as many problems as not responding to what's going on.
So the US governmental policies are obviously eating up a lot of the oxygen in the room. We would be remiss, but we would be remiss to only talk about them as the only risk that our community is facing. And we will certainly talk about them. But we also want to discuss other areas of concern, including research integrity, AI technology in general, new approaches coming out of China, for example, anything else really that's on our panelists mind.
And also, I'll say that I don't want this, this webinar to be entirely negative, as our state of uncertainty also offers opportunity and perhaps motivation for some potential reforms, even large scale reforms and changes that might not be possible with the inertia of a stable market. So with that, I want to introduce our panelists. I'll go alphabetically, starting with Todd Carpenter, who is executive director of niso, the National Information Standards Organization, a nonprofit Association that develops and maintains standards for the creation, persistent management and effective interchange of information.
Alice Meadows is a co-founder of the more brains cooperative scholarly communications consultancy, with a focus on open research and research infrastructure. Alice has many years of both scholarly publishing and research infrastructure experience. With us also is Caroline Sutton, who is the CEO for the STM Association, the International Association of science, technical and medical publishers, and hongzhao, who is the senior director of AI product innovation at Wiley, where he designs AI strategy, drives the product roadmap and leads teams in developing solutions.
So I want to start in the area of technology and we'll turn to Todd to get things rolling. So, Todd, what are some of the technical risks that scholarly publishing community is facing, and how do some of these risks relate to our current environment? Sure Thanks, David, and appreciate SSP for inviting me to speak. I think scholarly publishing is both an editorial scientific.
It's a research process, but fundamentally the process of publication, the process of distribution is fundamentally a technological one. And in this era, as David said, it's been we've been living through unprecedented technological change for the last 30 years. Things are rapidly changing. And in particular in this, I'd say in this particular moment, there are a lot of causes for concern around technological risk that are facing publishers.
We are possibly entering an economic downturn. It's a time, a period of economic uncertainty from a variety of different reasons. And this can lead organizations to batten down the hatches to, you know, preserve resources. And one of the things, one of the core problems that we have in that kind of environment is taking our eye off the ball of maintaining the infrastructure we have.
If I can, I will pause or delay the necessary maintenance or replacing my air conditioning system for just another year. That's it's been running for 25 years, but maybe it'll make it through. One more summer, maybe it will, or maybe it won't. But there are hidden costs to not maintaining infrastructure, not maintaining the technological. Underpinnings of scholarly communications.
Will they break immediately? Probably not. Could they teeter and creak as new added stresses are put on them? Quite possibly. I'm kind of thinking here about the incredible bandwidth and demands that are being taken, particularly on open systems from AI bots and things like that, that are constantly hitting these open systems to download as much of this open content as they can get.
But it is causing those systems to creak and is causing some of them to break, you know, temporarily. But that degrades service for the patrons and the users of those systems. Also, in eras when there is a kind of battening down the hatches, there's an ever increasing levels of technical debt. And technical debt is something that we've it's something that we've constantly had to manage as an industry.
Thinking here about the fact that the oldest IT systems on University campuses are the library management systems. They'll replace the it. They'll replace their accounting system. They'll replace their email system. They'll replace all of the technological systems. But the library system is the last one to get fixed. The average age of a library system in our ecosystem is over 20 years old.
That same model exists in the publishing ecosystem in terms of circulation systems. You know, it works. We'll keep it running. There is a reason why federal government businesses are running a lot of COBOL because it works, it functions, it's teetering. It's problematic. But that creates other issues.
There are in this present environment though also some other concerns from the technological perspective. There has been a lot of concern of late as it relates to preservation of government resources, of data sets, of repositories of information that the government provides. This similarly is an issue for our community, a scholarly publishing community, both because we link to them, we rely on those, you know, the protein data bank and other government resources.
But there's also questions about how we as a community, the scholarly community, preserve that information there stresses on data replication services and locks. How do we manage those risks. And some of these risks are internal. But some of the risks that we face are actually also external. I think everyone in the call is familiar with the issues of Silicon Valley coming in and creating challenges for our space search and discovery, which had been an important domain of library and publishing systems.
And AI services used to be a large, significant business, and it's kind of been eaten away by some Silicon Valley firms. There are also related to that kind of impacts on our own community. Here I'm thinking about the SeamlessAccess project, which is a joint project between niso, the STM Association. And internet2.
And this is a project to help facilitate access to. Subscribed resources to kind of solve the where are you from problem. That system was originally built on browser local storage, and unfortunately, browser local storage looks a lot like advertising cookies and has been deprecated by many browser vendors and we as a community are having to deal with that. We've shifted support for Seamless Access away from browser local storage to n pi system, but even that system is probably going to break in the long term as Silicon Valley.
As the tech world moves more towards things like digital wallets. How do we react to that? We need to invest resources. We need to work in partnership not only within the technical side of the publishing community, but also with our partners within the library and the academic space. And that kind of leads me to the final kind of thought here, which is the development of Partnerships Caroline, during her opening keynote at the STEM conference last month, really stressed the importance of Partnerships here.
And working with other members of our community to help solve some of these really big problems, and even to raise the profile of the issues that we have. How do we make ourselves bigger, if you will, in the eyes of the government, in the eyes of the Silicon Valley companies? You know, this entire industry is only a couple months of profit for a company like Apple, which is worrying, but collectively, and this is sort of one of the underlying reasons why I wrote the piece a couple of weeks ago on model licenses, because I think of ways in which we can collaborate, that can help affect, at a larger scale, the ways in which the Silicon Valley technology ecosystem interacts with our community.
And the only way we can do that is not in one off, one on one partnership conversations, one on one, one on one contracts with these large tech companies. But try and build consistent perspectives on some of these questions, some technological, others policy, but a kind of unified perspective on these questions that can really help achieve what we all like. What are our priorities?
What are we trying to achieve as a community? What are the things we care about? Things like provenance. Things like attribution. Things like trusted sourcing. Those sorts of things are valuable to us. And how can we raise those issues in a meaningful way that other communities, larger communities, might be willing to adopt if we speak with one voice?
So those are some thoughts on technology. I'm looking forward to some of the other thoughts from the other panelists. Yeah, I want to encourage all of our panelists to jump in with thoughts, questions or comments. And also those of you in the audience, you should have amp, a little button down the bottom of your screen. We'll try to get to questions sort of in context as they come along.
And hopefully have some time at the end and maybe I'll start. Todd I'm always reminded of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quote that everybody wants to build, and nobody wants to do maintenance. It's often, an overlooked aspect. But I've also was thinking of, we've seen this real call for moving away from closed infrastructure to open infrastructure to community owned, open infrastructure, but that's really largely dependent on a lot of these community organizations that you're talking about forming partnerships.
But what happens? We're in this situation where organizations that are dependent on grants, that are dependent upon meetings, you know, if you're a lot of your revenue comes from your annual meeting and, you know, no, no one internationally is going to come to your us meeting in the next several years, and no government employees will be allowed to go to your meetings.
Your your meeting revenue is going to be down as well. So what happens in the world of open infrastructure in these, you know, in these times like this? And does this drive us more towards single vendors providing closed systems as something we're going to end up relying on more. Well let's start from the perspective that open is never free. Open always has costs.
And one of the challenges, and this is often AI mean this is true of any product and any product, any company, any organization that's trying to create a product. You need to invest in it in order to maintain it. And there are trade offs with open versus closed systems. You could just as easily not invest in a closed system as not invest in an open system.
There are a variety of software tools that haven't been updated in years that are, you know, creaking under their own weight. So I don't think of this as a open versus closed system problem. It is an investment problem. And investments are always hard when people are tightening, tightening their belts. For open systems, you lack the centralization.
You lack the organizational structure to advance the prioritization of resources. Some open systems are better at that than others, so I don't want to blanket statements to say that this is a problem writ large, but that lack of centralization and prioritization is one of the key problems in open infrastructure. And that is certainly something that people are going to have to focus attention on and not look at it as public goods.
This open source project is a public good. And we are just doing this for the goodness of our heart. It has to come from real business motivated motivations. Yeah, it's a lot easier to do that maintenance. If you have a revenue stream and you're sustainable rather than sort of living. Grant to grant. I want to, you know, we can't really talk about technology and risk without talking about artificial intelligence.
So I want to turn to Hong. Hong, can you talk a little bit about the risks and the challenges that you see publishers facing in this emerging era of, of generative AI that we're either in the middle of or just entering into, depending on your where you think we are on this, on this curve of development. So maybe give us your thoughts on risk and AI and we'll go from there.
Sure, sure. Yeah so before I talk about the risk challenge, I just want to Bookshare and mention, you at beginning of this month. And I have, you know, attended the. Generative AI summit in London. So which, the many the industries. The companies from different industries that get together and share.
The ideas or the risk challenges I found, you know, the many of the risks. The challenges. You know, we have the similar, similar risk and challenges Among these different industries, for example, even integrity risk. So this is. Like the deep fake. So and especially the synthetic content all this is.
Mainly from the media media industry and also the scholarly publishing. So the generative I can create the realistic fake research data manuscript. Authorship as a kind of a paper mill. And the problem is, is ability to create. The human like the text and the, you know, the alter the images can make the fraud harder to spot. So this is and also I'm just I'm, I was thinking as AI generated content that becomes increasingly prevalent.
So we should I think it's worth considering whether we should proactively detect it in the future. Because because currently all the, the starts thinking. And I'll keep asking, Oh, what's the best tool to detect the AI generated content or something. But is it relevant in the future. So this is something. And another thing is about IP licensing the challenge. So this is we all know the user the content to train the large language model without clear the license can enroll the content value and create a legal risk.
So another one is about quality control risk. Because I driven all this manuscript processing, for example, the content summarization and copy editing, even the peer review stuff, it can introduce the error in accuracy. So how can we minimize this, all these errors. And I also learned from the other publishers and from other industry. And there's some others shared the common challenges.
One is about strategic misalignment and lack of the for example, lack of clarity on who owns the AI strategies. Is it owned by business or data team or technology or compliance? There are also some the disconnect between the leadership optimize and also the workforce reality. And I remember that in that summit the one. Oh, is this a Mac Mackenzie or something I forgot.
There's a clear the attention because they show us a data. This is clear. Clear? the tension between the leaders and the staff on AI maturity. So where are the 75% of the executives feel positive, but only the 45% of employees agree. So there's this gap. And another thing that I found is the absence of the formal approval process for AI tools adoption.
So the different people, different teams can use different tools. And also the shadow AI tools introduced by teams without oversight, without a standard approve, you know, approve the process. So this is bringing the risks under the Data and data security and copyright flagrant infringement of this and other things is about emerging regulation. So I think that the view you mentioned the EU, AI Act, GDPR, China's the regulation us, the, you know, the AI framework or require the proactive the compliance significantly raising the governance complexity.
So when we design. So this is a imply whenever we think about it, all the AI tools and design, the AI roadmap. We need to consider this cop this. And lastly, I think this is also common for many organizations is balance, innovation, governance and the strategic focus. Because sometimes the two restrictive policies stifle the innovation and the competitive position.
But on the other hand, conversely, the insufficient governance also risks ethical, legal, and reputational consequences. So this is something we need a balance and among the innovation, governance and the strategic focus. So I think this is the risk, the challenges I have learned so far. I'm sure there's many others, but I this is some this is 8 or 9.
This is what I feel is worth to mention because others also, you know, I think the I'm sure the many people have already know the other risks. Yeah Yeah. So and Yeah. And you know, as we were preparing for this webinar, you know, to me, there's this sort of common theme kept arising of just this level of uncertainty thinking short term thinking long term.
You know, when you think of so many of the issues with AI copyright issues. Well, you know, everything's in everything's in court cases right now. Is this fair use? Is this not fair use? Those court cases are going to take a while. I was just reminded the other day that the sci-hub case in India is now in its fifth year, and it just got delayed another I forget how many months.
So these are very sort of slow moving things and it makes it very difficult to do scenario planning to do sort of strategy planning in particular is an area that I struggle with in that we see this great promise. We constantly hear this, these, you know, we're going to have self-driving cars in a few years. We've been hearing that for, you know, decades now. And I think it's a real question of, where are we on the curve?
Are we I mean, I'll ask you, I mean, are we accelerating in the development? Have we hit a point where things are slowing down because we've found, you know, we've found all the low hanging fruit are things, you know, do you expect things to speed up in the short term as far as what I can do and the role it's going to play? Yeah, this is a very good question for me. I think the generic AI is still in its beginning, between the beginning and the middle, under the wave.
And there's still a lot of the potential. But the good thing, Thanks to the GPT, because I have the work on the AI for many years, and for example, the 10 years ago when we start talking about AI design, as I mentioned, the AI, not many people, the interest, the people interested in this, but not many people willing to pay for this, to invest on this. Because, you know, this is a no one knows.
You know, it's so complicated. And then we couldn't find, you know, the reliable, you know, the way to measure the value and to prove to them the value. But now, Thanks to the GPT, everyone know the potential, the value of the AI. So the now the organization start investing all this stuff. I think this but indeed this is a fundamental strategic challenge faced by organizations like what you said.
So because, you know, the it's significant uncertainty like what you said, especially with rapidly evolving technology like AI. I think it's because of the one reason is because of rapid technology technology shift, because innovation could happen. So quickly and unpredictably, so outpacing the traditional strategic planning cycle. So sometimes you can see that today is the AI models is it keeps releasing the powerful very powerful that almost every week or every day or something.
So it's the cutting edge. I can quickly become obsolete. So this is something. And also another thing I think is ecosystem readiness and the regular regulation uncertainty. I think this is also is worse sometimes. Let's use the, you know, the self-driving car as an example. So of course, the one reason is still is not, you know, the it's still not there yet.
And one thing I think is the one, of course, one reason is about technology because the technology is not that advanced yet, not mature yet. But another part is about ecosystem readiness and the regulation is the regulation there. And also it is the people's mindset is changed. Do they accept this? Are they willing to take this car? And it is the ecosystem because some, some, some people said, why is this always you know, this, you know, the accident, with, the self-driving car is because there's a mixture of the self-driven car and the human driven.
And if there's all about, you know, the self-driving cars on the road, maybe it's much better because everyone is follow the same rule. I mean, every car follow the same rule. So I think this need the ecosystem readiness and also the traffic or the, you know, the junction, the rules, all this stuff. I think this is something that what this imply to publish to us.
I think this is a for example we keep mentioning and it's built. We need a flexible strategies that can adapt as technology mature. And the second, you know, the change. So it's for us based on my experience. So a balanced the faces adoption plan, along with the strategic plan and prioritized readiness is crucial, which we shouldn't. You know, the we can think big but we need to start from small.
So this is a very important we need to build a more agile capability rather than the rigid plan. So we start think big, start from small to solve a real small problem. And then the measured value demo the value and then based on the face. And also another thing is about the we need to recognize short term opportunity then have immediate tangible impact.
Whereas the more you know, the speculative the long term promises. So sometimes, you know people, it's easy for people to mix this together. So we need to have the short term opportunity to implement this first and then think about the long term, not the, you know, the other way around. Yeah Yeah. Great I want to turn now to the elephant or perhaps the Herd of elephants in the room.
We're we're seeing a global rise in authoritarianism, led certainly over the last three months by the US federal government. We're increasingly seeing orders requiring the removal of information from public availability, as Todd touched on. We're seeing demands made on the research community to police what is said and how it is said. We saw threatening letters go out from a federal attorney to several journals in the last week alone.
So I want to turn to Alice because you have your finger on the pulse of these things, and you've been taking a leadership role in the community here. Can you talk about censorship? What forms of censorship are we seeing? Why are they a risk to our community of scholarly communications? Yeah Thanks, David. And I should preface this by saying I am by no means an expert on censorship, certainly not in the legal sense of the word, but I am, as I think probably many, maybe all of us on this call are very worried by the sudden dramatic increase in censorship here in the US, which I think, you know, is a serious existential threat for all of us working in this space.
So when David asked the chefs if we wanted to talk on this webinar, I did immediately put my hand up and say, yes, if nobody else wants to, I would like to talk about censorship. This slide shows just some a very tiny handful, sadly, of US government censorship in the headlines recently. Now, of course, censorship isn't new and it's not new in the US, according to my friendly internet, the earliest recorded instances of censorship date back to Greek and Roman times.
And of course, there have been all sorts of instances everywhere, including in the US. I am going to, without too much apologizing, speak mainly about the US situation because, as I say, I think that really is where the existential threat to scholarly communications is at the moment. And I would also say that arguably, we in the scholarly communications community didn't really pay enough attention to other censorship efforts and book bans and things like that have been escalating in recent years.
And I think probably that's mostly because they were impacting public and school libraries, not academic ones. So I, I do worry a bit that we were kind of basking in a false sense of security, and we should have been perhaps more on the ball about this. As David, you said, you know, the Trump administration is very focused on censorship, much of which, honestly, is legally questionable, legally questionable.
And one of the things that I am personally finding hard is how many organizations are kind of rolling over and just complying in advance without challenging whether what they're being asked to do is legal. And in fact, one my kind of favorite in a horrible way example of this happening is a friend of mine's sister who works in the Department of Defense as a Writer. Her job at the moment, instead of writing, is to go through everything she's written and literally remove every single reference to women, women or individual women, which I just think is so kind of Stalinist in its it's just unbelievable to me.
So I think this stuff is happening. It's real. People are complying, in my view, in advance. This includes things like the banning of words and phrases, including things like peanut butter allergy. I mean really defunding important research that doesn't align with the administration's anti-science goals. Dismantling or deleting elements of critical databases.
As David, you mentioned letters to journal editors threatening them. There's a lot going on in this space. So I think it's kind of self-evident why we should care about the censorship of research. But I still think it's probably worth kind of reiterating some of the reasons. So first of all, this sort of crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI work, you know, is being presented as if it's a bad thing.
But actually, even if you take the politics out of it, which shouldn't, in my view, really be there anyway, you can't do research meaningfully without taking into account diversity, equity and inclusion. You can't conduct health research without knowing the demographics of the people that you're talking to. You can't do social science research in the same way. You can't do humanities if you're not thinking critically about what our history teaches us.
For example, the fact that critical data is known to inform some of these sorts of treatments and policy decisions should worry all of us from a sort of equity perspective. The fact that important perspectives and voices are being silenced is also worrying. You know, if you want to think about academic freedom, we should all have the freedom to express our views. Even we may not agree with each other, but we should be able to respectfully express those views.
And we also now, sadly, are going to have a horribly incomplete research record. Even if things turn around, how are we going to plug those gaps that have now been created? I think the deletion of data and databases. Similarly is very worrying for us. All data is being changed, it's being deleted, it's being made inaccessible. That's not just impacting researchers here in the US.
That's impacting researchers everywhere. I don't know if you remember, about a month or so after the new administration came into effect, into PubMed, closed down sort of unexpectedly, unexpectedly, and everybody was in a panic because they thought maybe the plug had been pulled on it. Well, it hadn't, it was, you know, it was a legitimate reasons why it had been pulled down. But that fear should make us all realize how much we rely, and not just within the research space, but but across the whole world on that sort of data being readily available to us.
So the impact of this is going to be felt not just now, but far into the future. And there are also just to pick up on a little bit on what you said, you know, there are going to be consequences for AI and large language model training, that there's challenges enough around that already. But when you factor in all the incomplete and wrong data, that's going to be out there for AI to be trained on, that's not a good thing.
Again, looking at academic freedom, selective research funding based on the administration's priorities and beliefs is not a good thing for any of us. I mean, I guess you could argue this always happens to some extent, but because of the insertion of many sort of layers and, and groups of individuals to provide checks and balances. I think for the most part. Government funded research, at least in this country, has been fairly evenly handedly.
Approached the fact that freedom of speech on campus is being suppressed and. Prosecuted and, you know, people are being abducted off the streets. We should all be very, very concerned about that. And then this sort of politically motivated review of publications of journals of conference attendance, again, it's stopping academics and researchers from having free, free, valuable conversations with each other that lead to advances in research.
And then, of course, there's the global impact of all this, which again, I think is sort of self-evident in many ways. But, you know, we should be worried about the fact that there is already starting to be a reluctance to publish in or review for us journals because, you know, if somebody in another part of the world is worried that what they want to publish is going to be censored by a journal. That's a bad thing.
I think we're almost certainly going to see. Maybe we have already. I don't know, but a decrease in submissions and reviews from us academics. I think, as I say, are these threats to globally use data and resources that are currently housed in the US and developed over here, and then there's certainly much reduced funding available to address some of these issues of real global transnational concern like climate change, which we need to be acting together globally to, to address.
And a lot of the funding from that has been coming from the US and is now not going to be available. So lots I think I fear to be worried about, but I don't want to be completely gloom and doom. So I do want to talk a little bit about some of the groups who are standing up for research and doing so increasingly powerfully, which is really encouraging. I think it's very telling that initially the there was a lot of grassroots defense of research.
There was very little at the leadership level, which was honestly quite disappointing. But faculty and staff at universities moved quite quickly to stand up for science. So organizations like AAUP and the Union of Concerned Scientists have been very active. Libraries, probably because they have been in the censorship spotlight for a while, are also well prepared for this. Ella has been doing some good stuff.
Every library is a great Institute that is essentially a Pack for libraries, and I'm going to share in the chat in a minute a video of a webinar that they ran recently for academic libraries. Their focus in the past has been more on public and school libraries. But they did a fantastic webinar, which I think is openly available now for everybody for academic libraries, and I really encourage you to watch it.
It's very powerful. It was sponsored by Emerald. Institutions are finally at the leadership level, finally starting to band together. I think the Harvard standing up to Trump was a huge deal. There has now been this letter to Trump from, I think, about 200 University presidents. The Big Ten are making efforts to join forces. So it finally looks like there's groupings of resistance happening at the institutional level.
I think in the publishing community it's so far less the case. But again, there are individual organizations that are standing up. Again, I want to flag Emerald as a real leader in this space. In the publishers group, u. Press's library publishing coalition have all been doing good work. And of course, a number of individual journals also have been publishing editorials nature, the Lancet, science, lots of actually individual smaller journals.
And many of these groups, I'm very happy to say, have signed the Declaration to defend research against US government censorship, which is the initiative that I'm involved with on a personal level. This is not with my sort of more brains hat on, which was initiated by Lisa Schiff of California Digital library and is our kind of effort to give people the opportunity to stand up for what we believe in, in terms of defending research against US government censorship.
Many of the organizations I mentioned have signed that Declaration, along with well over 4,000 individuals, and we're hoping that this will give us some leverage to both work collaboratively with other organizations to push this anti-censorship agenda, and also give people a toolkit that they can use to fight back individually. So I do have some other thoughts around sort of opportunities and things like that, but I think I'll stop there.
Thanks Thanks, Alice. I mean, I, I take the philosophical point of view that, you know, that science is political, research is political. Anything we do in a social context has political aspects to it. There are those who disagree. But even if you take the politics out of it, there are a lot of practical concerns here in our community.
If your journal relies on a lot of US government authors or peer reviewers, they may be gone from your sphere of activity now. And also, you know, let's just talk a little bit about, research integrity. Can you publish an article with integrity if you can't talk about the demographics of the subjects, or if an author has to take their name off the paper? That's that be an accurate depiction of how the research is actually done?
Yeah so totally agree. Yeah and there's a question in, you know, you touched on a little about plans to join together to advocate, which maybe we'll turn to, to Caroline at this point, who can give us this sort of higher level view across many organizations. So the policies were coming, you know, we're seeing coming out of Washington go, go beyond just the controlling the messaging, you know, the censorship.
What is the truth? We're also seeing a pretty wide ranging program to, in my opinion, essentially dismantle the role of US universities and to dismantle the US's scientific and academic research programs as a whole. If implemented, this will have wide ranging impacts all over the community, ranging from, you know, things like budget cuts at libraries to just far less research being done.
So I want to bring in Carolyn. You know, you have something of a unique viewpoint here. Your organization works across a broad membership of global publishers and vendors and other groups, some for profit, some not for profit. Some are enormous. Some, you know, very small scale. Can you give us some thoughts on the big picture? You know, what are you seeing as far as the concerns, the scenario planning, advocacy efforts that are happening on behalf of the different organizations in our community?
Yeah Thanks, David. And I would also add to that breadth of the groups that I talk with in our members. We also have members from many different countries as well. So I'm sort of seeing where the concerns are coming up or bubbling up globally. And just to reiterate something you said at the beginning, like, I think that this isn't just about what's happening in the US right now.
That situation is layering on to the challenges that publishers were already facing, with Downward pressures on pricing, on pushes towards open access and public access, and how to adjust their own publishing programs in a way that would be sustainable for those organizations. We've seen steep increases, as has been noted earlier, in research integrity issues and the associated costs with fighting that.
Also, we've seen some opportunities and challenges, of course, that are related to a world that's now saturated with AI, which Hong was also discussing. What I think I'm seeing in general from the members of STM anyway, is I think the leadership in these associations and these organizations and companies are doing what leaders need to do in these situations is beginning with saying, OK, what's our core mission? Let's let's remind ourselves of what that is.
So that that can remain as our guiding star. And of course, we as STM have had to do this as well. If our mission is to advance trusted research, then we need to think about that seriously and think about threats or risks in relationship to that. That said, if I, if I think a little bit about the US situation and what I'm also seeing globally, there's also a set of risks, some of which I think we already are starting to see play out.
So scenarios, some facts, some things we do know about that we could start trying to think about and do some scenario planning or some modeling around. And of course then there are some other things that are only just now starting to show themselves or are sharknadoes. So if you saw the STEM trends 2029 or read Todd carpenter's article on The Scholarly Kitchen in this year's image.
In the background there is a Sharknado. So a tornado with sharks spinning around, which really was to symbolize the unknown and the stuff that and that's where I think we've gotten in this really strange world of, you don't even know how to scenario plan, because what could really happen may be well beyond your imagination of thinking about what could happen right now. But that said, let's bring it back to some things we do know.
And you mentioned some of the funding. So we are already aware, of course, that there are cuts being made in federal funding. Those are and I've spoken with some libraries. These are absolutely 100% going to affect those libraries. My heart goes out to those libraries who are really trying to grapple with those cuts. Someone also shared with me a group that has some transformative agreements, that this is going to be a little bit like COVID as well, with the cuts in federal funding, with the cuts to our own budget, with the cuts in the number of international students that will be on our campuses with the cuts and the kind of collaborative programs we might have with some groups overseas because they were based on federal funding, that's going to affect our outputs, and we don't quite know what that looks like yet.
So it's a little bit like COVID that we're going to need to try and do some modeling around that. So if you have a transformative agreement, I don't know how many articles, we are going to publish next year or the year after. So so there'll be a while kind of trying to adjust and work that out. I think those are things that we could start to run some scenarios around now.
I think too, there is related to that. I think there's a question in my mind as well, are we actually going to see the amount of research outputs in general decrease, or are we in due course? If things shift a little bit in the US, are we going to start to see the center of research outputs. And research shift somewhat, because there were already some things happening, even before this situation. In the US, for example, we know that China, China's share of research outputs in relationship to the rest of the world, has grown steeply, and they outpaced the US in recent years, China has very conscientiously been investing in research in specific areas, with an aim to be the world leader in those areas.
And coupled with that, they've been investing in building an international publishing industry, so publishing also content from around the world. And they focused on building very, very high impact, high quality journals. Many of those initially were partnered with publishers outside of China, but they're now in a second phase of their so-called excellence program are going to be starting to bring those journals back home.
And, and pulling them out of Partnerships. So that's a going to also shake things up, I think, for those non-chinese publishers who have been partnered with them. But it also means we may be seeing research outputs. And publishing moving to somewhere else. We also just want to say here in, I'm in Norway. And just today the Norwegian Research Council announced a new $100 million crowns.
So that's about 10 pounds million, I guess, monies that they're going to put into a special call already in May for international graduate students and researchers coming to Norway in some key core areas. So Europe is sort of working up, as you may have seen, some of the headlines of thinking about how can we attract some of the talent here. So I think researchers are still going to want to do research, and there are places that are more than happy to welcome those researchers or to help to fund that research, but it may well mean that we're going to start to see some shifts around, the percentage of what we publish coming from different countries and so potentially doing some modeling around that.
I would imagine is something that some of my STM members are doing. But there are also some other things that I think are also concerning that I've mentioned in some other contexts. Research security concerns. This is something that, you know, previously when I was traveling, I hadn't heard anyone mention this.
And then in 2024, I heard this in nearly every conversation in every country, with just a couple of exceptions. And just to build a little bit on also what Todd Carpenter was saying about some of the technical infrastructure, this relates to that as well, because with research security questions, we're seeing some policies coming down saying we need to be more careful about researchers from certain countries either coming to our institutions or entering into databases or using some of our resources.
We've also seen, I've heard this here in Europe, institutions saying we're having to be much more careful. And now thinking about security measures, about are our systems secure? Do people not have access to things they shouldn't have access to? And I think with all of this, it comes back to the publishers as well, because we're going to be probably facing new types of regulations and requests with respect to what we're publishing, who we're publishing, who can publish with whom.
Et cetera, et cetera. So we see some of that coming down the line as well. But all of that said, I do want to talk just a little bit about some of the positive things. And I think, again, I think this was a moment when folks are just refocusing again on what is our mission. And I think that can be very, very powerful, of course. But equally we're also seeing.
And so when Alice, I think you kind of cued this up a little bit as did Todd, that we're starting to see some groups together come together that maybe weren't coming together previously and really thinking about, hey, you know what? Deep down, we all agree on the deep values of this space and how can we collaborate and how can we work together to move things forward. And so I'm seeing those conversations emerge, and I'm hearing that from others as well.
And so it's really trying to figure out where can we align and move forward together. And that means that we might have an opportunity to reset some of the relationships that have become very polarized. So albeit in the US there's a really polarized atmosphere right now. I think nonetheless, some of us who felt polarized are kind of going, wait a minute, maybe we actually are more in the middle together and we can find a way to come together again.
And I think finally things weren't perfect. Right? so I think what is also good when things get thrown at us and challenge the way we have been doing things, is it is that opportunity to think through again, how might we do things better? A good example of that has been around that research integrity space, that steep incline. The need to massively retract articles has really ensured that publishers are now really focused on research integrity.
And I can say in terms of the technology, certainly no one has bowed out of their support for the research integrity hub, for example. We just see more and more people coming on board. So I do think that there are these opportunities when these things happen. Of of coming together and really trying to collaborate and work on some solutions. So I think, again, reevaluating what we've done, not everything was perfect.
Can we do it better? Can we do it differently? There's new collaboration opportunities, and I think there's an opportunity to reset some of the relationships that we've had in the past in, in the midst of all of this. But I do think the, the, the money is going to move around. The publishing outputs are going to move around a bit. And we're going to be seeing some of the trends that we're already starting to happen, but they're also accelerating even more because of what we began to see happening here in the US.
I think I'll park for now due to time there. David, I know there's so much more we can discuss. I posted, I posted in the chat. STM has a really interesting paper about phase two of the China excellence plans for journals. I posted the link to that in the chat. I encourage everyone to check that out. So you understand it better. I love the idea of, that we were this community that has a common purpose, and yet we've been viciously fighting with each other over the way to achieve that purpose for, for, you know, decades, if not longer than that.
And in a way, this is an opportunity when that entire purpose is threatened. Maybe we realize our difference that aren't that different, and maybe we can find that common ground and at least, you know, preserve things long enough that we can get back to arguing with each other. And it's something that, although I would say I think it's tenuous, right. Like I think when especially when money gets tight, that can then pull everything apart again.
So I think there's something in also feeling very committed to, to those things of trying to come together right now. Yeah there was a question in the chat about, you know, the economic questions. You know, we've got tariffs. What may be happening, happening now, not happening now, not happening. We've also you know, one of the things you and I talked about was this question, if, you know, if the European nations have to start investing more heavily in defense spending, if US support from NATO goes away, that money's probably a lot of that money may come out of education, may come out of research, or, you know, how are people thinking on that sort of economic level as we get more insular in some ways for each, each country.
Yeah I think that those are potential scenarios so far. I don't necessarily see that playing out in Europe, though. I think it could happen in terms of the shift in taking money from research and putting it into defense. Actually, quite the contrary. What we've seen is that the EU is starting to hunker down with putting forward that we should enshrine academic freedom in the law. So that's quite different.
And and the second being, as I said, instead we're seeing some calls in Europe going, Oh, this is our great opportunity to attract the best talent from the United States. How do we do that? So, so far, I'm not seeing what was my worst case scenario of the purse strings even tightening more here in Europe though we could see that of course. Yeah all right.
We're coming up on time. I'll apologize to everyone because this could have been a six hour webinar two. You know, we could talk about this. I think, you know, to me, you know, there's a message in diversity, a word which we're I know we're not supposed to use anymore. But in thinking of diversifying your activities, your portfolio, everything you do, not having all of your eggs in one basket, not being reliant upon one particular geographic region for everything you do, not being reliant on one business model or one set of policies, and thinking about keeping your eggs in many baskets, many revenue streams, things like that, different ways.
So when we do have these sort of existential threats. There there are ways to survive. If one particular thing goes, goes awry. I want to thank our panelists for their thoughts. Lori, I think you have some closing remarks for us. Yes, I do, Thank you, David. So Thanks, everyone for participating in today's SSP webinar.
And Thank you very much to our speakers for sharing their time and expertise. We encourage attendees to provide feedback on today's webinar, and provide suggestions for future webinars that helps us shape our programming. Please complete the evaluation via scanning the QR code or the evaluation link. You will receive at the conclusion of the event. As a reminder, the SSP annual meeting is coming up.
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Thank you. Thank you. Hi
Segment:0 .
So Hi, everyone. We'll get started in just a few moments as we. Let folks gather. Hello, everyone. We'll give it a couple of more seconds here, a few seconds, and then we will get underway as we allow folks to gather and join the webinar.
OK, we'll get underway. Folks are still gathering, but I think we can start. So thank you and welcome to today's Scholarly Kitchen webinar. The Scholarly Kitchen the state of risk in scholarly communications. Before we start, I want to thank our 2025 education sponsors, access innovations and Silverchair.
We are grateful for your support, as always. My name is Lori Carlin. I am the chief Commercial Officer at Delta. Thank and the SSP education committee's webinar lead. Before we get started, I have just a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists.
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We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. Now I'll pass the mic, so to speak, to our moderator for today's session, David Crotty, editor in chief of the Scholarly Kitchen and Sr. Consultant at Clark and Esposito. All right. Thanks, Lori.
And Thanks to everyone for joining us today. It's a quick sort of introduction. I recently I was writing an introduction to a report for a client, and I started with one of my sort of stock phrases, the statement that scholarly publishing is undergoing an unprecedented period of rapid change. And at that point, I realized I've been using this same statement pretty much for the last at least 10 years.
So it occurs to me that at some point, this sort of unprecedented period just really became our new normal. And volatility is just sort of the way things are now. We're seeing often contradictory shifts in the environment, some rapid, some longer term. We have a US government that seems to pivot its policies towards research funding and universities every 10 minutes or so.
Although the overall proposed direction of travel is pretty clear. We saw European and private funders give something like plan s about a five year runway, before seeming to largely abandon it without much available to replace it. So with all this uncertainty comes risk. Every organization, whether you're a publisher, a Research Society, a library or a supplier to the community needs to understand the risks that it's facing and builds build plans for adapting to and, where possible, countering those risks.
We're not talking about a zero sum game. And there, you know, there are trade offs that come with every strategy, both for the short and the long term. Risk also can come from overreacting to the moment. For example, if you think of publishing programs that shifted their portfolios to meet, you know, just the latest funder policy and then seeing the funder change their minds and pull the plug on that approach causes as many problems as not responding to what's going on.
So the US governmental policies are obviously eating up a lot of the oxygen in the room. We would be remiss, but we would be remiss to only talk about them as the only risk that our community is facing. And we will certainly talk about them. But we also want to discuss other areas of concern, including research integrity, AI technology in general, new approaches coming out of China, for example, anything else really that's on our panelists mind.
And also, I'll say that I don't want this, this webinar to be entirely negative, as our state of uncertainty also offers opportunity and perhaps motivation for some potential reforms, even large scale reforms and changes that might not be possible with the inertia of a stable market. So with that, I want to introduce our panelists. I'll go alphabetically, starting with Todd Carpenter, who is executive director of niso, the National Information Standards Organization, a nonprofit Association that develops and maintains standards for the creation, persistent management and effective interchange of information.
Alice Meadows is a co-founder of the more brains cooperative scholarly communications consultancy, with a focus on open research and research infrastructure. Alice has many years of both scholarly publishing and research infrastructure experience. With us also is Caroline Sutton, who is the CEO for the STM Association, the International Association of science, technical and medical publishers, and hongzhao, who is the senior director of AI product innovation at Wiley, where he designs AI strategy, drives the product roadmap and leads teams in developing solutions.
So I want to start in the area of technology and we'll turn to Todd to get things rolling. So, Todd, what are some of the technical risks that scholarly publishing community is facing, and how do some of these risks relate to our current environment? Sure Thanks, David, and appreciate SSP for inviting me to speak. I think scholarly publishing is both an editorial scientific.
It's a research process, but fundamentally the process of publication, the process of distribution is fundamentally a technological one. And in this era, as David said, it's been we've been living through unprecedented technological change for the last 30 years. Things are rapidly changing. And in particular in this, I'd say in this particular moment, there are a lot of causes for concern around technological risk that are facing publishers.
We are possibly entering an economic downturn. It's a time, a period of economic uncertainty from a variety of different reasons. And this can lead organizations to batten down the hatches to, you know, preserve resources. And one of the things, one of the core problems that we have in that kind of environment is taking our eye off the ball of maintaining the infrastructure we have.
If I can, I will pause or delay the necessary maintenance or replacing my air conditioning system for just another year. That's it's been running for 25 years, but maybe it'll make it through. One more summer, maybe it will, or maybe it won't. But there are hidden costs to not maintaining infrastructure, not maintaining the technological. Underpinnings of scholarly communications.
Will they break immediately? Probably not. Could they teeter and creak as new added stresses are put on them? Quite possibly. I'm kind of thinking here about the incredible bandwidth and demands that are being taken, particularly on open systems from AI bots and things like that, that are constantly hitting these open systems to download as much of this open content as they can get.
But it is causing those systems to creak and is causing some of them to break, you know, temporarily. But that degrades service for the patrons and the users of those systems. Also, in eras when there is a kind of battening down the hatches, there's an ever increasing levels of technical debt. And technical debt is something that we've it's something that we've constantly had to manage as an industry.
Thinking here about the fact that the oldest IT systems on University campuses are the library management systems. They'll replace the it. They'll replace their accounting system. They'll replace their email system. They'll replace all of the technological systems. But the library system is the last one to get fixed. The average age of a library system in our ecosystem is over 20 years old.
That same model exists in the publishing ecosystem in terms of circulation systems. You know, it works. We'll keep it running. There is a reason why federal government businesses are running a lot of COBOL because it works, it functions, it's teetering. It's problematic. But that creates other issues.
There are in this present environment though also some other concerns from the technological perspective. There has been a lot of concern of late as it relates to preservation of government resources, of data sets, of repositories of information that the government provides. This similarly is an issue for our community, a scholarly publishing community, both because we link to them, we rely on those, you know, the protein data bank and other government resources.
But there's also questions about how we as a community, the scholarly community, preserve that information there stresses on data replication services and locks. How do we manage those risks. And some of these risks are internal. But some of the risks that we face are actually also external. I think everyone in the call is familiar with the issues of Silicon Valley coming in and creating challenges for our space search and discovery, which had been an important domain of library and publishing systems.
And AI services used to be a large, significant business, and it's kind of been eaten away by some Silicon Valley firms. There are also related to that kind of impacts on our own community. Here I'm thinking about the SeamlessAccess project, which is a joint project between niso, the STM Association. And internet2.
And this is a project to help facilitate access to. Subscribed resources to kind of solve the where are you from problem. That system was originally built on browser local storage, and unfortunately, browser local storage looks a lot like advertising cookies and has been deprecated by many browser vendors and we as a community are having to deal with that. We've shifted support for Seamless Access away from browser local storage to n pi system, but even that system is probably going to break in the long term as Silicon Valley.
As the tech world moves more towards things like digital wallets. How do we react to that? We need to invest resources. We need to work in partnership not only within the technical side of the publishing community, but also with our partners within the library and the academic space. And that kind of leads me to the final kind of thought here, which is the development of Partnerships Caroline, during her opening keynote at the STEM conference last month, really stressed the importance of Partnerships here.
And working with other members of our community to help solve some of these really big problems, and even to raise the profile of the issues that we have. How do we make ourselves bigger, if you will, in the eyes of the government, in the eyes of the Silicon Valley companies? You know, this entire industry is only a couple months of profit for a company like Apple, which is worrying, but collectively, and this is sort of one of the underlying reasons why I wrote the piece a couple of weeks ago on model licenses, because I think of ways in which we can collaborate, that can help affect, at a larger scale, the ways in which the Silicon Valley technology ecosystem interacts with our community.
And the only way we can do that is not in one off, one on one partnership conversations, one on one, one on one contracts with these large tech companies. But try and build consistent perspectives on some of these questions, some technological, others policy, but a kind of unified perspective on these questions that can really help achieve what we all like. What are our priorities?
What are we trying to achieve as a community? What are the things we care about? Things like provenance. Things like attribution. Things like trusted sourcing. Those sorts of things are valuable to us. And how can we raise those issues in a meaningful way that other communities, larger communities, might be willing to adopt if we speak with one voice?
So those are some thoughts on technology. I'm looking forward to some of the other thoughts from the other panelists. Yeah, I want to encourage all of our panelists to jump in with thoughts, questions or comments. And also those of you in the audience, you should have amp, a little button down the bottom of your screen. We'll try to get to questions sort of in context as they come along.
And hopefully have some time at the end and maybe I'll start. Todd I'm always reminded of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quote that everybody wants to build, and nobody wants to do maintenance. It's often, an overlooked aspect. But I've also was thinking of, we've seen this real call for moving away from closed infrastructure to open infrastructure to community owned, open infrastructure, but that's really largely dependent on a lot of these community organizations that you're talking about forming partnerships.
But what happens? We're in this situation where organizations that are dependent on grants, that are dependent upon meetings, you know, if you're a lot of your revenue comes from your annual meeting and, you know, no, no one internationally is going to come to your us meeting in the next several years, and no government employees will be allowed to go to your meetings.
Your your meeting revenue is going to be down as well. So what happens in the world of open infrastructure in these, you know, in these times like this? And does this drive us more towards single vendors providing closed systems as something we're going to end up relying on more. Well let's start from the perspective that open is never free. Open always has costs.
And one of the challenges, and this is often AI mean this is true of any product and any product, any company, any organization that's trying to create a product. You need to invest in it in order to maintain it. And there are trade offs with open versus closed systems. You could just as easily not invest in a closed system as not invest in an open system.
There are a variety of software tools that haven't been updated in years that are, you know, creaking under their own weight. So I don't think of this as a open versus closed system problem. It is an investment problem. And investments are always hard when people are tightening, tightening their belts. For open systems, you lack the centralization.
You lack the organizational structure to advance the prioritization of resources. Some open systems are better at that than others, so I don't want to blanket statements to say that this is a problem writ large, but that lack of centralization and prioritization is one of the key problems in open infrastructure. And that is certainly something that people are going to have to focus attention on and not look at it as public goods.
This open source project is a public good. And we are just doing this for the goodness of our heart. It has to come from real business motivated motivations. Yeah, it's a lot easier to do that maintenance. If you have a revenue stream and you're sustainable rather than sort of living. Grant to grant. I want to, you know, we can't really talk about technology and risk without talking about artificial intelligence.
So I want to turn to Hong. Hong, can you talk a little bit about the risks and the challenges that you see publishers facing in this emerging era of, of generative AI that we're either in the middle of or just entering into, depending on your where you think we are on this, on this curve of development. So maybe give us your thoughts on risk and AI and we'll go from there.
Sure, sure. Yeah so before I talk about the risk challenge, I just want to Bookshare and mention, you at beginning of this month. And I have, you know, attended the. Generative AI summit in London. So which, the many the industries. The companies from different industries that get together and share.
The ideas or the risk challenges I found, you know, the many of the risks. The challenges. You know, we have the similar, similar risk and challenges Among these different industries, for example, even integrity risk. So this is. Like the deep fake. So and especially the synthetic content all this is.
Mainly from the media media industry and also the scholarly publishing. So the generative I can create the realistic fake research data manuscript. Authorship as a kind of a paper mill. And the problem is, is ability to create. The human like the text and the, you know, the alter the images can make the fraud harder to spot. So this is and also I'm just I'm, I was thinking as AI generated content that becomes increasingly prevalent.
So we should I think it's worth considering whether we should proactively detect it in the future. Because because currently all the, the starts thinking. And I'll keep asking, Oh, what's the best tool to detect the AI generated content or something. But is it relevant in the future. So this is something. And another thing is about IP licensing the challenge. So this is we all know the user the content to train the large language model without clear the license can enroll the content value and create a legal risk.
So another one is about quality control risk. Because I driven all this manuscript processing, for example, the content summarization and copy editing, even the peer review stuff, it can introduce the error in accuracy. So how can we minimize this, all these errors. And I also learned from the other publishers and from other industry. And there's some others shared the common challenges.
One is about strategic misalignment and lack of the for example, lack of clarity on who owns the AI strategies. Is it owned by business or data team or technology or compliance? There are also some the disconnect between the leadership optimize and also the workforce reality. And I remember that in that summit the one. Oh, is this a Mac Mackenzie or something I forgot.
There's a clear the attention because they show us a data. This is clear. Clear? the tension between the leaders and the staff on AI maturity. So where are the 75% of the executives feel positive, but only the 45% of employees agree. So there's this gap. And another thing that I found is the absence of the formal approval process for AI tools adoption.
So the different people, different teams can use different tools. And also the shadow AI tools introduced by teams without oversight, without a standard approve, you know, approve the process. So this is bringing the risks under the Data and data security and copyright flagrant infringement of this and other things is about emerging regulation. So I think that the view you mentioned the EU, AI Act, GDPR, China's the regulation us, the, you know, the AI framework or require the proactive the compliance significantly raising the governance complexity.
So when we design. So this is a imply whenever we think about it, all the AI tools and design, the AI roadmap. We need to consider this cop this. And lastly, I think this is also common for many organizations is balance, innovation, governance and the strategic focus. Because sometimes the two restrictive policies stifle the innovation and the competitive position.
But on the other hand, conversely, the insufficient governance also risks ethical, legal, and reputational consequences. So this is something we need a balance and among the innovation, governance and the strategic focus. So I think this is the risk, the challenges I have learned so far. I'm sure there's many others, but I this is some this is 8 or 9.
This is what I feel is worth to mention because others also, you know, I think the I'm sure the many people have already know the other risks. Yeah Yeah. So and Yeah. And you know, as we were preparing for this webinar, you know, to me, there's this sort of common theme kept arising of just this level of uncertainty thinking short term thinking long term.
You know, when you think of so many of the issues with AI copyright issues. Well, you know, everything's in everything's in court cases right now. Is this fair use? Is this not fair use? Those court cases are going to take a while. I was just reminded the other day that the sci-hub case in India is now in its fifth year, and it just got delayed another I forget how many months.
So these are very sort of slow moving things and it makes it very difficult to do scenario planning to do sort of strategy planning in particular is an area that I struggle with in that we see this great promise. We constantly hear this, these, you know, we're going to have self-driving cars in a few years. We've been hearing that for, you know, decades now. And I think it's a real question of, where are we on the curve?
Are we I mean, I'll ask you, I mean, are we accelerating in the development? Have we hit a point where things are slowing down because we've found, you know, we've found all the low hanging fruit are things, you know, do you expect things to speed up in the short term as far as what I can do and the role it's going to play? Yeah, this is a very good question for me. I think the generic AI is still in its beginning, between the beginning and the middle, under the wave.
And there's still a lot of the potential. But the good thing, Thanks to the GPT, because I have the work on the AI for many years, and for example, the 10 years ago when we start talking about AI design, as I mentioned, the AI, not many people, the interest, the people interested in this, but not many people willing to pay for this, to invest on this. Because, you know, this is a no one knows.
You know, it's so complicated. And then we couldn't find, you know, the reliable, you know, the way to measure the value and to prove to them the value. But now, Thanks to the GPT, everyone know the potential, the value of the AI. So the now the organization start investing all this stuff. I think this but indeed this is a fundamental strategic challenge faced by organizations like what you said.
So because, you know, the it's significant uncertainty like what you said, especially with rapidly evolving technology like AI. I think it's because of the one reason is because of rapid technology technology shift, because innovation could happen. So quickly and unpredictably, so outpacing the traditional strategic planning cycle. So sometimes you can see that today is the AI models is it keeps releasing the powerful very powerful that almost every week or every day or something.
So it's the cutting edge. I can quickly become obsolete. So this is something. And also another thing I think is ecosystem readiness and the regular regulation uncertainty. I think this is also is worse sometimes. Let's use the, you know, the self-driving car as an example. So of course, the one reason is still is not, you know, the it's still not there yet.
And one thing I think is the one, of course, one reason is about technology because the technology is not that advanced yet, not mature yet. But another part is about ecosystem readiness and the regulation is the regulation there. And also it is the people's mindset is changed. Do they accept this? Are they willing to take this car? And it is the ecosystem because some, some, some people said, why is this always you know, this, you know, the accident, with, the self-driving car is because there's a mixture of the self-driven car and the human driven.
And if there's all about, you know, the self-driving cars on the road, maybe it's much better because everyone is follow the same rule. I mean, every car follow the same rule. So I think this need the ecosystem readiness and also the traffic or the, you know, the junction, the rules, all this stuff. I think this is something that what this imply to publish to us.
I think this is a for example we keep mentioning and it's built. We need a flexible strategies that can adapt as technology mature. And the second, you know, the change. So it's for us based on my experience. So a balanced the faces adoption plan, along with the strategic plan and prioritized readiness is crucial, which we shouldn't. You know, the we can think big but we need to start from small.
So this is a very important we need to build a more agile capability rather than the rigid plan. So we start think big, start from small to solve a real small problem. And then the measured value demo the value and then based on the face. And also another thing is about the we need to recognize short term opportunity then have immediate tangible impact.
Whereas the more you know, the speculative the long term promises. So sometimes, you know people, it's easy for people to mix this together. So we need to have the short term opportunity to implement this first and then think about the long term, not the, you know, the other way around. Yeah Yeah. Great I want to turn now to the elephant or perhaps the Herd of elephants in the room.
We're we're seeing a global rise in authoritarianism, led certainly over the last three months by the US federal government. We're increasingly seeing orders requiring the removal of information from public availability, as Todd touched on. We're seeing demands made on the research community to police what is said and how it is said. We saw threatening letters go out from a federal attorney to several journals in the last week alone.
So I want to turn to Alice because you have your finger on the pulse of these things, and you've been taking a leadership role in the community here. Can you talk about censorship? What forms of censorship are we seeing? Why are they a risk to our community of scholarly communications? Yeah Thanks, David. And I should preface this by saying I am by no means an expert on censorship, certainly not in the legal sense of the word, but I am, as I think probably many, maybe all of us on this call are very worried by the sudden dramatic increase in censorship here in the US, which I think, you know, is a serious existential threat for all of us working in this space.
So when David asked the chefs if we wanted to talk on this webinar, I did immediately put my hand up and say, yes, if nobody else wants to, I would like to talk about censorship. This slide shows just some a very tiny handful, sadly, of US government censorship in the headlines recently. Now, of course, censorship isn't new and it's not new in the US, according to my friendly internet, the earliest recorded instances of censorship date back to Greek and Roman times.
And of course, there have been all sorts of instances everywhere, including in the US. I am going to, without too much apologizing, speak mainly about the US situation because, as I say, I think that really is where the existential threat to scholarly communications is at the moment. And I would also say that arguably, we in the scholarly communications community didn't really pay enough attention to other censorship efforts and book bans and things like that have been escalating in recent years.
And I think probably that's mostly because they were impacting public and school libraries, not academic ones. So I, I do worry a bit that we were kind of basking in a false sense of security, and we should have been perhaps more on the ball about this. As David, you said, you know, the Trump administration is very focused on censorship, much of which, honestly, is legally questionable, legally questionable.
And one of the things that I am personally finding hard is how many organizations are kind of rolling over and just complying in advance without challenging whether what they're being asked to do is legal. And in fact, one my kind of favorite in a horrible way example of this happening is a friend of mine's sister who works in the Department of Defense as a Writer. Her job at the moment, instead of writing, is to go through everything she's written and literally remove every single reference to women, women or individual women, which I just think is so kind of Stalinist in its it's just unbelievable to me.
So I think this stuff is happening. It's real. People are complying, in my view, in advance. This includes things like the banning of words and phrases, including things like peanut butter allergy. I mean really defunding important research that doesn't align with the administration's anti-science goals. Dismantling or deleting elements of critical databases.
As David, you mentioned letters to journal editors threatening them. There's a lot going on in this space. So I think it's kind of self-evident why we should care about the censorship of research. But I still think it's probably worth kind of reiterating some of the reasons. So first of all, this sort of crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI work, you know, is being presented as if it's a bad thing.
But actually, even if you take the politics out of it, which shouldn't, in my view, really be there anyway, you can't do research meaningfully without taking into account diversity, equity and inclusion. You can't conduct health research without knowing the demographics of the people that you're talking to. You can't do social science research in the same way. You can't do humanities if you're not thinking critically about what our history teaches us.
For example, the fact that critical data is known to inform some of these sorts of treatments and policy decisions should worry all of us from a sort of equity perspective. The fact that important perspectives and voices are being silenced is also worrying. You know, if you want to think about academic freedom, we should all have the freedom to express our views. Even we may not agree with each other, but we should be able to respectfully express those views.
And we also now, sadly, are going to have a horribly incomplete research record. Even if things turn around, how are we going to plug those gaps that have now been created? I think the deletion of data and databases. Similarly is very worrying for us. All data is being changed, it's being deleted, it's being made inaccessible. That's not just impacting researchers here in the US.
That's impacting researchers everywhere. I don't know if you remember, about a month or so after the new administration came into effect, into PubMed, closed down sort of unexpectedly, unexpectedly, and everybody was in a panic because they thought maybe the plug had been pulled on it. Well, it hadn't, it was, you know, it was a legitimate reasons why it had been pulled down. But that fear should make us all realize how much we rely, and not just within the research space, but but across the whole world on that sort of data being readily available to us.
So the impact of this is going to be felt not just now, but far into the future. And there are also just to pick up on a little bit on what you said, you know, there are going to be consequences for AI and large language model training, that there's challenges enough around that already. But when you factor in all the incomplete and wrong data, that's going to be out there for AI to be trained on, that's not a good thing.
Again, looking at academic freedom, selective research funding based on the administration's priorities and beliefs is not a good thing for any of us. I mean, I guess you could argue this always happens to some extent, but because of the insertion of many sort of layers and, and groups of individuals to provide checks and balances. I think for the most part. Government funded research, at least in this country, has been fairly evenly handedly.
Approached the fact that freedom of speech on campus is being suppressed and. Prosecuted and, you know, people are being abducted off the streets. We should all be very, very concerned about that. And then this sort of politically motivated review of publications of journals of conference attendance, again, it's stopping academics and researchers from having free, free, valuable conversations with each other that lead to advances in research.
And then, of course, there's the global impact of all this, which again, I think is sort of self-evident in many ways. But, you know, we should be worried about the fact that there is already starting to be a reluctance to publish in or review for us journals because, you know, if somebody in another part of the world is worried that what they want to publish is going to be censored by a journal. That's a bad thing.
I think we're almost certainly going to see. Maybe we have already. I don't know, but a decrease in submissions and reviews from us academics. I think, as I say, are these threats to globally use data and resources that are currently housed in the US and developed over here, and then there's certainly much reduced funding available to address some of these issues of real global transnational concern like climate change, which we need to be acting together globally to, to address.
And a lot of the funding from that has been coming from the US and is now not going to be available. So lots I think I fear to be worried about, but I don't want to be completely gloom and doom. So I do want to talk a little bit about some of the groups who are standing up for research and doing so increasingly powerfully, which is really encouraging. I think it's very telling that initially the there was a lot of grassroots defense of research.
There was very little at the leadership level, which was honestly quite disappointing. But faculty and staff at universities moved quite quickly to stand up for science. So organizations like AAUP and the Union of Concerned Scientists have been very active. Libraries, probably because they have been in the censorship spotlight for a while, are also well prepared for this. Ella has been doing some good stuff.
Every library is a great Institute that is essentially a Pack for libraries, and I'm going to share in the chat in a minute a video of a webinar that they ran recently for academic libraries. Their focus in the past has been more on public and school libraries. But they did a fantastic webinar, which I think is openly available now for everybody for academic libraries, and I really encourage you to watch it.
It's very powerful. It was sponsored by Emerald. Institutions are finally at the leadership level, finally starting to band together. I think the Harvard standing up to Trump was a huge deal. There has now been this letter to Trump from, I think, about 200 University presidents. The Big Ten are making efforts to join forces. So it finally looks like there's groupings of resistance happening at the institutional level.
I think in the publishing community it's so far less the case. But again, there are individual organizations that are standing up. Again, I want to flag Emerald as a real leader in this space. In the publishers group, u. Press's library publishing coalition have all been doing good work. And of course, a number of individual journals also have been publishing editorials nature, the Lancet, science, lots of actually individual smaller journals.
And many of these groups, I'm very happy to say, have signed the Declaration to defend research against US government censorship, which is the initiative that I'm involved with on a personal level. This is not with my sort of more brains hat on, which was initiated by Lisa Schiff of California Digital library and is our kind of effort to give people the opportunity to stand up for what we believe in, in terms of defending research against US government censorship.
Many of the organizations I mentioned have signed that Declaration, along with well over 4,000 individuals, and we're hoping that this will give us some leverage to both work collaboratively with other organizations to push this anti-censorship agenda, and also give people a toolkit that they can use to fight back individually. So I do have some other thoughts around sort of opportunities and things like that, but I think I'll stop there.
Thanks Thanks, Alice. I mean, I, I take the philosophical point of view that, you know, that science is political, research is political. Anything we do in a social context has political aspects to it. There are those who disagree. But even if you take the politics out of it, there are a lot of practical concerns here in our community.
If your journal relies on a lot of US government authors or peer reviewers, they may be gone from your sphere of activity now. And also, you know, let's just talk a little bit about, research integrity. Can you publish an article with integrity if you can't talk about the demographics of the subjects, or if an author has to take their name off the paper? That's that be an accurate depiction of how the research is actually done?
Yeah so totally agree. Yeah and there's a question in, you know, you touched on a little about plans to join together to advocate, which maybe we'll turn to, to Caroline at this point, who can give us this sort of higher level view across many organizations. So the policies were coming, you know, we're seeing coming out of Washington go, go beyond just the controlling the messaging, you know, the censorship.
What is the truth? We're also seeing a pretty wide ranging program to, in my opinion, essentially dismantle the role of US universities and to dismantle the US's scientific and academic research programs as a whole. If implemented, this will have wide ranging impacts all over the community, ranging from, you know, things like budget cuts at libraries to just far less research being done.
So I want to bring in Carolyn. You know, you have something of a unique viewpoint here. Your organization works across a broad membership of global publishers and vendors and other groups, some for profit, some not for profit. Some are enormous. Some, you know, very small scale. Can you give us some thoughts on the big picture? You know, what are you seeing as far as the concerns, the scenario planning, advocacy efforts that are happening on behalf of the different organizations in our community?
Yeah Thanks, David. And I would also add to that breadth of the groups that I talk with in our members. We also have members from many different countries as well. So I'm sort of seeing where the concerns are coming up or bubbling up globally. And just to reiterate something you said at the beginning, like, I think that this isn't just about what's happening in the US right now.
That situation is layering on to the challenges that publishers were already facing, with Downward pressures on pricing, on pushes towards open access and public access, and how to adjust their own publishing programs in a way that would be sustainable for those organizations. We've seen steep increases, as has been noted earlier, in research integrity issues and the associated costs with fighting that.
Also, we've seen some opportunities and challenges, of course, that are related to a world that's now saturated with AI, which Hong was also discussing. What I think I'm seeing in general from the members of STM anyway, is I think the leadership in these associations and these organizations and companies are doing what leaders need to do in these situations is beginning with saying, OK, what's our core mission? Let's let's remind ourselves of what that is.
So that that can remain as our guiding star. And of course, we as STM have had to do this as well. If our mission is to advance trusted research, then we need to think about that seriously and think about threats or risks in relationship to that. That said, if I, if I think a little bit about the US situation and what I'm also seeing globally, there's also a set of risks, some of which I think we already are starting to see play out.
So scenarios, some facts, some things we do know about that we could start trying to think about and do some scenario planning or some modeling around. And of course then there are some other things that are only just now starting to show themselves or are sharknadoes. So if you saw the STEM trends 2029 or read Todd carpenter's article on The Scholarly Kitchen in this year's image.
In the background there is a Sharknado. So a tornado with sharks spinning around, which really was to symbolize the unknown and the stuff that and that's where I think we've gotten in this really strange world of, you don't even know how to scenario plan, because what could really happen may be well beyond your imagination of thinking about what could happen right now. But that said, let's bring it back to some things we do know.
And you mentioned some of the funding. So we are already aware, of course, that there are cuts being made in federal funding. Those are and I've spoken with some libraries. These are absolutely 100% going to affect those libraries. My heart goes out to those libraries who are really trying to grapple with those cuts. Someone also shared with me a group that has some transformative agreements, that this is going to be a little bit like COVID as well, with the cuts in federal funding, with the cuts to our own budget, with the cuts in the number of international students that will be on our campuses with the cuts and the kind of collaborative programs we might have with some groups overseas because they were based on federal funding, that's going to affect our outputs, and we don't quite know what that looks like yet.
So it's a little bit like COVID that we're going to need to try and do some modeling around that. So if you have a transformative agreement, I don't know how many articles, we are going to publish next year or the year after. So so there'll be a while kind of trying to adjust and work that out. I think those are things that we could start to run some scenarios around now.
I think too, there is related to that. I think there's a question in my mind as well, are we actually going to see the amount of research outputs in general decrease, or are we in due course? If things shift a little bit in the US, are we going to start to see the center of research outputs. And research shift somewhat, because there were already some things happening, even before this situation. In the US, for example, we know that China, China's share of research outputs in relationship to the rest of the world, has grown steeply, and they outpaced the US in recent years, China has very conscientiously been investing in research in specific areas, with an aim to be the world leader in those areas.
And coupled with that, they've been investing in building an international publishing industry, so publishing also content from around the world. And they focused on building very, very high impact, high quality journals. Many of those initially were partnered with publishers outside of China, but they're now in a second phase of their so-called excellence program are going to be starting to bring those journals back home.
And, and pulling them out of Partnerships. So that's a going to also shake things up, I think, for those non-chinese publishers who have been partnered with them. But it also means we may be seeing research outputs. And publishing moving to somewhere else. We also just want to say here in, I'm in Norway. And just today the Norwegian Research Council announced a new $100 million crowns.
So that's about 10 pounds million, I guess, monies that they're going to put into a special call already in May for international graduate students and researchers coming to Norway in some key core areas. So Europe is sort of working up, as you may have seen, some of the headlines of thinking about how can we attract some of the talent here. So I think researchers are still going to want to do research, and there are places that are more than happy to welcome those researchers or to help to fund that research, but it may well mean that we're going to start to see some shifts around, the percentage of what we publish coming from different countries and so potentially doing some modeling around that.
I would imagine is something that some of my STM members are doing. But there are also some other things that I think are also concerning that I've mentioned in some other contexts. Research security concerns. This is something that, you know, previously when I was traveling, I hadn't heard anyone mention this.
And then in 2024, I heard this in nearly every conversation in every country, with just a couple of exceptions. And just to build a little bit on also what Todd Carpenter was saying about some of the technical infrastructure, this relates to that as well, because with research security questions, we're seeing some policies coming down saying we need to be more careful about researchers from certain countries either coming to our institutions or entering into databases or using some of our resources.
We've also seen, I've heard this here in Europe, institutions saying we're having to be much more careful. And now thinking about security measures, about are our systems secure? Do people not have access to things they shouldn't have access to? And I think with all of this, it comes back to the publishers as well, because we're going to be probably facing new types of regulations and requests with respect to what we're publishing, who we're publishing, who can publish with whom.
Et cetera, et cetera. So we see some of that coming down the line as well. But all of that said, I do want to talk just a little bit about some of the positive things. And I think, again, I think this was a moment when folks are just refocusing again on what is our mission. And I think that can be very, very powerful, of course. But equally we're also seeing.
And so when Alice, I think you kind of cued this up a little bit as did Todd, that we're starting to see some groups together come together that maybe weren't coming together previously and really thinking about, hey, you know what? Deep down, we all agree on the deep values of this space and how can we collaborate and how can we work together to move things forward. And so I'm seeing those conversations emerge, and I'm hearing that from others as well.
And so it's really trying to figure out where can we align and move forward together. And that means that we might have an opportunity to reset some of the relationships that have become very polarized. So albeit in the US there's a really polarized atmosphere right now. I think nonetheless, some of us who felt polarized are kind of going, wait a minute, maybe we actually are more in the middle together and we can find a way to come together again.
And I think finally things weren't perfect. Right? so I think what is also good when things get thrown at us and challenge the way we have been doing things, is it is that opportunity to think through again, how might we do things better? A good example of that has been around that research integrity space, that steep incline. The need to massively retract articles has really ensured that publishers are now really focused on research integrity.
And I can say in terms of the technology, certainly no one has bowed out of their support for the research integrity hub, for example. We just see more and more people coming on board. So I do think that there are these opportunities when these things happen. Of of coming together and really trying to collaborate and work on some solutions. So I think, again, reevaluating what we've done, not everything was perfect.
Can we do it better? Can we do it differently? There's new collaboration opportunities, and I think there's an opportunity to reset some of the relationships that we've had in the past in, in the midst of all of this. But I do think the, the, the money is going to move around. The publishing outputs are going to move around a bit. And we're going to be seeing some of the trends that we're already starting to happen, but they're also accelerating even more because of what we began to see happening here in the US.
I think I'll park for now due to time there. David, I know there's so much more we can discuss. I posted, I posted in the chat. STM has a really interesting paper about phase two of the China excellence plans for journals. I posted the link to that in the chat. I encourage everyone to check that out. So you understand it better. I love the idea of, that we were this community that has a common purpose, and yet we've been viciously fighting with each other over the way to achieve that purpose for, for, you know, decades, if not longer than that.
And in a way, this is an opportunity when that entire purpose is threatened. Maybe we realize our difference that aren't that different, and maybe we can find that common ground and at least, you know, preserve things long enough that we can get back to arguing with each other. And it's something that, although I would say I think it's tenuous, right. Like I think when especially when money gets tight, that can then pull everything apart again.
So I think there's something in also feeling very committed to, to those things of trying to come together right now. Yeah there was a question in the chat about, you know, the economic questions. You know, we've got tariffs. What may be happening, happening now, not happening now, not happening. We've also you know, one of the things you and I talked about was this question, if, you know, if the European nations have to start investing more heavily in defense spending, if US support from NATO goes away, that money's probably a lot of that money may come out of education, may come out of research, or, you know, how are people thinking on that sort of economic level as we get more insular in some ways for each, each country.
Yeah I think that those are potential scenarios so far. I don't necessarily see that playing out in Europe, though. I think it could happen in terms of the shift in taking money from research and putting it into defense. Actually, quite the contrary. What we've seen is that the EU is starting to hunker down with putting forward that we should enshrine academic freedom in the law. So that's quite different.
And and the second being, as I said, instead we're seeing some calls in Europe going, Oh, this is our great opportunity to attract the best talent from the United States. How do we do that? So, so far, I'm not seeing what was my worst case scenario of the purse strings even tightening more here in Europe though we could see that of course. Yeah all right.
We're coming up on time. I'll apologize to everyone because this could have been a six hour webinar two. You know, we could talk about this. I think, you know, to me, you know, there's a message in diversity, a word which we're I know we're not supposed to use anymore. But in thinking of diversifying your activities, your portfolio, everything you do, not having all of your eggs in one basket, not being reliant upon one particular geographic region for everything you do, not being reliant on one business model or one set of policies, and thinking about keeping your eggs in many baskets, many revenue streams, things like that, different ways.
So when we do have these sort of existential threats. There there are ways to survive. If one particular thing goes, goes awry. I want to thank our panelists for their thoughts. Lori, I think you have some closing remarks for us. Yes, I do, Thank you, David. So Thanks, everyone for participating in today's SSP webinar.
And Thank you very much to our speakers for sharing their time and expertise. We encourage attendees to provide feedback on today's webinar, and provide suggestions for future webinars that helps us shape our programming. Please complete the evaluation via scanning the QR code or the evaluation link. You will receive at the conclusion of the event. As a reminder, the SSP annual meeting is coming up.
It'll be held May 28th through 30 in Baltimore, Maryland. So if you haven't registered yet, please be sure to do so. And Thanks again to our sponsors, Silverchair and access innovations. Today's webinar was recorded and all registrants will be sent a link to the recording when it's posted on the SSP website. And this concludes our session today. Thank you all.
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