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Beyond Books & Journals: The wild world of content formats
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Beyond Books & Journals: The wild world of content formats
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Welcome, my name
HANSEN: is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I am the director of marketing at Silverchair, and I want to thank you for joining us for today's event, which is the third in the Platform Strategies Webinar Series. We have a really excellent lineup of speakers today and no shortage of ground to cover, so I will be quick and just taking us through a few housekeeping items before kicking it over to our speakers today. This event is being recorded, and a copy of the recording will be sent to you afterwards along with links to watch the previous two events in the series and to register for the final event, which will take place on November 9, and which is titled, Putting a Price on it, the changing nature of society publishing.
HANSEN: This series is a set of free virtual events. And as with the in-person iteration, we are excited to field your questions and engage in discussions with you that can carry beyond this hour. So please do engage with us via the Q&A. As we go along, we'll have some time for that at the end. And get in touch with us afterwards if you want to continue the conversation.
HANSEN: Finally, at the end of this event you'll see a survey requesting your rating for the event, which will just help us with future planning. We appreciate your feedback, and thanks again for joining. With that, I will hand it over to today's moderator, Hannah Heckner, Silverchair chair's director of Product Strategy.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much Stephanie. Great to have everyone here today. I'm really excited about the panel. Articles and e-books still remain the most prominent format in which research is communicated, but different content objects are being used more and more often to supplement these artifacts, and in some cases, replace them. This great group of panelists we've assembled here today is going to talk about what goes into discovering those new content types, developing them, and supporting them, and perhaps maybe muse a bit on what new content types we might be talking about a few years down the road.
HANNAH HECKNER: I will offer some biographies of these panelists today. And we will kick things off with Dawit Tegbaru. He joined the Knowledge Futures Group in September 2020 as Editorial Manager, where he supports community publishing on PubPub, it's open authoring and publishing platform. Dawit's work in scholarly publishing spans about 15 years. He's been managing journals for non-profit society publishers.
HANNAH HECKNER: He spent most of his career with the American Geophysical Union, and oversaw journals for societies in engineering and biomedicine disciplines as a managing editor. He was instrumental in developing the American Society for Radiation Oncology, data sharing policy, and advocated as a panel moderator, consensus building for a clinical trial data sharing policy, among oncology journals more broadly.
HANNAH HECKNER: Second, we'll be hearing from Rebekah Stacha. She is the assistant director of technical publications for the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Her responsibility, she has responsibility for the strategic management at SPE's publishing programs for journals proceedings, books and SPE's electronic databases, including the flagship of multi-society database, OnePetro. With over 20 years of non-profit association management experience at SPE, Rebekah is passionate about executing innovative solutions to capture and effectively deliver technical content to members worldwide.
HANNAH HECKNER: During her career at SPE, Rebekah has had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles beyond publications, which have helped her fully understand the complexities of non-profit association management. Maybe that could be a wild world to discuss as well. These include working in member and student programs, developing SPE's online communities of practice, and managing SPE's retail sales.
HANNAH HECKNER: Last but not least, we will hear from Todd Carpenter. Todd currently serves as executive director of the National Information Standards Organization. You may know it as NISO. It's a non-profit association that develops and maintains standards for the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information. Prior to joining NISO, Todd was director of business development at BioOne.
HANNAH HECKNER: He also held management positions at the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Energy Intelligence Group, and the Haworth Press. He has served on the boards of several industry and community organizations, including the Baltimore-- excuse me, Baltimore County Public Library, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and the Free Ebook Foundation. He contributes regularly as a chef on the Scholarly Kitchen. OK, great.
HANNAH HECKNER: I'm so excited to hear from you all. As I mentioned previously, we'll be starting with Dawit. Over to you Dawit.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Thank you Hannah. I'm going to share my screen. Can you all see my slides? All right. Thanks so much for having me. It's a definite pleasure and privilege to share this session with such highly esteemed colleagues. My name is Dawit. As Hannah mentioned, I'm Editorial Manager with the Knowledge Futures Group.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We're a non-profit technology organization building public digital infrastructure. And my role involves supporting the curation and production of content published on PubPub, which is our publishing platform, our open publishing platform, I should say. So from the outside, I do want to express how grateful I am to be supported by a really special team back at the virtual office.
DAWIT TEGBARU: I want to shout out Catherine Ahearn and Gabe Stein, Travis Rich, in particular who've been working on PubPub from the very beginning. And I must credit them for their leadership in bringing PubPub up so far in a relatively short period of time. So speaking of time, I'm sure we've all been contemplating like parents and generations before us, whether things will go back to the way they have been.
DAWIT TEGBARU: But I believe that we're living in a unique time where we're seeing paradigm shifts in the way we operate, one that's rooted in values and takes into account the way we relate to and support knowledge communities. And that's what the KFT strives to do. And as we build infrastructure that creates an atmosphere where groups irrespective of their discipline, their size, their ethnicity, their gender or location, we work to ensure that everyone is empowered to define knowledge and design publishing processes that are right for their mission.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so as I mentioned earlier, PubPub is our collaborative and open community-driven publishing platform. I won't go through all the features it has but I do want to mention some key things that it supports. One is versioning with a changelog, collaborative editing. We have support for interactive media elements, inline annotations and discussions, import, export, support for multiple file types, including JATS, XML LaTeX, Word, HTML, EPUB and others.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We also have the ability to generate Crossref DOIs, and communities and pubs are able to enjoy analytic dashboards. I should have mentioned earlier but we have a little over 3,000 communities, most of whom are independently using PubPub to manage their end-to-end publication workflows. And many of these communities are made up of libraries, university presses, scholarly societies, independent research groups and repositories.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so through our partnerships and sharing our roadmap and hosting open user forum, we try to be intentional about designing infrastructure that all groups can benefit from. We have a variety of key partners, but I'll just mention a few. One is eLife, UC Berkeley, MIT Press, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the American Psychological Association, Iowa State University Libraries, and AfricaArXiv.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so, as I mentioned earlier, we're very intentional about delivering communities of various types and size, a lower cost of exploring new models of publishing. And so we work with various stakeholders in the hope of making this concept of community publishing mainstream, and we put forward some really key components to make this happen early. And one is to expand the customization of review curation and publication management processes within PubPub so that it supports a variety of outputs, including journals, books, conferences, blogs preprint servers, and online newsletters and more.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We also are trying to provide workflow templates across various community types so that each of them can discover and integrate the benefits of various models. And finally, we're building tools to evaluate the impact of collaborative processes directly into the infrastructure that go beyond the traditional downloads and page views type of analytics. So I want to use the next minute or two to just provide some snippets of the different content types on PubPub, all of which are open access, and under Creative Commons licenses.
DAWIT TEGBARU: The first is the oral history of criminology project, which is supported by Criminology Open. And we really love that they're taking the oldest form of historical inquiry and presenting scholars or digital archive of scholars contributions to their field, and so each trial will take you to a video with relevant keywords. And then we also have great literature. And this journal of trial and error, which kind of speaks volumes by its title as supported by Utrecht University, and they really focus on closing the gap between what's research and publish.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So we like what they're doing. They have meta research and rejected grant applications. We have lightweight interactives. And that's actually become a noun at the KFG. We really enjoy brainstorming with authors and providing technical support. And one of our prior partners, as I mentioned APA earlier, their journal-- technology, mind, and behavior-- has been a great place to explore new ways of presenting research and engaging readers.
DAWIT TEGBARU: This example is from the widely-read article on Zoom fatigue. We also have the Harvard Data Science Review, another partner who's featuring interactive elements in their articles. In this example about AI-generated floor plans, we were able to utilize our inline annotations to invite readers to see a concept mentioned in the text and see it play out visually.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And readers are also in this particular instance able to interact with the underlying code. I also want to highlight Preprints. Preprints as we all know, has had an impact on scholarly communications and nothing like was been taking place since the start of the pandemic. So to combat misinformation, the Rapid Reviews COVID-19 project was launched by MIT Press and UC Berkeley to quickly provide reviews that affirm and reject preprints, or reject preprints.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so the reviews are citable. We have the AfricaArXiv, they're providing podcasts, audio-visual preprints, and just a really key partner. So just in the interest of time, I want to just move on to the end and say thank you for allowing me this opportunity to provide an overview of the KFG and PubPub.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much Dawit. That was really amazing to see what KFG is doing, especially with PubPub. Really excited to talk more about that. OK, Rebekah, over to you.
REBEKAH STACHA: Hey, I hope I'm sharing now. So a quick introduction, I'm Rebekah Stacha. I'm assistant director. As [? Heidi ?] said earlier, I was the Society of Petroleum Engineers. And I guess just really kind of giving you a quick perspective of more of your traditional publisher, but some of the ones that are being pushed by our industry and what we're doing to try and meet our readers and our members' needs.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I see that I'm not moving forward. There I go. So about us, just real quickly. We've been around since the 1800s. We were part of a larger organization called AIME, the mining engineers and we split off in the '50s. We are now 140,000 members strong in 144 countries worldwide. So we have a very global perspective in a lot of what we do.
REBEKAH STACHA: And it's very international in our perspective and how we approach our membership and supplying our publications in what we're producing. So obviously, we think our strength is again, back to those individual members and we support them through our publications, primarily through the OnePetro library that we produced, as well as our conferences and our workshops. So [INAUDIBLE] first place [INAUDIBLE] So our approach really one of the things that makes this a little unique from a lot of other society publishers out there is the fact that we focus quite heavily on conferences.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I will be the first to admit 2020 and 2021 have been very challenging. But we have tried to really pivot to doing a lot more virtual because the content remains still consistent of people wanting to present and share that content among the members. So we've just been working with a lot more virtual as many of you have. And it's now just changing how we capture and what we ultimately produce out of those conferences as captured content.
REBEKAH STACHA: Again, like a traditional publisher, we publish our books, our journals, and our conference proceedings. One of the things that we did do is shift quite a while back, probably six years, we only have one magazine that was still actually being printed. Other than, that we're almost entirely digital. And we do still make hard copies of books. But again, we are predominantly digital in both our journals and conference proceedings and anything else that we're doing.
REBEKAH STACHA: We're almost exclusively digital now. So that's really changed how we've approached our publishing and where we spend our time. One of the things that I find a little unique about working at SPE for the years I have, and different from other publishers, is the fact that we have a lot more of our content coming out of companies and our members in companies in addition to not just the academic sphere, which is driven a lot more by journals and impact factor and what's going on with that.
REBEKAH STACHA: A little bit back to what Dawit was saying, we want to push the boundaries about not only the content types but how we're capturing it because that's more of interest to our members than necessarily the name of the journal or what they're publishing into. So our users actually use our document repository. They have a question and they're looking for an answer, they're doing that sort of research a lot more times and using it in those tools as opposed to some of the deeper dives that you might see in scholarly world.
REBEKAH STACHA: There are active engineers using them to solve problems. So they look for individual papers. There's a lot of times when they care about more the individual paper, is a little odd to read more about the individual papers than they may about the journals or the conference that was published in. So the other thing that still I think really drives us and makes this kind of a unique perspective is the fact that we're so global in nature.
REBEKAH STACHA: It's driven a lot of our digital moves simply because the print pipelines and getting things in print worldwide was just logistically incredibly challenging. It's one of the benefits of being in a digital world and it means that we have and are always trying to push up, sorry, to push the boundaries about what we can do. So a look for the future of content, I think we covered so many great things in his presentation.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I know Todd is going to have some great ones coming up. So just a quick highlight, again, we really feel like multimedia interactive focus a little bit like even what we're showing you. But the papers have to [INAUDIBLE].. Now that [? they are ?] on the computers, what you can do with showing code, what you can do with showing how things are working. Multimedia video captures from presentations and conferences.
REBEKAH STACHA: Those are beginning to drive, moving the science forward and the technology forward in how we capture it. Software and AI driven solutions. One of the things we're finding now that people have and the ability to go through, it's not just going to be semantic language in some of those aspects but really moving into more AI, ask a question, get an answer, kind of question things coming back. I think we're going to see a lot more of those request-type things coming in and software platforms being driven that want to ingest content from our content, from our scholarly papers and things like that.
REBEKAH STACHA: So I think data mining is one of the things on the horizon that we're really looking at how to effectively use as a publisher and to protect our intellectual property while we do that. And the last thing I really feel like it's coming as a future of content is bite-size summarized content. I think that a lot of people really want something that's more of a summary coming up. They want to be able to get it that quick piece of information.
REBEKAH STACHA: And then they want to do a deeper dive in a full read only if they feel like there's that necessity to do so. I think that's being driven a lot by some of the things you're seeing in Google in a number of different ways of how that younger generation is preferring to consume its content. The last thing is really-- and I've said this in our discussions with the group previously. I really think multimedia as a stand-alone content is going to be really a key feature to how we're disseminating technology and conference-- sorry, not conference-- technology and content from the scholarly world going forward.
REBEKAH STACHA: Everyone has an iPhone, people are willing to record a lot more things and put it together. So many people now have the ability to create video themselves. I think that's something that's coming. How we effectively capture that and not only use it in scholarly publishing, but how do we maximize it? Is going to be one of the questions go forward. So thank you.
REBEKAH STACHA: That's my kind of quick and fast explanation about what I think the world's kind of looking like for the future.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much, Rebekah. Finally, we will hear from Todd. Over to you, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: All right. First thank you to Hannah and Stephanie and the entire team at Silverchair. Amazing people who I love working with all the time. So thank you for inviting me to speak with you all today. As much as Dawit and Rebekah moved forward and kind of talked about the future of formats and where content is headed, I'm going to take a step back and hopefully circle us back to the future but starting a bit from the past.
TODD CARPENTER: So starting about 3,500 years ago, people began recording information down on tablets, normally business transaction information. Prior to this, information was recorded on bones and stones and other soft materials. It wasn't until about 2,500 BCE that the Egyptians started using papyrus. And it wasn't until the 9th century that books began being printed using blocks and ink.
TODD CARPENTER: In China, roughly about 500 years later, the next advance in printing technology was invented by Johann Gutenberg in the 15th century. And from a standards perspective, this is where world kind of starts to get interesting. In the 16th and 17th century, as printing grew, content distribution was amongst the first of industrial process. And it was also one of the first processes to be up-start to apply standards.
TODD CARPENTER: This is an image from the 17th century that shows how signatures were folded when printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper. It illustrates one of the manufacturing problems with printing and assembling a book, that is, how do we ensure that it's put together in the proper order? Most of the earliest printers and their apprentices weren't even literate.
TODD CARPENTER: So they would annotate the corners of the pages with words or marks-- they were called catch words-- to signify that this page followed that page. And this eventually developed into a numbering system so that the binder could be assured that page 43 followed page 42 when it was all folded up and bound. So page numbers are a production system to solve a problem of keeping content in order as that developed.
TODD CARPENTER: And it eventually became a standard that we all use but for a very different purpose. So you start to see how information standards play a role in how content is created and used and distributed. Now jumping forward a few 100 years, we come to 1939. And that was the year that John Steinbeck's, Grapes of Wrath was first published. It is interestingly not coincidentally the year that NISO is formed.
TODD CARPENTER: We were formed as a part of the American Standards Institute. It was the committee on library and information, Z39, if you're into Antsy numbering systems. And it was formed to define how standards for content were managed, which really began with things like cataloging and organizational systems along with the abbreviations and naming conventions. And over the years, it grew to develop in terms of more physical issues, such as paper, ink, and identification systems.
TODD CARPENTER: Now jumping forward a few more decades, we are move into the 1960s and the dawn of commuters, and we kind of get to what Dawit and Rebekah we're talking about. This is an image of the first computer that was installed at the Library of Congress in January of 1965. Libraries were amongst the first adopters of computer technology because they were used to store vast amounts of information.
TODD CARPENTER: Now, how many of you remember these things? Raise your hands virtually. You'll notice down in the bottom right hand corner, it says, MARC, a little notation. This was a standard for creating these cards, the machine-readable cataloging standard. It was based on NISO's foundational Z39.2 standard for describing content, dated back to the 1930s. The MARC standard was developed in the '60s to encode this information.
TODD CARPENTER: And it was NISO's first foray into standards for digital information management. Now, in the last few decades, content forms have developed well beyond traditional books and journals. They've extended into code, into video, into visualizations, web pages, interactive tools, all of the things that Dawit and Rebekah were just talking about. And each of these formats, we have to explore the need for various standards for identifying them, describing them, delivering them, making them accessible for preserving them.
TODD CARPENTER: That brings us to NISO and how we have spent the last several decades, applying information technology, information standards to the world of content and applications. We're involved in all sorts of aspects of content, from its creation to its distribution to its preservation. And we're involved in applying standards in ways to make that process more efficient through JATS Office XML, EPUB standard, metadata standards for discovery, Dublin Core, KBART, Identifiers DOIs ISSNs, ISBNs, accessibility, DAISY, metrics, all of these things have to be retooled for the digital environment, which is how we're spending a lot of our time.
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm looking forward to discussing with Rebekah and Dawit and Hannah on all of these aspects of how information distribution is changing. So thank you. And Hannah, back to you.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, that was really great Todd. Thinking about signatures brings me back to my early days as a production assistant at TNF. That was a fun trip down memory lane. Great. Well, to remind everyone, please send along your questions as they arise. We have some conversation topics that we want to touch on but we of course would love to hear from you to keep that conversation going as well.
HANNAH HECKNER: So I thought that for this part of the discussion, it would be helpful to start with the ideation phase, about how an organization might decide to pursue a new content type. So maybe we'll start with you Dawit. So what were the conversations that led to pursuing these cool new ways to communicate the information and say about the Criminology Oral History Project?
HANNAH HECKNER: Was that driven by people that were creating that original content? Was it stakeholders within the organization? Could you just talk about that process about that project and maybe others?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah all of the examples that I showed are essentially highlights of the communities themselves defining, using their own practice, their discipline to inform how they want to disseminate the information. The PubPub platform that we're providing, the flexibility that we're giving to these various communities is more of the kind of the utility. And so we're actually learning-- it's like a symbiotic relationship.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We're learning a lot from these communities because they span across various disciplines. And we actually also involve them in the conversations about how we want to design it going forward. So it's a very iterative process. So we do have user forums, which is, I think, pretty standard. But our forums are very much open. And we can see not just questions about the platform.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We can see new ideas, and we can carry on conversations, even things that we might be thinking about for the future, for example, as we are building improvements or enhancements around the submission and review aspect of the platform, we kind of take an approach where we will see the conversations in the user forum and then also have road show product development phases where we can actually present what we're thinking before we spec it out.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And that way, these different groups have an opportunity to just share their insights and how they want the platform to really remain flexible and useful for their needs. So again, a lot of it is bringing in the communities, learn what they're excited about. We tried to put together a minimal viable product and iterate off of that. In fact, the rapid reviews, the preprint overlay journal that I showed earlier, that was definitely one great example of just a really agile response to what was happening in the world of scholarly publishing where you have a rise in preprints and people just trying to go through and figure out, like, is this information trustworthy?
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so we were able to kind of bring in the different groups and put that out and then kind of refine. And we have new features that are built around that that other communities can also take advantage of. So I think the main kind of takeaway here is just keeping an eye and ear out for community needs, engaging with them in different ways. We have user summits, we have to form. As I mentioned earlier, product roadshows, we can do surveys, and just being nimble but true also to our mission.
DAWIT TEGBARU: I think is really important. And that is to be that public digital infrastructure where everyone can kind of use it and define their processes accordingly.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's amazing, really community-centered and not just saying that but actually doing it. That's really great. Rebekah, I imagine that it might be a little bit different at SPE. Of course, you are a member-supported organization, so that community is really important. Could you speak about maybe the different stakeholders that would have input into the new content ideation and that whole process?
REBEKAH STACHA: Yeah so I think I'm going to echo Dawit. It sounds a little bit very similar. It's level is certainly different than in the way his communities are working. But again, being pushed by the community is still the underlying theme. Being pushed by the content creators, in this case, that's really one of the things that I think Dawit's groups are highly pushed by the content creators.
REBEKAH STACHA: The other piece that we kind of have that pushing us-- for some of the them, they should end up being the industry itself, the companies in the industry, that while we're an individual organization, they all work for these companies. They're all expecting to be able to kind of take that back into their working environment. So there's a lot of things being pushed by the companies wanting to have that access for their employees and what we can do about making that more available to them, more useful to them.
REBEKAH STACHA: How do we get that information to them in a more concise manner? Is driving some of that. So that's being pushed. Well, that's the only piece I would add to what Dawit already said. But I think is kind of a key feature.
HANNAH HECKNER: I see there's question that came in from Amit Joshi. Scott, I see your question as well. I'll address that later. Amit is asking about the best ways to get feedback from users and also to apply that. So he mentions that surveys can take a lot of work and get pretty low response rates. Dawit, you mentioned focus groups. But that could also be just that a very focused group.
HANNAH HECKNER: So are there other ways that you all have found to get effective and far more user feedback and evidence?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, so all of our users essentially are coming and using the platform because they want a flexible system. And so we're very accessible. They feel like they already know that they're part of the design. So it's a co-design platform. And so you might have the different phases where we might want to aggregate responses and feedback. But on a daily basis, we have conversations.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Folks will contact us either through email or Twitter to share ideas. Again, the user form is probably the most fluid area where ideas are encouraged. And they come from both directions-- our group, members of the team-- and may not have something that's prescriptive but just an idea that they want to get a sense from the communities, what they feel about those potential features that we're thinking about, but then also continue to allow them to suggest ideas.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And that's kind of been the case from the beginning, and it's just one of those things that continue to just to flow based on the type of relationships that we've been building within the platform.
HANNAH HECKNER: Rebekah, anything to add there?
REBEKAH STACHA: I think he hit on the things. You typically go with those two things you like the best, which is going to end up being surveys and focus groups. I think the only thing I say that-- and it's not as much user feedback as it is-- we've really started to relying more on analytics to tell us the things that we are not maybe seeing or somebody may have habits or things that they're doing. It's not forward thinking to suggest new ideas sometimes because that's hard to get from analytics, but it is certainly going to tell you and give you feedback on what you are trying and being able to work with.
REBEKAH STACHA: So the only piece I feel like is really maybe added in there would be the fact that we're really beginning to rely heavily on looking at the analytics of how people are using things and where we find gaps from that.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, I think that's a great addition. So a lot of times the well-trod paths are well-trod for a reason. There's not much incentive for innovation. One example here is folks are going to continue to publish in an established journal because that's how they get tenure. So, Todd, it would be great to hear some of your thoughts on how organizations can create incentives for innovation, or perhaps times when you've seen that work effectively.
TODD CARPENTER: Sure. And it's thinking of some of the things that Rebekah and Dawit are doing in terms of the content forms. Lots of people have lots of great ideas, or lots of people think they have great ideas. It's hard to take those great ideas and implement them and transform them into reality. And people have a tendency to push the bounds in some ways. Rather than starting over from scratch, people tend to take the last technology and tweak it even to the point of breaking to see if we can make it work.
TODD CARPENTER: We have a journalist platform. We could put books in it because books are kind of like journals. Presentations are kind of like papers, except their videos. Well, wait, at some point, Dawit and his engineering team are like, wait guys, you're totally breaking the system. I think a lot of this goes to questions of, will it function? Will it work?
TODD CARPENTER: Will it be interoperable? You might create a fantastic reading experience. A lot of this happened in the '90s, a lot of really interesting reading experiences that people just couldn't get working on their machines because their browsers weren't working or their devices weren't suitable, et cetera. And another important element here, I think is recognition.
TODD CARPENTER: A user might have this great idea, but then their 10-year faculty review committee is going to look at the thing and go, well, this isn't a peer review journal article, I don't know what to do with it. So there is a kind of interesting ecosystem that these products, these ideas, these things have to exist in, and you can't push one without pushing the others.
TODD CARPENTER: So, Dawit, I'd like to hear from your perspective, what is that looking like? You're building these systems, are you getting the users like, oh, I've got this great idea. How do we make that happen, or how do we get recognition for having done it?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, I mean, our systems definitely support the industry standard. So credit, for example, and just like the basic metadata, flows that typical journals and books will want to-- communities with journals and books will want to see. So that's still like the dominant workflow. But we also want to make sure that we're not stifling innovation. We want to allow different groups from various sectors. Some who just have new ideas and want to experiment, we want to give them a space where they can do that.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And a lot of times, again, as I said earlier, we kind of start with a minimal, viable product and then kind of hear from the community what they need and how they're seeing knowledge transfer work best in their communities. Not everyone that uses the platform will have a scholarly society behind them. It could be a very small research group. It could be community organizers.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Again, of course, the dominant groups that are using the system aren't traditional scholarly publishing types, but I think I also wonder like we all-- I'm sure we really wonder what the future holds in terms of preservation and content. I mean, we're all kind of seeing video and multimedia grow in our space. And so I think we all kind of question without prescribing how much will the scholarly outputs; mirror, media, and tech industries, say in five to 10 years.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And we don't have that answer but let's just assume, or let's pretend like it's close. And if it is close, what will be the standard? Will XML still be the standard at that point? Five to 10 years is not too far from now. And if so, if there is a realm of possibility that the technology adoptions in our space is going to change, we have to think about what the implications are when we're focusing on interoperability for today's future versus experimenting for tomorrow's relevance.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So we don't have the answers but that's why we want to have constant conversations with a very diverse set of groups who are really experimenting and showing that there's value in doing or pushing forward new models.
HANNAH HECKNER: We've touched a lot on multimedia and video specifically. And there was an earlier question from Scot Henry about the opportunities with video and the business cases surrounding that. Rebekah, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about SPE's use of video. I know that you all have a lot on just affiliated with the association overall. So what have been stumbling blocks with pursuing multimedia and packaging it and selling it and all that fun stuff?
REBEKAH STACHA: So I think, and I think Todd said this. It might have been in a previous conversation we had. But it has to do with the fact that you still really do need standards. You need metadata around that, you need these pieces and components that will allow you to work with it on a platform. I think that some of these things have been built. I mean, if you're coming back to some of the stuff on YouTube and [INAUDIBLE] somebody can get things uploaded.
REBEKAH STACHA: They've built that metadata and they're able to maximize off of it. But all of us who are in scholarly publishing, aren't Google as much as I get told that we should be. But I think that that's one of those things where it could comes back to-- with all the multimedia coming back, it won't come back just like the metadata and being able to tag things consistently, having the taxonomy behind it to help things become discoverable.
REBEKAH STACHA: So it's all key pieces that it isn't just about shooting the video. It's going to have to have a lot of structure to it. So as much if not more, then you're going to need to write a paper and get that in. And as we were kind of pointing out, papers moved through a long process of time. The speed at which video has developed and become a player has been in an incredibly short amount of time.
REBEKAH STACHA: So in some ways, we are still really trying to grapple with some of those pieces and how it fits into scholarly publishing, how do we use that as the captures? I think there's just some real interesting things coming out with multimedia. I don't know if we have all the answers. But I think it's going to be a key piece going forward because the young scientists, young engineers, young researchers of today are starting to capture their content in those ways.
REBEKAH STACHA: They're writing the code themselves. So I think those sorts of things are going to start driving a lot of innovation very quickly.
HANNAH HECKNER: Pivot to video. Easier-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
REBEKAH STACHA: It is. I just think there's some real pieces we have to work on as a scholarly publisher or some of the vendors out there that are starting to come into the space to work with us.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. Thanks Rebekah. We got a question in from Sarah Urnes. It is around how standards and protocols are established for things like metadata, discovery standards, are those ideological, provocative, or are they more community-driven or practical? Similarly, what is the motivation for AI and data mind-driven solutions? And how were those highly digitized processes and motives balanced with real people communities?
HANNAH HECKNER: So just a real easy softball question for you, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: Softball question. I'm going to answer the first one and then maybe punt on the second. So there are lots of different ways in which things develop. Some of them are ideological. I think of the work that's been done around data citation and development of data citation standards. Data citation, the use of data was kind of a small, ancillary, supplementary thing 15 years ago.
TODD CARPENTER: There was some data sharing but there wasn't an ecosystem for it. And the people who started really pushing data use focused on the metrics and recognition that citations get, and then developed ideas around what needs to be included in a data citation in order to push that forward. So it was a mix of community, but it was also really driven by those ideological interests in seeing data raised to the level of a first class [? goal ?] object.
TODD CARPENTER: And so that's a good example where there is a kind of provocateurs who get standards going. And now there's DataCite and now there's data citation standards and data peer review, I mean there's a whole ecosystem developing around data sharing and citation of data, which is fantastic. There are also the kind of metadata geeks, myself included, who are like, well, here's this thing and we need to develop a metadata structure for it.
TODD CARPENTER: And how do we extend Dublin Core Metadata to do this thing? So they both develop in their own kind of ways. And to the second question, similarly, people are looking at AI and various machine learning and how do we adjust our content, adjust our content forms, structures to be able to suit machine reading?
TODD CARPENTER: And some people are on the cutting edge of just machine reading, I don't care about your structure. And some are on the structure side, well, how do we adapt our structure to make it more ingestible? So people are coming at it from both different directions. There's no one path.
HANNAH HECKNER: Any other thoughts on this from Dawit and Rebekah? That was great. So we've sort of touched on a lot of different points with the ideation, supporting new content and such. But I think it would be interesting to look more at perhaps instances where a new content format has completely replaced the past content format.
HANNAH HECKNER: And just what that tipping point was, we spoke about it a little bit just now as far as data citations. But any examples of that hat you all could recall? I think, Dawit, you mentioned some examples in our previous conversations.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, so this kind of builds on what was just discussed. But I think again, working with a very diverse group of communities, for us it means that something being mission critical can be shared across the communities, but it can also be a unique experience. And so we're really trying to remove barriers like high costs for communities to experiment. Because again, there's this relationship that takes place in both directions where we're kind of building together and also seeing what's important for the communities, and more so, in terms of where standards can be developed where there is this shared emphasis going forward.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so, yeah, we just want to make sure that we're providing a space where they can experiment with end-to-end publishing processes. And again, well, we're also promoting openness within the scholarly ecosystem and making it easy for conventional outputs like XML and DOIs. We try to provide flexibility with additional file export formats like EPUB and HTML.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So the idea is to be community-led and community-empowering. And while we're doing that, we're keeping an eye towards relevance and just understanding what different groups need. And so this can definitely lead us into new exciting areas. And one in particular-- I may have mentioned in our earlier call-- is a project called Doc Maps.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Gabe, who I mentioned earlier from the team has really been leading this effort with other open science organizations like eLife and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. They're really thinking about new ways to provide machine-readable data, and in context about how community groups and peer review platforms are evaluating preprints, which is a huge service to our community. It's providing context, again, the human side and also giving the machines information that can be distributed to kind of again build on this theme of community publishing or distributed publishing as well.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Not being siloed in a particular institution or platform, but where communities across industries and across this knowledge ecosystem can kind of participate and not break a system that really puts heavy emphasis on metadata standards and making sure that the public is also informed correctly about the quality or the participation of the folks who are in this process of knowledge dissemination.
DAWIT TEGBARU:
HANNAH HECKNER: Thanks so much Dawit.
DAWIT TEGBARU: OK.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yes, so we mentioned a little bit about how we could stand to look at the trends that are happening in the journalism space, and see whether that might be some signs of what's to come for scholarly publishing. So what areas of development within journalism are you all seeing as perhaps promising for scholarly publishing moving forward other than that pivot to video?
REBEKAH STACHA: I'm going to jump in here. I think one of the things I'm discovering is that within journalism, you're finding there's an immediacy of information coming across. And that's one of the challenges journalism is really facing now, is that you have people tweeting the moment something happens, something's coming out on Instagram, you have a lot more content creation. So journalism isn't as formal as it used to be.
REBEKAH STACHA: You have a lot of people acting as their own advocates as they can get out there. There's platforms for them to talk direct. So I think that's one of the things that's changing in journalism beyond the old newspaper that spent time researching, writing, putting it down, coming out with it, it's very immediate in journalism now. And I think that's going to come back. And I think we're seeing that with the COVID, with the preprints and scholarly publishing being impacted by that same sort of thing.
REBEKAH STACHA: I think that's probably one of the things coming up, is how easy it is to get information out there. It's really impacted the volume of information, but it's also really impacted the quality. And what's coming out is just a huge juggernaut of information. And what scholarly publishing has always had is that fact that we have the ability to vet to put it through the paces and make sure it's got the quality to it.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I think that's going to get dramatically impacted. But what do you think, Todd, you are nodding there for a second?
TODD CARPENTER: Oh, yeah absolutely. I think the entire pace of publication even in scholarly communications is exploded. In the midst of doing a peer review right now and like what it used to be a month is now, could you get this back in 10 days? And I'm sure the peer reviewers who you all who are working on the editorial side are familiar with this.
TODD CARPENTER: They edit the authors, once it's peer-reviewed, you want it up, like it immediately. And the notion that it'll be delayed in production for a couple of days is kind of an anachronism, although, like really come on people, you don't just hit publish. I've written about this. Hitting send on an email is different from publishing.
TODD CARPENTER: But I think there's a culture of immediacy. And I've heard stories about researchers who want to get-- in this era of COVID, it needs to get out the door. We'll just record Zoom calls. And that will be the scholarly artifact of our collaboration. And that'll get posted in some repository somewhere. And I think there's value in speed.
TODD CARPENTER: But I think there's also value in thoughtful consideration, which is part of the publication process that I fear we might lose in this era of, well, just post it on Twitter, and that's good enough.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. I was thinking along the same lines as this question that just came through from Kreneke, is the world getting so obsessed with incorporating the disruptive new technologies that the primary purpose of the evolution of knowledge through journals is taking a backseat? Like, are we looking at a future solely of rapid reviews of Zoom calls between researchers? Is that in addition to the final published article or is that replacing it?
HANNAH HECKNER: Would be great to-- how about we hear your take on this first?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, my first thought is the journal, the traditional journals workflow, I mean it's pretty healthy, right? There's no difficulty in doing the reviews the way we've been doing and publishing with all the metadata that we know works well within the scholarly communities. But we also have to recognize that there's changes taking place. People are-- all of us really are using technologies that are constantly evolving, and it's becoming a part of our everyday lives.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We can take some lessons learned from outside scholarly communication industry, like the entertainment industry and media, technology. You can see YouTube, Instagram-- I'm not on Instagram but I bet more than 50% of audiences are on Instagram. There's Twitch, all of these are community-oriented though monetized through advertising. And so there's something that can be said about the utility around, where anyone can go live and generate a following.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Is it healthy? Well, it depends on your community, and depends on the mission. So if the idea is to have unfettered knowledge and have that distributed in a way that is equitable, I think is definitely possible for something like this to take root in our scholarly world, or at least see some of that crossover between tech and the scholarly industry, especially when you consider the shifts in demographics, like age and ethnicity and the growing international participation.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So I think that there's a lot to be said there. And then, of course, at the very least, we've been talking about video and multimedia. We definitely can appreciate storytelling. I mean, this has been a point of emphasis within the traditional publication. How can we engage society? How can we ensure that the results are applicable to the general public?
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so the journalism approach or using visualizations, normalizing that process when you have a technical publication where a broader group of people can actually understand and apply it, or at least know where their research is going. There's a lot of value in that. So if we can try to normalize that and have standards that support, I think we can all kind of move in the right direction.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I want a second what Dawit said right then, which is we have to have standards. I was thinking back about the fact that you were talking, Todd, on your presentation about the history of paper. But the fact is we've been able to in the digital world go back into archives and pull things up and make a lot of stuff very much available. Now there's been work to that.
REBEKAH STACHA: But the fact that somebody captured it and had some page numbering they ultimately came up with back from that time period enabled a lot of things we could do later. So I think that to make sure that the video capture the volume of things that are coming out, Instagram they're gone in a lot of times. In fact, some people are actually-- some of the idea-- and Snapchat, I think-- is to not have a record.
REBEKAH STACHA: But for what we're doing in scholarly publishing, I think that the record is an incredibly important thing to preserve and make sure we're putting things in place for standards so that the future generations can still access it and use it to build upon. I think that if we get too much into the speed, we lose some of that. And so there's some of the pieces that I think we need to be very intentional about so that we are setting the future people, the future generations up to be able to access the information that's coming out now.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: And in the thread of forms that we've gone through, people still read newspapers. You can still get a hard copy of a newspaper, maybe not everywhere. People still read hardcover books. There is still AM radio. This is all additive things. Technologies don't disappear. People don't stop using them for the most part.
TODD CARPENTER: And this is a growing ecosystem. It's not a shrinking ecosystem.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yes.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Right.
HANNAH HECKNER: And we definitely see that there is also a cost to all of this storage and all of this archival material. So, yeah, hopefully someone creates CO2 emission zero servers in the future. OK, this was such a great conversation. Thank you all so much. I have to hand it over to Stephanie now to take us home. But thank you all to our panelists and this really engaged group of attendees.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, thank you everyone. I feel like this is one of those topics that we can continue talking for hours about. So maybe we'll have to have a part 2 at some point. I am going to launch right quick a just quick poll to help us get a rating and help plan for the future. And as I do, I will remind you that the next event in the series is going to take place on November 9 where we will be joined by Rod Cookson of IWA Publishing, Ann Michael, of Delta Think, Sean Sanders of AAAS, and Miranda Walker of Wolters Kluwer Health for a roundtable discussion on the future of society publishing.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: So we'll solve all that then. We hope to see you. And thanks again to our speakers and everyone who joined us today. Thanks-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
REBEKAH STACHA: Everyone. Bye-bye.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Welcome, my name
HANSEN: is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I am the director of marketing at Silverchair, and I want to thank you for joining us for today's event, which is the third in the Platform Strategies Webinar Series. We have a really excellent lineup of speakers today and no shortage of ground to cover, so I will be quick and just taking us through a few housekeeping items before kicking it over to our speakers today. This event is being recorded, and a copy of the recording will be sent to you afterwards along with links to watch the previous two events in the series and to register for the final event, which will take place on November 9, and which is titled, Putting a Price on it, the changing nature of society publishing.
HANSEN: This series is a set of free virtual events. And as with the in-person iteration, we are excited to field your questions and engage in discussions with you that can carry beyond this hour. So please do engage with us via the Q&A. As we go along, we'll have some time for that at the end. And get in touch with us afterwards if you want to continue the conversation.
HANSEN: Finally, at the end of this event you'll see a survey requesting your rating for the event, which will just help us with future planning. We appreciate your feedback, and thanks again for joining. With that, I will hand it over to today's moderator, Hannah Heckner, Silverchair chair's director of Product Strategy.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much Stephanie. Great to have everyone here today. I'm really excited about the panel. Articles and e-books still remain the most prominent format in which research is communicated, but different content objects are being used more and more often to supplement these artifacts, and in some cases, replace them. This great group of panelists we've assembled here today is going to talk about what goes into discovering those new content types, developing them, and supporting them, and perhaps maybe muse a bit on what new content types we might be talking about a few years down the road.
HANNAH HECKNER: I will offer some biographies of these panelists today. And we will kick things off with Dawit Tegbaru. He joined the Knowledge Futures Group in September 2020 as Editorial Manager, where he supports community publishing on PubPub, it's open authoring and publishing platform. Dawit's work in scholarly publishing spans about 15 years. He's been managing journals for non-profit society publishers.
HANNAH HECKNER: He spent most of his career with the American Geophysical Union, and oversaw journals for societies in engineering and biomedicine disciplines as a managing editor. He was instrumental in developing the American Society for Radiation Oncology, data sharing policy, and advocated as a panel moderator, consensus building for a clinical trial data sharing policy, among oncology journals more broadly.
HANNAH HECKNER: Second, we'll be hearing from Rebekah Stacha. She is the assistant director of technical publications for the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Her responsibility, she has responsibility for the strategic management at SPE's publishing programs for journals proceedings, books and SPE's electronic databases, including the flagship of multi-society database, OnePetro. With over 20 years of non-profit association management experience at SPE, Rebekah is passionate about executing innovative solutions to capture and effectively deliver technical content to members worldwide.
HANNAH HECKNER: During her career at SPE, Rebekah has had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles beyond publications, which have helped her fully understand the complexities of non-profit association management. Maybe that could be a wild world to discuss as well. These include working in member and student programs, developing SPE's online communities of practice, and managing SPE's retail sales.
HANNAH HECKNER: Last but not least, we will hear from Todd Carpenter. Todd currently serves as executive director of the National Information Standards Organization. You may know it as NISO. It's a non-profit association that develops and maintains standards for the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information. Prior to joining NISO, Todd was director of business development at BioOne.
HANNAH HECKNER: He also held management positions at the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Energy Intelligence Group, and the Haworth Press. He has served on the boards of several industry and community organizations, including the Baltimore-- excuse me, Baltimore County Public Library, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and the Free Ebook Foundation. He contributes regularly as a chef on the Scholarly Kitchen. OK, great.
HANNAH HECKNER: I'm so excited to hear from you all. As I mentioned previously, we'll be starting with Dawit. Over to you Dawit.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Thank you Hannah. I'm going to share my screen. Can you all see my slides? All right. Thanks so much for having me. It's a definite pleasure and privilege to share this session with such highly esteemed colleagues. My name is Dawit. As Hannah mentioned, I'm Editorial Manager with the Knowledge Futures Group.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We're a non-profit technology organization building public digital infrastructure. And my role involves supporting the curation and production of content published on PubPub, which is our publishing platform, our open publishing platform, I should say. So from the outside, I do want to express how grateful I am to be supported by a really special team back at the virtual office.
DAWIT TEGBARU: I want to shout out Catherine Ahearn and Gabe Stein, Travis Rich, in particular who've been working on PubPub from the very beginning. And I must credit them for their leadership in bringing PubPub up so far in a relatively short period of time. So speaking of time, I'm sure we've all been contemplating like parents and generations before us, whether things will go back to the way they have been.
DAWIT TEGBARU: But I believe that we're living in a unique time where we're seeing paradigm shifts in the way we operate, one that's rooted in values and takes into account the way we relate to and support knowledge communities. And that's what the KFT strives to do. And as we build infrastructure that creates an atmosphere where groups irrespective of their discipline, their size, their ethnicity, their gender or location, we work to ensure that everyone is empowered to define knowledge and design publishing processes that are right for their mission.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so as I mentioned earlier, PubPub is our collaborative and open community-driven publishing platform. I won't go through all the features it has but I do want to mention some key things that it supports. One is versioning with a changelog, collaborative editing. We have support for interactive media elements, inline annotations and discussions, import, export, support for multiple file types, including JATS, XML LaTeX, Word, HTML, EPUB and others.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We also have the ability to generate Crossref DOIs, and communities and pubs are able to enjoy analytic dashboards. I should have mentioned earlier but we have a little over 3,000 communities, most of whom are independently using PubPub to manage their end-to-end publication workflows. And many of these communities are made up of libraries, university presses, scholarly societies, independent research groups and repositories.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so through our partnerships and sharing our roadmap and hosting open user forum, we try to be intentional about designing infrastructure that all groups can benefit from. We have a variety of key partners, but I'll just mention a few. One is eLife, UC Berkeley, MIT Press, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the American Psychological Association, Iowa State University Libraries, and AfricaArXiv.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so, as I mentioned earlier, we're very intentional about delivering communities of various types and size, a lower cost of exploring new models of publishing. And so we work with various stakeholders in the hope of making this concept of community publishing mainstream, and we put forward some really key components to make this happen early. And one is to expand the customization of review curation and publication management processes within PubPub so that it supports a variety of outputs, including journals, books, conferences, blogs preprint servers, and online newsletters and more.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We also are trying to provide workflow templates across various community types so that each of them can discover and integrate the benefits of various models. And finally, we're building tools to evaluate the impact of collaborative processes directly into the infrastructure that go beyond the traditional downloads and page views type of analytics. So I want to use the next minute or two to just provide some snippets of the different content types on PubPub, all of which are open access, and under Creative Commons licenses.
DAWIT TEGBARU: The first is the oral history of criminology project, which is supported by Criminology Open. And we really love that they're taking the oldest form of historical inquiry and presenting scholars or digital archive of scholars contributions to their field, and so each trial will take you to a video with relevant keywords. And then we also have great literature. And this journal of trial and error, which kind of speaks volumes by its title as supported by Utrecht University, and they really focus on closing the gap between what's research and publish.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So we like what they're doing. They have meta research and rejected grant applications. We have lightweight interactives. And that's actually become a noun at the KFG. We really enjoy brainstorming with authors and providing technical support. And one of our prior partners, as I mentioned APA earlier, their journal-- technology, mind, and behavior-- has been a great place to explore new ways of presenting research and engaging readers.
DAWIT TEGBARU: This example is from the widely-read article on Zoom fatigue. We also have the Harvard Data Science Review, another partner who's featuring interactive elements in their articles. In this example about AI-generated floor plans, we were able to utilize our inline annotations to invite readers to see a concept mentioned in the text and see it play out visually.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And readers are also in this particular instance able to interact with the underlying code. I also want to highlight Preprints. Preprints as we all know, has had an impact on scholarly communications and nothing like was been taking place since the start of the pandemic. So to combat misinformation, the Rapid Reviews COVID-19 project was launched by MIT Press and UC Berkeley to quickly provide reviews that affirm and reject preprints, or reject preprints.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so the reviews are citable. We have the AfricaArXiv, they're providing podcasts, audio-visual preprints, and just a really key partner. So just in the interest of time, I want to just move on to the end and say thank you for allowing me this opportunity to provide an overview of the KFG and PubPub.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much Dawit. That was really amazing to see what KFG is doing, especially with PubPub. Really excited to talk more about that. OK, Rebekah, over to you.
REBEKAH STACHA: Hey, I hope I'm sharing now. So a quick introduction, I'm Rebekah Stacha. I'm assistant director. As [? Heidi ?] said earlier, I was the Society of Petroleum Engineers. And I guess just really kind of giving you a quick perspective of more of your traditional publisher, but some of the ones that are being pushed by our industry and what we're doing to try and meet our readers and our members' needs.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I see that I'm not moving forward. There I go. So about us, just real quickly. We've been around since the 1800s. We were part of a larger organization called AIME, the mining engineers and we split off in the '50s. We are now 140,000 members strong in 144 countries worldwide. So we have a very global perspective in a lot of what we do.
REBEKAH STACHA: And it's very international in our perspective and how we approach our membership and supplying our publications in what we're producing. So obviously, we think our strength is again, back to those individual members and we support them through our publications, primarily through the OnePetro library that we produced, as well as our conferences and our workshops. So [INAUDIBLE] first place [INAUDIBLE] So our approach really one of the things that makes this a little unique from a lot of other society publishers out there is the fact that we focus quite heavily on conferences.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I will be the first to admit 2020 and 2021 have been very challenging. But we have tried to really pivot to doing a lot more virtual because the content remains still consistent of people wanting to present and share that content among the members. So we've just been working with a lot more virtual as many of you have. And it's now just changing how we capture and what we ultimately produce out of those conferences as captured content.
REBEKAH STACHA: Again, like a traditional publisher, we publish our books, our journals, and our conference proceedings. One of the things that we did do is shift quite a while back, probably six years, we only have one magazine that was still actually being printed. Other than, that we're almost entirely digital. And we do still make hard copies of books. But again, we are predominantly digital in both our journals and conference proceedings and anything else that we're doing.
REBEKAH STACHA: We're almost exclusively digital now. So that's really changed how we've approached our publishing and where we spend our time. One of the things that I find a little unique about working at SPE for the years I have, and different from other publishers, is the fact that we have a lot more of our content coming out of companies and our members in companies in addition to not just the academic sphere, which is driven a lot more by journals and impact factor and what's going on with that.
REBEKAH STACHA: A little bit back to what Dawit was saying, we want to push the boundaries about not only the content types but how we're capturing it because that's more of interest to our members than necessarily the name of the journal or what they're publishing into. So our users actually use our document repository. They have a question and they're looking for an answer, they're doing that sort of research a lot more times and using it in those tools as opposed to some of the deeper dives that you might see in scholarly world.
REBEKAH STACHA: There are active engineers using them to solve problems. So they look for individual papers. There's a lot of times when they care about more the individual paper, is a little odd to read more about the individual papers than they may about the journals or the conference that was published in. So the other thing that still I think really drives us and makes this kind of a unique perspective is the fact that we're so global in nature.
REBEKAH STACHA: It's driven a lot of our digital moves simply because the print pipelines and getting things in print worldwide was just logistically incredibly challenging. It's one of the benefits of being in a digital world and it means that we have and are always trying to push up, sorry, to push the boundaries about what we can do. So a look for the future of content, I think we covered so many great things in his presentation.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I know Todd is going to have some great ones coming up. So just a quick highlight, again, we really feel like multimedia interactive focus a little bit like even what we're showing you. But the papers have to [INAUDIBLE].. Now that [? they are ?] on the computers, what you can do with showing code, what you can do with showing how things are working. Multimedia video captures from presentations and conferences.
REBEKAH STACHA: Those are beginning to drive, moving the science forward and the technology forward in how we capture it. Software and AI driven solutions. One of the things we're finding now that people have and the ability to go through, it's not just going to be semantic language in some of those aspects but really moving into more AI, ask a question, get an answer, kind of question things coming back. I think we're going to see a lot more of those request-type things coming in and software platforms being driven that want to ingest content from our content, from our scholarly papers and things like that.
REBEKAH STACHA: So I think data mining is one of the things on the horizon that we're really looking at how to effectively use as a publisher and to protect our intellectual property while we do that. And the last thing I really feel like it's coming as a future of content is bite-size summarized content. I think that a lot of people really want something that's more of a summary coming up. They want to be able to get it that quick piece of information.
REBEKAH STACHA: And then they want to do a deeper dive in a full read only if they feel like there's that necessity to do so. I think that's being driven a lot by some of the things you're seeing in Google in a number of different ways of how that younger generation is preferring to consume its content. The last thing is really-- and I've said this in our discussions with the group previously. I really think multimedia as a stand-alone content is going to be really a key feature to how we're disseminating technology and conference-- sorry, not conference-- technology and content from the scholarly world going forward.
REBEKAH STACHA: Everyone has an iPhone, people are willing to record a lot more things and put it together. So many people now have the ability to create video themselves. I think that's something that's coming. How we effectively capture that and not only use it in scholarly publishing, but how do we maximize it? Is going to be one of the questions go forward. So thank you.
REBEKAH STACHA: That's my kind of quick and fast explanation about what I think the world's kind of looking like for the future.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you so much, Rebekah. Finally, we will hear from Todd. Over to you, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: All right. First thank you to Hannah and Stephanie and the entire team at Silverchair. Amazing people who I love working with all the time. So thank you for inviting me to speak with you all today. As much as Dawit and Rebekah moved forward and kind of talked about the future of formats and where content is headed, I'm going to take a step back and hopefully circle us back to the future but starting a bit from the past.
TODD CARPENTER: So starting about 3,500 years ago, people began recording information down on tablets, normally business transaction information. Prior to this, information was recorded on bones and stones and other soft materials. It wasn't until about 2,500 BCE that the Egyptians started using papyrus. And it wasn't until the 9th century that books began being printed using blocks and ink.
TODD CARPENTER: In China, roughly about 500 years later, the next advance in printing technology was invented by Johann Gutenberg in the 15th century. And from a standards perspective, this is where world kind of starts to get interesting. In the 16th and 17th century, as printing grew, content distribution was amongst the first of industrial process. And it was also one of the first processes to be up-start to apply standards.
TODD CARPENTER: This is an image from the 17th century that shows how signatures were folded when printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper. It illustrates one of the manufacturing problems with printing and assembling a book, that is, how do we ensure that it's put together in the proper order? Most of the earliest printers and their apprentices weren't even literate.
TODD CARPENTER: So they would annotate the corners of the pages with words or marks-- they were called catch words-- to signify that this page followed that page. And this eventually developed into a numbering system so that the binder could be assured that page 43 followed page 42 when it was all folded up and bound. So page numbers are a production system to solve a problem of keeping content in order as that developed.
TODD CARPENTER: And it eventually became a standard that we all use but for a very different purpose. So you start to see how information standards play a role in how content is created and used and distributed. Now jumping forward a few 100 years, we come to 1939. And that was the year that John Steinbeck's, Grapes of Wrath was first published. It is interestingly not coincidentally the year that NISO is formed.
TODD CARPENTER: We were formed as a part of the American Standards Institute. It was the committee on library and information, Z39, if you're into Antsy numbering systems. And it was formed to define how standards for content were managed, which really began with things like cataloging and organizational systems along with the abbreviations and naming conventions. And over the years, it grew to develop in terms of more physical issues, such as paper, ink, and identification systems.
TODD CARPENTER: Now jumping forward a few more decades, we are move into the 1960s and the dawn of commuters, and we kind of get to what Dawit and Rebekah we're talking about. This is an image of the first computer that was installed at the Library of Congress in January of 1965. Libraries were amongst the first adopters of computer technology because they were used to store vast amounts of information.
TODD CARPENTER: Now, how many of you remember these things? Raise your hands virtually. You'll notice down in the bottom right hand corner, it says, MARC, a little notation. This was a standard for creating these cards, the machine-readable cataloging standard. It was based on NISO's foundational Z39.2 standard for describing content, dated back to the 1930s. The MARC standard was developed in the '60s to encode this information.
TODD CARPENTER: And it was NISO's first foray into standards for digital information management. Now, in the last few decades, content forms have developed well beyond traditional books and journals. They've extended into code, into video, into visualizations, web pages, interactive tools, all of the things that Dawit and Rebekah were just talking about. And each of these formats, we have to explore the need for various standards for identifying them, describing them, delivering them, making them accessible for preserving them.
TODD CARPENTER: That brings us to NISO and how we have spent the last several decades, applying information technology, information standards to the world of content and applications. We're involved in all sorts of aspects of content, from its creation to its distribution to its preservation. And we're involved in applying standards in ways to make that process more efficient through JATS Office XML, EPUB standard, metadata standards for discovery, Dublin Core, KBART, Identifiers DOIs ISSNs, ISBNs, accessibility, DAISY, metrics, all of these things have to be retooled for the digital environment, which is how we're spending a lot of our time.
TODD CARPENTER: So I'm looking forward to discussing with Rebekah and Dawit and Hannah on all of these aspects of how information distribution is changing. So thank you. And Hannah, back to you.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, that was really great Todd. Thinking about signatures brings me back to my early days as a production assistant at TNF. That was a fun trip down memory lane. Great. Well, to remind everyone, please send along your questions as they arise. We have some conversation topics that we want to touch on but we of course would love to hear from you to keep that conversation going as well.
HANNAH HECKNER: So I thought that for this part of the discussion, it would be helpful to start with the ideation phase, about how an organization might decide to pursue a new content type. So maybe we'll start with you Dawit. So what were the conversations that led to pursuing these cool new ways to communicate the information and say about the Criminology Oral History Project?
HANNAH HECKNER: Was that driven by people that were creating that original content? Was it stakeholders within the organization? Could you just talk about that process about that project and maybe others?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah all of the examples that I showed are essentially highlights of the communities themselves defining, using their own practice, their discipline to inform how they want to disseminate the information. The PubPub platform that we're providing, the flexibility that we're giving to these various communities is more of the kind of the utility. And so we're actually learning-- it's like a symbiotic relationship.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We're learning a lot from these communities because they span across various disciplines. And we actually also involve them in the conversations about how we want to design it going forward. So it's a very iterative process. So we do have user forums, which is, I think, pretty standard. But our forums are very much open. And we can see not just questions about the platform.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We can see new ideas, and we can carry on conversations, even things that we might be thinking about for the future, for example, as we are building improvements or enhancements around the submission and review aspect of the platform, we kind of take an approach where we will see the conversations in the user forum and then also have road show product development phases where we can actually present what we're thinking before we spec it out.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And that way, these different groups have an opportunity to just share their insights and how they want the platform to really remain flexible and useful for their needs. So again, a lot of it is bringing in the communities, learn what they're excited about. We tried to put together a minimal viable product and iterate off of that. In fact, the rapid reviews, the preprint overlay journal that I showed earlier, that was definitely one great example of just a really agile response to what was happening in the world of scholarly publishing where you have a rise in preprints and people just trying to go through and figure out, like, is this information trustworthy?
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so we were able to kind of bring in the different groups and put that out and then kind of refine. And we have new features that are built around that that other communities can also take advantage of. So I think the main kind of takeaway here is just keeping an eye and ear out for community needs, engaging with them in different ways. We have user summits, we have to form. As I mentioned earlier, product roadshows, we can do surveys, and just being nimble but true also to our mission.
DAWIT TEGBARU: I think is really important. And that is to be that public digital infrastructure where everyone can kind of use it and define their processes accordingly.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's amazing, really community-centered and not just saying that but actually doing it. That's really great. Rebekah, I imagine that it might be a little bit different at SPE. Of course, you are a member-supported organization, so that community is really important. Could you speak about maybe the different stakeholders that would have input into the new content ideation and that whole process?
REBEKAH STACHA: Yeah so I think I'm going to echo Dawit. It sounds a little bit very similar. It's level is certainly different than in the way his communities are working. But again, being pushed by the community is still the underlying theme. Being pushed by the content creators, in this case, that's really one of the things that I think Dawit's groups are highly pushed by the content creators.
REBEKAH STACHA: The other piece that we kind of have that pushing us-- for some of the them, they should end up being the industry itself, the companies in the industry, that while we're an individual organization, they all work for these companies. They're all expecting to be able to kind of take that back into their working environment. So there's a lot of things being pushed by the companies wanting to have that access for their employees and what we can do about making that more available to them, more useful to them.
REBEKAH STACHA: How do we get that information to them in a more concise manner? Is driving some of that. So that's being pushed. Well, that's the only piece I would add to what Dawit already said. But I think is kind of a key feature.
HANNAH HECKNER: I see there's question that came in from Amit Joshi. Scott, I see your question as well. I'll address that later. Amit is asking about the best ways to get feedback from users and also to apply that. So he mentions that surveys can take a lot of work and get pretty low response rates. Dawit, you mentioned focus groups. But that could also be just that a very focused group.
HANNAH HECKNER: So are there other ways that you all have found to get effective and far more user feedback and evidence?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, so all of our users essentially are coming and using the platform because they want a flexible system. And so we're very accessible. They feel like they already know that they're part of the design. So it's a co-design platform. And so you might have the different phases where we might want to aggregate responses and feedback. But on a daily basis, we have conversations.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Folks will contact us either through email or Twitter to share ideas. Again, the user form is probably the most fluid area where ideas are encouraged. And they come from both directions-- our group, members of the team-- and may not have something that's prescriptive but just an idea that they want to get a sense from the communities, what they feel about those potential features that we're thinking about, but then also continue to allow them to suggest ideas.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And that's kind of been the case from the beginning, and it's just one of those things that continue to just to flow based on the type of relationships that we've been building within the platform.
HANNAH HECKNER: Rebekah, anything to add there?
REBEKAH STACHA: I think he hit on the things. You typically go with those two things you like the best, which is going to end up being surveys and focus groups. I think the only thing I say that-- and it's not as much user feedback as it is-- we've really started to relying more on analytics to tell us the things that we are not maybe seeing or somebody may have habits or things that they're doing. It's not forward thinking to suggest new ideas sometimes because that's hard to get from analytics, but it is certainly going to tell you and give you feedback on what you are trying and being able to work with.
REBEKAH STACHA: So the only piece I feel like is really maybe added in there would be the fact that we're really beginning to rely heavily on looking at the analytics of how people are using things and where we find gaps from that.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah, I think that's a great addition. So a lot of times the well-trod paths are well-trod for a reason. There's not much incentive for innovation. One example here is folks are going to continue to publish in an established journal because that's how they get tenure. So, Todd, it would be great to hear some of your thoughts on how organizations can create incentives for innovation, or perhaps times when you've seen that work effectively.
TODD CARPENTER: Sure. And it's thinking of some of the things that Rebekah and Dawit are doing in terms of the content forms. Lots of people have lots of great ideas, or lots of people think they have great ideas. It's hard to take those great ideas and implement them and transform them into reality. And people have a tendency to push the bounds in some ways. Rather than starting over from scratch, people tend to take the last technology and tweak it even to the point of breaking to see if we can make it work.
TODD CARPENTER: We have a journalist platform. We could put books in it because books are kind of like journals. Presentations are kind of like papers, except their videos. Well, wait, at some point, Dawit and his engineering team are like, wait guys, you're totally breaking the system. I think a lot of this goes to questions of, will it function? Will it work?
TODD CARPENTER: Will it be interoperable? You might create a fantastic reading experience. A lot of this happened in the '90s, a lot of really interesting reading experiences that people just couldn't get working on their machines because their browsers weren't working or their devices weren't suitable, et cetera. And another important element here, I think is recognition.
TODD CARPENTER: A user might have this great idea, but then their 10-year faculty review committee is going to look at the thing and go, well, this isn't a peer review journal article, I don't know what to do with it. So there is a kind of interesting ecosystem that these products, these ideas, these things have to exist in, and you can't push one without pushing the others.
TODD CARPENTER: So, Dawit, I'd like to hear from your perspective, what is that looking like? You're building these systems, are you getting the users like, oh, I've got this great idea. How do we make that happen, or how do we get recognition for having done it?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, I mean, our systems definitely support the industry standard. So credit, for example, and just like the basic metadata, flows that typical journals and books will want to-- communities with journals and books will want to see. So that's still like the dominant workflow. But we also want to make sure that we're not stifling innovation. We want to allow different groups from various sectors. Some who just have new ideas and want to experiment, we want to give them a space where they can do that.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And a lot of times, again, as I said earlier, we kind of start with a minimal, viable product and then kind of hear from the community what they need and how they're seeing knowledge transfer work best in their communities. Not everyone that uses the platform will have a scholarly society behind them. It could be a very small research group. It could be community organizers.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Again, of course, the dominant groups that are using the system aren't traditional scholarly publishing types, but I think I also wonder like we all-- I'm sure we really wonder what the future holds in terms of preservation and content. I mean, we're all kind of seeing video and multimedia grow in our space. And so I think we all kind of question without prescribing how much will the scholarly outputs; mirror, media, and tech industries, say in five to 10 years.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And we don't have that answer but let's just assume, or let's pretend like it's close. And if it is close, what will be the standard? Will XML still be the standard at that point? Five to 10 years is not too far from now. And if so, if there is a realm of possibility that the technology adoptions in our space is going to change, we have to think about what the implications are when we're focusing on interoperability for today's future versus experimenting for tomorrow's relevance.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So we don't have the answers but that's why we want to have constant conversations with a very diverse set of groups who are really experimenting and showing that there's value in doing or pushing forward new models.
HANNAH HECKNER: We've touched a lot on multimedia and video specifically. And there was an earlier question from Scot Henry about the opportunities with video and the business cases surrounding that. Rebekah, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about SPE's use of video. I know that you all have a lot on just affiliated with the association overall. So what have been stumbling blocks with pursuing multimedia and packaging it and selling it and all that fun stuff?
REBEKAH STACHA: So I think, and I think Todd said this. It might have been in a previous conversation we had. But it has to do with the fact that you still really do need standards. You need metadata around that, you need these pieces and components that will allow you to work with it on a platform. I think that some of these things have been built. I mean, if you're coming back to some of the stuff on YouTube and [INAUDIBLE] somebody can get things uploaded.
REBEKAH STACHA: They've built that metadata and they're able to maximize off of it. But all of us who are in scholarly publishing, aren't Google as much as I get told that we should be. But I think that that's one of those things where it could comes back to-- with all the multimedia coming back, it won't come back just like the metadata and being able to tag things consistently, having the taxonomy behind it to help things become discoverable.
REBEKAH STACHA: So it's all key pieces that it isn't just about shooting the video. It's going to have to have a lot of structure to it. So as much if not more, then you're going to need to write a paper and get that in. And as we were kind of pointing out, papers moved through a long process of time. The speed at which video has developed and become a player has been in an incredibly short amount of time.
REBEKAH STACHA: So in some ways, we are still really trying to grapple with some of those pieces and how it fits into scholarly publishing, how do we use that as the captures? I think there's just some real interesting things coming out with multimedia. I don't know if we have all the answers. But I think it's going to be a key piece going forward because the young scientists, young engineers, young researchers of today are starting to capture their content in those ways.
REBEKAH STACHA: They're writing the code themselves. So I think those sorts of things are going to start driving a lot of innovation very quickly.
HANNAH HECKNER: Pivot to video. Easier-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
REBEKAH STACHA: It is. I just think there's some real pieces we have to work on as a scholarly publisher or some of the vendors out there that are starting to come into the space to work with us.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. Thanks Rebekah. We got a question in from Sarah Urnes. It is around how standards and protocols are established for things like metadata, discovery standards, are those ideological, provocative, or are they more community-driven or practical? Similarly, what is the motivation for AI and data mind-driven solutions? And how were those highly digitized processes and motives balanced with real people communities?
HANNAH HECKNER: So just a real easy softball question for you, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: Softball question. I'm going to answer the first one and then maybe punt on the second. So there are lots of different ways in which things develop. Some of them are ideological. I think of the work that's been done around data citation and development of data citation standards. Data citation, the use of data was kind of a small, ancillary, supplementary thing 15 years ago.
TODD CARPENTER: There was some data sharing but there wasn't an ecosystem for it. And the people who started really pushing data use focused on the metrics and recognition that citations get, and then developed ideas around what needs to be included in a data citation in order to push that forward. So it was a mix of community, but it was also really driven by those ideological interests in seeing data raised to the level of a first class [? goal ?] object.
TODD CARPENTER: And so that's a good example where there is a kind of provocateurs who get standards going. And now there's DataCite and now there's data citation standards and data peer review, I mean there's a whole ecosystem developing around data sharing and citation of data, which is fantastic. There are also the kind of metadata geeks, myself included, who are like, well, here's this thing and we need to develop a metadata structure for it.
TODD CARPENTER: And how do we extend Dublin Core Metadata to do this thing? So they both develop in their own kind of ways. And to the second question, similarly, people are looking at AI and various machine learning and how do we adjust our content, adjust our content forms, structures to be able to suit machine reading?
TODD CARPENTER: And some people are on the cutting edge of just machine reading, I don't care about your structure. And some are on the structure side, well, how do we adapt our structure to make it more ingestible? So people are coming at it from both different directions. There's no one path.
HANNAH HECKNER: Any other thoughts on this from Dawit and Rebekah? That was great. So we've sort of touched on a lot of different points with the ideation, supporting new content and such. But I think it would be interesting to look more at perhaps instances where a new content format has completely replaced the past content format.
HANNAH HECKNER: And just what that tipping point was, we spoke about it a little bit just now as far as data citations. But any examples of that hat you all could recall? I think, Dawit, you mentioned some examples in our previous conversations.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, so this kind of builds on what was just discussed. But I think again, working with a very diverse group of communities, for us it means that something being mission critical can be shared across the communities, but it can also be a unique experience. And so we're really trying to remove barriers like high costs for communities to experiment. Because again, there's this relationship that takes place in both directions where we're kind of building together and also seeing what's important for the communities, and more so, in terms of where standards can be developed where there is this shared emphasis going forward.
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so, yeah, we just want to make sure that we're providing a space where they can experiment with end-to-end publishing processes. And again, well, we're also promoting openness within the scholarly ecosystem and making it easy for conventional outputs like XML and DOIs. We try to provide flexibility with additional file export formats like EPUB and HTML.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So the idea is to be community-led and community-empowering. And while we're doing that, we're keeping an eye towards relevance and just understanding what different groups need. And so this can definitely lead us into new exciting areas. And one in particular-- I may have mentioned in our earlier call-- is a project called Doc Maps.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Gabe, who I mentioned earlier from the team has really been leading this effort with other open science organizations like eLife and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. They're really thinking about new ways to provide machine-readable data, and in context about how community groups and peer review platforms are evaluating preprints, which is a huge service to our community. It's providing context, again, the human side and also giving the machines information that can be distributed to kind of again build on this theme of community publishing or distributed publishing as well.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Not being siloed in a particular institution or platform, but where communities across industries and across this knowledge ecosystem can kind of participate and not break a system that really puts heavy emphasis on metadata standards and making sure that the public is also informed correctly about the quality or the participation of the folks who are in this process of knowledge dissemination.
DAWIT TEGBARU:
HANNAH HECKNER: Thanks so much Dawit.
DAWIT TEGBARU: OK.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yes, so we mentioned a little bit about how we could stand to look at the trends that are happening in the journalism space, and see whether that might be some signs of what's to come for scholarly publishing. So what areas of development within journalism are you all seeing as perhaps promising for scholarly publishing moving forward other than that pivot to video?
REBEKAH STACHA: I'm going to jump in here. I think one of the things I'm discovering is that within journalism, you're finding there's an immediacy of information coming across. And that's one of the challenges journalism is really facing now, is that you have people tweeting the moment something happens, something's coming out on Instagram, you have a lot more content creation. So journalism isn't as formal as it used to be.
REBEKAH STACHA: You have a lot of people acting as their own advocates as they can get out there. There's platforms for them to talk direct. So I think that's one of the things that's changing in journalism beyond the old newspaper that spent time researching, writing, putting it down, coming out with it, it's very immediate in journalism now. And I think that's going to come back. And I think we're seeing that with the COVID, with the preprints and scholarly publishing being impacted by that same sort of thing.
REBEKAH STACHA: I think that's probably one of the things coming up, is how easy it is to get information out there. It's really impacted the volume of information, but it's also really impacted the quality. And what's coming out is just a huge juggernaut of information. And what scholarly publishing has always had is that fact that we have the ability to vet to put it through the paces and make sure it's got the quality to it.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I think that's going to get dramatically impacted. But what do you think, Todd, you are nodding there for a second?
TODD CARPENTER: Oh, yeah absolutely. I think the entire pace of publication even in scholarly communications is exploded. In the midst of doing a peer review right now and like what it used to be a month is now, could you get this back in 10 days? And I'm sure the peer reviewers who you all who are working on the editorial side are familiar with this.
TODD CARPENTER: They edit the authors, once it's peer-reviewed, you want it up, like it immediately. And the notion that it'll be delayed in production for a couple of days is kind of an anachronism, although, like really come on people, you don't just hit publish. I've written about this. Hitting send on an email is different from publishing.
TODD CARPENTER: But I think there's a culture of immediacy. And I've heard stories about researchers who want to get-- in this era of COVID, it needs to get out the door. We'll just record Zoom calls. And that will be the scholarly artifact of our collaboration. And that'll get posted in some repository somewhere. And I think there's value in speed.
TODD CARPENTER: But I think there's also value in thoughtful consideration, which is part of the publication process that I fear we might lose in this era of, well, just post it on Twitter, and that's good enough.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. I was thinking along the same lines as this question that just came through from Kreneke, is the world getting so obsessed with incorporating the disruptive new technologies that the primary purpose of the evolution of knowledge through journals is taking a backseat? Like, are we looking at a future solely of rapid reviews of Zoom calls between researchers? Is that in addition to the final published article or is that replacing it?
HANNAH HECKNER: Would be great to-- how about we hear your take on this first?
DAWIT TEGBARU: Yeah, my first thought is the journal, the traditional journals workflow, I mean it's pretty healthy, right? There's no difficulty in doing the reviews the way we've been doing and publishing with all the metadata that we know works well within the scholarly communities. But we also have to recognize that there's changes taking place. People are-- all of us really are using technologies that are constantly evolving, and it's becoming a part of our everyday lives.
DAWIT TEGBARU: We can take some lessons learned from outside scholarly communication industry, like the entertainment industry and media, technology. You can see YouTube, Instagram-- I'm not on Instagram but I bet more than 50% of audiences are on Instagram. There's Twitch, all of these are community-oriented though monetized through advertising. And so there's something that can be said about the utility around, where anyone can go live and generate a following.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Is it healthy? Well, it depends on your community, and depends on the mission. So if the idea is to have unfettered knowledge and have that distributed in a way that is equitable, I think is definitely possible for something like this to take root in our scholarly world, or at least see some of that crossover between tech and the scholarly industry, especially when you consider the shifts in demographics, like age and ethnicity and the growing international participation.
DAWIT TEGBARU: So I think that there's a lot to be said there. And then, of course, at the very least, we've been talking about video and multimedia. We definitely can appreciate storytelling. I mean, this has been a point of emphasis within the traditional publication. How can we engage society? How can we ensure that the results are applicable to the general public?
DAWIT TEGBARU: And so the journalism approach or using visualizations, normalizing that process when you have a technical publication where a broader group of people can actually understand and apply it, or at least know where their research is going. There's a lot of value in that. So if we can try to normalize that and have standards that support, I think we can all kind of move in the right direction.
REBEKAH STACHA: And I want a second what Dawit said right then, which is we have to have standards. I was thinking back about the fact that you were talking, Todd, on your presentation about the history of paper. But the fact is we've been able to in the digital world go back into archives and pull things up and make a lot of stuff very much available. Now there's been work to that.
REBEKAH STACHA: But the fact that somebody captured it and had some page numbering they ultimately came up with back from that time period enabled a lot of things we could do later. So I think that to make sure that the video capture the volume of things that are coming out, Instagram they're gone in a lot of times. In fact, some people are actually-- some of the idea-- and Snapchat, I think-- is to not have a record.
REBEKAH STACHA: But for what we're doing in scholarly publishing, I think that the record is an incredibly important thing to preserve and make sure we're putting things in place for standards so that the future generations can still access it and use it to build upon. I think that if we get too much into the speed, we lose some of that. And so there's some of the pieces that I think we need to be very intentional about so that we are setting the future people, the future generations up to be able to access the information that's coming out now.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: And in the thread of forms that we've gone through, people still read newspapers. You can still get a hard copy of a newspaper, maybe not everywhere. People still read hardcover books. There is still AM radio. This is all additive things. Technologies don't disappear. People don't stop using them for the most part.
TODD CARPENTER: And this is a growing ecosystem. It's not a shrinking ecosystem.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yes.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Right.
HANNAH HECKNER: And we definitely see that there is also a cost to all of this storage and all of this archival material. So, yeah, hopefully someone creates CO2 emission zero servers in the future. OK, this was such a great conversation. Thank you all so much. I have to hand it over to Stephanie now to take us home. But thank you all to our panelists and this really engaged group of attendees.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, thank you everyone. I feel like this is one of those topics that we can continue talking for hours about. So maybe we'll have to have a part 2 at some point. I am going to launch right quick a just quick poll to help us get a rating and help plan for the future. And as I do, I will remind you that the next event in the series is going to take place on November 9 where we will be joined by Rod Cookson of IWA Publishing, Ann Michael, of Delta Think, Sean Sanders of AAAS, and Miranda Walker of Wolters Kluwer Health for a roundtable discussion on the future of society publishing.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: So we'll solve all that then. We hope to see you. And thanks again to our speakers and everyone who joined us today. Thanks-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
REBEKAH STACHA: Everyone. Bye-bye.
DAWIT TEGBARU: Thank you.
TODD CARPENTER: Thank you.
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The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
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Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
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