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STM goes to Washington: How Scholarly Publishers Can (or Can't) Influence Policy
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STM goes to Washington: How Scholarly Publishers Can (or Can't) Influence Policy
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Segment:0 .
Thank you all for being here today. Hello and welcome to our panel discussion on government affairs and how scholarly publishers can or can't influence policy. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm the head of Public Affairs and advocacy for frontiers. I am very happy to see you all in the room and on the live stream as well.
Given the interest that we have in this session, I think we're going to have a very good discussion and ideally some very good questions. I have been told that they're supposed to be a joke to start out with this. So as someone who has nine nieces and nephews and three goddaughters, I'm going to go with my old standby. What is Brown and sticky a stick? Thank you.
Thank you very much. We have a tremendous panel. Excited to share their expertise and insights with you on these topics. Before I make introductions and hand it off to the panel, I just wanted to remind everybody that we are abiding by the code of conduct, as we have been for everything else during this meeting, and that abides by our core values of community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity.
As I said, I am Tom Ciavarella. I will be the moderator for today's session. Susan willner is also going to be a moderator as well because we are live streaming this. So if there are questions from online, we want those people to be just as involved and included as they can be. She will be helping us out with that. In the past three years, publishing and government decision making have overlapped significantly.
But how these decisions are reached and how to get involved in the decision making process can be difficult to understand and to introduce a theme that we're going to talk about throughout this hour. You should be involved. Our community is the most well versed in the subjects we're going to address today, and they are most directly affected as well. Our communities voice is a valuable one, but it can be heard only through engagement.
I should also note that this is a conversation about process and the actors in policy making, not about what position you should take on those policies. The hottest issue of the day is likely the implementation of the guidance and the panelists, and many in the audience are likely to hold varied positions on that. And we hope that if you have an opinion that is not expressed up here, that during the Q&A portion, you will let us know about that.
So we have a short period of time, only an hour. So we're going to break the discussion into sections. I am first going to briefly introduce the panel. They will take turns introducing themselves, talking a little bit about their background and a topic in the public policy sphere that they are most interested in or passionate about. I'll have a few follow up questions, but then the bulk of the time will be for you in the audience.
So with all of that said, I am quite pleased to be joined by Allison denbigh of Oxford University Press. Laura Patton of Springer nature, Miriam quintal of Lewis Birk associates, and David Weinreich of the International Association of Publishers. And before I hand it off to Miriam to open it up, please, round of applause for our panel.
OK, great. Thank you so much, Tom, for that introduction. I'm Miriam quintal with Louis Burke associates. We are a government relations firm focused exclusively on the science, technology, health and education sectors, working with many scientific associations and universities on their public policy and federal relations goals. I think for a long time, publishing goals have been over here, and organizations, even those that have a focus in advocacy, have their goals over here, their community engagement, grassroots advocacy kind of over here.
But increasingly we see an ecosystem that is challenged by policy in ways that make it hard to separate out these issues. So, of course, the Nelson memo, as has been emphasized many times, and we're happy to get more into that. But I wanted to also share a few other things that are affecting this ecosystem. On the policy side, we are under divided government for the first time in quite a while, and what that means is a different kind of environment for policymaking, one that is more constrained in terms of funding, more constrained in terms of passing laws and moving policy forward from the Congress.
We just had a debt ceiling deal signed or not signed, but agreed to and passed out of the House yesterday. And that is going to constrain funding going into the scientific ecosystem quite a bit relative to the flush period we've been in the past few years. And how will that affect what kinds of publications come forward and how the author community is impacted by that funding?
And then also a huge conversation around AI and what the regulatory elements are research, security, trust, and this can affect the data flows and affect our publishing industry quite a bit, as has been discussed in many panels. So I think all of these issues need to be considered together and thinking about how we can talk about the value and our role in this larger ecosystem and how policy policies affect that, affect that ecosystem and affect us.
Thanks, Miriam. So my name is Laura Patton. I'm the head of government affairs for Springer Nature. Before I was at Springer nature, I was in congressional relations at the Rand Corporation. And then before that, I worked for two different members of Congress. So I think Miriam did a great job of setting the stage for where we are today with government advocacy.
I kind of want to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how it's done. You know, I think when people think of, you know, telling their government about something that matters to them, they think of protests, writing angry letters. And, you know, those are all very valid ways of getting your point across. But what we're talking about government advocacy, we're talking about, you know, really talking to the policy makers that are trying to make the decisions.
Right so you want to talk to the administration, you want to talk to congress, you need to think about how the levers of government kind of work together. So I'll give an example. If Nasa does something that you hate, then you can talk to Nasa, but you can also talk to Congress. But you don't want to just kind of walk into a random member of Congress's office.
I mean, you can do that. But as a former congressional staffer, no one liked that. So would not recommend. But what you have to think about is, OK, who are the committees that oversee Nasa, who has oversight, who funds nasa? And then then you look at who are these members, who are the members on the committees? And then so those are the staff that you want to talk to.
That's kind of how you can target your focus. You know, there's obviously the house, there's the Senate. So you need to meet with both sides. I often find people are surprised a little bit. You need to leave your personal politics at the door. You know, when you go in, you want to talk to both Republicans and Democrats. You know, as Mary mentioned, it's divided government. You know, you can't just say, well, I'm a republican, so I'll only talk to.
That's not effective government efficacy. You have to be aware that the parties are working together. The debt ceiling Bill did not pass on a party line vote. So both parties are in power. Both parties have, you know, their own ways of doing oversight. And you're most effective if you're talking to both sides. So let me just pass it over to Allison. Oh, that's right.
You have your own mic from somewhere behind you. Yeah Thank you. Thank you, Laura. So I wanted to. I'm Alison denbigh of Oxford University Press. So representing a not for profit community, but actually a community of 300 different societies that range from every single subject discipline and actually massively in size.
Our largest societies are about 140 times the smallest in terms of revenue. So hugely diverse population. And I think my position here is a little bit different to everybody else's in the sense of the scale that we have and our ability to influence is quite difficult. So I'm sort of on the if you can't do it, how do you get around it and what else can you do? So taking a positive look at that, but thinking about how do we represent the very diverse stakeholders that we have, which is really quite difficult because there isn't a single voice.
And I think we said that right at the beginning. There's not one business model that works for all. There's not one policy implementation or practice that works for all. So we have to think about how do we manage in a very complex situation with different subjects being represented in different ways and make sure that they can all help and support and move forward under conditions that are somewhat imposed but as positively as we possibly can.
So it's trying to take all of that and think about our objective as well as many of our societies, in fact, all of them. And that's really how do we ensure the sustainability of high quality, curated and integrity in everything that we do. And I think we're hearing a lot about all of those things, and none of that comes easily or very cheaply. And I think that's one of the things that we've heard a little bit about scale and what do we do around that.
And similarly, lobbying takes scale and influence. So according to chatgpt, that is how you influence. And I looked it up. I'm like, so what am I supposed to say at this session that says do lobbying? And well, we don't really have the size for that. So, you know, what we are trying to do is think about what are the positive ways to influence things or not influence, but actually respond if I'm honest.
So how can we better show and demonstrate all the amazing work that we all do, all the energy and effort that is going into producing content, really doing that in a consistent way across our industry? I mean, we are superb at coming up with standards and conforming to simple practices and persistent identifiers. I mean, it's something that we need to celebrate, but it's actually something that I think is going to underpin our success potentially here.
We have to take all of that and we have to decide how do we use that post-publication to demonstrate value. At the end of the day, people will pay for what works for them and what is valuable to them, and that's really the position for us. So we're looking at New ways to demonstrate the impact of what we're doing for funded research, to really show how that funded research makes a difference.
And then why you should be paying potentially in a very market rate economy, the right amount for the right sort of influence and impact. So thinking about what do we do there? How do we demonstrate research integrity, I sort of think there's now a need for us as a group of publishers to come together in the way that we do, to show how we can demonstrate that the content we're publishing is as far as we can manage.
I get that has passed sort of consistent research, integrity barriers. And what does that mean and how do we do it together? Because again, going on that scale size, we can't all do this as individual organizations, but it's going to be really essential to continued influence and that will drive funding if we can make a difference. And if we can publish content that is really helping in terms of improving science, that's what people will pay for and will add value.
So that's really what we're looking for. And I think there are other elements that we can do. We know the massive list of things that publishers do that we keep trying to tell some of our government colleagues and all the different things that are serving different elements of what we do. They don't hear any of that. They just need to see why.
So it's the show, why it matters, why what we do is important and demonstrate that rather than the how. Because I think we've spent a lot of time talking about the how. But we do know if you try to disaggregate the industry and replicate it, I think the Clark and Esposito number 50 something, I don't know if anybody's here talked a lot about that. You know, how much it would cost to do a lot of the things that we've already put in place.
We should make those available, but we need to be able to be doing that in a sustainable manner. So thinking about the positives of the future is really where I'm trying to go. Great Thank you. I'm David weinrich. I'm director of policy and Government Relations at STM, the trade Association for academic publishers, which I see many faces in the room of folks who are members.
So thank you. I've been I'm a trained mathematician. A published mathematician. Which is how I publishing. Well But I've been working in DC for about 20 years now, and when I got first got to dc, it was impressed upon me that in order to influence policy, influence government discussions, you've got to have three things.
You've got to have policy that you're interested in. You've got to have politics on your side and you've got to understand procedure. And each of the panelists here has kind of alluded to that. But I wanted to just give that as a framework for our conversation and for questions that you might have from a policy standpoint. You've got to know what you want. And as Tom mentioned at the outset, you know, we're a very diverse community as a membership organization, has organizations pursuing different needs, different goals, different approaches.
And what's the fundamental thing that we want? We want to maintain a quality system of scholarly communication that's available with integrity for the public, for researchers to drive innovation and discovery. And that's all good to say, but you've got to know where you're going. What is the actual ask that goes along with that goal and I'll save that for questions and over a beer later.
Um, the second thing is politics and there's the broader politics that Miriam talked about, but there's also individual, interpersonal politics. It's really important to have what Allison talked about, understanding of what our values are, what the political levers might be. But we heard if people were at the plenary this morning, Amy brand mentioned that trust in science is something that you can't convince people about, that you have to bring them in, that you have to build community.
And that is a key part of the politics of advocacy, of lobbying, of government relations. You need to understand what the folks that you're meeting with value, why what you care about might be important to them, or what parts of what you care about you might emphasize in order to get them on your side, to bring them together. And one of the things that you see in politics is also that you can build a coalition either within policy making or outside of policy making, without everyone in that coalition having the same goal or motivation for being part of that coalition.
But you want to do it in a way that's with integrity. You don't want to, you know, say one thing to one person and another thing to another person because that's not going to build community in the way that you want. But not everybody has to be there for the same reason. As long as there is agreement on what the goal is. And that's part of politics. And then the last thing is procedure.
Procedure is who's important that Laura mentioned, who can actually influence your random member of congress, for example, doesn't have necessarily a lot of say on to certain policies. You've got to know who's on what, committees, where they can influence things. You've got to also know what is possible through legislation, through various legislative vehicles. And where the opportunities are.
And that's something that you can learn through study you can reach out to. Me, I won't. Probably most of the folks on the panel would be happy to talk to you about those sorts of things. But you've got to really have those three things in concert policy, politics and procedure in order to achieve your goals and encourage you to use those levers to join us in speaking up for scholarly communications.
And whether you're a member of or not, happy to talk to you about how you can get more involved. Thank you very much. So I think I would like to start by coming back around because, David, between you and Alison, you represent like the largest batch of our ecosystem societies. University presses, large commercial publishers, smaller commercial publishers.
So given all those different business models, those different organizations, those different interests that they might have, are there any inherent advantages to some? I mean, if you are a University press, you only have certain things at your disposal, but you would think that a University press is smaller, perhaps doesn't have the cloud that a larger press would or a larger company would.
Are there advantages to being smaller? Are there advantages to being a society over a commercial publisher when you're dealing with the government? How how does that happen when you're of a size that you can't control? You are the size that you are, so how do you manage that? So what I would say to that and then I'll pass it to Alison Is. This is the politics part.
You want to understand where you sit-in the ecosystem. Who might like certain aspects of what you do and who might be more less inclined. So if you're a big commercial entity, you know. Uh, folks who are focused on the business community are going to be more receptive to, to what you're saying, whether that's a new Democrat or a business focused Republican.
You lean into your contributions to the economy. You lean into those sorts of things. If you're and if you're a social scientist. Where you know, the main person who is going to influence you as a Republican who's against social science, you want to find aspects of your identity that are appropriate and contour wise. If you're, you know, representing a large group of researchers, especially if there's a University in the congressional district that that, you know, has a lot of your members, you know, you lean into things like that.
Thanks, David. Slightly different perspective from the University press. So we are the largest, I think, University press, at least in journals, so 550 journals. And that does have some advantages. I think having being a not for profit. And representing not for profit means we can actually open doors usually fairly easily because there is a feeling of a bit more trust I think that we can take advantage of or not.
I think that's a big question. How do we do that when we walk into the room? I mean, we know of people at the OSTP who are very sympathetic to not disrupting society publishing yet. They don't really understand what that means and what the broader policies mean. So I think and the hard thing for us is, is that disruption is very, very different for different scales and different types of societies.
So you talk about humanities societies and funding entirely different to many of the sciences which are well funded. And I think that's the bit that we try to help to educate. And the education starts sometimes with the policy and the government, but there's also an awful lot of education then we need to bring to our societies for them to understand what these business models mean to them.
It's really quite stressful for many of them thinking about changes and how this will impact their membership and how they will continue to publish in high quality. Because again, Amy, I think this morning or it was mentioned several times, this real, real conflict at the minute between business models that volume over curatorship as we are pivoting. So how do we help to support that?
I mean, one of the ways is, is all the transformative agreements and working between not just the policy element of this, but within the institutional environment, so influencing how we sell and how we represent our content to transition from read revenue, for want of a better word, subscription revenue to publish revenue. And how does that then intersect with the funding environment and what do we do to reach out to the different agencies and help to support our communities in terms of funding?
And I think there are some of the University presses. MIT is one of them who are really exploring that. And there are other areas where we're thinking about what does platinum look like? Does it work here are these areas that really need alternative support to move to open access, and what do we do to support that? And the challenge we have when we go into government is that's really complicated.
It's not a simple story. There isn't the one ask. And that's the real difficult thing. I think what we're trying to do is get towards a place where we can explain and provide messaging to help understand. But it is very, very difficult compared to, you know, the beauty of some of the pure open access arguments. They're very simple. So I think that's one of the challenges we have to get to.
But again, you know, what we're trying to do is guide and help to manage this in a transitional and slow but effective manner. So that it's not a shock to the system, to our societies and to our journals and really try to explain where we can, how they're influencing and publishing some of the most important content. And we can't disrupt that. We need to support it.
I think that situation is a little different for universities and scientific societies. So for University press, as part of a US university, you have actually tremendous cloud with a specific congressional delegation, right? You might be the largest employer, for example, in your district. Alumni that are members of Congress that love the institution.
But then, of course, the press and the libraries are just one part of a big institution that has a lot of priorities, many of which are not specifically related to publishing or might have different considerations from the research side of the organization, from the library side, et cetera. So in for a university, I think it's more about balancing your priorities and thinking about how to leverage your personal delegation that you have and their ability to impact national organizations for societies.
It's exactly the opposite. You have national reach in a very specific arena, and I think the best, the best assets that brings is very trusted relationships with specific federal programs and folks that are in a particular discipline that might support your that might support your community and who value you as a partner in engaging that community and thinking about how to leverage that in terms of influencing agency implementation is helpful.
On the congressional side, I think we've got, you know, societies have to think about how to leverage their grassroots advocacy and balance that with a lot of the Society Policy priorities, which could largely be about funding for science and other things that affect your community as opposed to the publishing itself. I wanted to give one example that just happened today, in fact.
So the White House office of Science and Technology Policy is holding listening sessions on open science for early career researchers. So we've been talking a lot, I think, over the course of the day about early career researchers and how to educate them and publishing. And you know, personally, I didn't think we should just spin up a bunch of early career researchers to talk about publishing because they're not necessarily experts in it.
But what we did for one of our clients, the Society for industrial and applied mathematics and I think is here. So we have our early career Fellows. We had them talk about the value of the society to them, the issues that affect them. They need infrastructure to do open science, they need funding to do their science. All of these things affect the society and affect the future.
And I think we're really building the case for after the implementation and all of the follow on effects on this ecosystem, how do we make it sure that it's clear that these societies have real public value and agencies, if they mess this up, they're going to have to pick up the pieces later on and think about, you know, how do we support this ecosystem and ensure there's a diversity of organizations going forward. Thank you very much.
Laura, I wanted to ask you something. So you had a really great example of, you know, if you know, you're angry at Nasa, you could go to Nasa, but maybe it's better for you to go to whoever has oversight of Nasa. And that could be somebody who sits on a committee. And you were a staffer, so you've taken I don't know how many meetings in the past, and now you're on the other side of the table.
You're having the meetings with staffers. So I'm interested in learning from you. What what did you respond to when you were a staffer? When someone came in and wanted to influence legislation or policy, what did you respond to and how does that inform how you go into offices now in your new role? Sure So I think one of the most important things to remember is and I'm going to speak mostly of congressional meetings, is that, you know, a lot of times the staffers you're meeting with are very young, are very new to the position, probably don't have any background in the issue you're talking about.
You know, when I was a staffer, I was just handed issues. All of a sudden I was told, you're going to handle Homeland Security and now you're going to take meetings with FEMA and a bunch of lobbyists about Homeland Security issues. And that was how I learned about it. So kind of echoing Allison's point, it is really important to go in with, you know, an eye towards educating.
You want to explain to them, you know, first kind of the basis of the industry. And then, like David said, you do want to have a short, sharp message on why it matters to them specifically and an ask. So, you know, you want to think educate and then you want to have, you know, kind of tailor your message and then you want to have here's what I here's what I'm hoping I will get out of this meeting.
And, you know, sometimes you'll go in and you'll have 15 minutes. So it it has to be fairly short. You can't think you're going to come in there with like 20 PowerPoint slides and have a captive audience for an hour. Yeah I would just add that the other thing that you can do and this also relates to the question of building on your strength is how can you help this person that you're meeting with?
And it's true, especially with congressional staffers, but also with administration policymakers, it's, you know, what do you have to offer as far as helping their boss, helping their office? Related to what they care about. So do your homework to know what if you're meeting with a congressional office, what is something that the boss that the member of Congress recently spoke about or what's on their website as one of their top three priorities?
Can you tie what you want to talk about to one of those things? And, you know, that can be really the key to building a relationship and being effective. Thank you very much. I want to talk a little bit about the guidelines, and that's already been alluded to.
And I'm sure it's something that, you know, the people in the audience would like to talk about as well. Um, Laura, you made the point that, you know, you're going to go in and speak to people and this is going to be perhaps brand new to them. You've got to do a lot of educating of them. Um, there's been nothing public per se in terms of hearings, like there have been a couple of rfis from the agencies.
There is the guidelines themselves that came out last August. So I'm going to ask anyone who would like to answer at this point to look a couple of months into the future, I know that we can't look all that far, but do you think there's going to be hearings? Do you think there's places where publishers could make their voice heard in a way that hasn't been done before?
Or do you think the groundwork has already been laid and now we just have to leave it with the Congress and with the OSTP and see what happens next. Well, so, you know, as somebody who works in government, I am a big believer in advocacy as a way of making change. So, you know, part of I think the point of this panel is to really encourage all of you, if you see the Nelson memo as affecting you in a positive or negative way, you know, go in and talk to the members of Congress that are pursuing these issues.
And that is the house science and Technology Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee. Those are the ones that would be holding hearings. And, you know, obviously, Springer Nature. We have our position. I'm sure everyone else here has theirs. But, you know, it is if they don't hear from anyone, they're going to think it doesn't matter to the community.
So whether, you know, people are going in and saying the same things or even different things, you know, that's important because it shows the Congress who's doing the funding and oversight, that this is something that matters and that they should be paying attention to. I think there's a limit to what the Congress can do or will do at this point to turn back the clock on the Nelson memo.
So the Nelson memo is out there. It's not going to be reversed. So I think we have to think about everything that we're doing in that context of it, of it going forward, no matter what the position is on it. So I think, as I mentioned, policy makers understanding the transformation of this ecosystem and what are the policies going forward in the future that are going to help our organizations be sustainable, that are going to help our organizations thrive?
And talking about our value, I think is worthwhile. But it's not a short term project. That's a long term project, right? And in the short term, I think where we're most focused is on the agency implementation. So that's in responding to requests for information, joining listening sessions that the agencies are holding, really talking to OSTP and the White House about how they can be inclusive of a really broad ecosystem when they're holding these kinds of events.
So they're not only hearing from the biggest groups or the largest publishers, but also hearing from smaller sum, from smaller publishers and from scientific societies. And these activities are not sort of traditional advocacy, but I always think about all of them as very integrated approach where you want to leverage all of your different resources to impact, impact the policy ecosystem and not think about these activities in isolation.
With respect to the Nelson memo and agency revisions of public access policies, I agree with everything that's been said. But to make it a little bit more concrete, there's. A variety of levels of engagement and difficulty that you could choose two ways that you could choose to engage. So NIH has released their public access plan, their revisions to the public access plan pursuant to the Nelson memo.
Nasa has now released theirs as well. Um, NIH had a request for information and comment on their public access policy that is now closed, but they did say that they would accept late submissions. NASA's request for comments is open until mid-august. I think these are very easy ways. Know public ways. You can just submit your comments.
Um, NSF allegedly will have their plan published soon and also have a request for comment. And other agencies may as well. The Department of Transportation had a request for comment as well. And these are good opportunities to raise your voice. They're pretty easy opportunities from one standpoint that they've laid out what their plan is. You can say in response whatever you want to say, you can respond to their specific questions that they often lay out, or you can make general comments of your concerns or recommendations of how they actually do implementation.
The other opportunity is right now for OSTP and NSF are doing a series of listening sessions that Miriam alluded to. You can sign up for these. They're open to all of the public. As was mentioned, one series of them is focused on early career researchers. The NSF series is divided by disciplines, but they aren't restricted to those groups participating.
And so you are welcome to join and participate. They're zooms. You can write into the chat. You can raise your hand to comment and so forth. So those are the easy things. The harder things. Not that hard, but that actually take more proactive action from you and your organization are the kind of direct engagement that's been talked about.
And there are three. Areas for direct engagement. One is the administration, the white house, that is the Office of Science and Technology policy, office of Management and Budget. Those sorts of places that are probably a little bit more difficult to get into, but. Would have a lot of influence on the eventual outcome. If you're able to get in and move the needle of the opinion of folks that you're talking to.
The second and easier is the individual agencies. In addition to these RFCS and listening sessions, many of you, especially scientific societies but the rest of you as well. Should have or do have or people within your organization. Have relationships with folks in the agencies. And you can talk to them and you can figure out. You want to figure out who actually is making the decisions, but.
Being able to talk to them, understand where they're coming from, share your own views in a private setting is really helpful. And then the third thing is, is Congress and I'd agree that Congress is unlikely to do anything major to change the trajectory, but the house Science Committee has been talking about potentially doing some hearings and ultimately, in as much as whatever's put in place costs money.
Or whatever's put in place requires new mechanisms for directing, funding or supporting the research community that's going to need to be authorized by Congress. And so we're really focusing on those aspects when we're engaging with Congress to help them understand what a big deal this is and how Congress might start thinking about putting in place structures and funding mechanisms to make sure that scholarly communication can continue to be sustainable.
Thank you very much. We could talk a lot about this, and I'm sure there's going to be some audience questions. So I'm not going to ask a few of the things that I want to switch gears actually for a moment and talk a little bit about the fact that when we talk about OSTP and other things in this world, we're talking about the physical sciences, we're talking about journals.
But the Nelson memo is also taking into account openness in terms of the arts and humanities and the social sciences books as well. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that just in terms of when you're speaking with agencies, when you're speaking with staffers, does that come up? Does do the arts and humanities come up? Do you have to bring that up? Are you are you trying not to talk about it because it's away from the ask in a certain way.
But there's already been some thought the same way that we saw with the plan that, you know, arts and humanities just don't work the same way that the physical sciences do. So how can you shoehorn everybody into a single policy? So what's going on with that discussion? Maybe I can start, um, so I think there's a few things. One is the social sciences are actually really at the front of the policy making at NSF.
So one of the co-chairs, Ellen Tompkins, of the NSF's decision making is from the Social sciences part of NSF. So I think they're very much coming at this with an understanding of the social science community. But also I think there's a real difference. Number one, if you look at the humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities is really for the first time promulgating a policy since they weren't they didn't fall under the 2013 memo as a smaller agency.
So for them, it's a little bit brand new. And I think engagement is even more important than with some of the bigger agencies because they're not just doing a small update to their plan. They're doing a whole new a whole new policy that does need to think about the real differences of that community. And I think the biggest thing there are probably many, many differences.
But the biggest thing is that the federal funding is not nearly as universal as it is in, say, like an engineering or biomedical research, where you have most, many, many authors kind of coming in with federal funding and thinking about the author equity pieces and how and some of the other disciplines like math also has this issue, this issue, you know, the author equity piece is where we don't set up an ecosystem where open access is available to those with federally federal funding, authors with federal funding, but not to authors without federal funding, I think is something to really make sure that agencies are cognizant of and they're thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, very big topic among the agencies and a real priority for them.
So I think if we can think about our messages in terms of how these policies impact diversity in our community, that's going to resonate with the agencies. Yeah I mean, we work a lot with the arts and humanities and many of the big societies who are really quite threatened by this. And I think equity is their biggest argument and their major concern. But I think the other one is all the what would not be chargeable, for want of a better word, content in the journals that they publish and even the articles that they do charge for or would be chargeable under this policy if they were funded or could be covered under a read and publish agreement, for example.
Typically a much, much longer. There's a lot more time goes into them. There's a lot more copy editing and other costs that goes into them. So the, the, you know, the standard accepted, for want of a better word, is our average of what, I don't know, three k, 4k and it just doesn't work right. And it doesn't support all the other content that they're very proud to publish book reviews.
There's a lot of other influential stuff that these groups are publishing that has no value effectively in an open access model. So it's not just finding the money to support potentially through funded people unfunded as well, those not in the University sector. There's an awful lot in the humanities who aren't part of a University system either, so they can't benefit from some of the bigger University deals.
So it's been a huge question. And there's a lot of fear, honestly, in that community about how do we sustain those journals and the value that they bring and how do we not throw the baby out with the bath water effectively. And I think the answer often has been a little bit. Well, there's diamond, right? What does that look like?
How do you go out and get. But again, going back to the volume of publishing, that then would have to be potentially supported and where will that money come from in the long term, I think is a real challenge in thinking about that model. It might work. I can't see it can work at scale. So a lot of fear there. And I think anything we can do to try to influence the National endowment, but it goes way beyond that.
And I do think there's a big worry here about equity and it's a genuine one. Yeah, and we're talking about publications here, but we haven't even weighed into the data piece of, of this, which is huge for social science and humanities as well. Um, but to your question, it's really helpful actually that we have social science and humanities in this mix because it's very clear the, the differences between disciplines, the difference between math and physics, for example, which is huge as far as the practices and the funding isn't as clear to your average policymaker as the difference between social science and physics.
And so it's helpful to point out the complexity of the system and the complexity of what's being asked and the complexity of the questions of how we're going to get there. Um, it's helpful to be able to point to social science and humanities in that setting. Thank you all very much. This has been exceedingly helpful.
We're at about 15 minutes left in this session, so I'm going to look at my colleague Susan and see if there's any questions in the room, which I can't see because of the Blinding Lights or if there's any questions online. There there is a question. I copied it down from online. Let me read it to you. Is it reasonable to expect change during a request for comments?
Are there do you think that the folks at HTTP the question continues? Do you think the folks at OSTP and the National Science Foundation really listened to the feedback, or is it lip service? Has the train already left the station? Great questions. I will diplomatically say I think it's a mix, but I think they're not asking for comment If they didn't want it.
And I think, you know, we've heard that. I think people are truly considering some of the concerns and the issues that the community is bringing. I just want to separate out the things that they're not going to change and the things that they might change. So are they going to change the zero embargo? No, they're not going to change that.
That's the central part of the policy. So they're not going to go they're not going to change anything. That's sort of the big picture. But I think in the details it is worth commenting and getting in the weeds on this stuff. What what are the exact requirements? What kind author accepted manuscripts versus the version of record?
What are the copyright issues that are a part of this? What what are the backstops? I also think that the OSTP was a little bit disingenuous in the memo and that they said there would be federal funding for this. What we're hearing from the agencies is they are absolutely not planning to add any money to any grants for this. And, and, and I've heard that very clearly from different agencies.
So and anyway, the funding, as I said at the beginning, is likely to be flat for the agencies. And they have a lot of trade offs to make over the next couple of years. So given that, you know, what can they be doing to support the community and what are the other things? So I think they are looking for input because the agencies are for the know, I think largely public servants want to do good for their communities.
They do not want to hurt this ecosystem. So they're trying to make the best policy possible under this larger framework. And I think they really want advice on how to do that, and they need to hear about the concerns from the broad and diverse group of stakeholders. I think something else to, if I might just add to that is that it is agent by agency, by agency. The RFI that was put out by Nasa, for instance, wants all of its responses limited to only four pages.
As a PDF, Nasa is ahead of the curve when it comes to open science. So certainly they want to hear from us. But NASA's been thinking about this for a long time, whereas other agencies probably need to hear more about this than others. So sometimes inside of the rfi, they start to tip their hand a little bit in terms of just how much they would like to hear.
Are there other. I don't have to run like Oprah. Wait Thank you all for your insights today. Yesterday's keynote, we saw many examples of reasons to have some skepticism about what is published. And at this session this morning, I heard a publisher say that we shouldn't necessarily trust what comes out of a publisher just because the publisher published it.
And one of our themes here at the meeting is trust. So I'm wondering about the question of integrity. When you talk to legislators, to what degree do you does that topic track with them? How do you sell that to them? Is that something they're thinking about or when they're thinking about the role of publishers? Are they thinking more about how does it gain commercial advantage for our country?
Is it how what are the topics that speak to politicians? So not they are definitely thinking about integrity. And I think there's a huge concern here. And I think this is where we have a strong voice and it's a very, very important voice to share all the work that we do to maintain and improve and actually now go back and look at the past record to make sure that all the content we as far as we possibly can, right, the content that we publish is trustworthy.
And I do think this is one of the really powerful points we can make when we go to speak to any member of the government or anybody who's making policy around here. We really need to explain just what we're doing here and how complex it is and how much it's taking in terms of investment, but how critical. I mean, it's just probably it's the biggest issue we're facing right now, how critical that is going to be in the future to advancing science and education.
So I think it's one of the ways actually to open a door in a very positive way about what publishers do, do and do very well. And I think that's the one thing that I would stress is going with the positive messaging and not the defensive positioning. It's like, how can we help? And I think we've all said that in some way or other, but I think that's probably the first thing you should ask yourself before you go to speak to them.
And this is clearly one of those issues. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think as a message about value, it really works. As a message about how our industry has challenges. It's not a good one. We don't want to bring. We don't want to bring and say our community is having real issues with integrity and therefore we have a problem, right?
No, definitely not. So it's how you frame things. I also wanted to mention and I and I mentioned these at the beginning, but I wanted to bring it back. There are several issues related to integrity that are very, very hot congressional issues right now and a big concern for policy makers. So insofar as we can connect into that and paint the bigger picture about how we're involved in this.
So number one is competitiveness and a huge concern about competitiveness, about and about research security. And this is largely driven about concerns about the Chinese government and their activities around IP. So members of Congress are really ready to talk about those issues. They want to know about how universities, for example, are protecting IP coming out of research. And I think they're going to be naturally interested in that.
The other one that I mentioned is AI, and there's huge, huge discussions of AI. I mean, I'm seeing like seven articles a day about AI policy or something like that and its impacts on all different facets. But there's a lot of issues of interest to policymakers around the regulatory ecosystem of AI and its effects on privacy, its effect on bias, its effect on trust.
And so I think in those two categories, policymakers are really primed to hear about, to hear about information and expertise that we may bring to those topics. Is there a question in the back? Oh, you're going to make me run. It's a good.
Thank you. Hi great discussion. Chris kennealy with CCC. I'm curious, I know the title of the program is scholarly publishing goes to Washington, right. But this is a global environment, a global ecosystem. And I wonder, to what extent is this some kind of 3D chess game where what you are thinking about when you're talking to people in Washington interacts with what you're talking about in London now that it is separated from the EU with what happens in brussels, with what happens in Singapore or Australia or any of these places.
It must make it, as I say, a kind of a chess game to sort of with the point about was just made about competitiveness. That has to play as well. Can we talk about it in the global context? Yeah, I think that that varies depending on who you are and what you're worried about. I think that there are some.
American based societies that are very focused on America and the Uc policy sphere. For us as a global organization and with members with authorship around the world. We're certainly concerned about how the different initiatives in individual regions. Or things like the UNESCO recommendation or there was a G7 communique about open science, how all of those things interact.
And so it is in our mind when we're figuring out. The policy piece of it. For the politics, for the procedure. Obviously the procedure is us procedure if we're in DC. But for the politics, it's a mix. And you know, we as STM are doing advocacy in China. But as Miriam mentioned, competitiveness with China is a huge political issue across the political spectrum here.
And we would be foolish not to talk about that and talk about how our concerns play into those concerns. Um, again, in a way that we can do with integrity. Um, so that if it gets, if, if what we're saying is communicated in China. And we're talking to Chinese policymakers, it doesn't close the doors or work in a counterproductive way.
Don't know. There's no more online and there's nobody else in the room for the moment. So we have a few moments left. I will ask the panel if they have any final thoughts, if there's something we didn't have an opportunity to touch on or anything that you want to make sure that the audience comes away with.
Now, I would just underline that there are a lot of opportunities to be engaged. There are a lot of opportunities to influence things. And Miriam mostly said it in response to the question about can you and Laura both about will your comments, will your engagement actually influence things? And I think the answer is very much yes. I think that there's a lot of details that need to be worked out.
There's a lot of things that have been thought about. I think, as has been said, policymakers who are engaging on this in general are very thoughtful. They want to do the right thing. They want to support the research communities where they can. But there aren't easy answers on a lot of these things, given the direction of travel and the Nelson memo, that as has been mentioned, that part is not going to change.
And so where we can be creative to think about win-win kinds of solutions on funding, on flexibility, on licensing, on repositories, on data sharing and linking, that's where we want to come to the table and roll up our sleeves and offer solutions and collaboration. I think that was my point really as well. What can we do to actually support and help demonstrate the impact of what we're doing, how effective the publishing industry is, all the standards and things that we already provide.
And I don't mean in a defensive way, but the fact that a lot of what's in the Nelson memo publishes are really doing and very, very efficiently. So not to, you know, make sure that we use that really effectively and we demonstrate how we're using that to really push the content that funders are funding and make sure it's widely available, accessible, used. And that's what they want, right?
They need the research that they're publishing to be effective. So how do we support all of that, using all the tools that we have already? Great yeah, I would just echo kind of everyone and say that like we've kind of been saying push everybody to get involved, you know, send your comments in. David outlined a couple levels of how hard it is to talk to government, but I think in general, it is easier than you think.
It's not like house of cards. People want to take your meetings. They're not going to like murder you in the streets afterwards. You know, it's doable. And I think it's an important part of, you know, like I said, our democracy. I always say it's more veep than house of cards. Yeah, but but yeah, I would just circle back to one of the first questions we talked about.
Think about the assets that you have if you are a University and at a university, talk to your government relations people about your concerns. Make sure they're aware and think about what could be done with, you know, with their involvement. You do not want to be a lone actor in a University setting. If you are a small society or even a big, big society, make sure if a big society makes sure you're talking to your people and about and making sure you're integrated.
If you're a small society, think about how you can better leverage your profile raising in Washington and how you can think about that engagement with agencies and how to make that full circle in terms of your local agency partners and having them understand the challenges that you're facing. Think about how you can use your community better, maybe leverage a science policy committee or a committee on science policy, or think about how you can get your early career folks involved more in advocacy.
So I think it really depends on the organization, but there's a lot you can be doing both as yourself and as part of a larger organization. Thank you all on the panel for being involved today. Thank you all in the audience, both here in the room and online for being involved. Ideally, this is just the start of your involvement. Thanks for your time. Have a very good rest of the meeting.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Thank you all for being here today. Hello and welcome to our panel discussion on government affairs and how scholarly publishers can or can't influence policy. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm the head of Public Affairs and advocacy for frontiers. I am very happy to see you all in the room and on the live stream as well.
Given the interest that we have in this session, I think we're going to have a very good discussion and ideally some very good questions. I have been told that they're supposed to be a joke to start out with this. So as someone who has nine nieces and nephews and three goddaughters, I'm going to go with my old standby. What is Brown and sticky a stick? Thank you.
Thank you very much. We have a tremendous panel. Excited to share their expertise and insights with you on these topics. Before I make introductions and hand it off to the panel, I just wanted to remind everybody that we are abiding by the code of conduct, as we have been for everything else during this meeting, and that abides by our core values of community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity.
As I said, I am Tom Ciavarella. I will be the moderator for today's session. Susan willner is also going to be a moderator as well because we are live streaming this. So if there are questions from online, we want those people to be just as involved and included as they can be. She will be helping us out with that. In the past three years, publishing and government decision making have overlapped significantly.
But how these decisions are reached and how to get involved in the decision making process can be difficult to understand and to introduce a theme that we're going to talk about throughout this hour. You should be involved. Our community is the most well versed in the subjects we're going to address today, and they are most directly affected as well. Our communities voice is a valuable one, but it can be heard only through engagement.
I should also note that this is a conversation about process and the actors in policy making, not about what position you should take on those policies. The hottest issue of the day is likely the implementation of the guidance and the panelists, and many in the audience are likely to hold varied positions on that. And we hope that if you have an opinion that is not expressed up here, that during the Q&A portion, you will let us know about that.
So we have a short period of time, only an hour. So we're going to break the discussion into sections. I am first going to briefly introduce the panel. They will take turns introducing themselves, talking a little bit about their background and a topic in the public policy sphere that they are most interested in or passionate about. I'll have a few follow up questions, but then the bulk of the time will be for you in the audience.
So with all of that said, I am quite pleased to be joined by Allison denbigh of Oxford University Press. Laura Patton of Springer nature, Miriam quintal of Lewis Birk associates, and David Weinreich of the International Association of Publishers. And before I hand it off to Miriam to open it up, please, round of applause for our panel.
OK, great. Thank you so much, Tom, for that introduction. I'm Miriam quintal with Louis Burke associates. We are a government relations firm focused exclusively on the science, technology, health and education sectors, working with many scientific associations and universities on their public policy and federal relations goals. I think for a long time, publishing goals have been over here, and organizations, even those that have a focus in advocacy, have their goals over here, their community engagement, grassroots advocacy kind of over here.
But increasingly we see an ecosystem that is challenged by policy in ways that make it hard to separate out these issues. So, of course, the Nelson memo, as has been emphasized many times, and we're happy to get more into that. But I wanted to also share a few other things that are affecting this ecosystem. On the policy side, we are under divided government for the first time in quite a while, and what that means is a different kind of environment for policymaking, one that is more constrained in terms of funding, more constrained in terms of passing laws and moving policy forward from the Congress.
We just had a debt ceiling deal signed or not signed, but agreed to and passed out of the House yesterday. And that is going to constrain funding going into the scientific ecosystem quite a bit relative to the flush period we've been in the past few years. And how will that affect what kinds of publications come forward and how the author community is impacted by that funding?
And then also a huge conversation around AI and what the regulatory elements are research, security, trust, and this can affect the data flows and affect our publishing industry quite a bit, as has been discussed in many panels. So I think all of these issues need to be considered together and thinking about how we can talk about the value and our role in this larger ecosystem and how policy policies affect that, affect that ecosystem and affect us.
Thanks, Miriam. So my name is Laura Patton. I'm the head of government affairs for Springer Nature. Before I was at Springer nature, I was in congressional relations at the Rand Corporation. And then before that, I worked for two different members of Congress. So I think Miriam did a great job of setting the stage for where we are today with government advocacy.
I kind of want to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how it's done. You know, I think when people think of, you know, telling their government about something that matters to them, they think of protests, writing angry letters. And, you know, those are all very valid ways of getting your point across. But what we're talking about government advocacy, we're talking about, you know, really talking to the policy makers that are trying to make the decisions.
Right so you want to talk to the administration, you want to talk to congress, you need to think about how the levers of government kind of work together. So I'll give an example. If Nasa does something that you hate, then you can talk to Nasa, but you can also talk to Congress. But you don't want to just kind of walk into a random member of Congress's office.
I mean, you can do that. But as a former congressional staffer, no one liked that. So would not recommend. But what you have to think about is, OK, who are the committees that oversee Nasa, who has oversight, who funds nasa? And then then you look at who are these members, who are the members on the committees? And then so those are the staff that you want to talk to.
That's kind of how you can target your focus. You know, there's obviously the house, there's the Senate. So you need to meet with both sides. I often find people are surprised a little bit. You need to leave your personal politics at the door. You know, when you go in, you want to talk to both Republicans and Democrats. You know, as Mary mentioned, it's divided government. You know, you can't just say, well, I'm a republican, so I'll only talk to.
That's not effective government efficacy. You have to be aware that the parties are working together. The debt ceiling Bill did not pass on a party line vote. So both parties are in power. Both parties have, you know, their own ways of doing oversight. And you're most effective if you're talking to both sides. So let me just pass it over to Allison. Oh, that's right.
You have your own mic from somewhere behind you. Yeah Thank you. Thank you, Laura. So I wanted to. I'm Alison denbigh of Oxford University Press. So representing a not for profit community, but actually a community of 300 different societies that range from every single subject discipline and actually massively in size.
Our largest societies are about 140 times the smallest in terms of revenue. So hugely diverse population. And I think my position here is a little bit different to everybody else's in the sense of the scale that we have and our ability to influence is quite difficult. So I'm sort of on the if you can't do it, how do you get around it and what else can you do? So taking a positive look at that, but thinking about how do we represent the very diverse stakeholders that we have, which is really quite difficult because there isn't a single voice.
And I think we said that right at the beginning. There's not one business model that works for all. There's not one policy implementation or practice that works for all. So we have to think about how do we manage in a very complex situation with different subjects being represented in different ways and make sure that they can all help and support and move forward under conditions that are somewhat imposed but as positively as we possibly can.
So it's trying to take all of that and think about our objective as well as many of our societies, in fact, all of them. And that's really how do we ensure the sustainability of high quality, curated and integrity in everything that we do. And I think we're hearing a lot about all of those things, and none of that comes easily or very cheaply. And I think that's one of the things that we've heard a little bit about scale and what do we do around that.
And similarly, lobbying takes scale and influence. So according to chatgpt, that is how you influence. And I looked it up. I'm like, so what am I supposed to say at this session that says do lobbying? And well, we don't really have the size for that. So, you know, what we are trying to do is think about what are the positive ways to influence things or not influence, but actually respond if I'm honest.
So how can we better show and demonstrate all the amazing work that we all do, all the energy and effort that is going into producing content, really doing that in a consistent way across our industry? I mean, we are superb at coming up with standards and conforming to simple practices and persistent identifiers. I mean, it's something that we need to celebrate, but it's actually something that I think is going to underpin our success potentially here.
We have to take all of that and we have to decide how do we use that post-publication to demonstrate value. At the end of the day, people will pay for what works for them and what is valuable to them, and that's really the position for us. So we're looking at New ways to demonstrate the impact of what we're doing for funded research, to really show how that funded research makes a difference.
And then why you should be paying potentially in a very market rate economy, the right amount for the right sort of influence and impact. So thinking about what do we do there? How do we demonstrate research integrity, I sort of think there's now a need for us as a group of publishers to come together in the way that we do, to show how we can demonstrate that the content we're publishing is as far as we can manage.
I get that has passed sort of consistent research, integrity barriers. And what does that mean and how do we do it together? Because again, going on that scale size, we can't all do this as individual organizations, but it's going to be really essential to continued influence and that will drive funding if we can make a difference. And if we can publish content that is really helping in terms of improving science, that's what people will pay for and will add value.
So that's really what we're looking for. And I think there are other elements that we can do. We know the massive list of things that publishers do that we keep trying to tell some of our government colleagues and all the different things that are serving different elements of what we do. They don't hear any of that. They just need to see why.
So it's the show, why it matters, why what we do is important and demonstrate that rather than the how. Because I think we've spent a lot of time talking about the how. But we do know if you try to disaggregate the industry and replicate it, I think the Clark and Esposito number 50 something, I don't know if anybody's here talked a lot about that. You know, how much it would cost to do a lot of the things that we've already put in place.
We should make those available, but we need to be able to be doing that in a sustainable manner. So thinking about the positives of the future is really where I'm trying to go. Great Thank you. I'm David weinrich. I'm director of policy and Government Relations at STM, the trade Association for academic publishers, which I see many faces in the room of folks who are members.
So thank you. I've been I'm a trained mathematician. A published mathematician. Which is how I publishing. Well But I've been working in DC for about 20 years now, and when I got first got to dc, it was impressed upon me that in order to influence policy, influence government discussions, you've got to have three things.
You've got to have policy that you're interested in. You've got to have politics on your side and you've got to understand procedure. And each of the panelists here has kind of alluded to that. But I wanted to just give that as a framework for our conversation and for questions that you might have from a policy standpoint. You've got to know what you want. And as Tom mentioned at the outset, you know, we're a very diverse community as a membership organization, has organizations pursuing different needs, different goals, different approaches.
And what's the fundamental thing that we want? We want to maintain a quality system of scholarly communication that's available with integrity for the public, for researchers to drive innovation and discovery. And that's all good to say, but you've got to know where you're going. What is the actual ask that goes along with that goal and I'll save that for questions and over a beer later.
Um, the second thing is politics and there's the broader politics that Miriam talked about, but there's also individual, interpersonal politics. It's really important to have what Allison talked about, understanding of what our values are, what the political levers might be. But we heard if people were at the plenary this morning, Amy brand mentioned that trust in science is something that you can't convince people about, that you have to bring them in, that you have to build community.
And that is a key part of the politics of advocacy, of lobbying, of government relations. You need to understand what the folks that you're meeting with value, why what you care about might be important to them, or what parts of what you care about you might emphasize in order to get them on your side, to bring them together. And one of the things that you see in politics is also that you can build a coalition either within policy making or outside of policy making, without everyone in that coalition having the same goal or motivation for being part of that coalition.
But you want to do it in a way that's with integrity. You don't want to, you know, say one thing to one person and another thing to another person because that's not going to build community in the way that you want. But not everybody has to be there for the same reason. As long as there is agreement on what the goal is. And that's part of politics. And then the last thing is procedure.
Procedure is who's important that Laura mentioned, who can actually influence your random member of congress, for example, doesn't have necessarily a lot of say on to certain policies. You've got to know who's on what, committees, where they can influence things. You've got to also know what is possible through legislation, through various legislative vehicles. And where the opportunities are.
And that's something that you can learn through study you can reach out to. Me, I won't. Probably most of the folks on the panel would be happy to talk to you about those sorts of things. But you've got to really have those three things in concert policy, politics and procedure in order to achieve your goals and encourage you to use those levers to join us in speaking up for scholarly communications.
And whether you're a member of or not, happy to talk to you about how you can get more involved. Thank you very much. So I think I would like to start by coming back around because, David, between you and Alison, you represent like the largest batch of our ecosystem societies. University presses, large commercial publishers, smaller commercial publishers.
So given all those different business models, those different organizations, those different interests that they might have, are there any inherent advantages to some? I mean, if you are a University press, you only have certain things at your disposal, but you would think that a University press is smaller, perhaps doesn't have the cloud that a larger press would or a larger company would.
Are there advantages to being smaller? Are there advantages to being a society over a commercial publisher when you're dealing with the government? How how does that happen when you're of a size that you can't control? You are the size that you are, so how do you manage that? So what I would say to that and then I'll pass it to Alison Is. This is the politics part.
You want to understand where you sit-in the ecosystem. Who might like certain aspects of what you do and who might be more less inclined. So if you're a big commercial entity, you know. Uh, folks who are focused on the business community are going to be more receptive to, to what you're saying, whether that's a new Democrat or a business focused Republican.
You lean into your contributions to the economy. You lean into those sorts of things. If you're and if you're a social scientist. Where you know, the main person who is going to influence you as a Republican who's against social science, you want to find aspects of your identity that are appropriate and contour wise. If you're, you know, representing a large group of researchers, especially if there's a University in the congressional district that that, you know, has a lot of your members, you know, you lean into things like that.
Thanks, David. Slightly different perspective from the University press. So we are the largest, I think, University press, at least in journals, so 550 journals. And that does have some advantages. I think having being a not for profit. And representing not for profit means we can actually open doors usually fairly easily because there is a feeling of a bit more trust I think that we can take advantage of or not.
I think that's a big question. How do we do that when we walk into the room? I mean, we know of people at the OSTP who are very sympathetic to not disrupting society publishing yet. They don't really understand what that means and what the broader policies mean. So I think and the hard thing for us is, is that disruption is very, very different for different scales and different types of societies.
So you talk about humanities societies and funding entirely different to many of the sciences which are well funded. And I think that's the bit that we try to help to educate. And the education starts sometimes with the policy and the government, but there's also an awful lot of education then we need to bring to our societies for them to understand what these business models mean to them.
It's really quite stressful for many of them thinking about changes and how this will impact their membership and how they will continue to publish in high quality. Because again, Amy, I think this morning or it was mentioned several times, this real, real conflict at the minute between business models that volume over curatorship as we are pivoting. So how do we help to support that?
I mean, one of the ways is, is all the transformative agreements and working between not just the policy element of this, but within the institutional environment, so influencing how we sell and how we represent our content to transition from read revenue, for want of a better word, subscription revenue to publish revenue. And how does that then intersect with the funding environment and what do we do to reach out to the different agencies and help to support our communities in terms of funding?
And I think there are some of the University presses. MIT is one of them who are really exploring that. And there are other areas where we're thinking about what does platinum look like? Does it work here are these areas that really need alternative support to move to open access, and what do we do to support that? And the challenge we have when we go into government is that's really complicated.
It's not a simple story. There isn't the one ask. And that's the real difficult thing. I think what we're trying to do is get towards a place where we can explain and provide messaging to help understand. But it is very, very difficult compared to, you know, the beauty of some of the pure open access arguments. They're very simple. So I think that's one of the challenges we have to get to.
But again, you know, what we're trying to do is guide and help to manage this in a transitional and slow but effective manner. So that it's not a shock to the system, to our societies and to our journals and really try to explain where we can, how they're influencing and publishing some of the most important content. And we can't disrupt that. We need to support it.
I think that situation is a little different for universities and scientific societies. So for University press, as part of a US university, you have actually tremendous cloud with a specific congressional delegation, right? You might be the largest employer, for example, in your district. Alumni that are members of Congress that love the institution.
But then, of course, the press and the libraries are just one part of a big institution that has a lot of priorities, many of which are not specifically related to publishing or might have different considerations from the research side of the organization, from the library side, et cetera. So in for a university, I think it's more about balancing your priorities and thinking about how to leverage your personal delegation that you have and their ability to impact national organizations for societies.
It's exactly the opposite. You have national reach in a very specific arena, and I think the best, the best assets that brings is very trusted relationships with specific federal programs and folks that are in a particular discipline that might support your that might support your community and who value you as a partner in engaging that community and thinking about how to leverage that in terms of influencing agency implementation is helpful.
On the congressional side, I think we've got, you know, societies have to think about how to leverage their grassroots advocacy and balance that with a lot of the Society Policy priorities, which could largely be about funding for science and other things that affect your community as opposed to the publishing itself. I wanted to give one example that just happened today, in fact.
So the White House office of Science and Technology Policy is holding listening sessions on open science for early career researchers. So we've been talking a lot, I think, over the course of the day about early career researchers and how to educate them and publishing. And you know, personally, I didn't think we should just spin up a bunch of early career researchers to talk about publishing because they're not necessarily experts in it.
But what we did for one of our clients, the Society for industrial and applied mathematics and I think is here. So we have our early career Fellows. We had them talk about the value of the society to them, the issues that affect them. They need infrastructure to do open science, they need funding to do their science. All of these things affect the society and affect the future.
And I think we're really building the case for after the implementation and all of the follow on effects on this ecosystem, how do we make it sure that it's clear that these societies have real public value and agencies, if they mess this up, they're going to have to pick up the pieces later on and think about, you know, how do we support this ecosystem and ensure there's a diversity of organizations going forward. Thank you very much.
Laura, I wanted to ask you something. So you had a really great example of, you know, if you know, you're angry at Nasa, you could go to Nasa, but maybe it's better for you to go to whoever has oversight of Nasa. And that could be somebody who sits on a committee. And you were a staffer, so you've taken I don't know how many meetings in the past, and now you're on the other side of the table.
You're having the meetings with staffers. So I'm interested in learning from you. What what did you respond to when you were a staffer? When someone came in and wanted to influence legislation or policy, what did you respond to and how does that inform how you go into offices now in your new role? Sure So I think one of the most important things to remember is and I'm going to speak mostly of congressional meetings, is that, you know, a lot of times the staffers you're meeting with are very young, are very new to the position, probably don't have any background in the issue you're talking about.
You know, when I was a staffer, I was just handed issues. All of a sudden I was told, you're going to handle Homeland Security and now you're going to take meetings with FEMA and a bunch of lobbyists about Homeland Security issues. And that was how I learned about it. So kind of echoing Allison's point, it is really important to go in with, you know, an eye towards educating.
You want to explain to them, you know, first kind of the basis of the industry. And then, like David said, you do want to have a short, sharp message on why it matters to them specifically and an ask. So, you know, you want to think educate and then you want to have, you know, kind of tailor your message and then you want to have here's what I here's what I'm hoping I will get out of this meeting.
And, you know, sometimes you'll go in and you'll have 15 minutes. So it it has to be fairly short. You can't think you're going to come in there with like 20 PowerPoint slides and have a captive audience for an hour. Yeah I would just add that the other thing that you can do and this also relates to the question of building on your strength is how can you help this person that you're meeting with?
And it's true, especially with congressional staffers, but also with administration policymakers, it's, you know, what do you have to offer as far as helping their boss, helping their office? Related to what they care about. So do your homework to know what if you're meeting with a congressional office, what is something that the boss that the member of Congress recently spoke about or what's on their website as one of their top three priorities?
Can you tie what you want to talk about to one of those things? And, you know, that can be really the key to building a relationship and being effective. Thank you very much. I want to talk a little bit about the guidelines, and that's already been alluded to.
And I'm sure it's something that, you know, the people in the audience would like to talk about as well. Um, Laura, you made the point that, you know, you're going to go in and speak to people and this is going to be perhaps brand new to them. You've got to do a lot of educating of them. Um, there's been nothing public per se in terms of hearings, like there have been a couple of rfis from the agencies.
There is the guidelines themselves that came out last August. So I'm going to ask anyone who would like to answer at this point to look a couple of months into the future, I know that we can't look all that far, but do you think there's going to be hearings? Do you think there's places where publishers could make their voice heard in a way that hasn't been done before?
Or do you think the groundwork has already been laid and now we just have to leave it with the Congress and with the OSTP and see what happens next. Well, so, you know, as somebody who works in government, I am a big believer in advocacy as a way of making change. So, you know, part of I think the point of this panel is to really encourage all of you, if you see the Nelson memo as affecting you in a positive or negative way, you know, go in and talk to the members of Congress that are pursuing these issues.
And that is the house science and Technology Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee. Those are the ones that would be holding hearings. And, you know, obviously, Springer Nature. We have our position. I'm sure everyone else here has theirs. But, you know, it is if they don't hear from anyone, they're going to think it doesn't matter to the community.
So whether, you know, people are going in and saying the same things or even different things, you know, that's important because it shows the Congress who's doing the funding and oversight, that this is something that matters and that they should be paying attention to. I think there's a limit to what the Congress can do or will do at this point to turn back the clock on the Nelson memo.
So the Nelson memo is out there. It's not going to be reversed. So I think we have to think about everything that we're doing in that context of it, of it going forward, no matter what the position is on it. So I think, as I mentioned, policy makers understanding the transformation of this ecosystem and what are the policies going forward in the future that are going to help our organizations be sustainable, that are going to help our organizations thrive?
And talking about our value, I think is worthwhile. But it's not a short term project. That's a long term project, right? And in the short term, I think where we're most focused is on the agency implementation. So that's in responding to requests for information, joining listening sessions that the agencies are holding, really talking to OSTP and the White House about how they can be inclusive of a really broad ecosystem when they're holding these kinds of events.
So they're not only hearing from the biggest groups or the largest publishers, but also hearing from smaller sum, from smaller publishers and from scientific societies. And these activities are not sort of traditional advocacy, but I always think about all of them as very integrated approach where you want to leverage all of your different resources to impact, impact the policy ecosystem and not think about these activities in isolation.
With respect to the Nelson memo and agency revisions of public access policies, I agree with everything that's been said. But to make it a little bit more concrete, there's. A variety of levels of engagement and difficulty that you could choose two ways that you could choose to engage. So NIH has released their public access plan, their revisions to the public access plan pursuant to the Nelson memo.
Nasa has now released theirs as well. Um, NIH had a request for information and comment on their public access policy that is now closed, but they did say that they would accept late submissions. NASA's request for comments is open until mid-august. I think these are very easy ways. Know public ways. You can just submit your comments.
Um, NSF allegedly will have their plan published soon and also have a request for comment. And other agencies may as well. The Department of Transportation had a request for comment as well. And these are good opportunities to raise your voice. They're pretty easy opportunities from one standpoint that they've laid out what their plan is. You can say in response whatever you want to say, you can respond to their specific questions that they often lay out, or you can make general comments of your concerns or recommendations of how they actually do implementation.
The other opportunity is right now for OSTP and NSF are doing a series of listening sessions that Miriam alluded to. You can sign up for these. They're open to all of the public. As was mentioned, one series of them is focused on early career researchers. The NSF series is divided by disciplines, but they aren't restricted to those groups participating.
And so you are welcome to join and participate. They're zooms. You can write into the chat. You can raise your hand to comment and so forth. So those are the easy things. The harder things. Not that hard, but that actually take more proactive action from you and your organization are the kind of direct engagement that's been talked about.
And there are three. Areas for direct engagement. One is the administration, the white house, that is the Office of Science and Technology policy, office of Management and Budget. Those sorts of places that are probably a little bit more difficult to get into, but. Would have a lot of influence on the eventual outcome. If you're able to get in and move the needle of the opinion of folks that you're talking to.
The second and easier is the individual agencies. In addition to these RFCS and listening sessions, many of you, especially scientific societies but the rest of you as well. Should have or do have or people within your organization. Have relationships with folks in the agencies. And you can talk to them and you can figure out. You want to figure out who actually is making the decisions, but.
Being able to talk to them, understand where they're coming from, share your own views in a private setting is really helpful. And then the third thing is, is Congress and I'd agree that Congress is unlikely to do anything major to change the trajectory, but the house Science Committee has been talking about potentially doing some hearings and ultimately, in as much as whatever's put in place costs money.
Or whatever's put in place requires new mechanisms for directing, funding or supporting the research community that's going to need to be authorized by Congress. And so we're really focusing on those aspects when we're engaging with Congress to help them understand what a big deal this is and how Congress might start thinking about putting in place structures and funding mechanisms to make sure that scholarly communication can continue to be sustainable.
Thank you very much. We could talk a lot about this, and I'm sure there's going to be some audience questions. So I'm not going to ask a few of the things that I want to switch gears actually for a moment and talk a little bit about the fact that when we talk about OSTP and other things in this world, we're talking about the physical sciences, we're talking about journals.
But the Nelson memo is also taking into account openness in terms of the arts and humanities and the social sciences books as well. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that just in terms of when you're speaking with agencies, when you're speaking with staffers, does that come up? Does do the arts and humanities come up? Do you have to bring that up? Are you are you trying not to talk about it because it's away from the ask in a certain way.
But there's already been some thought the same way that we saw with the plan that, you know, arts and humanities just don't work the same way that the physical sciences do. So how can you shoehorn everybody into a single policy? So what's going on with that discussion? Maybe I can start, um, so I think there's a few things. One is the social sciences are actually really at the front of the policy making at NSF.
So one of the co-chairs, Ellen Tompkins, of the NSF's decision making is from the Social sciences part of NSF. So I think they're very much coming at this with an understanding of the social science community. But also I think there's a real difference. Number one, if you look at the humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities is really for the first time promulgating a policy since they weren't they didn't fall under the 2013 memo as a smaller agency.
So for them, it's a little bit brand new. And I think engagement is even more important than with some of the bigger agencies because they're not just doing a small update to their plan. They're doing a whole new a whole new policy that does need to think about the real differences of that community. And I think the biggest thing there are probably many, many differences.
But the biggest thing is that the federal funding is not nearly as universal as it is in, say, like an engineering or biomedical research, where you have most, many, many authors kind of coming in with federal funding and thinking about the author equity pieces and how and some of the other disciplines like math also has this issue, this issue, you know, the author equity piece is where we don't set up an ecosystem where open access is available to those with federally federal funding, authors with federal funding, but not to authors without federal funding, I think is something to really make sure that agencies are cognizant of and they're thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, very big topic among the agencies and a real priority for them.
So I think if we can think about our messages in terms of how these policies impact diversity in our community, that's going to resonate with the agencies. Yeah I mean, we work a lot with the arts and humanities and many of the big societies who are really quite threatened by this. And I think equity is their biggest argument and their major concern. But I think the other one is all the what would not be chargeable, for want of a better word, content in the journals that they publish and even the articles that they do charge for or would be chargeable under this policy if they were funded or could be covered under a read and publish agreement, for example.
Typically a much, much longer. There's a lot more time goes into them. There's a lot more copy editing and other costs that goes into them. So the, the, you know, the standard accepted, for want of a better word, is our average of what, I don't know, three k, 4k and it just doesn't work right. And it doesn't support all the other content that they're very proud to publish book reviews.
There's a lot of other influential stuff that these groups are publishing that has no value effectively in an open access model. So it's not just finding the money to support potentially through funded people unfunded as well, those not in the University sector. There's an awful lot in the humanities who aren't part of a University system either, so they can't benefit from some of the bigger University deals.
So it's been a huge question. And there's a lot of fear, honestly, in that community about how do we sustain those journals and the value that they bring and how do we not throw the baby out with the bath water effectively. And I think the answer often has been a little bit. Well, there's diamond, right? What does that look like?
How do you go out and get. But again, going back to the volume of publishing, that then would have to be potentially supported and where will that money come from in the long term, I think is a real challenge in thinking about that model. It might work. I can't see it can work at scale. So a lot of fear there. And I think anything we can do to try to influence the National endowment, but it goes way beyond that.
And I do think there's a big worry here about equity and it's a genuine one. Yeah, and we're talking about publications here, but we haven't even weighed into the data piece of, of this, which is huge for social science and humanities as well. Um, but to your question, it's really helpful actually that we have social science and humanities in this mix because it's very clear the, the differences between disciplines, the difference between math and physics, for example, which is huge as far as the practices and the funding isn't as clear to your average policymaker as the difference between social science and physics.
And so it's helpful to point out the complexity of the system and the complexity of what's being asked and the complexity of the questions of how we're going to get there. Um, it's helpful to be able to point to social science and humanities in that setting. Thank you all very much. This has been exceedingly helpful.
We're at about 15 minutes left in this session, so I'm going to look at my colleague Susan and see if there's any questions in the room, which I can't see because of the Blinding Lights or if there's any questions online. There there is a question. I copied it down from online. Let me read it to you. Is it reasonable to expect change during a request for comments?
Are there do you think that the folks at HTTP the question continues? Do you think the folks at OSTP and the National Science Foundation really listened to the feedback, or is it lip service? Has the train already left the station? Great questions. I will diplomatically say I think it's a mix, but I think they're not asking for comment If they didn't want it.
And I think, you know, we've heard that. I think people are truly considering some of the concerns and the issues that the community is bringing. I just want to separate out the things that they're not going to change and the things that they might change. So are they going to change the zero embargo? No, they're not going to change that.
That's the central part of the policy. So they're not going to go they're not going to change anything. That's sort of the big picture. But I think in the details it is worth commenting and getting in the weeds on this stuff. What what are the exact requirements? What kind author accepted manuscripts versus the version of record?
What are the copyright issues that are a part of this? What what are the backstops? I also think that the OSTP was a little bit disingenuous in the memo and that they said there would be federal funding for this. What we're hearing from the agencies is they are absolutely not planning to add any money to any grants for this. And, and, and I've heard that very clearly from different agencies.
So and anyway, the funding, as I said at the beginning, is likely to be flat for the agencies. And they have a lot of trade offs to make over the next couple of years. So given that, you know, what can they be doing to support the community and what are the other things? So I think they are looking for input because the agencies are for the know, I think largely public servants want to do good for their communities.
They do not want to hurt this ecosystem. So they're trying to make the best policy possible under this larger framework. And I think they really want advice on how to do that, and they need to hear about the concerns from the broad and diverse group of stakeholders. I think something else to, if I might just add to that is that it is agent by agency, by agency. The RFI that was put out by Nasa, for instance, wants all of its responses limited to only four pages.
As a PDF, Nasa is ahead of the curve when it comes to open science. So certainly they want to hear from us. But NASA's been thinking about this for a long time, whereas other agencies probably need to hear more about this than others. So sometimes inside of the rfi, they start to tip their hand a little bit in terms of just how much they would like to hear.
Are there other. I don't have to run like Oprah. Wait Thank you all for your insights today. Yesterday's keynote, we saw many examples of reasons to have some skepticism about what is published. And at this session this morning, I heard a publisher say that we shouldn't necessarily trust what comes out of a publisher just because the publisher published it.
And one of our themes here at the meeting is trust. So I'm wondering about the question of integrity. When you talk to legislators, to what degree do you does that topic track with them? How do you sell that to them? Is that something they're thinking about or when they're thinking about the role of publishers? Are they thinking more about how does it gain commercial advantage for our country?
Is it how what are the topics that speak to politicians? So not they are definitely thinking about integrity. And I think there's a huge concern here. And I think this is where we have a strong voice and it's a very, very important voice to share all the work that we do to maintain and improve and actually now go back and look at the past record to make sure that all the content we as far as we possibly can, right, the content that we publish is trustworthy.
And I do think this is one of the really powerful points we can make when we go to speak to any member of the government or anybody who's making policy around here. We really need to explain just what we're doing here and how complex it is and how much it's taking in terms of investment, but how critical. I mean, it's just probably it's the biggest issue we're facing right now, how critical that is going to be in the future to advancing science and education.
So I think it's one of the ways actually to open a door in a very positive way about what publishers do, do and do very well. And I think that's the one thing that I would stress is going with the positive messaging and not the defensive positioning. It's like, how can we help? And I think we've all said that in some way or other, but I think that's probably the first thing you should ask yourself before you go to speak to them.
And this is clearly one of those issues. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think as a message about value, it really works. As a message about how our industry has challenges. It's not a good one. We don't want to bring. We don't want to bring and say our community is having real issues with integrity and therefore we have a problem, right?
No, definitely not. So it's how you frame things. I also wanted to mention and I and I mentioned these at the beginning, but I wanted to bring it back. There are several issues related to integrity that are very, very hot congressional issues right now and a big concern for policy makers. So insofar as we can connect into that and paint the bigger picture about how we're involved in this.
So number one is competitiveness and a huge concern about competitiveness, about and about research security. And this is largely driven about concerns about the Chinese government and their activities around IP. So members of Congress are really ready to talk about those issues. They want to know about how universities, for example, are protecting IP coming out of research. And I think they're going to be naturally interested in that.
The other one that I mentioned is AI, and there's huge, huge discussions of AI. I mean, I'm seeing like seven articles a day about AI policy or something like that and its impacts on all different facets. But there's a lot of issues of interest to policymakers around the regulatory ecosystem of AI and its effects on privacy, its effect on bias, its effect on trust.
And so I think in those two categories, policymakers are really primed to hear about, to hear about information and expertise that we may bring to those topics. Is there a question in the back? Oh, you're going to make me run. It's a good.
Thank you. Hi great discussion. Chris kennealy with CCC. I'm curious, I know the title of the program is scholarly publishing goes to Washington, right. But this is a global environment, a global ecosystem. And I wonder, to what extent is this some kind of 3D chess game where what you are thinking about when you're talking to people in Washington interacts with what you're talking about in London now that it is separated from the EU with what happens in brussels, with what happens in Singapore or Australia or any of these places.
It must make it, as I say, a kind of a chess game to sort of with the point about was just made about competitiveness. That has to play as well. Can we talk about it in the global context? Yeah, I think that that varies depending on who you are and what you're worried about. I think that there are some.
American based societies that are very focused on America and the Uc policy sphere. For us as a global organization and with members with authorship around the world. We're certainly concerned about how the different initiatives in individual regions. Or things like the UNESCO recommendation or there was a G7 communique about open science, how all of those things interact.
And so it is in our mind when we're figuring out. The policy piece of it. For the politics, for the procedure. Obviously the procedure is us procedure if we're in DC. But for the politics, it's a mix. And you know, we as STM are doing advocacy in China. But as Miriam mentioned, competitiveness with China is a huge political issue across the political spectrum here.
And we would be foolish not to talk about that and talk about how our concerns play into those concerns. Um, again, in a way that we can do with integrity. Um, so that if it gets, if, if what we're saying is communicated in China. And we're talking to Chinese policymakers, it doesn't close the doors or work in a counterproductive way.
Don't know. There's no more online and there's nobody else in the room for the moment. So we have a few moments left. I will ask the panel if they have any final thoughts, if there's something we didn't have an opportunity to touch on or anything that you want to make sure that the audience comes away with.
Now, I would just underline that there are a lot of opportunities to be engaged. There are a lot of opportunities to influence things. And Miriam mostly said it in response to the question about can you and Laura both about will your comments, will your engagement actually influence things? And I think the answer is very much yes. I think that there's a lot of details that need to be worked out.
There's a lot of things that have been thought about. I think, as has been said, policymakers who are engaging on this in general are very thoughtful. They want to do the right thing. They want to support the research communities where they can. But there aren't easy answers on a lot of these things, given the direction of travel and the Nelson memo, that as has been mentioned, that part is not going to change.
And so where we can be creative to think about win-win kinds of solutions on funding, on flexibility, on licensing, on repositories, on data sharing and linking, that's where we want to come to the table and roll up our sleeves and offer solutions and collaboration. I think that was my point really as well. What can we do to actually support and help demonstrate the impact of what we're doing, how effective the publishing industry is, all the standards and things that we already provide.
And I don't mean in a defensive way, but the fact that a lot of what's in the Nelson memo publishes are really doing and very, very efficiently. So not to, you know, make sure that we use that really effectively and we demonstrate how we're using that to really push the content that funders are funding and make sure it's widely available, accessible, used. And that's what they want, right?
They need the research that they're publishing to be effective. So how do we support all of that, using all the tools that we have already? Great yeah, I would just echo kind of everyone and say that like we've kind of been saying push everybody to get involved, you know, send your comments in. David outlined a couple levels of how hard it is to talk to government, but I think in general, it is easier than you think.
It's not like house of cards. People want to take your meetings. They're not going to like murder you in the streets afterwards. You know, it's doable. And I think it's an important part of, you know, like I said, our democracy. I always say it's more veep than house of cards. Yeah, but but yeah, I would just circle back to one of the first questions we talked about.
Think about the assets that you have if you are a University and at a university, talk to your government relations people about your concerns. Make sure they're aware and think about what could be done with, you know, with their involvement. You do not want to be a lone actor in a University setting. If you are a small society or even a big, big society, make sure if a big society makes sure you're talking to your people and about and making sure you're integrated.
If you're a small society, think about how you can better leverage your profile raising in Washington and how you can think about that engagement with agencies and how to make that full circle in terms of your local agency partners and having them understand the challenges that you're facing. Think about how you can use your community better, maybe leverage a science policy committee or a committee on science policy, or think about how you can get your early career folks involved more in advocacy.
So I think it really depends on the organization, but there's a lot you can be doing both as yourself and as part of a larger organization. Thank you all on the panel for being involved today. Thank you all in the audience, both here in the room and online for being involved. Ideally, this is just the start of your involvement. Thanks for your time. Have a very good rest of the meeting.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
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