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Segment:0 .
Thank you and welcome to today's ask the Experts panel. We are pleased you can join our discussion with publishing executives. I'm David Myers, SSP Education Committee member and a senior lead publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Before we start, I want to thank our 2024 education sponsors, access innovations, openathens and Silverchair.
We are grateful for your support. A few housekeeping items. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with other participants and organizers. Our agenda is to cover whatever questions you have, so don't be shy about participating.
Closed captions have been enabled. You can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing Show Captions. This one hour session will be recorded and available following today's broadcast. Registered attendees will be sent an email when the recording is available. A quick note on SSPs code of conduct in today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity, and providing an inclusive meeting environment, fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. We would also like to promote the SSP generations fund, help us reach our goal of raising $500,000 to ensure the future of our fellowship and mentoring programs and initiatives during the more than 350 organizations and individuals that have already donated. Scan the QR code on the screen for more information and to donate.
It is now my pleasure to introduce our moderators. David Turner is a content consultant and head of partnership at DXL and is a regular presenter on topics like digital transformation, publishing, automation, XML, metadata and content management. He's also a proud Texan living and joining us remotely from the Dallas area, marisha is the director of publications operations at the American Geophysical society.
She oversees peer review management policies and operations of the 24 scientific journals and the Earth and the Earth and space science Open Archive AGU's preprint and community servers. Mia is also the lead for AGs publications, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts and is a committee member of SSP, CSA and the Joint Committee commitment for action and inclusion and diversity and publishing.
She is joining us from Bloomington, Indiana. And now over to you, David and Mia. All right, well, Thank you, everybody, for joining today. We are thrilled to have this opportunity. We're thrilled to have such a great slate of panelists. As the other David said. I'm David Turner from DXL and we're co moderating today. As he said, I'm in, I'm in saxy, Texas, which is just outside of Dallas.
And anyway, I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity. So anyway, we're not going to spend a lot of time on introduction, but I will say this. This program doesn't happen without your questions. It's an ask the experts event. So if you haven't asked a question yet, it's time to get it in there. Put your question in the Q&A and we'll look forward to answering it.
And while you're doing that. Let me just give you a quick background. Our format is basically to let the leaders from these various publishing organizations answer your questions. As part of this, they'll also be discussing what they consider are the greatest risks facing the industry, but also the greatest opportunities for the industry.
And they'll share their thoughts on the current state of scholarly publishing. You'll find it's a diverse panel. We try to set this up by bringing together, a commercial publisher, University Press library all these different places. And you'll also find probably over the course of the conversation that we have some various publishing geographies represented.
We have some who have focus areas in South America and Latin America. We have others that have worked in Asia. We have some that are in Europe. And we have something in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is kind of its own geography sometimes ? just kidding, Charles. In any case, our panelists today include Jason who he is the director of researcher services and networks at Taylor and Francis.
He's also a council member for the Committee on publication ethics. So we're glad to have Jason. We've got the great Miriam mouse, who is the chief publishing officer at IOP publishing. We've got Sarah rouhi, who's with PLOS. She's the regional director of Global publishing development for the Americas. And then we've got Charles watkinson, who is kind of a dual role as University librarian in publishing.
And also is the director of the University of Michigan press or scholarly publishing office. I'm sure we'll talk about all those things along the way. So welcome all. And with that, Mia. Over to you to ask the first question. All right. Thanks, everybody. So we do have a list of prepared questions because I have a ton of questions.
David has a ton of questions. So we're using this opportunity. But as David said, please drop in your questions in the Q&A or in the chat. And if you have follow up questions to anything that, the panelists say, please go ahead. So with that, I'm going to ask the first question and I'm going to point this to Miriam. This is part of our topic, obviously, but the future of scholarly publishing, the greatest threats, opportunities and excitement.
But what excites excites you the most about scholarly publishing now or for the future. Thanks me and Hello, everybody from sunny Bristol, UK. So what excites me most about the publishing industry at the moment. It's a big question because the easy answer is to say lots. So I'm going to pick one thing that I feel particularly inspired by at the minute, and that is that I feel we're discovering that we have much more in common than things that divide us.
I don't think I've ever seen as much collaboration and mutual support across the industry. If you think about the challenges that have come our way over the last 12 to 18 months, particularly in the Research Integrity, space, paper Mills, et cetera, just to see everybody coming together around a shared challenge, a shared goal to make things better has been really it's been really reassuring and great and it's been great to be part of those discussions and continue to be part of those.
I will also just refer for a minute to a two initiative that we kicked off with the Institute of Physics publishing with a couple of other physics publishers, American Physical Institute and the American Institute of Physics publishing. We have recently formed a little coalition. We're calling ourselves purpose led publishing. And this is really about foregrounding the narrative and the story we can tell as not for profit, domain specific, society based publishers.
And it's been really great to see that we have that joint narrative and we have those kind of shared opportunities and and delights and worries while still, of course, being fiercely competitive when it comes to also. So we still want to publish the best physics there is. But there is. There is. There is.
There's more to be gained from working together. So I feel very inspired and very lucky to be working in publishing right now. Wonderful Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I'm noticing definitely there's more kind of joint efforts and nothing like shared demands and developments to bring people together. How about you, Jason.
What do you what are you most excited about. I so to me, I think it's more about the future. So in the next few years, I think it's the so the generative AI coupled with open science as also the Open Data that's going to be very exciting. I think now is everybody is really very actively to watch or already started the experimenting, right. But with the movement with more and more data content even though now there's some copyright issues, but I believe it will be resolved anyway, then that's going really to empower the generative AI, the capability it will.
So it will very fast, probably even so faster than we can imagine has already been proven in the last few months. So I personally I'm very excited, but also very interested to see how this is going to make some paradigm shift about research about our industry. Yeah Thank you. I think that shift is felt by in multiple fronts and Thank you for that.
And folks, as I think David mentioned earlier, Jason is also part of the Code Council members. So if you have questions later about research integrity and what is code more excited about we can dig into that later. But now I'm going to ask Sarah. Sarah, what's you're most excited about and scholarly publishing. This might be a sort of strange answer, but I'm actually really excited that we've reached what I feel like is a tipping point around.
Things just cannot keep working the way they have in the past, particularly the role of commercial interests in scholarly publishing writ large, but particularly in federally funded research. We're looking to our neighbors, those in Latin America who've been doing this for a really long time and doing it in a different way. It's a shame it's taken us so long. But in the Global North, we have the curse of resources.
And I think that's set us back. And I think we're finally getting to a point where we're recognizing, as Miriam said, that we have to work together. And I it's a challenge for the industry. But I also think it's really exciting that we're having these conversations. And finally taking it seriously in a way that feels new. Yeah, I agree with you.
I think that part is really exciting. Exciting and I've learned very recently and I should know this already, that my home country of Indonesia is one of the largest publisher authors, publishing and kind of open infrastructure systems. And it's just their system is different but I think this is kind of all this new information and collaboration is coming up on these new areas. So it's really exciting.
How about you, Charles Well, it's interesting you mention that, Mia. I know my colleague Peter Berkery, who's the executive director of the Association of University presses, has just come back from Indonesia, and he found 150 University presses in Indonesia, which is it we've been blinded to the degree of activity happening all over the world, I think.
But The thing that excites me the most, I think, is that all over the publishing landscape, our content is becoming open, including in places like humanities books, and we're starting to see readers engage with content that was developed in a very specialist, high quality way. And with an global audience, there are enough deep niche kind of readers that we're finding all kinds of unexpected connections.
And it's we used to have a very kind of presumption that our work as scholarly publishers, the works we published, were too complicated for people to understand. If they weren't if they were outside the Academy, it's not true. In almost in every area of endeavor, there are enthusiastic and excited readers who are now able to encounter the work that we do and have enthusiastic reactions.
And that's very exciting. I love that. And that makes me think about the way we communicate to our researchers, to authors and the larger community and the public about science. I think there's. Yeah, OK. I think, David, do you want to take on the next question, which is the.
Yeah, you bet. So we get we have gotten a couple of questions in here. So the next question talks about a specific publisher not having some of the IDs and other bits of standards and metadata on their content on the versions of record. And I publishers have been working harder and harder. We just are fresh off of the niso plus conference. What a week or two ago.
Talking about these kinds of things. I guess the question here for the group and I'll just open it to the whole group, any of you who are involved in this, I think the question behind this is really, what are the best practices for transparency and accessibility when it comes to things like PIDs orchid IDs, PPM IDs all of these different standards and IDs that are out there.
And they're all going to jump so quickly to answer this question. I know. Can I start off first. So sorry, Charles. OK, go ahead. I used to work for. OK for about a year. I think the PYD indeed is very important infrastructure, in terms to increase the transparency.
If we say the transparency about the author's identity. The challenge is really to verify that. We talk about the so the OK, the ID or email address or any other. The problem is or this can be created by the author very so easily in a few seconds. But the greatest thing about the ORCID ID is it can be verified by the organization. So for example, by the researchers intuition.
If they join the member, they can connect with their personnel, the system with the OK, the API, then they can verify the author's identity. Say so this author is my employee. But the cost is it's not been that widely been adopted by every organization yet. So that's currently one of the challenge I feel indeed if we really needed to reach it, like the ambition really to have the great transparency, at least also for now, like the author's identity as a key focus for now, giving the others.
So the issues right I do want to so the advocate or the organization to try to consider to adopt the not necessarily so the orchid but to try to join some of the international recognize the ID so the infrastructure and then try to put things so forward. So that's going to make a big change, I think. Yeah and I was just going to add that I think those of us, especially at smaller publishers have just been a bit confused by the landscape until maybe this year and now the way in which the US funding agencies and also the UK funding agencies and so on are really endorsing three particular identifiers, it's really helpful.
So clearly die, clearly orchid and clearly roar as well. And it just feels like now we know the magic three. Now we can really go for assigning them in our systems. And I think that clearly journal literature has done a good job. I think generally in adopting those systems, book literature is much further behind, partly because our systems are actually, our systems are not adapted in terms of bibliographic record creation to include those identifiers in the book world, but at least we now know which three matter.
I can jump in on this, too, from the commercial business model perspective. I will say that any publisher that's trying to engage in New business models around open access or really anything that isn't subscription licensing has to engage with these identifiers. It's jaw numbingly boring stuff, but it's the insides of the machine that make it possible to explore different ways of funding, publishing of enabling readership, of enabling alternative forms of credit.
So as challenging as it can be. And I think, Charles, your point about the core 3, I find that really helpful. I hadn't gelled that. So that's a really good thing to focus on if you have to limit yourself. But even this seems very easy and it's actually quite complicated. So that's my two cents on that.
Yeah, I totally agree with what my fellow panelists have said, so I haven't got anything substantial to add other than to say the recently published a thought, quite insightful report on shared infrastructure in publishing. I think I'm right in saying that's freely available on the internet and reading that there were lots of findings in there. But one of the things that you really get when you read that report is how PIDs are absolutely essential for this whole ecosystem to work and for the information to be a reliable trusted and for it all to hang together.
So absolutely agree with everybody. It's not the most exciting part of publishing but without it I don't think we will have much success going forward. Yeah all right. Well, in my only comment on this is that these persistent identifiers are going to be really critical as these large language models are looking at all of this data.
When we talk at SSP about Jason who we know who Jason, who is, but, there could be 40 Jason who's out there that are publishing content or that could be journal articles but at the same name. And I think it's just going to clarify for those large language models as we get further. But anyway, enough about that. And by the way, check we've now touched I in our webinar.
So we've accomplished that. Mia, back to you. The next question. Yeah wonder how quickly I was going to come up. So let's see. 20 minutes in. So see, there's a few questions in the chat. And I'm going to get to them in just a little bit. But I want to make sure that we cover the second part of today's topic, which is the opportunities and the threats or concerns.
So I'm going to ask the panelists the second question, which think some of you already kind of implied with your previous answer is about what do you see as or your largest concern within scholarly publishing now. So I'm going to go backwards and I'm going to start with Sarah. I'm going to start with Sarah first. Just kind of looking the flip side of what I'm most excited about. I think one of the things that's most concerning right now is the regions, whether it's Indonesia or Latin America, that are having a lot of success with diamond models that they launched 30 years ago are actually in danger due to the pull of Global North business models that are very commercial, that are very dominant.
Given the research evaluation and assessment paradigm, it's really gutting to see institutions in Mexico and Brazil starting to put small fees on their articles to be able to maintain their functions. And there's I'll actually share in the chat. Juan Pablo alperin, who's part of CPCP, his dissertation really unpacks some of the consequences of diamond infrastructure being sort of overrun by commercial interests.
And again, it's that tipping point challenge of which path are we going to take. And sort of if you think of the impacts of the Global North on all of these communities, whether it's the colonial legacy sort of paternalistic approaches to these research communities, we have the chance to do the right thing, but we could very much do the wrong thing if we're not very conscientious.
So I'll share some of those resources in the chat. Thank you, Sarah. In addition to what you said, it's also affecting the way we collaborate and international collaboration in that the nowadays business models and mandates are affecting the way researchers are collaborating within and publishing their work. So Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to go to Jason next.
So Jason, if you could talk about what you see as the largest concern any of you could can comment also seeing that you have an extensive background in working with researchers in China and in Asia. If you could also comment on that as well, with other geographies. Yeah So my biggest concern with my two has one is so working for a publisher.
The other as a council member for cope is so currently is really the paper Mills issue. I think that's indeed a big challenge. But also there are some others. So it's like a citation manipulation by some of the University to boost their ranking, for example. That's indeed a big challenge. So far.
The publishers, I think, have done a great job by themselves to enlarge their research Integrity Team, try to adopt technology, but also through some cross the publishers collaboration. So, for example, the integrity hub. And recently you might already heard of the United to act. It's like a great initiative being supported by cope and stem really to try to address this issue.
But also, it's very important that every stakeholders in this community must to work together to address this issue. So that's kind of my biggest concern. I personally, I came from China. I got a deep rooted in China and the Asia countries, right in or I think the so the behavior or the citizens is probably quite the similar, but there are some of the nuance. So the difference in terms of, for example, the so the authors in China and Asia, they probably have a more the preference on the ranking.
So the system right for the historical reasons. But there are some even the difference between the countries in Asia, for example, right in China the authors, they prefer impact factor. But in your country your home country, Mia, Indonesia the sculptor's index journal probably is good enough right. That's a kind of there a preference but also in somehow it's.
A kind of a so distorted the preference when the author choose where to publish. So the other. The difference is probably the health, the pressure on the evaluation the pressure. They might prefer so a faster speed on publication. In some countries. And of course, there's a language barrier and also a different understanding about the common practice.
So the practice. So the best practice. So for example, in terms of the research integrity and publication. So, so the issues there might be a lack of understanding or different standing right. So what's being widely adopted in the Western part of the world are not so necessarily fully understand or agreed in so in some part of the Eastern part.
So that's so the so the difference I think that's currently come up to my mind. Yes Yeah. Wow that's. There's a lot there. We could just take on that and talk about it for hours on each of those topics. But Thank you, Jason. You touched on a lot of concern that's been raised by the community and it's really connected to everything that we do.
It's an evaluation and rankings and the differences between regions and behaviors, but just generally across stakeholders on how funders and institutions are evaluating and promoting the work of researchers. So Thank you for sharing that. Let's see, going backwards. So next is Charles about your largest concerns. I think we're not putting enough effort and attention into digital preservation.
And you may well have seen the paper by Martin Eve recently, based on a study of 7 million articles with Doi, with Crossref Doi, where he says that more than one quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved. And I've just put the link into the chat and mean. The thing to point out there I think is that scholarly articles with a Doi. And we know that that's a very small minority of the complete output of scholars.
So if it's really that bad a situation for scholarly articles with a DUI, what does it look like. If we look across the wider spread of research outputs, including research data, books, reports, et cetera. So I think that's something as an industry, we need to step up to. Yeah Yeah. That article was shared by everybody. No, I'm saying that I'm sending it to me.
Yes, I'm concerned. Miriam, over to you. So when you first ask the question, my initial thought was my largest concern is that the enormous job we still have to do on diversity and inclusion. But I think Sarah covered that. So I'm going to share another concern. More than one.
So another concern I have and I think about where we are in our industry and how we're viewed is that the value we bring to the table as publishers is not sufficiently recognized. There's been a narrative in some parts of our ecosystem that sort of portrays publishers as feeding off volunteer work from the academic sector, making huge profits, not really paying anything back or paying anything forward. And, there may be pockets of that.
But I think just having that as a standard narrative somewhat Mrs. the point and deliberately Mrs. the point and doesn't really recognize how much we do to produce trusted science through peer review, to make research results discoverable, to safeguard the integrity of the published literature, et cetera. So I I'm a little bit concerned about how loud some of those voices can get.
And this is a very live discussion in Europe. So kind of the EU is an enormous funder and that there are voices in that community that sort of paint is very black and white picture and there's sort of a US against them and I it that is a concern because in my experience as a publisher and through the work we do with authors is that I think that authors, editors, reviewers everybody we work with day to day they do appreciate the value we bring and the service we provide to the community.
So I just worry how we can set the balance somewhat right on that topic. Yeah, that's a big one for sure. And it's something that's on top of my mind a lot. And it's this value and things are changing in the last 15 years of what is expected like, researchers expect a lot from journals and publishers, as they should. They should. But the number of things that has grown, that becomes put in place of journals to do and just some of the things that Jason, you mentioned, paper Mills and research integrity so developing that vetting process and who's doing that work with every submission that's coming in, that's time to the publishers.
Like some of these kind of activities like I have a. What, like 16 early career, publishing staff. That is like checking in 18,000 submissions a year, and then adding a process to that research integrity, which is highly, highly critical and important to the enterprise of published in Science and open data and making sure data are links and repositories are linked correctly, which again is something that came out of the community falls on their shoulders.
And this adds to the work that the publishers are doing. So Yeah. Can I jump in on that real quick. Yeah so one of the things I point folks to is the work coalition has done around price transparency. And I think that it's Klaus is involved with it. We're really happy to support it. It's not perfect by any means, but one of the things it really does try to make transparent is what it is you're paying for, whether it's a subscription, an APC, some other publishing agreement.
It's easy to think, well, you just post a PDF and that's it. But the whole discovery, dissemination vetting, all of that, there's no sense of it's really expensive to run a peer review platform. It's really complicated to manage Tens of thousands of authors and reviewers and editors. And so that effort, I think, is starting to lift the lid a little bit. But I think there's a lot more education to.
I agree. And I've been feeling very encouraged to see in the last few years. I think Emma was one of the first that did this. They did their pricing transparency of how much it costs. And so is working on this as well. So I think we will see more of that coming from publishers, particularly societies.
So I'm excited to see that. Thanks for sharing that. Sara, anything else on this from the panel. If not, I'm going to turn it back to David to take on the next question. I see a really great one from Sena. Yeah so that's when I was looking at and I like this question because obviously SSP cares a lot about early career publishers.
I think we've got the podcast on that. We've got I think we've got a subgroup, a subgroup that's out there. So to the panel. And so you guys don't have to fight each other. I'll let's start with Charles on this one. What are your recommendations for early career publishers To be successful in their roles. What advice would you give So I know that Jackie Lord from SSP is also on the call.
And so I've got a kind of an existential one for Santa and then something a bit more concrete. So the existential one is the work that SSP is doing with other publishing organizations, the Association of University alpsp looking at a skills based way of thinking about publishing progression. And this builds on the skills map work. And the latest iteration of that is an analysis of publishing job descriptions that is then coded against a group of skills and will allow you when it's ready to identify where you are now in your career, where in certain fields of publishing you want to get to what might be the next step.
And to identify the skills that you need to develop and focus on to move forward. So that's been kind of gestating for a while. It's a little bit complicated, but I think that skills based framework is very helpful because it moves beyond having to have certain experiences. Some of those experiences require a certain amount of privilege to get.
It moves towards really thinking about the skills that you have and the skills that you can develop. So I think that's very, very helpful. Just the observation more specifically is I think understanding that publishing is not a unified industry and that in fact, it's a whole group of different fields of activity is a really helpful insight. And you can move.
And SSP is a group of individual members shows how you can move between those fields. But understanding the dynamic of the particular field that you're interested in is the really important thing. That's very good. All right. Well, Thank you, Charles. Miriam, let's go to you on that. OK I'm going to I'm going to not be very original and sort of copy two bits of advice I've been given in my career, which have stood me in very good stead over the years.
So the first one was and actually that was by somebody called Bob Campbell, who used to be the president of wiley-blackwell, and before that a director at Blackwell. And his advice was or his observation was that as a publisher, you're only ever as good as your network. So make sure you develop your networks internally and particularly externally.
Make connections wherever you can even if it's not immediately obvious where a connection will take you through. It's always worth knowing people and people knowing you volunteer for things. We're a relatively small industry, so it's actually not that hard to get around it. And it's hugely enjoyable to work with people who have similar interests and similar motivations than you.
But it also kind of just opens your eyes to that, to the fact that as Charles said, that it's a really diverse industry and you can do lots of interesting stuff. And then the second advice, which is something I remind myself of regularly even now. Is that change can be an opportunity that of change happens a lot. Most of the time it's not necessarily change we thought.
It's change that happens to us and sort of resist the urge to think this is bad news, I need to change, but see it as an opportunity to do something different, something new. And once you kind of buy into that philosophy, your resilience goes up and you open yourself up to New experiences. Those are my two bits of advice. Wonderful well, Jason, you're not muted and Sarah is, so I'll let you go next.
OK so to me, I think it's. Two words, probably open minded, mean, keep open minded and keep learning. For two reasons. One is, regardless of whichever role you start with in this industry, you might find that you love this role, or you don't. So keep open minded. And then so and learning, then try to explore.
But also we are in quite an interesting era keep changing with new technology, New business models, New trends and so on. I think it's very important to keep up with all the new. So the newest technology and the change, that's very important, even though the publishing itself is quite old industry for many years is quite being perceived as a conservative. But you think about especially the academic publishing, we adopted the internet in a very early stage, right.
We translated the business model, very early stage. So we still doing fine. I think that's very important to keep that. Personally, I am not sure I can say I'm successful, but I do enjoy my career. I have the benefit and privilege, to go quite a versatile roles, so across my career with Wiley, with arcade, with Taylor Francis, I even survived out the industry to do some so so to join some e-commerce.
So startup, right. So I do feel that's quite a rewarding experience. Yeah Yeah. All right, Sarah. I would definitely encourage folks to volunteer in your professional organization. I mean, shamelessly, I'm going to plug SSP, but there's alpsp in the UK. I'm blanking on EU or so.
If someone can shout those out, that would be great. But all of these organizations are run by volunteers. The folks who put together this webinar are a volunteer group. Many of us started doing this when we were at the beginning of our careers. We've been doing this for a while. We get tired, we get old, we tap out the next generation of folks volunteers. And that certainly for me was huge.
And building the network and understanding the various kinds of jobs and things you can do across the industry and that network piece is huge. The second piece I'll mention is just echoing Jason. When I joined, we were when I started in this industry, we were sending paper journals to conferences. Like it was not the most exciting stuff. But now between the globalization of our work, the geopolitical stuff, I like there are a lot of interesting things that you could dive into and make your thing.
For me, it's really been inclusion and access to equitable participation in publishing for other people. It's AI for other people. It's going to be this research integrity stuff. So find your thing and nerd out on that. We need folks who can dive deep on these, particularly with the energy to participate in these volunteer organizations. So those would be my recommendations.
Absolutely I agree. I think if anybody wants the moderator's opinion, my two cents is always be a student and don't be afraid to ask questions. A lot of people think I should probably know that. But ask just ask. I learned years ago I mentored under one of my favorite people in SSP, Bill Kasdorf, and every now and then Bill would ask questions that I would think he should know that.
But if he didn't completely understand it, he would ask and he would learn. And that's why he's one of the best in the business. Always a student, always asking questions. So anyway, Mia, I'll let you follow up on that Super quick. This is an industry with a lot of people from academia and a lot of course I know everything. And it's really important for folks to admit like when they don't, it doesn't matter how senior the group is, it doesn't matter who's there, but a lot more like intellectual humility, I think would be helpful.
And this is not an industry that's good at that. So asking those questions I think is so important. So Thanks for flagging that. Yeah Yeah. Only so so true. I mean, one thing that you learn pretty quickly is only because somebody sounds particularly confident doesn't. Doesn't necessarily mean they know better than you do. So trust your instincts.
And sometimes kind of do actually. You do actually know. Absolutely absolutely. All right. Well, Mia, I'm going to go ahead I'm going to ask you your answer to this question as well because I know you work with some early career publishers. What is your advice.
And then after that just take it on to the next question. I think a lot of things that you all already covered. I found a lot of. Rewards from the committee and the volunteering and think what I would note is that it sounds kind of overwhelming, especially when you're busy and you want to have a work life balance. But some of these committees have really different like terms and time commitment.
Some really is just like an hour meeting every quarter. So there's really different things that you could check out. And, if you don't, you're not into it. Then you could finish your term and then do the next thing. The other thing I would mention is that and I think this one is a little harder and maybe deserves like a whole other like webinar on it. It's like finding your champions and mentors and allies, I think. And this is something that I didn't really have early on in my career and I got it kind of mid-career.
I'm still mid-career, so I don't know. I've been in here for like 17 years, but whatever. The first few years, I didn't have a mentor or a sponsor or anything like that. And just the thought of trying to find one was like terrifying. But this has become normalized in the last few years, particularly. And a lot of organizations have developed like mechanisms for this, has a mentoring program and a lot of other organizations have that.
And you could start with coffees just from people. I love it when people reach out to me like, can I just pick your brain and talk. And it could grow from there. So I think finding those champions, whether it's that organization, your organization or outside it, can be really helpful and rewarding for both sides. Yeah Yeah. OK right.
So I'm supposed to ask the next question. Was like looking at you, David was like, give me more questions. OK, so let's see. Looking at time went by quickly. We got 18 minutes. I'm noting there's a few questions in the chat. It's from Luciano. So let's see.
I think I'm going to go with one of the prepared question. And if you go to this the Luciano's question, but if anybody else have questions, please put it in the chat or in the Q&A. I guess we could talk about I mean, we can't have a webinar with an AI. It's there, so and it touches on so many things. So the question is really about what are the conversations like around particularly Gen and a large language models in your organization and there's so much to tackle.
So what are you focusing on. Where are you kind of putting your focus on right now. So I'm going to go with Sarah first. Man Where to begin. I think one of the things that we're really trying to do is make sure we have an understanding of how. Our own systems. Really understanding our own systems well enough to be able to thoughtfully integrate AI in the future.
It can be really tempting. I mean, like Zoom now has an AI like little thing at the bottom of the screen. And I don't even want to click on it because I don't know what's going to happen. If I do. So there's a real sense of before we just start saying use AI, like think about what is that going to mean.
And I mean, I personally and this comes up a lot in our discussions, of course, I'm personally very troubled by the way a lot of these large language models are very they're built by white men who speak English, and that is reflected in how they work. And so I think we're taking a pretty cautious approach about how we integrate this. And we're really thinking about what are going to be the impacts for non native English speakers, what are going to be the impacts for more marginalized groups.
I'm going to pop a couple articles that I've been looking at in the chat around these issues. The one place I think that could be very exciting is more publishing outside of English. I think we could really see, peer review soup to nuts being done in native languages. And Jason, maybe you want to speak to that, but there's again, so many pitfalls there too. So I'll pop a couple articles that I've been looking at in the chat.
That's such a dream right there, publishing in a whole system in other languages. But I got so excited just now. I'm going to go to Jason and then Charles and then Miriam. So, Jason, you're next. Where we're good question actually, I think especially the generalities. It's really a great tool that empower the individuals we are talking about in our industry.
It could be researchers, or reviewers or the editors or our own colleagues. So that's a. Two sides. From the political side is Yeah, it's a indeed can take a lot of the opportunity to increase these productivity, creativity, and so on, so on. But the question is to the organization like a publisher how we can harness the power of this, how we can integrate all or the solutions and power into the workflow, the system then to offer better services.
So to the authors or the reviewers, that's a big question for the publisher to answer, I think. But also there is a. The risk. We all know that there's a copyright, privacy issue. There's the accuracy issue. There's a bias issue. And we publisher we are supposed to produce and publish all those the peer reviewed trusted source of knowledge.
Yeah and how we actually can work with those, the big tech companies like really to help them to improve that while we also respect the copyright as the interest of the party, but also try to join this journey to help to improve that right. So which will eventually is a benefit to everybody. I think that's probably a very big question. For us to think about that.
Yeah great, Charles. So I'm sitting on a University campus at University of Michigan. And I think what has been turning up in the conversation about generative AI is that it's got a lot of people excited and then realizing that generative AI is not the thing they're excited about. It's the older forms of machine learning that they just weren't tracking on.
And I think the number one use case across campus is how can we make sense of big corpora of information that we're looking for patterns in. And that's certainly been true for us as a publisher. It's like, how could we make sense of that big scanned collection of contracts that it just takes ages to go through. Can we employ a non generative AI tool to actually organize it and make some sense out of it.
Also, how could we create new levels of search that are perhaps not articulated more in the language of a particular discipline like archaeology using some of these machine learning tools, especially disciplines that don't have very strong ontologies or taxonomies. So I think everybody's got excited by AI and then they've taken a step back and they've gone actually, we don't want something that's potentially making up nonsense.
We actually want the ability to make sense of the stuff that we've got. Yeah, I love that, Miriam. So Yeah, huge question. And I think we're the four of us are pretty aligned here. So from my point of view, working for a medium sized. Domain specific publisher, I think our conversation falls sort of in 3 into three categories. There is opportunity, concern questions.
So opportunity mean we're thinking about opportunity in the efficiency and workflow space. Yeah revenue opportunities there as well. But because of our size and makeup, we're kind of honing in on those. And we've got quite successful sort of little taken, some successful little steps there and we're using AI to assess accepted manuscripts for additional language editing they need.
And there are sort of and potentially larger things that you could really look at through the publishing workflow where I can really help you, I can really help people just being a little bit more efficient in their personal work. So if you write lots of reports, ChatGPT is actually quite good at getting you started so that that's in the opportunity space. The concern bucket is, in my view at the moment larger.
And the big ones. There are. Making sure that generative AI is used appropriately. It's OK to use it to augment your writing and your manuscripts. It's not OK to submit work that is entirely generated by a large language model. We have in the last few months seen increasing numbers of reviewer reports generated by large language models.
And I can say one thing with absolute clarity ChatGPT is not up to assessing original research. And we've so I was chatting to a colleague about that. And she said that when it's relatively easy to spot that so we can see if we get a review back, that's AI generated. So, so and we challenged the reviewers and asked them to give us a bit more background. And my colleague told me that one reviewer was quite honest and said, actually, I didn't even read it.
I just Fed the manuscript into the system and send the review report because I don't have time. It kind of gets them through the bigger problem. OK, that it's just a sort of a cry for help from the reviewer community. We can't get into that. But those are the kind of things that absolutely give me and my colleagues. Sleepless nights and bias is another one.
I totally agree. I'm not a native speaker, so I kind of I quite like the world to be kind of plural in terms of languages and all these really biased towards English. And any algorithm always reinforces biases. We know that. So those are the two big concern buckets. And then the third area is where we have questions. And the biggest one there I would say is.
How do we control or even know about the way the content we produce is used. Can copyright be protected in an AI world, even in the Creative Commons environment. Attribution, how do you attribute work to somebody. So these are really, really big questions. And kind of Jason referenced it earlier. I think we're kind of just at the stage where we're foregrounding these questions.
Getting answers to them will probably be another whole lot of work discussion and may take a little while. Absolutely Thank you. Yeah and time. And time. All these questions are such big questions. And remember when ChatGPT was released. And I was like my God, what's the situation at cope right now.
You are they like calling all the council members and like assemble, figure, all this stuff. Everyone's contacting us, but a lot of these things, they will take time to figure out. And with a larger society kind of community to figure out. And my thing is like, what happens in the meantime. How do we deal with some of this stuff in the meantime when things are happening without us not knowing it or have the workflows or policies to watch out for it.
So I think it's something a lot of I really enjoy a lot of the transparency and sharing that's been happening within the publisher community. So I think that's been really helpful. Yeah Wow. We have eight minutes left. Yeah, go ahead, Jason. So just to add a quick thought about it's a really I think it's because of the technology, like the generative AI has been developed so fast in the last couple of years, right.
I think I personally feel there's a lot of the challenge of questions is to be answered or be resolved. Personally, I feel it's probably we should look at more what the generative the I can do now and then try to tolerate what they cannot do yet or do well yet. Because all these challenges might be resolved very quickly. So we don't know. But from what we can see, what they can do now is already so amazing.
There's a really great capability, right. If we so we focus there, then give the other the Chinese more time. So that might be a good way to handle and move ahead with it. Yeah Yeah. I like what Nico from OUP said last week. I wrote it down here. I also think it's entirely consistent to be both excited and mildly terrified about the ramifications of AI.
I think that's so true. And well, I think you all attested to that. We only have a few minutes left. I'm going to combine Luciano's got a couple of questions here. And just interested in your opinions on this. He's talking about version of record PDFs. And the first question you ask is, given that it's given that it's usual for articles to undergo many revision rounds, which of those should we use as the revised date or is it all of those.
So if we use all of those, would that be more transparent. Any thoughts. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule here. So I think there's a sort of conversation probably to have with the editors and the editorial boards at publishing. We use the date where we call it a provisional, except because of course, once you've got the except signs there, there's still some work to do.
But we use we use the date when we said, OK, this is now ready to go into the publication, the production workflow, which is the last revision. But I'm not I'm not saying that that's the only and the right way to do it, that just happens to be what we do. Another thing that he asked in the next question really hits on something that we had a little internal chat and that's what is the version of record.
For some publishers it's for some it's the HTML. And there's also questions of accessibility for both. So he asks in here some publishers really seem to focus on the HTML version. But if you've got someone with special needs and mostly uses PDFs, shouldn't we be using the accessibility trend to make the PDFs, more complete or more accessible as well.
Thoughts on that. Let's throw it out to the whole big group. I think one of the challenges with the version of record piece is it really re inscribes this idea that publishing results in one thing and whether you're thinking about green open access or you're thinking about open science writ large, where we're talking about many pieces of a research effort being the result of the work, not just the final paper.
I think when we really and there's a reason, commercial publishers, many, many publishers plus included, focus on that version of record. I'm certainly when it comes to things like retractions that's really important. But the reality is it really undermines this idea of research as a process that is constantly unfolding and not an endpoint. I also think that Luciano's question is really good, but it also illustrates the diverse fields of publishing.
So I look at this from a books perspective, and I see his point about PDFs. I mean, PDFs clearly are used by a lot of people, but in the books world, the EPUB 3 is very much the accessible version of record, and PDFs are felt to lack the accessibility of the EPUB 3 has. So it just illustrates that we talk different languages within the industry. We are a group of publishing fields and that makes the question particularly hard to answer.
Yeah all right, Mia, we've got two minutes left. Think maybe three. I think we're supposed to end like two minutes ago. So David could do. David could do his closing spiel. So think we're going to end it here. These are really great questions. So before I pass it on to David to wrap us up I wanted to say Thank you so much to my co moderator and to all your wonderful panelists.
We have so many questions. And I don't maybe there's a part two needed, but Thank you for everyone that's here. And this has been really great. Yeah So I don't know, I'll hand it over to. To David. The other David. David Yes. Thank you, Mia and David.
And thanks to all the panelists and thanks to everybody who entered questions. Maybe we do need to do this one next year again as well. I want to thank one last time our sponsors access innovations, openathens and Silverchair. Thanks for your support. Again, my pitch to gender to the generations fund. And please note the next SSP experts webinar is going to be all about generative AI.
So if you have questions about it. And want to talk about that some more, look for that. It will be on June 12, so that'll be posted on the website shortly. So this concludes today's session. When you receive the surveys, please answer it. And we thank everybody for attending. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye.