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Experiments in Community Engagement at the Society Associations
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Experiments in Community Engagement at the Society Associations
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the session with community engagement. What is our experiment in society publishing programs. So what you will expect today this is one hour. So briefly our three speakers will have very brief introduction first. And then each of them will share their experiment in their community engagement within their society associations.
And you can ask questions. We welcome you to ask questions with our speaker. And in the end, our panel will be here and welcome your feedback, your questions, how you can share. What's your approach within your community. Engaging so before we start, I'm asking you to talk about our code of conduct. SSP is committed to diversity, equity, and providing a safe, inclusive, and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas for harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct.
Our values community. Adaptability, inclusivity and integrity. All right. David it is. So my name is David Haber. I am the director of publishing operations at the American Society of Microbiology, and we publish about 16 or 17 journals, depending on what day it is and how I'm counting.
And do you want to introduce yourself. Yeah I'm Matt Jim. I'm with the American Geophysical Union and we cover all of Earth and Space sciences ag publications has about. It has 24 journals and books, four book series and preprint server. So we try to cover everything that anyone could want for Earth and space sciences.
Thank you. I'm Darla Henderson, the chief publications open science and research integrity office officer at FASEB, which is also the longest title in history, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. And we're a Federation of 22 scholarly societies in the US focused on the biological and biomedical sciences and representing 110,000 researchers.
We have two journals in house, but we also provide policy feedback to federal agencies, collective voices, and we will be expanding our services to member societies and beyond in the US to include issues like driving, engagement and helping to achieve growth in your journal.
All right. So as I said, we have between 16 and 17 journals. And to get a sense, we publish under different publishing models. A gold a Greenaway a subscription model in this new subscribe to open model. And that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit. But I really don't want to focus on the model. I want to focus on a problem in a story.
So this story, it kind of stopped me in the tracks, in my tracks when I heard this. And I want to use this story to frame how we look at, subscribe to open and reimagine our role as a publisher, not as a true publisher, but as a community Steward, and what that means. So about 8 to 10 months ago, as we were thinking about what to do with our hybrid journals.
I was in an editorial board meeting and the standard conversation came up. Peer review crisis. We can't find reviewers. It takes forever. This is ridiculous. What are we going to do. How are these journals going to survive. How can we continue to publish.
Science is going to pot. Same conversation we hear over and over again. And then a senior editor pulled his chair back and said, I used to volunteer to review all the time, but I did that because one of the benefits of reviewing is I could get early access to science and see what my colleagues are doing, see where the science is going, think about what I want to do in the future, but I don't do that anymore.
I don't even review for you guys, because I can just go to a preprint server and read stuff whenever I want. And the whole room sort of got quiet. I looked at him and I was like, for real. You really. You've heard this story. This is something that's honest true. And he was like, it's not just a story.
This is like, this is what I do. It's what my students do. This is more common than you think. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting and kind of crazy. So this moment stuck with me like for a really long time. And I didn't really want to view it in a lens of cynicism and everything's falling apart.
But it made me realize how decentered the journal has become. Not just by open access models, but models that prioritize speed and volume over curation. Like anything we do that does that. It puts a different pressure point on how we do science and how we publish. So when you strip this journal of its purpose as a place where researchers gather to review, to learn, to mentor, to build trust among themselves don't just lose submissions, which we've seen in the data, but you lose the community that you've built.
And as an association, we're all about community building. So what are we doing. And in no way want to villainize like APC models, gold models, because there's a place for that. There's use cases for that. And they solved a really important problem, which was access to science and scientific content globally. And that's really, really important. And it's something that ASM as an organization embraces.
But in solving that problem, we created another one, a more fundamental one, like fragmenting of science from topic specific journals and a shared space to share ideas, to something else. So when you have smaller community journals and you try to force them into an APC type model, foundationally, what are you doing. Like, are you breaking what you're trying to uphold. And that was a question that had been in my mind as we were thinking about subscribe to open and what that could potentially mean.
So let me back up a minute just so you have a sense of what subscribe to open is. If you don't know. It's at its core. It's really simple. It's a subscription model. It's like going backwards to go forwards. Library subscribe like they always have.
And if enough libraries participate, we open the content for everyone, everywhere around the world. So each new volume year, it's a condition based on what the subscribers are telling you as a scientific community about the content you publish. There's lots of variations on a theme of S2 0, and I don't really want to focus on that because that's not really what's important.
What's important is the idea behind subscribe to open is to spread cost at a foundational level between authors, funders, and libraries and build a community in a different way. So instead, I want to take a minute and focus on what it means when libraries decide to participate in this kind of activity. And they remove one of this huge lever that APC models influence, which is rising cost, not distributed cost, and drive more and more society.
Publishers publishers towards an article based method of publishing which is solely based on volume, which frankly, societies, it's hard to sustain. So what we heard. Before we dove in, we created we created a library advisory board, and there was a lot of education that had to happen. Our sales team became teachers, not sales salespeople anymore. And this was a very important change in mentality.
Because everyone has their own perspective about how they want to subscribe, why they subscribe, why they want to participate in this particular niche in science. So we had to hear what their concerns were and we had to explain why you should participate. Like, why should we subscribe to something if you're going to make it open. What's the purpose.
Why and how come there may still be costs if you're trying to distribute it. Because we are trying to distribute it equally across all kinds of people. And once we explained to our various constituents in the library and at institutions. We got incredibly positive feedback, which was great. Our librarian community, especially in the United States and in China and in other countries, really embraced this.
I will be honest. The Europeans had a different view because they're so tied to read and publish. So that kind of Education was slow and deliberate but important. And they to have embraced this idea of distributed cost and more equitable publishing in the name of open science. So what are we seeing.
I was going to pull up lots of charts and graphs, but I decided not to because who wants to see charts and charts and graphs. But we took our six community journals, our formerly hybrid journals, and they fully transitioned to the Subscribe to open model this year when they transitioned. We've seen engagement on discovery platforms doubling and tripling research. Great gate usage is out of this world.
We've never seen anything like this before. It's the surge is fueling what appears to be a massive increase in submissions for us across all our journals, which had either stagnated or declined over the past five to 10 years. Now, can we attribute this growth solely to a model change. No like, I don't want to make that claim because there's all kinds of different factors and it's really hard to unpack. But here's what we know before subscribe to open.
Our engagement was down. Submissions were down in every single scientific community, where we had a niche journal. Everything was declining. They were focusing on larger mega journals, different competitors, all kinds of different things. After this transition, engagement has skyrocketed. Like I said before. So although there's not a clean causal line, what we're seeing is some patterns that are really making us ask ourselves some foundational questions.
So like our librarians, through their support, signaling to authors that ASM journals align with their core values that the libraries embrace. Does this increase in submission reflect an appreciation for a model that distributes cost. And here's a big one. Does collective support from funders, institutions, libraries, authors, readers. Does this create a new sort of gravitational gravitational pull that reactivates the broader community that we've seen stagnating around our journals.
So, in other words, might this model actually make it easier to find the next editor because it's not focused on journal impact, but on community growth. The next peer reviewer will now be easier to find new peer reviewers. Are the next generation of contributors who see the journal not just as a publishing outlet, but as a space to engage with each other and their community and their scientific niche.
Is that change in perspective happening, and can we at least partially align it with this business model change. So this brings me back to the editor who stopped, said they were reviewing the problem isn't the preprints or early access to content. It's the accelerating pressure to publish faster and faster and faster.
But maybe beneath all that, the real issue is our journals no longer felt like a center worth returning to. So the risk we face when we treat journals as endlessly growing content containers, rather than spaces where people gather and trying to emphasize that aspect of the science and the community. You lose trust. People stop returning, and they stop debating and engaging.
So at ASM, our belief right now and our operating theory until proven otherwise, is that Subscribe to open can help us rebuild that push the community back to the center and wrap it in the journal. So this is not by going backward, but by like reimagining what the journal is as a community anchor. And I think so far it's been really spectacular and a mind shift for us all internally.
And we're really excited to see where it goes next. And ha, 6 seconds to spare. Yes thank you. Hi when you're invited us to come up with what this session would be, she said she wanted to do something around community engagement.
And I said, do you mean engagement with editors, authors and reviewers and readers and that community. Or do you mean like local communities and broader impacts of research within the wider world. And she said, yes. So I'm going to actually try to talk about both. The first thing I thought of was this broader impacts on the wider world. How do we do place based science and make science and research relevant to communities.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about. But we can talk about too, about how within the community of AGU, we had a class of researcher that was not being served. And how we engage with that community to build this new infrastructure, community science exchange and work with them to say, research that is done in the service of a community and the community's priorities should have a home and what AGU publications is.
So if you don't get anything else out of this, I'm trying to talk about those two things, and I'm happy to answer questions about those later. So first I'm going to tell you a little bit about ag pubs. And then I'll tell you a little bit about wider ag and tell you about how wider ag pubs then influence what we do. Sorry wider AG influenced what we did with AG pubs, so don't even look at all of that. We have 24 journals now.
12 of them are open access, so about 74% of our materials is open access. So we are getting wide readership. Sorry, 74% of our articles are publishing open access in a given year through our two different streams of journals. The most important part of this, I would say, is we are now with all our journals and books. We have more than 1,000 editors in our community to make all of this work, and we have a publications staff of 30 doing this editorial work.
And we obviously partner with our publishing partner, Wiley and our wider publications committee. It is a big community. So wider AGU, our strategic plan has really been focused in the past 10 to five years. The last two strategic plans on how do we go from still doing discovery science to also having solutions and how our solution, science, can benefit the world. So one example of this is AGU created new sections.
We have 25 sections of domain specific research within AGU, but one of them now new, maybe six or seven years ago is the science and society section. And these are researchers who are really like, OK, I'm operating in the domain of hydrology, but I also want to be involved in this section. That's like science should benefit people. So that creation is something that's been happening at AGU. It's really exciting, really vibrant community within AGU parallel to that AGU has now.
12 years ago, something like that created a journal, Earth's future. And really thinking about the idea of the Anthropocene, as humans are now creating our climate in the world. How can we as humans concentrate on what we're doing to the Earth and how do we make sure we have a sustainable future. So we're trying to make home for papers that are again, are about how science can help humanity.
So not just basic science. And we're also taking whatever resources. Research is a 40-year-old journal that has always been devoted to water resources, but they're trying to do to hearken to that strategic plan and say, well, let's do special collections around translational research for water. And we've also created a journal, geohealth. And another section geohealth.
So that intersection of place and people and health, and obviously you probably have all heard of One Health. This is a ESM is involved in this as well. This concept of environment and people shaping the environment is also shaping our health. So then back to broader AGU again strategic plan. We know that people are out there wanting to do good work and they're wanting to get credit for that.
And we've also got communities that want action. They want to take science and say, we solved a problem. So thriving Earth exchange was created at AGU to connect researchers and communities. And the whole idea is to the community says, we have a problem or we have five problems and we want some researchers to decide which one. We should help us decide which one we should work on. And it's at the community's priority.
And they really are just doing this linking work. And they've had a mantra over the past 10 years. It's paper is not an outcome. The community doesn't care if there's a paper. The community cares if they've figured out where their community garden could be planted. That isn't a toxic site. If there's a paper that comes out of it, that's great for the scientists.
It's not great for it's not necessarily great for the community. So this relationship has to be helpful to both. And this program has been really celebrated at AGU. But at the same time, going back to our community of researchers, they want to get credit for the work they're doing, and they want to get tenure and they want to be recognized. And in our let me just go back in the journals that I said, we're trying to create these spaces, but there still wasn't many times say you publish in water resources research, and you did community based work, and you have a finding well, that can be published there, but they don't want you to really talk about all the work with the community.
They just want to know the science discovery. So we worked with the community and have come up with community science exchange. And there is a journal, but it's more than a journal. It's a place for people to share case studies, case reports, resources, how to do science. And we're really excited about it. But it is a lot of community building that takes place in this, because one of the things is we're trying to even define what community science is.
So I should mention we have partners. So American Anthropological Association, American Public Health Association, the Association for advancing participatory sciences union, geofisica mexicana and Wiley are all partners in this with us. And I want to also point out association for Advancement of participatory sciences used to be the citizen Science Association. So how many people have heard of citizen science.
How many people have heard of community science. You heard about it from me. How many people think there's the same thing. Oh, some of you should raise your. No they're not. Well, I think I distinguish between them. So citizen science is this concept of engaging people. Like, if you want to study bird species and their migration, you can engage people all over the world in tracking the birds.
And there may be apps to help with that. But the community science, as I've already told you, we think should be really focused on community, has a problem. They have priorities. We need to address those priorities with the research. So we're in the journey with the citizen Science Association, which has said, OK, we need to change our name because we want to be broader than the concept of just people on an app helping scientists.
So we're really excited about this new collaborative effort. So within the scope of the community science exchange, we've got this editor in chief. The scope is community science. It refers to transdisciplinary science, including social and public health, that is conducted with communities and is intended to address the community challenges while contributing to science theory and methodology. So we've got article types to help you with that.
Ask me questions later if you would like. Again, we've got this journal and I'll just speed through this. And we also have this hub. So some people working on these projects, they don't need a academic journal, but they do want to get credit or they want to share their projects and their resources. And so we've also created this hub, and we've got deputy editor specifically for the hub, where it's not exactly peer reviewed, but it's sort of vetted and tagged and excitingly, we've got, we're giving for these materials.
So there's a commitment to preserving them. And then so this all comes together. And the ecosystem at AGU that we're thinking of our community science ecosystem, where there is obviously the part I'm involved with community science exchange, the journal and whatnot, the thriving Earth exchange, the connecting of these researchers and communities, but also advocacy and resources that we're building within AGU.
And I think I'll stop there. I don't know if somebody's doing that. Are you going to switch. That over time. Should have sorted this detail out at the beginning. Thank you.
OK, I'm seeing it, but it's not showing up on the screen. Is that. Yeah give you a minute. Thank you. All right, there we go. So I'm going to talk a little bit today about what you can do if you don't have 16 journals and 30 members in the publication staff, but instead you have a much smaller organization.
And the reason that I was asked to speak was exactly that. So let's see if I can do it this way. So FASEB as a Federation has 22 member societies. They're listed here. Collectively, those member societies have 72 journals and they are managed in various ways. Some are self-published, some are co-published, some are owned by a commercial publisher. And so basically what we have on our hands is a lot of journals, a lot of individual societies collectively with a common mission that is involved with advancing whatever their particular science is and spanning the biological and biomedical sciences.
So the approaches that we've taken have been really about thinking deeply about what you can do on a small basis, but then what will work collectively for others. OK, I'm going to do this manually. And so we've taken three general tactics around our community engagement thoughts. One is refocusing. And I think this is really where you take your small society, your individual journal.
If you're a managing editor and you work with them on what is it that you do best as a society, what we do best as a Federation is collaborative governance and collective work. And so that's not something that we can ignore. That is, in fact, the reason that our member societies join our Federation, and we do a lot with policy and advocacy on that front. The second tactic is what are adding those practical strategies that can drive towards improved engagement.
And the third is really broadening that. So no brilliant insight here, but one of the first efforts that I undertook at FASEB in 2022 was really having the conversation about who we are and what we've gotten away from. And as societies, we often walk away from what the core mission is of the organization. Because we're a journal, we're a publication. So aligning very much with this concept that we're not just that we're part of the mission and that we want to put science first.
We recognize what was happening in 2022 and what we're feeling, the pain points of now, which is that trust and research integrity are not there broadly in the US citizenship and actually in other parts of the world as well. We built ourselves some inclusive governance. I'm going to talk about how we did that, and started to move towards concepts that can bring together those collective voices and actually take the word collaboration that we're hearing at every conference we go to this year and start to put it in action.
So I'm going to start with, the tactics that we took at FASEB. So inclusive governance is something you can do at any society. And we recognize that one of our biggest Mrs. was early career researchers. And so the first thing we did was we added early career researcher positions on our board of directors. We added early career researchers on our task force, our working groups.
And a couple of these folks here were with me on a generative AI task force last year. We added early career researchers on our publications committee, and those are dedicated spots. So those spots can only be filled by early career researchers. And then we moved on to looking at our journal editorial team. And when we did that, we didn't just add two or three. I had an editor who wanted to blow the model up, and that made for a lot of fun and excitement.
But also 118 early career researcher, editorial board member around the world. And the concept that we had was we are creating our community. We are creating our next generation of our community. And so this is not going to be a passive let the ACR show up at the board meeting once a year. Get them to review one paper. This is going to be an active active board. People always ask, what did that look like setting it up.
It took almost six or seven months really to get something actually together. And we did an open call because that's what we believe works best. We close those nominations, research the nominees, the editors reviewed and selected the finalists. And then we did a verification process because obviously, like all of you, when you open nominations. You don't know these people.
You haven't met these people. So we wanted to make sure we weren't being infiltrated by paper Mills or other bad actors. And we announced that in January, we actually did the whole process. So we treated these ACR EVMs as if they were going to be official partners of ours. So they were sent letters of agreement that they had to sign and thank you, Docusign, including our code of conduct, the role description, the responsibilities we had.
All of them go through a bias awareness training, and we gave several options for that our code of conduct, our conflict of interest policies. And then that process happened for all 118 people. And then we started training them because we recognized that, we can't be leveraging these folks if they're not part of our process. So we started to build in that peer reviewer ethics training. How do you peer review.
What are the comments that need to go to the author and which ones are only for the editor. What are our policies at the journal. So they had a real deep understanding of that. And in April of last year, they started to peer review and actually contribute to that part of the process. So now we have 118 new peer reviewers who are also believers in the journal and the journal mission.
And we did not do this alone as staff. We had a great editor in chief partner who was at every and has been at every single early career researcher, editorial board training and is super engaged in this entire process. So I think that's really a critical piece for you to think about. And then we've sort of started to think about, well, how can we add recognition.
Because this is a service that they provide. And just being an ACR m member is a career builder. Being able to put that on your resume, and particularly when you can back that up with this is what I do for the journal is how many papers I reviewed. This is what my contributions have been. These are the numbers of times I've engaged with that. We are in the process. And I'll show you soon a little example.
We do a lot of post-meeting surveys with these EVM because this is their vision too. This is their education. So we are in the process of starting to implement research and progress webinars where they can collectively share their work and practice their presentations and collect feedback and create a real community. And we've just planned out an SDR Spotlight Series on social media, and also in our monthly newsletter to help promote these individuals in their careers.
Separately, we have a FASEB journal early career researcher award, where we provide 10 modest annual travel and recognition awards, and those are presented as well. So we're thinking about how do we give these folks recognition. And as a bonus, what happened is we expanded our geographical representation and this map is still missing lots of areas. However, in 2022, this journal was 95% US based and 85% based in the Northeastern part of the United States.
And it is now and had 0 early career researchers, so it is now much more broadly represented. Approximately half of our associate editors are external to the US itself, and our editorial board is also primarily outside the US. We're representing 156 institutions and 19 countries. So we're actually representing our potential author base. And we are looking at how do we expand into South America. How do we do more in the Middle East, and where are the areas that we really need to target in Africa.
So the professional development was an interesting piece, and so we really wanted to think of these early career researchers as our community, our direct community. So you've heard me talk about the training that we did and the opportunities that they have to engage with the editor in chief, with associate editors. They each have a chance to have that direct sort of mentoring relationship if they'd like it.
But the second thing that we've done is we've actually started to say what's next, what's beyond peer review for you. So we have an ACR engaged in co-editing one of our special issues. And that's just another practical have a mentor, learn how to coordinate a special issue and learn what that looks like. And beyond the journal, they've chosen additional topics.
So we want again to make this a community where we're giving them more and we're not just taking peer review from them. And so in one of our surveys, we said, what opportunities would you be interested in learning about a lot of that feedback was still more on getting published getting published, but there were things beyond what we would typically do. However, we have editors who do these things.
So starting a collaboration, we've had a session on a training session on how do you start a collaboration. And our editor in chief shared some of the documents that he uses when he's starting a collaboration. So there's clarity of roles, how to promote your research, how do you get your research funded. So we're really trying to make this much more of that focus. And then when we ask them, where do we need in the journal more best practices resources and reviewing.
We've got that feedback on the right side with you've got to do more in omics to clarify that. So that's going into the policy development stage that our publications committee works on. And then we've been doing a lot to blend in-person and online and had not traditionally traveled outside the US as a US journal. I don't think that's a big surprise. This is what happens a lot of times with us journals and we've started to build into our budget and at least once a year annual trip.
And last year we were in Paris and Munich, and this year we're going to Shanghai and Xi'an. And that's part of our budgeting process, because that gives your editor in chief the chance to meet with the community of authors. All of this is data driven. We choose those locations based on where our authors are, but also where our potential authors are, where competitors are succeeding.
And that's how we choose the institutions and the locations that we go to. So really blending in-person and online has been critical. We've already identified from last year's trip new editorial board members, new early career researcher, editorial board members, potential associate editors. And we've seen some submissions uptick in that area as well. So what's next. All this was within FASEB.
It was within our journals, our little model journals. We have been working for two years with many of our member societies on conversations, and we haven't announced this publicly yet anywhere. But we are building a collaboration and a collaborative effort, and we actually have a couple of journals and other societies that are in our pilot phase right now. So we'll be announcing that later on.
The concept is that as small societies, we're limited in what we can do individually, but collectively with best practices, with the power of negotiation. When you have more than one or two journals, we really can build more of what we want to achieve. And what we want to achieve is not simply the quality that's critical, we understand how critical the quality of what we publish is.
But it's also, quite frankly, the size. We have a mission to advance the biological and biomedical sciences if we aren't growing in the publications. I think you have AI have to ask yourself and your board the question, are you meeting your mission. And if you're not growing faster than the market, are you doing it better than everybody else or are you not. And what do we need to do to change that. So the collective vision is really about working collaboratively with societies to develop consortia type approach, where we can collectively have the voice and power that we need to have in those negotiations, drive the things that are important to us on the quality side and the research integrity side, which we believe are critical to what we do in terms of trust in science.
So look for more to follow on that. But that's like the first peak of that. OK great. Yeah thank you so much for all three speakers. So we share three experiment. How are the society publishers to engage with their communities. So we're open for questions.
So you can ask the questions about Speaker, how they do it. What do you want to learn more about it. You can also share your own approach what you are doing to engage with your community. Please feel free to come to the speaker. Ask a question while we wait. Yeah, sure can be next. The last thing you mentioned, I know it's was a teaser of a broader announcement, but this consortium is that around coming together to negotiate for tools for research integrity or is it more was that interactions with libraries.
What was the who were you negotiating with. So the way it's being structured and those of you in societies will understand this has been a two year journey talking with all of our member societies, multiple summits of scientists, multiple society leaders having conversations. The way it's structured is really all of the above. It's structured around the concept that small societies have lost our leverage.
And in the March issue of Clark and Esposito, the brief, the headline story is about that. And it basically says the biggest story that's not been talked about is the loss of and the transfer of billions of dollars in revenues from scholarly societies to commercial or non-commercial publishers. And we are nodding our head because we in the publishing world know that and have seen that happen.
That's not to say those relationships haven't had value. That's not to say that at all. It's simply to say that's a reality. And the reality is hitting hard on small societies today. Small societies are looking at how do we stay in business. That's how hard that reality has hit. And so what we wanted to provide was a solution that allows those societies to retain certain amounts of control and to share other amounts of control.
So if you think about a library consortia and their negotiation, a bunch of libraries get together, they negotiate for a deal. That's part of it. But it's also about bringing that business intelligence, bringing those practical day to day strategies, looking at each journal and deciding what does this journal need to succeed, and to make it succeed so that the editors aren't left solo.
They're not hanging out by themselves and thinking, how do I do this or the staff isn't less solo if you have a small staff at the society. So it's a big concept. Thank you for the great, great panel presentation. My first is a two part question. First for Darla, but then for all of you. So you onboarded 100 plus editorial board members, which is a huge feat.
And my question was going to be how they were integrated into the existing board. But you've already answered that. My question for you and then for all is what are some lessons learned where things didn't go well along the way in what you've accomplished in the end. All right. I'll give you the most practical lesson on the EVM. And that is there's value to open calls for nominations.
But we didn't realize how many of these people we wouldn't know and that we would need to do the additional research on. And so we would alter our application process to leave it open, but to request recommendation letters or at least one recommendation letter. And we would probably also involve our associate editors more closely in that process, because they are in different regions. Now They can help us do some identity verification.
I think the identity verification tools coming along will help us, but we're not there yet. And this was all done before that concept. That's good. Any lesson you learned. Well, I can talk a little bit about. We have some editorial, some early career editorial boards as well at AGU. And we've taken a little bit of an incubator model.
We've tried to do something across all the journals, and frankly, the editors at the different journals are. It's like herding cats. But they all have different ideas of what that should be. And they have different energy levels. And right now, I think we have four or 5 out of the 24 have just empowered them to envision what those early career boards should be. And I think we've had some good success there.
And the open calls are really important for all of them. And the other thing is the editors have all agreed to is if they're going to do this, they should make sure that those early career reviewers are not just doing tasks for the journals, but that they're actually giving something to those early, early career researchers. And whether that be training or all of the things that you should be doing for them, if it's a true sort of mentorship, not just exploiting them.
We learned all kinds of different things. But the one thing I want to talk about is the idea of what it means to sell. Our sales force had to change their entire approach. They truly became teachers, which is mind boggling to me because it our core fear with doing this was if you are committing to open stuff up, does that mean you're going to lose subscriptions.
That's a foundational fear. And what we've learned is that value is more important than the idea. Like people are willing to continue to pay for things as it if it matches their values. And intellectually that. But seeing it in practice is really, really reassuring, especially from an association standpoint where you try to champion your own values.
But it's really hard because it's just hard in a business environment to stay consistent. And we. I really think one of the reasons is because our sales force they weren't selling, they were selling the value of what it means to be a society publisher now. And that is it's such a different way of even thinking about it.
We have tons of agents who sell things, but our sales team went to the institutions that were covered by those agents and talked to people directly. It was like, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. This is what you're supporting if you do it. And that kind of it was just different and mind opening to me at least.
Actually, do you mind if I give a second answer on the topic I spoke about lessons learned. I would just say that creating something new, truly new, is difficult. When you're creating a publication around a field that is still defining itself. You have to be ready for lots of stops and starts, and some dialing back, stepping back and be like, oh, we're redefining what this is.
And it has not. It's sort of a longer term investment. It wasn't just like initially, like lots of submissions and everything, and we're still developing that slow burn. Sorry to interrupt your question. My question is for David. Can you answered what I was going to ask about expounding on your sales strategy and your pitch to libraries.
But what I'd also like to know is if you could expand on what you mean by community engagement, what kind of interactions are you seeing. What is manifested. Is it an analytics thing. I mean, how is it you're seeing these results, your Roi on this. On this. Subscribe to open. Oh, sorry.
No it's OK. So this is where my non-scientist. I'm not a scientist. I don't like making decisions by data. I do it by gut, so it's dangerous. So that's why I wanted to tell this story in the context of that senior editor and his feeling about preprints and what the unseen, unseen consequences of business models are and all that kind of stuff we always talk about.
And what we are seeing in ResearchGate in particular, broken out, because that's a community we normally are. Our engagement was low, it was consistent and low, and the moment we switched, something happened. We were doing other activities. So it wasn't a controlled experiment. So there's other forces going on. But there is definitely a correlation between the engagement we are seeing on ResearchGate in terms of usage, commentating on our articles, country location increases.
I can't even put it into words. It's doubled and tripled. And I'm not talking like in tens of thousands and because we are also seeing increasing, increasing submissions across these journals for which we didn't see increasing submissions for years and years, even during the COVID spikes, like something is happening now, we can say it's MDPI is crashing and burning frontiers is correct.
We can say all those things that's contributing, but I really think something else is going on and we're trying to tease out the data and try to get at some more substantial conclusions. But at this point it's. The timing and the mapping of what we're seeing correlates. Are you sorry to just but to follow up, are you connecting any of that to membership drives or things like that for your society.
We're trying to because it's interesting the we did projections on what we expected to happen. Some of our data was bad, so what we expected to happen. It's hard to determine how off we were, but what we're seeing is our membership publishing rates have increased. What we're seeing is our subscriber publishing rates. Had we had projected around 40% We're seeing 80% now.
Some of that's bad data. I fully acknowledge that. But we're going back and recalculating our projections. And it's not as bad as we first thought. So again, are the libraries driving people to us or just is it marketing. Like, I don't know what's going on, but something is going on. OK guys.
So I have a two part question for you. The first is how much of in those hybrid journals or those journals that you've now transitioned as to how much of that content was originally the year before open access. Because you're going to get the open access effect. But what's encouraging to me is not just the usage, it's the other engagement that you're seeing that I think has real promise there.
So sorry. Traditionally I in the previous years our splits were trying to remember. I think it was around 50% maybe a little maybe it was going it was going up. So of course open access it's the usage is higher. But it's this ResearchGate engagement because we had all our OA journals in ResearchGate and it was I mean it was consistently flat.
So there's. And the other thing is we're seeing weird, interesting spikes in both usage and submissions that are correlating, like from Bangladesh, just weird, weird things. And we're not sure if we have ambassadors there. We're not sure if it's related to how we've reached out and talked to the institutions about subscribe to open.
So it's a confused mess, but the timing is all suggesting subscribe and open has something to do with it. Well, I'll ask you a question. Was it easy to convince the libraries that they're part of the community, and that the way of shifting their subscription to this S2 model was something that was worth doing.
Is it easier because you're a society. It might be easier because we are a society, maybe, I think it depends on where the research institutions were. And this points me back to something that the community science you're doing. Because to me, these two things are actually related in a really interesting way because the European community were suspicious of this. Subscribe to open model because it's conditional.
But different localities have different interpretations. And it's really interesting. Like if you expand that, what does that mean and what you're doing with the community science focus. Like to me that's the next step of something like this. Because if we can get feedback based on what the institutions are doing and where those institutions are located and what people around the institutions are doing, I mean, it's just fascinating to me because we did see that different countries had different responses.
Germans approached it one way, the Spaniards a different way, it's. It's stuff you intellectually but when it's confronted to you, it's different. I see. Any additional questions. Sarah, please. Thank you.
These are I don't how do I turn this on. Do I press the button. Oh, sorry. Thanks these were really interesting and inspiring examples, and I think definitely gave me a lot of things to take back to my institution. And one question I have for all of you is when something is new, it's really exciting and people buy into it. But how do you have plans to keep the momentum going, sort of beyond of initial phase.
How do you keep that. OK, I want to start that. That goes back to the Inclusive part and the actions and on the ground actions. And that's for small societies that's often where small societies will fall. They'll try something new. It worked well. It doesn't continue to work well.
It's the commitment to ongoing investment and experimentation that has to become part of the team's plan. And so, we too have seen 40% higher submissions this year over last year. I've not attributed that to the ACR m however, we know we have advocates in the community. We know we have people out there who understand what we do at FASEB and the commitment we're making and how the process works and how it adds value.
And that is different. And we are definitely seeing early career researcher uptake in terms of being first time authors as well as we have a profile page where they can choose their career stage. Yeah, we're seeing uptake in all of those numbers as well. So it's really about the continued commitment that we want to be an inclusive organization, regardless of the fact a dirty word these days.
We still want to be that. We think that is how we grow the science. It is the only way we grow the science, and it is how we meet our mission. And so we're not backing away from that. You might have to drop a program that got funded by NIH, which happens has happened to many of us. But you don't have to stop your commitment to what you're doing on the ground.
All right. Thank you. For us, I think that one of the main challenges has been these we have this various partners that are involved and coordinating with them and keeping our excitement levels and contribution levels on par. AG really did sort of like initiate the whole thing. And as Kristina is here, she's our managing editor for The journal and helps lead some of the development.
And so we've taken on a majority of the work. But then it's like we still need those partners to be championing this concept within their communities. Some of them have other activities that they're doing that are along the same lines, but so they're like they're complementary. But we also need that energy to be consolidated around all of what all of their societies are doing.
So that's been a challenge in terms of how do we all work together to help each other with our various initiatives. Yeah, I agree that the energy is important, but knowing that the energy has to be flexible energy because we are thrown into a situation now where I'm not clear that libraries will pay for anything next year. So where does that leave this model.
So we have to be flexible enough to think about OK. So we have this concept. How can we morph it. How can we change it. Not necessarily throw it out but be flexible enough to recognize like we have. We can't use the energy as a sustaining energy, I don't think you have to use the energy as a flexible, sort of critical energy to really critique what's going on.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth, I'm from Elsevier. And my question was tagged on to something Darla said. But it's relevant for all of you. Something that I'm in I work in with our society publishers, and something I'm interested in is if there are new initiatives. What has your society. I wonder if you can each speak to what your society has had to let go of to make space for those new initiatives.
Or maybe you haven't, but I'd be interested to hear. So one of the things that happens at societies and small, small societies, whether they're co-publishing or self-publishing is that you continue to do things the way that they've always been done. And so when I came to FAFSA mid-year 2021, what I saw was whack-a-mole, what I call whack-a-mole.
It was total whack-a-mole, and there's no other way to describe it. And job descriptions weren't clear. People were not focused on growing the journal. No one was looking at the data and the metrics, but they were instead making sure that they were also copyediting every single manuscript in advance of sending it to our publishing partner and all of the things that we know are important.
But maybe we have to let go of. And so that was a hard discussion that we had. And in 2022, we developed a strat plan with our pubs committee, and that's how we've used that to build on OK, these are our goals and these are not our goals. Job descriptions rewritten, roles revamped. The entire bucket. All right.
Thank you all for your feedback, your questions. So let's share some summarize. What are the take home message for. Would you like to share if other organizations want to start their community engagement. I think a really important thing with any new idea or experiment you're going to do is making sure one you have clear what the high level goal is and how you're going to communicate it, and who the people are going to be who the communicators are going to be.
Because if that is not open and clear within your organization, you're going to get a hodgepodge of messaging. And it's going to fail. Not because it might have been a bad idea, but because it's just a communication crash and burn situation. And I've seen so many things we've tried fail only because we couldn't talk about it in a cogent way.
I guess I'd say sort of it relates to that last question. You have to establish what problem you're trying to solve, and then you have to really assess your priorities and whether there's something you're going to be taking resources away from something else in order to direct them to the new thing. Even if you don't think you're going to be doing that are doing it. So taking that prioritization idea and then coming back to it and checking in on how are my how are our resources aligned to our activities.
OK I'll say data driven. That's it. Yeah so overall, it sounds like community engagement is critical to our future. Thank you so much. Have any questions, you can ask afterwards. Yeah thank you so much. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the session with community engagement. What is our experiment in society publishing programs. So what you will expect today this is one hour. So briefly our three speakers will have very brief introduction first. And then each of them will share their experiment in their community engagement within their society associations.
And you can ask questions. We welcome you to ask questions with our speaker. And in the end, our panel will be here and welcome your feedback, your questions, how you can share. What's your approach within your community. Engaging so before we start, I'm asking you to talk about our code of conduct. SSP is committed to diversity, equity, and providing a safe, inclusive, and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas for harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct.
Our values community. Adaptability, inclusivity and integrity. All right. David it is. So my name is David Haber. I am the director of publishing operations at the American Society of Microbiology, and we publish about 16 or 17 journals, depending on what day it is and how I'm counting.
And do you want to introduce yourself. Yeah I'm Matt Jim. I'm with the American Geophysical Union and we cover all of Earth and Space sciences ag publications has about. It has 24 journals and books, four book series and preprint server. So we try to cover everything that anyone could want for Earth and space sciences.
Thank you. I'm Darla Henderson, the chief publications open science and research integrity office officer at FASEB, which is also the longest title in history, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. And we're a Federation of 22 scholarly societies in the US focused on the biological and biomedical sciences and representing 110,000 researchers.
We have two journals in house, but we also provide policy feedback to federal agencies, collective voices, and we will be expanding our services to member societies and beyond in the US to include issues like driving, engagement and helping to achieve growth in your journal.
All right. So as I said, we have between 16 and 17 journals. And to get a sense, we publish under different publishing models. A gold a Greenaway a subscription model in this new subscribe to open model. And that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit. But I really don't want to focus on the model. I want to focus on a problem in a story.
So this story, it kind of stopped me in the tracks, in my tracks when I heard this. And I want to use this story to frame how we look at, subscribe to open and reimagine our role as a publisher, not as a true publisher, but as a community Steward, and what that means. So about 8 to 10 months ago, as we were thinking about what to do with our hybrid journals.
I was in an editorial board meeting and the standard conversation came up. Peer review crisis. We can't find reviewers. It takes forever. This is ridiculous. What are we going to do. How are these journals going to survive. How can we continue to publish.
Science is going to pot. Same conversation we hear over and over again. And then a senior editor pulled his chair back and said, I used to volunteer to review all the time, but I did that because one of the benefits of reviewing is I could get early access to science and see what my colleagues are doing, see where the science is going, think about what I want to do in the future, but I don't do that anymore.
I don't even review for you guys, because I can just go to a preprint server and read stuff whenever I want. And the whole room sort of got quiet. I looked at him and I was like, for real. You really. You've heard this story. This is something that's honest true. And he was like, it's not just a story.
This is like, this is what I do. It's what my students do. This is more common than you think. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting and kind of crazy. So this moment stuck with me like for a really long time. And I didn't really want to view it in a lens of cynicism and everything's falling apart.
But it made me realize how decentered the journal has become. Not just by open access models, but models that prioritize speed and volume over curation. Like anything we do that does that. It puts a different pressure point on how we do science and how we publish. So when you strip this journal of its purpose as a place where researchers gather to review, to learn, to mentor, to build trust among themselves don't just lose submissions, which we've seen in the data, but you lose the community that you've built.
And as an association, we're all about community building. So what are we doing. And in no way want to villainize like APC models, gold models, because there's a place for that. There's use cases for that. And they solved a really important problem, which was access to science and scientific content globally. And that's really, really important. And it's something that ASM as an organization embraces.
But in solving that problem, we created another one, a more fundamental one, like fragmenting of science from topic specific journals and a shared space to share ideas, to something else. So when you have smaller community journals and you try to force them into an APC type model, foundationally, what are you doing. Like, are you breaking what you're trying to uphold. And that was a question that had been in my mind as we were thinking about subscribe to open and what that could potentially mean.
So let me back up a minute just so you have a sense of what subscribe to open is. If you don't know. It's at its core. It's really simple. It's a subscription model. It's like going backwards to go forwards. Library subscribe like they always have.
And if enough libraries participate, we open the content for everyone, everywhere around the world. So each new volume year, it's a condition based on what the subscribers are telling you as a scientific community about the content you publish. There's lots of variations on a theme of S2 0, and I don't really want to focus on that because that's not really what's important.
What's important is the idea behind subscribe to open is to spread cost at a foundational level between authors, funders, and libraries and build a community in a different way. So instead, I want to take a minute and focus on what it means when libraries decide to participate in this kind of activity. And they remove one of this huge lever that APC models influence, which is rising cost, not distributed cost, and drive more and more society.
Publishers publishers towards an article based method of publishing which is solely based on volume, which frankly, societies, it's hard to sustain. So what we heard. Before we dove in, we created we created a library advisory board, and there was a lot of education that had to happen. Our sales team became teachers, not sales salespeople anymore. And this was a very important change in mentality.
Because everyone has their own perspective about how they want to subscribe, why they subscribe, why they want to participate in this particular niche in science. So we had to hear what their concerns were and we had to explain why you should participate. Like, why should we subscribe to something if you're going to make it open. What's the purpose.
Why and how come there may still be costs if you're trying to distribute it. Because we are trying to distribute it equally across all kinds of people. And once we explained to our various constituents in the library and at institutions. We got incredibly positive feedback, which was great. Our librarian community, especially in the United States and in China and in other countries, really embraced this.
I will be honest. The Europeans had a different view because they're so tied to read and publish. So that kind of Education was slow and deliberate but important. And they to have embraced this idea of distributed cost and more equitable publishing in the name of open science. So what are we seeing.
I was going to pull up lots of charts and graphs, but I decided not to because who wants to see charts and charts and graphs. But we took our six community journals, our formerly hybrid journals, and they fully transitioned to the Subscribe to open model this year when they transitioned. We've seen engagement on discovery platforms doubling and tripling research. Great gate usage is out of this world.
We've never seen anything like this before. It's the surge is fueling what appears to be a massive increase in submissions for us across all our journals, which had either stagnated or declined over the past five to 10 years. Now, can we attribute this growth solely to a model change. No like, I don't want to make that claim because there's all kinds of different factors and it's really hard to unpack. But here's what we know before subscribe to open.
Our engagement was down. Submissions were down in every single scientific community, where we had a niche journal. Everything was declining. They were focusing on larger mega journals, different competitors, all kinds of different things. After this transition, engagement has skyrocketed. Like I said before. So although there's not a clean causal line, what we're seeing is some patterns that are really making us ask ourselves some foundational questions.
So like our librarians, through their support, signaling to authors that ASM journals align with their core values that the libraries embrace. Does this increase in submission reflect an appreciation for a model that distributes cost. And here's a big one. Does collective support from funders, institutions, libraries, authors, readers. Does this create a new sort of gravitational gravitational pull that reactivates the broader community that we've seen stagnating around our journals.
So, in other words, might this model actually make it easier to find the next editor because it's not focused on journal impact, but on community growth. The next peer reviewer will now be easier to find new peer reviewers. Are the next generation of contributors who see the journal not just as a publishing outlet, but as a space to engage with each other and their community and their scientific niche.
Is that change in perspective happening, and can we at least partially align it with this business model change. So this brings me back to the editor who stopped, said they were reviewing the problem isn't the preprints or early access to content. It's the accelerating pressure to publish faster and faster and faster.
But maybe beneath all that, the real issue is our journals no longer felt like a center worth returning to. So the risk we face when we treat journals as endlessly growing content containers, rather than spaces where people gather and trying to emphasize that aspect of the science and the community. You lose trust. People stop returning, and they stop debating and engaging.
So at ASM, our belief right now and our operating theory until proven otherwise, is that Subscribe to open can help us rebuild that push the community back to the center and wrap it in the journal. So this is not by going backward, but by like reimagining what the journal is as a community anchor. And I think so far it's been really spectacular and a mind shift for us all internally.
And we're really excited to see where it goes next. And ha, 6 seconds to spare. Yes thank you. Hi when you're invited us to come up with what this session would be, she said she wanted to do something around community engagement.
And I said, do you mean engagement with editors, authors and reviewers and readers and that community. Or do you mean like local communities and broader impacts of research within the wider world. And she said, yes. So I'm going to actually try to talk about both. The first thing I thought of was this broader impacts on the wider world. How do we do place based science and make science and research relevant to communities.
And so that's what I'm going to talk about. But we can talk about too, about how within the community of AGU, we had a class of researcher that was not being served. And how we engage with that community to build this new infrastructure, community science exchange and work with them to say, research that is done in the service of a community and the community's priorities should have a home and what AGU publications is.
So if you don't get anything else out of this, I'm trying to talk about those two things, and I'm happy to answer questions about those later. So first I'm going to tell you a little bit about ag pubs. And then I'll tell you a little bit about wider ag and tell you about how wider ag pubs then influence what we do. Sorry wider AG influenced what we did with AG pubs, so don't even look at all of that. We have 24 journals now.
12 of them are open access, so about 74% of our materials is open access. So we are getting wide readership. Sorry, 74% of our articles are publishing open access in a given year through our two different streams of journals. The most important part of this, I would say, is we are now with all our journals and books. We have more than 1,000 editors in our community to make all of this work, and we have a publications staff of 30 doing this editorial work.
And we obviously partner with our publishing partner, Wiley and our wider publications committee. It is a big community. So wider AGU, our strategic plan has really been focused in the past 10 to five years. The last two strategic plans on how do we go from still doing discovery science to also having solutions and how our solution, science, can benefit the world. So one example of this is AGU created new sections.
We have 25 sections of domain specific research within AGU, but one of them now new, maybe six or seven years ago is the science and society section. And these are researchers who are really like, OK, I'm operating in the domain of hydrology, but I also want to be involved in this section. That's like science should benefit people. So that creation is something that's been happening at AGU. It's really exciting, really vibrant community within AGU parallel to that AGU has now.
12 years ago, something like that created a journal, Earth's future. And really thinking about the idea of the Anthropocene, as humans are now creating our climate in the world. How can we as humans concentrate on what we're doing to the Earth and how do we make sure we have a sustainable future. So we're trying to make home for papers that are again, are about how science can help humanity.
So not just basic science. And we're also taking whatever resources. Research is a 40-year-old journal that has always been devoted to water resources, but they're trying to do to hearken to that strategic plan and say, well, let's do special collections around translational research for water. And we've also created a journal, geohealth. And another section geohealth.
So that intersection of place and people and health, and obviously you probably have all heard of One Health. This is a ESM is involved in this as well. This concept of environment and people shaping the environment is also shaping our health. So then back to broader AGU again strategic plan. We know that people are out there wanting to do good work and they're wanting to get credit for that.
And we've also got communities that want action. They want to take science and say, we solved a problem. So thriving Earth exchange was created at AGU to connect researchers and communities. And the whole idea is to the community says, we have a problem or we have five problems and we want some researchers to decide which one. We should help us decide which one we should work on. And it's at the community's priority.
And they really are just doing this linking work. And they've had a mantra over the past 10 years. It's paper is not an outcome. The community doesn't care if there's a paper. The community cares if they've figured out where their community garden could be planted. That isn't a toxic site. If there's a paper that comes out of it, that's great for the scientists.
It's not great for it's not necessarily great for the community. So this relationship has to be helpful to both. And this program has been really celebrated at AGU. But at the same time, going back to our community of researchers, they want to get credit for the work they're doing, and they want to get tenure and they want to be recognized. And in our let me just go back in the journals that I said, we're trying to create these spaces, but there still wasn't many times say you publish in water resources research, and you did community based work, and you have a finding well, that can be published there, but they don't want you to really talk about all the work with the community.
They just want to know the science discovery. So we worked with the community and have come up with community science exchange. And there is a journal, but it's more than a journal. It's a place for people to share case studies, case reports, resources, how to do science. And we're really excited about it. But it is a lot of community building that takes place in this, because one of the things is we're trying to even define what community science is.
So I should mention we have partners. So American Anthropological Association, American Public Health Association, the Association for advancing participatory sciences union, geofisica mexicana and Wiley are all partners in this with us. And I want to also point out association for Advancement of participatory sciences used to be the citizen Science Association. So how many people have heard of citizen science.
How many people have heard of community science. You heard about it from me. How many people think there's the same thing. Oh, some of you should raise your. No they're not. Well, I think I distinguish between them. So citizen science is this concept of engaging people. Like, if you want to study bird species and their migration, you can engage people all over the world in tracking the birds.
And there may be apps to help with that. But the community science, as I've already told you, we think should be really focused on community, has a problem. They have priorities. We need to address those priorities with the research. So we're in the journey with the citizen Science Association, which has said, OK, we need to change our name because we want to be broader than the concept of just people on an app helping scientists.
So we're really excited about this new collaborative effort. So within the scope of the community science exchange, we've got this editor in chief. The scope is community science. It refers to transdisciplinary science, including social and public health, that is conducted with communities and is intended to address the community challenges while contributing to science theory and methodology. So we've got article types to help you with that.
Ask me questions later if you would like. Again, we've got this journal and I'll just speed through this. And we also have this hub. So some people working on these projects, they don't need a academic journal, but they do want to get credit or they want to share their projects and their resources. And so we've also created this hub, and we've got deputy editor specifically for the hub, where it's not exactly peer reviewed, but it's sort of vetted and tagged and excitingly, we've got, we're giving for these materials.
So there's a commitment to preserving them. And then so this all comes together. And the ecosystem at AGU that we're thinking of our community science ecosystem, where there is obviously the part I'm involved with community science exchange, the journal and whatnot, the thriving Earth exchange, the connecting of these researchers and communities, but also advocacy and resources that we're building within AGU.
And I think I'll stop there. I don't know if somebody's doing that. Are you going to switch. That over time. Should have sorted this detail out at the beginning. Thank you.
OK, I'm seeing it, but it's not showing up on the screen. Is that. Yeah give you a minute. Thank you. All right, there we go. So I'm going to talk a little bit today about what you can do if you don't have 16 journals and 30 members in the publication staff, but instead you have a much smaller organization.
And the reason that I was asked to speak was exactly that. So let's see if I can do it this way. So FASEB as a Federation has 22 member societies. They're listed here. Collectively, those member societies have 72 journals and they are managed in various ways. Some are self-published, some are co-published, some are owned by a commercial publisher. And so basically what we have on our hands is a lot of journals, a lot of individual societies collectively with a common mission that is involved with advancing whatever their particular science is and spanning the biological and biomedical sciences.
So the approaches that we've taken have been really about thinking deeply about what you can do on a small basis, but then what will work collectively for others. OK, I'm going to do this manually. And so we've taken three general tactics around our community engagement thoughts. One is refocusing. And I think this is really where you take your small society, your individual journal.
If you're a managing editor and you work with them on what is it that you do best as a society, what we do best as a Federation is collaborative governance and collective work. And so that's not something that we can ignore. That is, in fact, the reason that our member societies join our Federation, and we do a lot with policy and advocacy on that front. The second tactic is what are adding those practical strategies that can drive towards improved engagement.
And the third is really broadening that. So no brilliant insight here, but one of the first efforts that I undertook at FASEB in 2022 was really having the conversation about who we are and what we've gotten away from. And as societies, we often walk away from what the core mission is of the organization. Because we're a journal, we're a publication. So aligning very much with this concept that we're not just that we're part of the mission and that we want to put science first.
We recognize what was happening in 2022 and what we're feeling, the pain points of now, which is that trust and research integrity are not there broadly in the US citizenship and actually in other parts of the world as well. We built ourselves some inclusive governance. I'm going to talk about how we did that, and started to move towards concepts that can bring together those collective voices and actually take the word collaboration that we're hearing at every conference we go to this year and start to put it in action.
So I'm going to start with, the tactics that we took at FASEB. So inclusive governance is something you can do at any society. And we recognize that one of our biggest Mrs. was early career researchers. And so the first thing we did was we added early career researcher positions on our board of directors. We added early career researchers on our task force, our working groups.
And a couple of these folks here were with me on a generative AI task force last year. We added early career researchers on our publications committee, and those are dedicated spots. So those spots can only be filled by early career researchers. And then we moved on to looking at our journal editorial team. And when we did that, we didn't just add two or three. I had an editor who wanted to blow the model up, and that made for a lot of fun and excitement.
But also 118 early career researcher, editorial board member around the world. And the concept that we had was we are creating our community. We are creating our next generation of our community. And so this is not going to be a passive let the ACR show up at the board meeting once a year. Get them to review one paper. This is going to be an active active board. People always ask, what did that look like setting it up.
It took almost six or seven months really to get something actually together. And we did an open call because that's what we believe works best. We close those nominations, research the nominees, the editors reviewed and selected the finalists. And then we did a verification process because obviously, like all of you, when you open nominations. You don't know these people.
You haven't met these people. So we wanted to make sure we weren't being infiltrated by paper Mills or other bad actors. And we announced that in January, we actually did the whole process. So we treated these ACR EVMs as if they were going to be official partners of ours. So they were sent letters of agreement that they had to sign and thank you, Docusign, including our code of conduct, the role description, the responsibilities we had.
All of them go through a bias awareness training, and we gave several options for that our code of conduct, our conflict of interest policies. And then that process happened for all 118 people. And then we started training them because we recognized that, we can't be leveraging these folks if they're not part of our process. So we started to build in that peer reviewer ethics training. How do you peer review.
What are the comments that need to go to the author and which ones are only for the editor. What are our policies at the journal. So they had a real deep understanding of that. And in April of last year, they started to peer review and actually contribute to that part of the process. So now we have 118 new peer reviewers who are also believers in the journal and the journal mission.
And we did not do this alone as staff. We had a great editor in chief partner who was at every and has been at every single early career researcher, editorial board training and is super engaged in this entire process. So I think that's really a critical piece for you to think about. And then we've sort of started to think about, well, how can we add recognition.
Because this is a service that they provide. And just being an ACR m member is a career builder. Being able to put that on your resume, and particularly when you can back that up with this is what I do for the journal is how many papers I reviewed. This is what my contributions have been. These are the numbers of times I've engaged with that. We are in the process. And I'll show you soon a little example.
We do a lot of post-meeting surveys with these EVM because this is their vision too. This is their education. So we are in the process of starting to implement research and progress webinars where they can collectively share their work and practice their presentations and collect feedback and create a real community. And we've just planned out an SDR Spotlight Series on social media, and also in our monthly newsletter to help promote these individuals in their careers.
Separately, we have a FASEB journal early career researcher award, where we provide 10 modest annual travel and recognition awards, and those are presented as well. So we're thinking about how do we give these folks recognition. And as a bonus, what happened is we expanded our geographical representation and this map is still missing lots of areas. However, in 2022, this journal was 95% US based and 85% based in the Northeastern part of the United States.
And it is now and had 0 early career researchers, so it is now much more broadly represented. Approximately half of our associate editors are external to the US itself, and our editorial board is also primarily outside the US. We're representing 156 institutions and 19 countries. So we're actually representing our potential author base. And we are looking at how do we expand into South America. How do we do more in the Middle East, and where are the areas that we really need to target in Africa.
So the professional development was an interesting piece, and so we really wanted to think of these early career researchers as our community, our direct community. So you've heard me talk about the training that we did and the opportunities that they have to engage with the editor in chief, with associate editors. They each have a chance to have that direct sort of mentoring relationship if they'd like it.
But the second thing that we've done is we've actually started to say what's next, what's beyond peer review for you. So we have an ACR engaged in co-editing one of our special issues. And that's just another practical have a mentor, learn how to coordinate a special issue and learn what that looks like. And beyond the journal, they've chosen additional topics.
So we want again to make this a community where we're giving them more and we're not just taking peer review from them. And so in one of our surveys, we said, what opportunities would you be interested in learning about a lot of that feedback was still more on getting published getting published, but there were things beyond what we would typically do. However, we have editors who do these things.
So starting a collaboration, we've had a session on a training session on how do you start a collaboration. And our editor in chief shared some of the documents that he uses when he's starting a collaboration. So there's clarity of roles, how to promote your research, how do you get your research funded. So we're really trying to make this much more of that focus. And then when we ask them, where do we need in the journal more best practices resources and reviewing.
We've got that feedback on the right side with you've got to do more in omics to clarify that. So that's going into the policy development stage that our publications committee works on. And then we've been doing a lot to blend in-person and online and had not traditionally traveled outside the US as a US journal. I don't think that's a big surprise. This is what happens a lot of times with us journals and we've started to build into our budget and at least once a year annual trip.
And last year we were in Paris and Munich, and this year we're going to Shanghai and Xi'an. And that's part of our budgeting process, because that gives your editor in chief the chance to meet with the community of authors. All of this is data driven. We choose those locations based on where our authors are, but also where our potential authors are, where competitors are succeeding.
And that's how we choose the institutions and the locations that we go to. So really blending in-person and online has been critical. We've already identified from last year's trip new editorial board members, new early career researcher, editorial board members, potential associate editors. And we've seen some submissions uptick in that area as well. So what's next. All this was within FASEB.
It was within our journals, our little model journals. We have been working for two years with many of our member societies on conversations, and we haven't announced this publicly yet anywhere. But we are building a collaboration and a collaborative effort, and we actually have a couple of journals and other societies that are in our pilot phase right now. So we'll be announcing that later on.
The concept is that as small societies, we're limited in what we can do individually, but collectively with best practices, with the power of negotiation. When you have more than one or two journals, we really can build more of what we want to achieve. And what we want to achieve is not simply the quality that's critical, we understand how critical the quality of what we publish is.
But it's also, quite frankly, the size. We have a mission to advance the biological and biomedical sciences if we aren't growing in the publications. I think you have AI have to ask yourself and your board the question, are you meeting your mission. And if you're not growing faster than the market, are you doing it better than everybody else or are you not. And what do we need to do to change that. So the collective vision is really about working collaboratively with societies to develop consortia type approach, where we can collectively have the voice and power that we need to have in those negotiations, drive the things that are important to us on the quality side and the research integrity side, which we believe are critical to what we do in terms of trust in science.
So look for more to follow on that. But that's like the first peak of that. OK great. Yeah thank you so much for all three speakers. So we share three experiment. How are the society publishers to engage with their communities. So we're open for questions.
So you can ask the questions about Speaker, how they do it. What do you want to learn more about it. You can also share your own approach what you are doing to engage with your community. Please feel free to come to the speaker. Ask a question while we wait. Yeah, sure can be next. The last thing you mentioned, I know it's was a teaser of a broader announcement, but this consortium is that around coming together to negotiate for tools for research integrity or is it more was that interactions with libraries.
What was the who were you negotiating with. So the way it's being structured and those of you in societies will understand this has been a two year journey talking with all of our member societies, multiple summits of scientists, multiple society leaders having conversations. The way it's structured is really all of the above. It's structured around the concept that small societies have lost our leverage.
And in the March issue of Clark and Esposito, the brief, the headline story is about that. And it basically says the biggest story that's not been talked about is the loss of and the transfer of billions of dollars in revenues from scholarly societies to commercial or non-commercial publishers. And we are nodding our head because we in the publishing world know that and have seen that happen.
That's not to say those relationships haven't had value. That's not to say that at all. It's simply to say that's a reality. And the reality is hitting hard on small societies today. Small societies are looking at how do we stay in business. That's how hard that reality has hit. And so what we wanted to provide was a solution that allows those societies to retain certain amounts of control and to share other amounts of control.
So if you think about a library consortia and their negotiation, a bunch of libraries get together, they negotiate for a deal. That's part of it. But it's also about bringing that business intelligence, bringing those practical day to day strategies, looking at each journal and deciding what does this journal need to succeed, and to make it succeed so that the editors aren't left solo.
They're not hanging out by themselves and thinking, how do I do this or the staff isn't less solo if you have a small staff at the society. So it's a big concept. Thank you for the great, great panel presentation. My first is a two part question. First for Darla, but then for all of you. So you onboarded 100 plus editorial board members, which is a huge feat.
And my question was going to be how they were integrated into the existing board. But you've already answered that. My question for you and then for all is what are some lessons learned where things didn't go well along the way in what you've accomplished in the end. All right. I'll give you the most practical lesson on the EVM. And that is there's value to open calls for nominations.
But we didn't realize how many of these people we wouldn't know and that we would need to do the additional research on. And so we would alter our application process to leave it open, but to request recommendation letters or at least one recommendation letter. And we would probably also involve our associate editors more closely in that process, because they are in different regions. Now They can help us do some identity verification.
I think the identity verification tools coming along will help us, but we're not there yet. And this was all done before that concept. That's good. Any lesson you learned. Well, I can talk a little bit about. We have some editorial, some early career editorial boards as well at AGU. And we've taken a little bit of an incubator model.
We've tried to do something across all the journals, and frankly, the editors at the different journals are. It's like herding cats. But they all have different ideas of what that should be. And they have different energy levels. And right now, I think we have four or 5 out of the 24 have just empowered them to envision what those early career boards should be. And I think we've had some good success there.
And the open calls are really important for all of them. And the other thing is the editors have all agreed to is if they're going to do this, they should make sure that those early career reviewers are not just doing tasks for the journals, but that they're actually giving something to those early, early career researchers. And whether that be training or all of the things that you should be doing for them, if it's a true sort of mentorship, not just exploiting them.
We learned all kinds of different things. But the one thing I want to talk about is the idea of what it means to sell. Our sales force had to change their entire approach. They truly became teachers, which is mind boggling to me because it our core fear with doing this was if you are committing to open stuff up, does that mean you're going to lose subscriptions.
That's a foundational fear. And what we've learned is that value is more important than the idea. Like people are willing to continue to pay for things as it if it matches their values. And intellectually that. But seeing it in practice is really, really reassuring, especially from an association standpoint where you try to champion your own values.
But it's really hard because it's just hard in a business environment to stay consistent. And we. I really think one of the reasons is because our sales force they weren't selling, they were selling the value of what it means to be a society publisher now. And that is it's such a different way of even thinking about it.
We have tons of agents who sell things, but our sales team went to the institutions that were covered by those agents and talked to people directly. It was like, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. This is what you're supporting if you do it. And that kind of it was just different and mind opening to me at least.
Actually, do you mind if I give a second answer on the topic I spoke about lessons learned. I would just say that creating something new, truly new, is difficult. When you're creating a publication around a field that is still defining itself. You have to be ready for lots of stops and starts, and some dialing back, stepping back and be like, oh, we're redefining what this is.
And it has not. It's sort of a longer term investment. It wasn't just like initially, like lots of submissions and everything, and we're still developing that slow burn. Sorry to interrupt your question. My question is for David. Can you answered what I was going to ask about expounding on your sales strategy and your pitch to libraries.
But what I'd also like to know is if you could expand on what you mean by community engagement, what kind of interactions are you seeing. What is manifested. Is it an analytics thing. I mean, how is it you're seeing these results, your Roi on this. On this. Subscribe to open. Oh, sorry.
No it's OK. So this is where my non-scientist. I'm not a scientist. I don't like making decisions by data. I do it by gut, so it's dangerous. So that's why I wanted to tell this story in the context of that senior editor and his feeling about preprints and what the unseen, unseen consequences of business models are and all that kind of stuff we always talk about.
And what we are seeing in ResearchGate in particular, broken out, because that's a community we normally are. Our engagement was low, it was consistent and low, and the moment we switched, something happened. We were doing other activities. So it wasn't a controlled experiment. So there's other forces going on. But there is definitely a correlation between the engagement we are seeing on ResearchGate in terms of usage, commentating on our articles, country location increases.
I can't even put it into words. It's doubled and tripled. And I'm not talking like in tens of thousands and because we are also seeing increasing, increasing submissions across these journals for which we didn't see increasing submissions for years and years, even during the COVID spikes, like something is happening now, we can say it's MDPI is crashing and burning frontiers is correct.
We can say all those things that's contributing, but I really think something else is going on and we're trying to tease out the data and try to get at some more substantial conclusions. But at this point it's. The timing and the mapping of what we're seeing correlates. Are you sorry to just but to follow up, are you connecting any of that to membership drives or things like that for your society.
We're trying to because it's interesting the we did projections on what we expected to happen. Some of our data was bad, so what we expected to happen. It's hard to determine how off we were, but what we're seeing is our membership publishing rates have increased. What we're seeing is our subscriber publishing rates. Had we had projected around 40% We're seeing 80% now.
Some of that's bad data. I fully acknowledge that. But we're going back and recalculating our projections. And it's not as bad as we first thought. So again, are the libraries driving people to us or just is it marketing. Like, I don't know what's going on, but something is going on. OK guys.
So I have a two part question for you. The first is how much of in those hybrid journals or those journals that you've now transitioned as to how much of that content was originally the year before open access. Because you're going to get the open access effect. But what's encouraging to me is not just the usage, it's the other engagement that you're seeing that I think has real promise there.
So sorry. Traditionally I in the previous years our splits were trying to remember. I think it was around 50% maybe a little maybe it was going it was going up. So of course open access it's the usage is higher. But it's this ResearchGate engagement because we had all our OA journals in ResearchGate and it was I mean it was consistently flat.
So there's. And the other thing is we're seeing weird, interesting spikes in both usage and submissions that are correlating, like from Bangladesh, just weird, weird things. And we're not sure if we have ambassadors there. We're not sure if it's related to how we've reached out and talked to the institutions about subscribe to open.
So it's a confused mess, but the timing is all suggesting subscribe and open has something to do with it. Well, I'll ask you a question. Was it easy to convince the libraries that they're part of the community, and that the way of shifting their subscription to this S2 model was something that was worth doing.
Is it easier because you're a society. It might be easier because we are a society, maybe, I think it depends on where the research institutions were. And this points me back to something that the community science you're doing. Because to me, these two things are actually related in a really interesting way because the European community were suspicious of this. Subscribe to open model because it's conditional.
But different localities have different interpretations. And it's really interesting. Like if you expand that, what does that mean and what you're doing with the community science focus. Like to me that's the next step of something like this. Because if we can get feedback based on what the institutions are doing and where those institutions are located and what people around the institutions are doing, I mean, it's just fascinating to me because we did see that different countries had different responses.
Germans approached it one way, the Spaniards a different way, it's. It's stuff you intellectually but when it's confronted to you, it's different. I see. Any additional questions. Sarah, please. Thank you.
These are I don't how do I turn this on. Do I press the button. Oh, sorry. Thanks these were really interesting and inspiring examples, and I think definitely gave me a lot of things to take back to my institution. And one question I have for all of you is when something is new, it's really exciting and people buy into it. But how do you have plans to keep the momentum going, sort of beyond of initial phase.
How do you keep that. OK, I want to start that. That goes back to the Inclusive part and the actions and on the ground actions. And that's for small societies that's often where small societies will fall. They'll try something new. It worked well. It doesn't continue to work well.
It's the commitment to ongoing investment and experimentation that has to become part of the team's plan. And so, we too have seen 40% higher submissions this year over last year. I've not attributed that to the ACR m however, we know we have advocates in the community. We know we have people out there who understand what we do at FASEB and the commitment we're making and how the process works and how it adds value.
And that is different. And we are definitely seeing early career researcher uptake in terms of being first time authors as well as we have a profile page where they can choose their career stage. Yeah, we're seeing uptake in all of those numbers as well. So it's really about the continued commitment that we want to be an inclusive organization, regardless of the fact a dirty word these days.
We still want to be that. We think that is how we grow the science. It is the only way we grow the science, and it is how we meet our mission. And so we're not backing away from that. You might have to drop a program that got funded by NIH, which happens has happened to many of us. But you don't have to stop your commitment to what you're doing on the ground.
All right. Thank you. For us, I think that one of the main challenges has been these we have this various partners that are involved and coordinating with them and keeping our excitement levels and contribution levels on par. AG really did sort of like initiate the whole thing. And as Kristina is here, she's our managing editor for The journal and helps lead some of the development.
And so we've taken on a majority of the work. But then it's like we still need those partners to be championing this concept within their communities. Some of them have other activities that they're doing that are along the same lines, but so they're like they're complementary. But we also need that energy to be consolidated around all of what all of their societies are doing.
So that's been a challenge in terms of how do we all work together to help each other with our various initiatives. Yeah, I agree that the energy is important, but knowing that the energy has to be flexible energy because we are thrown into a situation now where I'm not clear that libraries will pay for anything next year. So where does that leave this model.
So we have to be flexible enough to think about OK. So we have this concept. How can we morph it. How can we change it. Not necessarily throw it out but be flexible enough to recognize like we have. We can't use the energy as a sustaining energy, I don't think you have to use the energy as a flexible, sort of critical energy to really critique what's going on.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth, I'm from Elsevier. And my question was tagged on to something Darla said. But it's relevant for all of you. Something that I'm in I work in with our society publishers, and something I'm interested in is if there are new initiatives. What has your society. I wonder if you can each speak to what your society has had to let go of to make space for those new initiatives.
Or maybe you haven't, but I'd be interested to hear. So one of the things that happens at societies and small, small societies, whether they're co-publishing or self-publishing is that you continue to do things the way that they've always been done. And so when I came to FAFSA mid-year 2021, what I saw was whack-a-mole, what I call whack-a-mole.
It was total whack-a-mole, and there's no other way to describe it. And job descriptions weren't clear. People were not focused on growing the journal. No one was looking at the data and the metrics, but they were instead making sure that they were also copyediting every single manuscript in advance of sending it to our publishing partner and all of the things that we know are important.
But maybe we have to let go of. And so that was a hard discussion that we had. And in 2022, we developed a strat plan with our pubs committee, and that's how we've used that to build on OK, these are our goals and these are not our goals. Job descriptions rewritten, roles revamped. The entire bucket. All right.
Thank you all for your feedback, your questions. So let's share some summarize. What are the take home message for. Would you like to share if other organizations want to start their community engagement. I think a really important thing with any new idea or experiment you're going to do is making sure one you have clear what the high level goal is and how you're going to communicate it, and who the people are going to be who the communicators are going to be.
Because if that is not open and clear within your organization, you're going to get a hodgepodge of messaging. And it's going to fail. Not because it might have been a bad idea, but because it's just a communication crash and burn situation. And I've seen so many things we've tried fail only because we couldn't talk about it in a cogent way.
I guess I'd say sort of it relates to that last question. You have to establish what problem you're trying to solve, and then you have to really assess your priorities and whether there's something you're going to be taking resources away from something else in order to direct them to the new thing. Even if you don't think you're going to be doing that are doing it. So taking that prioritization idea and then coming back to it and checking in on how are my how are our resources aligned to our activities.
OK I'll say data driven. That's it. Yeah so overall, it sounds like community engagement is critical to our future. Thank you so much. Have any questions, you can ask afterwards. Yeah thank you so much. Thank you.
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