Cadmore media player playing video The Scholarly Kitchen Live! What's Next for an Equitable and Sustainable Future?
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
The Scholarly Kitchen Live! What's Next for an Equitable and Sustainable Future?
Description:
The Scholarly Kitchen Live! What's Next for an Equitable and Sustainable Future?
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/3f0331db-7b5d-4b8b-96a3-a957db192c78/thumbnails/3f0331db-7b5d-4b8b-96a3-a957db192c78.png
Duration:
T01H12M13S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/3f0331db-7b5d-4b8b-96a3-a957db192c78
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/3f0331db-7b5d-4b8b-96a3-a957db192c78/Closing Plenary - The Scholarly Kitchen Live.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=2v6XT%2BhnISGJyCRxz9HRZeBrIJHoZfMWwh4YSasgM0U%3D&st=2024-11-21T21%3A08%3A07Z&se=2024-11-21T23%3A13%3A07Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-02-02T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
ANGELA COCHRAN: Welcome, everyone to the closing plenary in our TSK live session. I'm Angela Cochran, past president of SSP, Vice President of publishing at ASCO, and associate editor of the Scholarly Kitchen. Before we get into our panel discussion, I want to introduce Alice Meadows and Roger Schoenfeld who will discuss the TSK reader survey. Over to you, Alice.
ALICE MEADOWS: I think we might have a video to play first as well. So I think, Mary Beth, over to you?
MARY BETH: Yes we do. Let me queue up a message from our sponsor.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you, Alice. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Hi, this is Mike Bisaccio, Communications Manager with Cabell's. We're really happy to have the opportunity to take part in sponsoring this year's SSP annual meeting, especially the Scholarly Kitchen session, which is always an informative and lively discussion. Of course, we'd prefer to be able to be together with everyone.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Attending SSP's annual meeting is always one of the highlights of the year for us at Cabell's, especially the cocktail hour, which we were only too happy to sponsor at the 41st annual meeting in San Diego in 2019. So here's to hoping we can safely meet together in the near future. At Cabell's, we provide scholarly analytics to the academic and research communities.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We curate information about journals to enable researchers, librarians, administrators, institutions, and funders to make confident decisions about journal selection. Journalytics is our curated database of over 11,000 academic journals across 18 disciplines that aids researchers in getting the most impact out of their work. Each journal included in Journalytics has been reviewed and evaluated by our journal specialists ensuring every journal listed is a trusted and verified publication.
ANGELA COCHRAN: In addition to basic general details and logistical information like editor contact info, helpful links, calls for papers, and ISSNs, each entry provides information on manuscript guidelines and shows what to expect during the submission and peer review processes. You can also analyze journals using our suite of citation backed metrics to gauge discipline-specific journal influence and track citation activity and online attention across the web.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Users can also compare data from previous years to judge journals' impact over time. Predatory Reports is the only searchable database that identifies and documents deceptive and exploitative journals. Our journal specialist evaluates suspected publications against over 70 behavioral indicators to flag and report predatory operations.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Predatory reports currently includes over 14,000 journals, and each entry includes information on how to identify the publication as well as a comprehensive report on each behavioral indicator that was uncovered in the journal's evaluation. Journalytics and Predatory Reports are valuable tools for stakeholders across academia by safeguarding research on limited budgets and protecting the reputations of academics and their institutions and funding organizations.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We're also excited about the upcoming launch of our new Journalytics medicine resource, which will arrive in fall 2021, and will feature key intelligence on thousands of verified and predatory journals. Journalytics medicine will also include all vital information found in our academic Journalytics database, along with some new features and redesigned user interface. So keep an eye out for more on this down the road. Our thanks to SSP for putting together another great program for this year's meeting under difficult circumstances.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now we're looking forward to hearing from the chefs. We hope everyone enjoys the session. Thanks and be well. [END PLAYBACK]
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you for your sponsorship, and I can't believe I missed an opportunity to say, and first, a word from our sponsors. But here we are back, and I will once again throw us over to Alice, who's going to tell us about our reader survey.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks, Angela. Yes, my fellow chef Roger Schoenfeld and I asked if we could steal a bit of time from the beginning of this panel to tell you a little bit about the readership survey for the Scholarly Kitchen that went out earlier this year. So I just wanted to say a few words to put it in context, and then Roger's going to share just some of the highlights initially, and will be reporting in more detail in the coming months.
ALICE MEADOWS: Some of you may remember that we did a similar survey three years ago in 2018. That was the first Scholarly Kitchen readership survey, and it was very much prompted by a desire among the SSP boards that we should have a better understanding of what was working and what wasn't. And in particular, from a sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective, how well we were doing in various ways.
ALICE MEADOWS: Because as I hope you will know, this is something that's very important to the organization. And the answer 3 years ago was mixed, to be honest. There were some things that people clearly valued. Some areas that we weren't doing as well on. And Roger, I think, is going to say a little bit more about some of those. But broadly speaking, I think the areas where there was room for improvement were, indeed, diversity, which we had thought might be the case based on anecdotal evidence, and turned out to be.
ALICE MEADOWS: Also sort of specifically inclusivity in the sense of being welcoming. I think there was a sense among some people that the Kitchen wasn't as welcoming as it could be, particularly in terms of commenting. And then in terms of value, and that was something that was very much the case three years ago, people valued this, and I'm happy to say it's very much the case now as well.
ALICE MEADOWS: In fact, I think in terms of value it's gone up a bit. And in fact, this survey was quite a lot more responses to than the last one. And I will say with my own personal hand up that the last one was a lot more amateurish than this one, thanks to Roger's inputs. This time around it's a much more rigorous scientific survey, which is really good. The other thing I wanted to say before I hand over to Roger is part of the reason this time around we wanted to do the survey was not just to look at how well or not we've done what progress we've made since the last one, but also to really look at ways we can use this information to continue to improve not just the Scholarly Kitchen, but also the Society for Scholarly Publishing overall.
ALICE MEADOWS: And I think there's an awful lot in this survey. As I say, you'll just be hearing some highlights, but there's some really, really helpful information in the survey, particularly in terms of the free text comments that I think we're going to find very helpful going forward. So I just want to end by saying thank you so much to everybody who took part. It was a long survey. A lot of you made it all the way through, which we enormously, enormously appreciate.
ALICE MEADOWS: And please be assured that your feedback is really going to be put to good use, both for the Kitchen and for SSP. So thank you. And Roger, over to you.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Thanks so much, Alice. So I am going to say just go through some very, very high level findings that will hopefully whet your appetite for a blog post that we plan to publish to the Kitchen shortly that will presumably provide a little bit more detail. I just want to make sure to give thanks to all the members of the Scholarly Kitchen cabinet, as well as to Simon Holt, Haseeb Irfanullah, Alice Meadows and Simone Taylor for special help with the analysis.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: I'm sharing part of a group, a real group effort here. So at the highest level, we had a wonderful base of responses at 1,600 complete responses. We're so pleased with that level of engagement and participation. These findings really speak to our community from our community of readers really effectively. I'm not unbiased in this.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: I'm really pleased to see that a huge share of respondents found that the Kitchen is relevant to their professional needs. This is probably the clearest indication that we're providing a service that we hope is of broad value to the community. And this is a question where almost all racial and ethnic groups, we saw similar levels of really, really high satisfaction, or high relevance, I should say.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: One exception that we'd like to look into a little bit more is individuals who identify as Native Americans. It was a bit more mixed, rather than quite this positive. Readers overwhelmingly hail from the US, Canada, UK, and Europe. So we have, basically, North America and Europe are our two areas of foremost readership. But they continue to want to see more global coverage. And we have some folks who think that it's too US focused.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Others think it's too focused on the US, UK, and Europe. So there is more that we can do there. But the plurality of respondents said it's well balanced globally. Three types-- sort of turning now to our readership-- three types of employers dominate among our readers. We saw not-for-profits, societies and associations represent the largest share of our readers, the employers of our readers.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Libraries represent the second highest group, and then commercial publishers come in third place. And then there's a sort of longer tale of other types of organizations. This is really heartening. We're reaching a wide array of different types of organizations. And so that's something we're going to dig into a little bit more.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Some of the differences by those groups. Interestingly, of our readers, more than 3/4 are not SSP members. And when we asked about whether they attend the SSP conference, similarly, aren't likely to attend the SSP conference. So we're actually reaching a much wider group of a much wider community than SSP alone. And that suggests some really, really interesting opportunities in terms of how the Kitchen is positioned and what directions that we can take with it.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Finally, one or two questions that we've been interested in. The majority of respondents think that the Kitchen favors open access. We asked if the Kitchen is in favor of, against, or neutral towards open access. And the vast majority think that we are in favor of open access. This is something that we felt was an issue over time, that we wanted to monitor how that was how that was seen among our readers going forward.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: And then finally, readers really like-- or respondents, I should say-- really like our increasing space, the increasing space that we've made for guest authors. We see some level of strong to very strong agreement that the perspectives provided by guest posts have made the Scholarly Kitchen more valuable. That's not really a surprise, but it's nice to see that reflected.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Respondents disagree substantially with the idea that they're less likely to read guest posts than those from the chefs, so there's a sense that guest posts are being equally engaged with. And there's a sense that the quality and relevance of posts by guest authors and chefs is equally valuable. So that's something that we're really pleased with. Our efforts to expand participation, to widen authorship, seems to have really been recognized by our readership.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Last but not least, commenting is now seen as a positive experience or a neutral experience among individuals who participated in our comments over the last two years. So about 40% of respondents-- of commenters-- say that it's a positive experience, and only-- I'm sorry, the number somehow got jumbled there-- but it's only about 3% or 4% of respondents have said that it's at all a negative experience.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: The majority say that it's neither positive nor negative, but the weight is towards it being a positive experience. So that's another issue that we had been monitoring since the last time the survey was conducted. So with that, I want to close this brief overview. We're looking forward to continuing to learn from and sharing these findings, as Alice was saying. And also, acting on them to continue to make the Kitchen more valuable, we hope, for the entire community.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Thanks, all.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you, Roger, for sharing out that reader feedback on Scholarly Kitchen. And thank you to all of you who filled out the survey. We're very open to the feedback, and excited at the changes that have occurred since then, since the last one. So I want to mention that we will have time to answer your questions at the end. So please put them in the Pathable platform chat, and we will get to as many as we can. I am very excited to be joined today by four of my fellow chefs as we discuss what's next for an equitable and sustainable future.
ANGELA COCHRAN: The past 15 months have presented global challenges to all of us as individuals, but also for our organizations. We could spend an hour just ticking through the list of groundbreaking occurrences. Today, as some countries are feeling ready around the corner from COVID, we are reminded of our colleagues in India or Brazil and other places that are suffering incredible losses still.
ANGELA COCHRAN: When the chefs were discussing the theme for today, all of this was weighing on our minds. While at the same time, we wanted to be forward thinking as always. Equity and sustainability felt like the right terms to frame our discussion today. I am joined by Haseeb Irfanullah Sian Harris, Alison Mudditt and Jasmine Wallace. I want to start with you, Alison.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We've been talking for years about how to ensure that new business models are sustainable. The APC powered business model that launched PLOS garnered lots of attention, but also highlighted issues around equity. Instead of there being paywalls as barriers, APCs became barriers to unfunded or underfunded authors. Now PLOS is at it again with a new set of models aimed at addressing some of those issues.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Can you tell us a bit more about how your new models address equity issues? Oh, you're still muted, Alison.
ALISON MUDDITT: Good you saw that. OK. So yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, Angela, about the barriers that APCs have created. Clearly they played a valuable role in getting open access to the point it's at the moment, but it's clear from our vantage point at PLOS that we need to expand our vision and objectives if we're really thinking about equitable participation as well as access.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think we, and I personally, remain equally concerned about the current push towards gold open access via transformative agreements as the solution. I think they risk hardwiring the exclusion of many researchers, especially in the global South. And far from being transformative, they run the risk of locking in the high cost of subscriptions to our future, and they reinforce the market dominance of the biggest players.
ALISON MUDDITT: And again, risk further entrenching the inequalities we see in the current system. So what we've been doing over the past couple of years is to really think about how we move beyond this, and how we develop new models that are equitable and regionally appropriate ways to support open access. Our ultimate goal here is to move away from all author-facing fees for all PLOS journals, although that's probably some years away.
ALISON MUDDITT: We started this out with our flat fee agreements, which, in some ways, the least innovative. They look a little bit more like a transformative agreement for a native OA publisher. And they simply streamline and simplify the management of APCs by shifting that cost away from the individual articles to an annual institutional flat fee. The next one was our community action publishing model. This is for two of our most selective titles, but we're actually adding one of the five new launches to this model.
ALISON MUDDITT: I'm not going to go into full detail. You can find that on our website. But essentially, institutions commit to an annual flat fee, ensuring that their researchers have unlimited free publishing opportunities in these journals. But then on Tuesday, as we announce sort of that our new journals were open for submission, we introduce a third model, which we've called our global equity model.
ALISON MUDDITT: And this really aims to empower institutions in every region of the world to provide unlimited open access publication support for their authors through a single annual fee that's both affordable and equitable, and reflects the reality of local regional economies. It's also important to note that researchers in Research for Life countries can publish for free regardless of the size of the institution in any of these models.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think I close by saying that I think there's a key point that, actually, Cameron [INAUDIBLE] made on Twitter after the panel on this on Monday, that I think collectively, and publishers, we can and should do better. And that means designing systems that treat all researchers with dignity, and as equal participants, as well as readers.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. Yeah, I'm reminded, from your comments, I'm reminded to of an early career researcher panel that I was involved in with the National Academies Journal Summit. That they talked about these challenges of getting published and on their timeline, and this idea of treating authors with dignity. And I think that's really worth, as publishers, us exploring. Because we certainly don't think that we're putting any harm toward anyone, but certainly there are barriers to participation that we need to look at.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And Sian, you work directly with researchers from resource-stratified environments, and are an enthusiastic advocate for global participation. And I'm curious if you think these new PLOS models or others that are being trialed elsewhere will open the door to new authors.
SIAN HARRIS: Yes. So I think, first of all, it's really encouraging to hear that publishers like PLOS are taking this issue seriously. It's really exciting to know that people are recognizing these issues, and also talking about the issue of treating researchers with dignity. There was a, now as we heard a couple of weeks ago, an SSP webinar that I was part of about open access around the world.
SIAN HARRIS: And that APC approach has, it's been found, really, not always to work for everybody. And you can just shift the point in the communication process where that inequity happens from the reader's side to the author's side. So it's really great to hear about publishers thinking about this, and looking at other ways. But I think one thing that's kind of important, not just with this particular model that Alison was talking about, but anything, is about clarity and consistency.
SIAN HARRIS: So we did a study. I work for INASP, and we have an author aid project working with early career researchers throughout low and middle income countries particularly. And we found in our survey that 60% of the people who responded had paid their APCs themselves.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah.
SIAN HARRIS: And there was many kind of complex reasons. We can speculate, and we've done and found in other research that some of the kind of answers to this. But the two key things that sort of stood out was that people aren't aware of the options available in some cases. And in other cases, that the bureaucracy around handling the negotiations with publishers, whether it's just sort of sorting out an APC waiver or something else.
SIAN HARRIS: So this is something that our friends at Research for Life have been highlighting recently about the difficulty that researchers sometimes find in finding out exactly how to navigate this system. You know, that the information is not very clear, or it's just different from publisher to publisher. So, yes. It sounds great, but it needs to be clearly communicated, transparent, and ideally, not add to the general volume of different approaches available to authors.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I think that make an excellent point about the difficulty and the bureaucracy that can exist, even for authors who may-- I mean, we hear it all the time. They don't know that their institution has funds set aside to pay APCs. And then if they do, then they realize it's going to take time, and their paper might be delayed from publication, because now they're trying to work through a complicated invoicing process.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so it does seem that the way to solve that problem is to shift back away from the authors as being individuals that are responsible for making these payments. Jasmine, you and I have talked about this a little bit in preparations for today, and you seemed really enthusiastic about new models like this Subscribe to Open, which certainly fits those goals as well. While an APC-free no paywall model may address the equity issues, there's a lot of debate currently on the sustainability of those models.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I'm curious what excites you or concerns you about this particular model, or other trials that you see.
JASMINE WALLACE: Yeah, I'm really-- I've really taken to this S2O model, as they refer to it. I like this model, because I think it does move us towards a more equitable future. Is it sustainable? I think that will come with time to see whether or not it literally is something we can keep up with. But I think it almost represents the epitome of what we like to strive to achieve with open access. And that being that every participant in the publishing ecosystem has access to the highest and most valuable content.
JASMINE WALLACE: And I think that's the mission, right? So I think that model also highlights what happens when the community really starts to engage in their social responsibilities about driving that access of knowledge. And just in general, it gives the largest group of participants access for the smallest amount of money, right? And so I think that gets us away from this APC space, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: How do we get there? And I thought it also helps to foster an environment for collaboration amongst publishers. So it starts to move us away from these transactional relationships that we've always had in the past, right? And then it becomes a matter of not what we want to see and how do we want to get there, but I think this is how you start to make those goals possible. So it's us working this thing out in live time and not so much a distant future.
JASMINE WALLACE: It shifts our priorities. I think it makes us shift our collective priority. I think that is a part of how we get it done-- like, we all have to be on the same page about what we need to be doing. And I think moving away from 2020 and taking something from it, it shows us how to make impossible possible. So what we say we can't do, it's absolutely possible if we're working towards that goal.
JASMINE WALLACE: So I don't think it's a matter of whether these models are sustainable. I think it's a matter of creating a different framework about how we begin to address them, right? That anything can become sustainable. And it makes us shift our resources. It starts to make us shift our ideals behind what we've always known to be.
JASMINE WALLACE: One of the things I think is really important, and that excites me most about this, is that this new model is like an equity based model. If what we had, or what we've always had in the past is an equity based model, where we're coming from the space of we're not trying to be equitable, right? This is our shift towards becoming a more equitable space.
JASMINE WALLACE: And when you start to talk about those things, in time, that space automatically yields more sustainability. So, again, I don't think it's a matter of if it's sustainable, how do we get it done? Those are things we'll just work out, I think, as we move forward and we progress. But I think the S1 model is a really good example, just because it's opening the space up, and it's giving so many people access, again, for these lower costs.
JASMINE WALLACE: Because that APC is not something that is, we know for a fact, sustainable, right? So.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Great, thank you. Staying on the topic of sustainability, this is really in your wheelhouse, Haseeb. What does sustainability look like in scholarly publishing to you?
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Thanks, Angela. Listening to my fellow chefs, I have been thinking that there are three aspects of when we talk about sustainability. The first one is obviously, we need to sustain the scholarly publishing. So the financial sustainability is the first thing to remember. We have already heard a different model to our revenue. Subscription, nexus model, hybrid, some journals in transition.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And there are different types of industry models, as well. All actually contributing to growth, isn't it, in terms of revenue as well as in terms of recognition. Like there are so many different metrics that we use to measure the growth of our individual journal, as well as the publisher. Circulation of individual journals, or a group of journals are not all.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: We often think that certain journals, they are expanding their horizon because of the demand from their readers as well as researchers. As Alison just mentioned that from seven journals, the [INAUDIBLE] has now got 12 titles, isn't it? Five new titles have been added to the portfolio. So all of these things, as well as the merger acquisition we have seen all contributes to their growth financially.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Of course, the mission is always playing an important role here. Whether it is a peer review system, the innovation is there. We have just heard earlier today how publishers are working with preprint archives, and taking things forward, reaching out to researchers. So this is the first one, the economic aspect of sustainability. The second one is, I will call it a non economic or social aspect.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Just that Sian mentioned quite a few things. For example, the accessibility to journals, journal papers, has been really a big crisis 30 years back. That's why INASP, Sian's organization, used to call itself the National Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication. But later on, 20 years back, we have seen Research for Life, which not only making things available, but also accessible.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And publishers that join in. And publishers, despite the fact that FSE can be a burden or kind of a barrier for researchers from the global South, we have already heard that there are waivers as well as discounts for the low and [INAUDIBLE] income countries. And we have been seeing that journals, the editorial boards are shifting. They are becoming more inclusive.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: They're investing resources to build the capacity of the researchers, editors, as well as authors. But importantly, we have seen in this term, like diversity, equity, and inclusion over the last one year, so many strong stand been taken by different scholarly societies like SSP as well as others, as well as publishers. So I see it as a social aspect of sustainability. I will end this particular point by saying we've all seen what happened in March 2020.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: When the pandemic was declared, big publishers, small publishers, they came together and put aside the profitability of profit, and focused more on how to fight the pandemic by making COVID papers that publicly available for everybody, freely accessible to everybody. So these are the social aspects of sustainability [INAUDIBLE].. But the third and the last point is we all live in environment.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: I mean, obviously, we are living in an artificial environment, but you can't deny the contribution of nature. And we all know that it is not only climate change but biodiversity that environment is degrading so much. And it is our journal papers who are putting forward the evidence, such as conducting research and the publishing industry is putting forward and communicating that research clearly.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: But as part of publishing industry, other scholarly publishers, should we be neutral towards those findings? Don't we have a responsibility? Should we internalize those findings? Shouldn't we think of how we are managing our waste, how we are consuming our energy? What's the source of this energy? Whether it is for [INAUDIBLE].
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: What's the carbon footprint or ecological footprint of our industry? How much contribution we are making towards our pollution? So these, the third aspect, which is environmental aspect of sustainability, should be considered quite strongly by us. And it can be done when we link our activity with the globally forward sustainable development goals, which has got 17 goals, as well as 269 targets.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And higher education institutions are coming forward and trying to link their research to sustainable development goals. So it is high time that the scholarly publishing industry is trying to make that connection. There is no time to be neutral. Thank you.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah, that's a very thought provoking to think about the time being now to really think about not only how we promote climate science in our publications, but also the footprint that we leave behind us as publishers. Certainly, the inability to travel over the last 15 months or so has brought that carbon footprint of in-person conferences, for example, to the forefront. I mean, there were certainly research communities that were already concerned about how much travel is part of their research dissemination and sharing and networking.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And many societies that I talk to expect to move into a hybrid model going forward, once we sort of get back to in-person meetings. And that's really difficult to pull off. Sian, I'm curious if you're hearing with virtual and hybrid conferences, many of our societies that host these conferences, scientific meetings, have talked about a new global community that can now attend the conference because it is largely available online.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And these are conferences that, perhaps, they've not been able to attend in the past due to lack of resources for expensive travel. But what I've really been curious about is whether online or hybrid conferences, if we have yet seen an increase in participation, not just as attendees, but also as content presenters. Just looking at sort of our own ASCO meetings, we've not seen a big increase in abstract submissions from an international audience, which seems a shame, given that the travel barriers are gone.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But what are you hearing about participation in conferences?
SIAN HARRIS: Yeah, well it's a very interesting thing. I mean, I think there's a point about how easy it becomes to be at a conference. I mean, I'm in the UK, currently. It's 9 o'clock. Haseeb, I have no idea what time of night it is. I'm amazed he's still awake. But yes, definitely, there's the great opportunity to participate with a much lower barrier, to participate as attendees.
SIAN HARRIS: And I think at the start of the pandemic last year when the travel restrictions came in, we actually saw not that much change in the speakers in conferences. I think lots of conferences had already lined up the speakers, and so it was the same people, but shifting to how it was delivered. I did notice, which I think was different from your experience, towards the end of last year and into this year, my inbox has been increasingly busy with people in the scholarly publishing sector, particularly saying, is there anyone you can suggest who we could invite to speak?
SIAN HARRIS: We really want to increase the geographical spread. Is there, we're looking particularly for a librarian in Africa, they might say. Or they have kind of quite specific things in order to try and get a spread. And I think it's something that's really exciting. So yes, I have seen since a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a webinar-- I think I started to mention, and I have a feeling I may not have finished mentioning it-- but their speakers were from India, Cameroon and Mexico, and then in the UK.
SIAN HARRIS: And it was an SSP webinar. I think it's really exciting, and that wasn't an isolated example. Personally, I really hope this continues after the pandemic. But I think there's still an important point to note about equity, and we always have to kind of bring in this equity angle. There are still some people who are excluded. Internet availability, stability, and cost are not evenly distributed around the world.
SIAN HARRIS: Or even within countries, there's often greater provision in capital cities than in more rural areas. So it's important, always, to recognize that some people remain excluded from conversations, and so not necessarily to regard to the fact that more people can be speaking at a conference or attending means that everybody is there.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. And I do think that there is, obviously, as we have all said many times over the last couple of days that as wonderful and as engaging as SSP virtual is, we're all at home. We're all virtual. There's no one in person. And I think it gets a little bit more complicated when we start talking about hybrid meetings. So, you know, Jasmine, again, we had been talking a little bit about this and how difficult it is to do hybrid meetings.
ANGELA COCHRAN: No one at home wants to feel like they're watching a conference on their computer. And no one who's traveled to the conference venue wants to walk into a ballroom and watch everyone give presentations on a screen. And so both audiences need to feel served. What opportunities, though, do you think we have with respect to hybrid conferences? I mean, I guess with what Sian was saying, the worst case scenario, if we expand in a hybrid and in a virtual model to include more global voices, that when we inevitably get back to in person, do we close the door again?
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I'm interested in what your thoughts are with hybrid conferences going forward.
JASMINE WALLACE: I don't think-- I mean, first of all, I love virtual conferences. With the exhaustion of Zoom and everything, all of the good and bad, I still really, really like them for all the reasons that we've mentioned. And I think that as we move forward, I don't think we can go back. I don't think that there's a back to go to. So I felt like we really need to think about what it looks like. But again, no one, again, wants to feel like they're at home.
JASMINE WALLACE: They don't want to be at home and vice versa, as you discussed. But I think we have to keep in mind the ultimate benefits to this space, right? Does the good outweigh the bad? The good definitely outweighs the bad, so we have to figure out how to get it done. And I think there's a ton of opportunities. And like Sian has said, it is literally, I think, hybrid meetings are a way of becoming more equitable, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: And again, all of this has to work together. It feeds into each other. So because more people have access to conferences, I think we have to now take our hats off as to what a conference is. And I think that limits us, because we've only ever had conferences in one way. And then there was this push to have virtual conferences, and they were just conferences as we've always known them.
JASMINE WALLACE: How do we make them virtual? But that is not what we should be doing. I think that is a part of the problem. It's starting from the end and then working our way back, right? So like now that we have this virtual space, now that we know the abilities that it offers us, the barriers that are removed because of this, just think don't think of what you've always known, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: And I think that's really hard, because that's not just a shift in thinking a pattern, but that's almost a cultural shift for us to not do conferences the way we've always known them, right? But if you were to do that, if you were to just be able to have in an unimaginable virtual slash hybrid, or I don't even know if we should use hybrid if we're talking about something new and something different, what does it look like?
JASMINE WALLACE: One of the things I think about is the planning process for a conference, right? We usually know the cities that we're going to be going to years in advance. And for some of us, I know working within other organizations, we can't get out of these contracts. So they may be what they are for quite some time if you have an extended contract.
JASMINE WALLACE: But is there a way to renegotiate those contracts and see something different? So let's take, for example, if you have a contract for a Hilton or some other hotel, right? And usually you have it at one city, one meeting. Everyone goes, everyone attends. Maybe it now is, now we have it multiple places. Smaller groups, smaller meetings, smaller settings. And they're not meetings, they're not, they're more like workshops or seminars.
JASMINE WALLACE: And then you offer them at the same time. So we can sort of get into that asynchronous synchronous learning that I think everyone is aware of now they're moving to education space, right? Like honing in on that, and then having them at the exact same time in different cities right. I think about SSP. A lot of the sessions were prerecorded, which is great. Because like Sian has discussed, it gets more voices in there.
JASMINE WALLACE: And they don't have to be up like Haseeb at ungodly hours. You can record them at a standard time. But maybe it's something where we move away from a three day meeting, a two day conference. It's the first week, we give access to everything, right? You just can go and watch at your own leisure, which is really good. Because it's hard. I'm the queen of virtual out of office messages for these meetings, but I am still getting emails right now.
JASMINE WALLACE: So no one respects those boundaries just yet. So you have the first week, and you're doing something like that. The second week are these in-person regional based meetings. I think also what we should consider is where people are. The human aspect of who we are now. Some people do not want to fly. Some people are not comfortable doing that just yet.
JASMINE WALLACE: But if it's a little bit closer, you can drive. Maybe take a train. I know people still ride buses, and if that'll be a thing, but also not sure, right? And then you're having something that's so different. I don't know what I'm experiencing. And you're still having keynotes and closings. And then at the end, you have a collective of like, what have we learned in all these different areas?
JASMINE WALLACE: I think it helps us get more communal in our individual spaces, which we tend to do. Like if you're in the D.C. region, you're going to go to that D.C. conference if it's in Philadelphia. Or if you're down South, maybe it's in Texas and you're coming from the lower parts of Cali, you're going over. But just really just blowing out the window what we've known.
JASMINE WALLACE: And also considering, like, how do we keep our resources low, right? We don't want to spend more money. So a bomb.com hybrid meeting and a bomb.com virtual meeting not really possible. You know, one's going to suffer. So just kind of like expanding that, and thinking about what can we do if we could do anything? And I think that is the excitement that we should have around it.
JASMINE WALLACE: And starting to think about those types of ideas.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I love your approach and enthusiasm to burn the place down and start over. It's helpful and refreshing, I think, for some of us to just think, like, yeah, it doesn't have to look the same. What works about it, and how can we replicate that? We're all talking in our day jobs about this as well. When will we return to our offices? Will we return to our offices? Right now, everybody's talking about how great it's been to work from home, but everybody's working at home.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And again, that dynamic changes if some people are home and some people are in the office. Alison, you've written several times about what our new workplace reality might look like. How are you reimagining the concept of home office for your California and UK offices?
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, first of all, Jasmine, I loved your phrase there. And I think I would the same about going back to the office. There's no back to go to, right? So we need to reinvent a different future. And I think this absolutely connects to the themes of equity and sustainability. So for us at PLOS, we've been able to hire staff in different parts of the country that we never had access to talent there, because they, like many people, couldn't afford to move to the Bay Area, as one example.
ALISON MUDDITT: But we're thinking that this is kind of a couple of stages. And like there's that kind of longer term future that you talked about. What does hybrid look like in the long term? But we're also kind of, I think, in some ways, more focused right now on what that slow emergence from the past year looks like. And I think there's a lot in common with some of the things Jasmine was saying about travel and conferences.
ALISON MUDDITT: There are many of us, I think, who are going to return with unanswered questions, different expectations. We've got staff who are desperate to return to normal, they're re-energized, they can't wait to get back. Others are just exhausted. They're confused and need much more time to process what we've all been through over the last 12 months.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think we've got some who wonder if they should return at all. So I think it's really important for us individually and collectively to understand that emerging from this hugely disruptive experience that we've all been through is going to take time. And so we're trying to answer as much as we can before we reopen our offices, which we're targeting to do in the summer. But it's, at the same time, I think it's likely that most of us are going to need opportunities and time to integrate and reflect and readjust our practices post-pandemic over time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So having said, that I think it's clear to us that the concept of a home office is something that doesn't really exist anymore. We'll still have physical offices in San Francisco and Cambridge. We may have ones elsewhere in the world over time. And we'll still have some staff who go into those offices regularly. But it's highly unlikely that's going to be every day.
ALISON MUDDITT: The survey we did a couple of months ago, there were just four staff out of over 200 at PLOS who said they wanted to be in the office five days a week. So it's been a really big shift there. And most of our staff see those offices primarily as a space for collaboration, either with their team or with other teams. And for the kind of work that we're all finding less easy to do virtually.
ALISON MUDDITT: Things like brainstorming, complex problem solving, and socializing. Actually, kind of hanging out with your colleagues is really important as well. So we're fully embracing this, but I think it's really going to take us time to figure out how to make hybrids successful for us over the long run. And we're going to have to be really deliberate and thoughtful about a whole range of issues.
ALISON MUDDITT: Those things include obvious things like communication and policies and expectations. How we develop more asynchronous work practices, but also things like culture keeping, and how we continue to build and maintain relationships as well as all the tools we can use to effectively support that. So right now we're sort of putting together a task force that's helping us with the sort of immediate questions of reopening.
ALISON MUDDITT: But over time, it's going to have to grow into trying to answer some of these bigger, deeper questions that's going to be a knotty set of problems that we solve together.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. My sense is we will see sort of waves, patterns that occur. That there may be an enthusiastic group that wants to return to the office. Again, probably not five days a week, but they may find that they're sitting at their desk on Zoom calls all day because most of their coworkers are scattered about in different places, and maybe that's not the meaningful-- to me, I would be like, hey, I could have done this at home and not sat in traffic.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so we may see people that are enthusiastic to come back, and then find, like, it actually isn't, it's still a little lonely in the office. And they're still experiencing that Zoom fatigue, who may retreat. And then eventually, I think what we all need to be prepared for is that it might take a little bit of time before we get back to whatever our normal office situation is going to look like.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I have a few more questions for our chef panels, but I want to remind everyone that if you have questions for us, please put them in the chat box on the Pathable platform and we will be starting on those in a few minutes. But I want to ask Haseeb, do you think we're going to see less international travel for things like deal making and customer visits? I mean, it seems a good deal of money and time could be saved with the added benefit of positively impacting the environment.
ANGELA COCHRAN:
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: That is very difficult to answer, isn't it? Because we're still in the middle of a pandemic. But the structure that we have borrowed from the other [INAUDIBLE]. Things [INAUDIBLE] obviously. And when we talk about traveling, when we talk about reducing carbon footprint, I would like to just share a few [INAUDIBLE] facts about the climate change, which can be used together because we're discussing sustainability.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Five years back, all the world leaders, they have agreed upon that, we need to reduce the carbon emissions. It's a must. For example, UK and USA, they have decided that it will not be emitting any carbon by 2050. It might seem like a dream, but they have promise there. And it has made it legal to reach zero carbon by 2050. But how do they make those calculations?
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: How do they know what might happen? How do they predict the future? Every few years, IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on climate change publishes a report. And those reports actually talk about these facts. These figures. IPCC, they don't conduct a research. They, in fact, make all of those analyses based on peer review journal [INAUDIBLE]..
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Which means that all our understanding on climate change, [AUDIO OUT] What we should point [INAUDIBLE],, or what we as a scholarly publishing industry need to look into. Definitely, we should be proud of ourselves that our environmental footprint has been reduced, because almost all the journals are now being published online.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Although some have got hard copies. I'm not talking about not the big publishers, but publishers, small publishers like [INAUDIBLE] Association, which publishes from Bangladesh. Back to where it is
2: 00 AM in Dhaka--
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: AM. [AUDIO OUT] But we need to understand that although we have moved it online, journal publishing, sharing, everything, reviewing, but we need to think of what kind of energy we're consuming. Because our interface would be quite energy consuming. So we need to be looking at that. A second point is, to answer to your question, we need [AUDIO OUT]
ANGELA COCHRAN: You're breaking up a little bit on us, Haseeb.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: [AUDIO OUT] the way we promote our [AUDIO OUT]. Is it better now?
ANGELA COCHRAN: A little bit. Yep.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: So promoting our journals, the business meetings, the conferences, you need to look into our travel plan. Our not only the cost, but our responsibility. What meeting can be done virtually, and what need to be done physically. We need to look into that. The third point is, we not only focus on the publishing industry as a whole, because they'd just be run by people.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: The publishing staff members, our editors, the authors. How could we make them-- all of us, actually-- more climate responsible? And the final point is we need to think of-- I'm not saying that we have to take a stand, but we need to think of whether it is an ethical issue to publish a study in favor of fossil fuel, against renewable energy, against climate change, calling climate change a fake news.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: So we need to think that what should be our stand? Can we talk about climate responsibility of scholarly publishing? Thanks.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah, and I think a lot of societies in particular have, and publishers have learned, that things like our editorial board meetings, where I know a lot of societies that used to hold their editorial board meetings at their annual conference because most people were already there. And then shifted away from that, because everyone who was there was extremely distracted.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And you have people and going to multiple committee meetings, and having to balance that. And so we started having separate meetings, and flying editors from all over the world in for these discussions. And I wrote a little bit about this in the Scholarly Kitchen. Based on my own experience, but also feedback from colleagues and other places, that those meetings in particular are doing really well in the virtual environment.
ANGELA COCHRAN: These are very busy volunteer professionals that don't necessarily need to take three whole days out of their work schedule to come to an editorial board meeting that we could facilitate online. And so I think that there will be less business travel, just because we've proven that it works now. So I want to make sure that we have time to answer some audience questions. And I do have a question for Alison that came in.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Alison, can you talk a little bit about what the difference is between the flat fee model and the global equity model?
ALISON MUDDITT: Sure. I mean, they're both sort of flat fees from institutions. But I think what we've learned as we started rolling out these new models is that although we are, over time, as I said, trying to move away from author-facing payments, we've learned that there are some authors, some funders, some countries that still prefer APCs based on how they're sort of funding and administrating open access. And so the flat fee model is really designed to make that easy and seamless for people by simply providing a way for institutions to cover those fees.
ALISON MUDDITT: What we do there is to kind of look at their publishing history with PLOS develop a flat fee based on the average of their publishing history over, I think, three to five years, and that's their fee for the next few years. And they can publish an unlimited amount once they pay that fee. The global equity model is a brand new one that we're using to apply to new journals, and so this is a different problem from the one we've been trying to solve in the past.
ALISON MUDDITT: Many publishers are trying to move from subscriptions to APCs. We're trying to move from APIs fees to something different and better. But with our new journals, we're sort of thinking about, well, if you're launching a journal from scratch, what would that look like? We don't have that sort of legacy of APCs to transition. So in many ways, I think you could almost think, and this would probably make PLOS's founders turn in their, I was going to say graves, but they're all still alive, turn in their graves to hear me say it's kind of like a subscription, right?
ALISON MUDDITT: In that what we're trying to do here is to figure out what's a fair annual payment for institutions to make to cover open access publishing for their authors. And so the annual fee isn't based on anything historically, because there's no history there. We look at an institution's research output in the relevant subject areas of the journal. And then we're also going to be looking at the country's World Bank lending tier.
ALISON MUDDITT: And then the model itself, the annual price, will therefore allow a large institution in a lower income country, for example, to pay less than one of comparable size in a high income country. If you go and take a look at the blog post on the PLOS blog on Tuesday, you can see a lot more detail about that, including the whole pricing chart.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Great, thank you. So we had a comment, not so much a question, but I have a feeling that I can turn it into a question a little bit, for Sian. You talked about authors who are paying, researchers who have paid the APC themselves. So not coming from their institutions, per se. And Eric is positing that perhaps we should evaluate how many of them had to dip into credit or debt to make that payment, or how many had cash on hand versus literally had to pay for it on credit and pay it off later.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And which made me also think about with that data, like how much of the, even if we framed it as how much of a percentage. So we'll see things on Twitter, particularly with some of the new APCs for things like Nature or other high impact journals that have much higher APCs, really selective journals that have higher APCs.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But even for APCs that we would consider reasonable from a publishing standpoint, you'll see authors from other parts of the world say, well that's my salary for the month, or for half the month. So when you're looking at the APC structure and what it's costing people, what those barriers are, is there data to sort of put it in context to, I get this much funding and this percentage of it has to go to pay for one APC, or salary wise?
SIAN HARRIS: Yeah, it's one of those things. The moment you do a survey and you get the results of the survey, you think, I wish I'd asked that question.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah.
SIAN HARRIS: So we didn't ask, in that survey, I mean, we were sort of somewhat surprised to find there was an interesting finding with that question. We did not actually expect 60% to be the answer to that question. But what we didn't ask is what amount the APCs were. And I think that's a really key question. Because it isn't just about the APC in Nature being higher than the APC in another journal from a big commercial publisher.
SIAN HARRIS: It might be the APC in a journal in the country that they live in, which could be, it's not in the same order of magnitude in terms of their cost. And something Haseeb can talk more about in terms of APC costs for the journals that have them in Bangladesh. But it might be that it's, sort of, essentially a very, very small amount to just sort of keep the things, keep the process going rather than needing to actually pay for anyone's profit.
SIAN HARRIS: So but I think, I've been talking to people in a separate study we did and actually interviewing people. There were some people who just said, it's just the bureaucracy. I know that I probably could get something, like I could get a waiver or something. But I don't know who to talk to at my university, and there's some system, and I don't know what the system is, and I don't know who to talk to.
SIAN HARRIS: And it's, I think quite often, we have, all of us all around the world, if the bureaucracy's too high, the cost to our time to navigate the bureaucracy is higher than the cost to deal with the whatever. But that's, I don't imagine. I don't know, because we didn't ask the question. But I don't imagine we were talking about the kind of level of APCs that we see in some journals.
SIAN HARRIS: I don't know if Haseeb wanted to just follow up with something about actually how much that the costs might be for some journals.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Yeah, in Bangladesh, many of the journals that [INAUDIBLE] because these are all free journals. So they might be asking all of us to pay our membership fee, which would be, say, $25, $30. Not more than that. So you can't call it an APC. And most of the journals are society journals or institution journals. I often tell this story, that many of the society journals are being published in Bangladesh by the funding from the government.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Because the publishing is so minimal. You don't have to expend anything. It's just the printing cost. Because you don't pay much the editors. So that's why we don't see it APC per se in Bangladesh. Just to add to what Sian say. But if you ask that how Bangladeshi researchers, for example, they're publishing in big journals, open access journals, high quality journals.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Often, they don't feel like submitting there. One reason is they don't feel their research is the quality, their research is standard enough. Second is, they often don't know that they might be getting a discount or whatever. They're not aware of it. So awareness is a challenge. The other point is, often, they collaborate with international developed countries.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Because sometimes, they are part of a very big project. So often, those APC issues are being dealt with by the leading developed country professor or principal investigator. So they don't bother about it. So if there are so many different mechanisms and reasons, or avenues that, from my experience, Bangladeshi researchers, they are [INAUDIBLE],, they are trying to [INAUDIBLE] their research for inclusiveness.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Thank you.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you. So we are wrapping up on our time. And we have, I think, Lauren is going to pop in to wish us all a farewell. So stay tuned in. But I want to thank you all for joining me today for this panel. I love doing the TSK live plenary at the end of the meeting. And we will be doing a kind of a wrap up in the Scholarly Kitchen.
ANGELA COCHRAN: For those of us who've been attending sessions, are going to be sharing in a future Ask The Chefs session coming up, a post coming up soon, we'll talk about some of our takeaways from this most excellent meeting. So thank you all for participating in the session today. And I'm going to turn it over to you, Lauren.
LAUREN KANE: Thanks so much, Angela. And thank you to this wonderful panel. What a perfect way to wrap up today's educational program for our 43rd annual meeting. Before I go any further, I think we have a video to show again that didn't play properly the first time. But please do stay, because we'll be announcing the poster winners, and I want to say a proper goodbye.
LAUREN KANE: So first, Mary Beth, will you roll that footage?
MARY BETH: Yes, thank you, Lauren. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Hi, this is Mike Bisaccio, Communications Manager with Cabell's. We're really happy to have the opportunity to take part in sponsoring this year's SSP annual meeting, especially the Scholarly Kitchen session, which is always an informative and lively discussion. Of course, we'd prefer to be able to be together with everyone.
MARY BETH: Attending SSP's annual meeting is always one of the highlights of the year for us at Cabell's, especially the cocktail hour, which we were only too happy to sponsor at the 41st annual meeting in San Diego in 2019. So here's to hoping we can safely meet together in the near future. At Cabell's, we provide scholarly analytics to the academic and research communities.
MARY BETH: We curate information about journals to enable researchers, librarians, administrators, institutions, and funders to make confident decisions about journal selection. Journalytics is our curated database of over 11,000 academic journals across 18 disciplines that aids researchers in getting the most impact out of their work. Each journal included in Journalytics has been reviewed and evaluated by our journal specialists, ensuring every journal listed is a trusted and verified publication.
MARY BETH: In addition to basic journal details and logistical information, like editor contact info, helpful links, calls for papers, and ISSNs, each entry provides information on manuscript guidelines, and shows what to expect during the submission and peer review processes. You can also analyze journals using our suite of citation backed metrics to gauge discipline specific journal influence and track citation activity and online attention across the web.
MARY BETH: Users can also compare data from previous years to judge a journal's impact over time. Predatory Reports is the only searchable database that identifies and documents deceptive and exploitative journals. Our journal specialists evaluate suspected publications against over 70 behavioral indicators to flag and report predatory operations.
MARY BETH: Predatory Reports currently includes over 14,000 journals, and each entry includes information on how to identify the publication as well as a comprehensive report of each behavioral indicator that was uncovered in the journal's evaluation. Journalytics and Predatory Reports are valuable tools for stakeholders across academia by safeguarding research on limited budgets and protecting the reputations of academics and their institutions and funding organizations.
MARY BETH: We're also excited about the upcoming launch of our new Journalytics Medicine Resource, which will arrive in Fall 2021, and will feature key intelligence on thousands of verified and predatory. Journalytics Medicine will also include all vital information found in our academic journalistic database, along with some new features and redesigned user interface. So keep an eye out for more on this down the road. Our thanks to SSP for putting together another great program for this year's meeting under difficult circumstances.
MARY BETH: Now we're looking forward to hearing from the chefs. We hope everyone enjoys the session. Thanks, and be well. [END PLAYBACK]
LAUREN KANE: Thanks, thanks so much for that wonderful video and for your sponsorship. So again, thank you so much to this fantastic panel for closing us out. And now I would like to announce the winners from SSP's inaugural poster session. I hope you all got a chance to look at these fantastic submissions. I'd encourage you to do so later if you haven't. The voting was very, very close.
LAUREN KANE: There were so many good submissions. But a few stood out to our audience. So first, for Best Content, and that is that poster that provides an innovative idea or ideas with compelling perspective, clearly laying out the research content objective in a strong distinct presentation. And the winner of Best Content was Gabe Harp from the MIT Press for An OKR Story: Objectives and Key Results at the MIT Press.
LAUREN KANE: So congratulations, Gabe. Next, for Best Poster Design, which shows creative and clear visual display that enhances readability and encourages engagement with the content. The winner here was the Journal of Ethics and Publishing from the George Washington University, submitted by Gabriel Bettencourt Hughes from George Washington University, Lois Jones from the American Psychological Association, and John Warren from George Washington University.
LAUREN KANE: So congratulations all. And then lastly, we have our Best All Around Poster. So this reflects excellence in content, clarity, and visual presentation. Virtual drumroll, the winner is, Is Implicit Bias Impacting Your Users' Experience? Rachel Volentine from the University of Tennessee. Congratulations Rachel on your big win. And congratulations to all the winners and everyone who submitted a poster.
LAUREN KANE: I think posters are something that we hope to have as part of the SSP meeting going forward. They were a great success here. So next, for one final time, I just would like to thank, again, our generous sponsors, staff, meeting co-chairs, and program committee for their many contributions to the success of this event. I would also like to acknowledge our keynote speakers, Dr. Laura Helmuth and Dr. Joseph Williams, as well as our special honored guest, Dr. [INAUDIBLE] from Cast.
LAUREN KANE: Appreciation for the privilege and responsibility we have in scholarly communications to ensure that this is a truly global, diverse, and inclusive industry is something that has resonated throughout this meeting. So I would like to thank every attendee for making space during their busy lives to share in this experience. To not just attend the meeting, but to interact and engage.
LAUREN KANE: I have seen some incredible examples of people in a virtual environment being so welcoming of the very many first time attendees that we had at this meeting. And that really is such a hallmark of the SSP community, and I'm so happy to see that it continued in a virtual environment. So I hope that you enjoyed this event as much as I did. I certainly think that's the case, judging from many of the tremendous comments throughout all the chats.
LAUREN KANE: And that you appreciated the opportunity to engage with those people, organizations, and maybe new ideas that you might not typically. And again, I want to extend a special thanks to those many first time attendees that we had at this year's event. Your participation certainly enhanced the event for us all. So while the session program may be complete, the Marketplace Gallery is still open until 6:00 PM Eastern, and both structured and informal networking is available as well, also through 6:00 PM Eastern.
LAUREN KANE: So please cap off your meeting experience with a visit to both of these spaces. Remember, as well, that all attendees can go back and watch recordings on the platform for the next six months. A great opportunity to catch up on any of the fantastic content that you might have missed. Lastly, please make sure to fill out the post-meeting survey you'll be receiving with your feedback as we continue to strive to provide you with richer programming.
LAUREN KANE: So a sign of a great conference is talking about next year before this year is even through. So with that in mind, I hope that you will plan on joining us in 2022 in Chicago for what we hope and expect will be a grand return to an in-person option. I, for one, cannot wait, and look forward to seeing many of you then, if not before. Thank you so much for being part of this community and for making this year's event so special.
LAUREN KANE:
Segment:0 .
ANGELA COCHRAN: Welcome, everyone to the closing plenary in our TSK live session. I'm Angela Cochran, past president of SSP, Vice President of publishing at ASCO, and associate editor of the Scholarly Kitchen. Before we get into our panel discussion, I want to introduce Alice Meadows and Roger Schoenfeld who will discuss the TSK reader survey. Over to you, Alice.
ALICE MEADOWS: I think we might have a video to play first as well. So I think, Mary Beth, over to you?
MARY BETH: Yes we do. Let me queue up a message from our sponsor.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you, Alice. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Hi, this is Mike Bisaccio, Communications Manager with Cabell's. We're really happy to have the opportunity to take part in sponsoring this year's SSP annual meeting, especially the Scholarly Kitchen session, which is always an informative and lively discussion. Of course, we'd prefer to be able to be together with everyone.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Attending SSP's annual meeting is always one of the highlights of the year for us at Cabell's, especially the cocktail hour, which we were only too happy to sponsor at the 41st annual meeting in San Diego in 2019. So here's to hoping we can safely meet together in the near future. At Cabell's, we provide scholarly analytics to the academic and research communities.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We curate information about journals to enable researchers, librarians, administrators, institutions, and funders to make confident decisions about journal selection. Journalytics is our curated database of over 11,000 academic journals across 18 disciplines that aids researchers in getting the most impact out of their work. Each journal included in Journalytics has been reviewed and evaluated by our journal specialists ensuring every journal listed is a trusted and verified publication.
ANGELA COCHRAN: In addition to basic general details and logistical information like editor contact info, helpful links, calls for papers, and ISSNs, each entry provides information on manuscript guidelines and shows what to expect during the submission and peer review processes. You can also analyze journals using our suite of citation backed metrics to gauge discipline-specific journal influence and track citation activity and online attention across the web.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Users can also compare data from previous years to judge journals' impact over time. Predatory Reports is the only searchable database that identifies and documents deceptive and exploitative journals. Our journal specialist evaluates suspected publications against over 70 behavioral indicators to flag and report predatory operations.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Predatory reports currently includes over 14,000 journals, and each entry includes information on how to identify the publication as well as a comprehensive report on each behavioral indicator that was uncovered in the journal's evaluation. Journalytics and Predatory Reports are valuable tools for stakeholders across academia by safeguarding research on limited budgets and protecting the reputations of academics and their institutions and funding organizations.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We're also excited about the upcoming launch of our new Journalytics medicine resource, which will arrive in fall 2021, and will feature key intelligence on thousands of verified and predatory journals. Journalytics medicine will also include all vital information found in our academic Journalytics database, along with some new features and redesigned user interface. So keep an eye out for more on this down the road. Our thanks to SSP for putting together another great program for this year's meeting under difficult circumstances.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now we're looking forward to hearing from the chefs. We hope everyone enjoys the session. Thanks and be well. [END PLAYBACK]
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you for your sponsorship, and I can't believe I missed an opportunity to say, and first, a word from our sponsors. But here we are back, and I will once again throw us over to Alice, who's going to tell us about our reader survey.
ALICE MEADOWS: Thanks, Angela. Yes, my fellow chef Roger Schoenfeld and I asked if we could steal a bit of time from the beginning of this panel to tell you a little bit about the readership survey for the Scholarly Kitchen that went out earlier this year. So I just wanted to say a few words to put it in context, and then Roger's going to share just some of the highlights initially, and will be reporting in more detail in the coming months.
ALICE MEADOWS: Some of you may remember that we did a similar survey three years ago in 2018. That was the first Scholarly Kitchen readership survey, and it was very much prompted by a desire among the SSP boards that we should have a better understanding of what was working and what wasn't. And in particular, from a sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective, how well we were doing in various ways.
ALICE MEADOWS: Because as I hope you will know, this is something that's very important to the organization. And the answer 3 years ago was mixed, to be honest. There were some things that people clearly valued. Some areas that we weren't doing as well on. And Roger, I think, is going to say a little bit more about some of those. But broadly speaking, I think the areas where there was room for improvement were, indeed, diversity, which we had thought might be the case based on anecdotal evidence, and turned out to be.
ALICE MEADOWS: Also sort of specifically inclusivity in the sense of being welcoming. I think there was a sense among some people that the Kitchen wasn't as welcoming as it could be, particularly in terms of commenting. And then in terms of value, and that was something that was very much the case three years ago, people valued this, and I'm happy to say it's very much the case now as well.
ALICE MEADOWS: In fact, I think in terms of value it's gone up a bit. And in fact, this survey was quite a lot more responses to than the last one. And I will say with my own personal hand up that the last one was a lot more amateurish than this one, thanks to Roger's inputs. This time around it's a much more rigorous scientific survey, which is really good. The other thing I wanted to say before I hand over to Roger is part of the reason this time around we wanted to do the survey was not just to look at how well or not we've done what progress we've made since the last one, but also to really look at ways we can use this information to continue to improve not just the Scholarly Kitchen, but also the Society for Scholarly Publishing overall.
ALICE MEADOWS: And I think there's an awful lot in this survey. As I say, you'll just be hearing some highlights, but there's some really, really helpful information in the survey, particularly in terms of the free text comments that I think we're going to find very helpful going forward. So I just want to end by saying thank you so much to everybody who took part. It was a long survey. A lot of you made it all the way through, which we enormously, enormously appreciate.
ALICE MEADOWS: And please be assured that your feedback is really going to be put to good use, both for the Kitchen and for SSP. So thank you. And Roger, over to you.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Thanks so much, Alice. So I am going to say just go through some very, very high level findings that will hopefully whet your appetite for a blog post that we plan to publish to the Kitchen shortly that will presumably provide a little bit more detail. I just want to make sure to give thanks to all the members of the Scholarly Kitchen cabinet, as well as to Simon Holt, Haseeb Irfanullah, Alice Meadows and Simone Taylor for special help with the analysis.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: I'm sharing part of a group, a real group effort here. So at the highest level, we had a wonderful base of responses at 1,600 complete responses. We're so pleased with that level of engagement and participation. These findings really speak to our community from our community of readers really effectively. I'm not unbiased in this.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: I'm really pleased to see that a huge share of respondents found that the Kitchen is relevant to their professional needs. This is probably the clearest indication that we're providing a service that we hope is of broad value to the community. And this is a question where almost all racial and ethnic groups, we saw similar levels of really, really high satisfaction, or high relevance, I should say.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: One exception that we'd like to look into a little bit more is individuals who identify as Native Americans. It was a bit more mixed, rather than quite this positive. Readers overwhelmingly hail from the US, Canada, UK, and Europe. So we have, basically, North America and Europe are our two areas of foremost readership. But they continue to want to see more global coverage. And we have some folks who think that it's too US focused.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Others think it's too focused on the US, UK, and Europe. So there is more that we can do there. But the plurality of respondents said it's well balanced globally. Three types-- sort of turning now to our readership-- three types of employers dominate among our readers. We saw not-for-profits, societies and associations represent the largest share of our readers, the employers of our readers.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Libraries represent the second highest group, and then commercial publishers come in third place. And then there's a sort of longer tale of other types of organizations. This is really heartening. We're reaching a wide array of different types of organizations. And so that's something we're going to dig into a little bit more.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Some of the differences by those groups. Interestingly, of our readers, more than 3/4 are not SSP members. And when we asked about whether they attend the SSP conference, similarly, aren't likely to attend the SSP conference. So we're actually reaching a much wider group of a much wider community than SSP alone. And that suggests some really, really interesting opportunities in terms of how the Kitchen is positioned and what directions that we can take with it.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Finally, one or two questions that we've been interested in. The majority of respondents think that the Kitchen favors open access. We asked if the Kitchen is in favor of, against, or neutral towards open access. And the vast majority think that we are in favor of open access. This is something that we felt was an issue over time, that we wanted to monitor how that was how that was seen among our readers going forward.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: And then finally, readers really like-- or respondents, I should say-- really like our increasing space, the increasing space that we've made for guest authors. We see some level of strong to very strong agreement that the perspectives provided by guest posts have made the Scholarly Kitchen more valuable. That's not really a surprise, but it's nice to see that reflected.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Respondents disagree substantially with the idea that they're less likely to read guest posts than those from the chefs, so there's a sense that guest posts are being equally engaged with. And there's a sense that the quality and relevance of posts by guest authors and chefs is equally valuable. So that's something that we're really pleased with. Our efforts to expand participation, to widen authorship, seems to have really been recognized by our readership.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Last but not least, commenting is now seen as a positive experience or a neutral experience among individuals who participated in our comments over the last two years. So about 40% of respondents-- of commenters-- say that it's a positive experience, and only-- I'm sorry, the number somehow got jumbled there-- but it's only about 3% or 4% of respondents have said that it's at all a negative experience.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: The majority say that it's neither positive nor negative, but the weight is towards it being a positive experience. So that's another issue that we had been monitoring since the last time the survey was conducted. So with that, I want to close this brief overview. We're looking forward to continuing to learn from and sharing these findings, as Alice was saying. And also, acting on them to continue to make the Kitchen more valuable, we hope, for the entire community.
ROGER SCHOENFELD: Thanks, all.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you, Roger, for sharing out that reader feedback on Scholarly Kitchen. And thank you to all of you who filled out the survey. We're very open to the feedback, and excited at the changes that have occurred since then, since the last one. So I want to mention that we will have time to answer your questions at the end. So please put them in the Pathable platform chat, and we will get to as many as we can. I am very excited to be joined today by four of my fellow chefs as we discuss what's next for an equitable and sustainable future.
ANGELA COCHRAN: The past 15 months have presented global challenges to all of us as individuals, but also for our organizations. We could spend an hour just ticking through the list of groundbreaking occurrences. Today, as some countries are feeling ready around the corner from COVID, we are reminded of our colleagues in India or Brazil and other places that are suffering incredible losses still.
ANGELA COCHRAN: When the chefs were discussing the theme for today, all of this was weighing on our minds. While at the same time, we wanted to be forward thinking as always. Equity and sustainability felt like the right terms to frame our discussion today. I am joined by Haseeb Irfanullah Sian Harris, Alison Mudditt and Jasmine Wallace. I want to start with you, Alison.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We've been talking for years about how to ensure that new business models are sustainable. The APC powered business model that launched PLOS garnered lots of attention, but also highlighted issues around equity. Instead of there being paywalls as barriers, APCs became barriers to unfunded or underfunded authors. Now PLOS is at it again with a new set of models aimed at addressing some of those issues.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Can you tell us a bit more about how your new models address equity issues? Oh, you're still muted, Alison.
ALISON MUDDITT: Good you saw that. OK. So yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, Angela, about the barriers that APCs have created. Clearly they played a valuable role in getting open access to the point it's at the moment, but it's clear from our vantage point at PLOS that we need to expand our vision and objectives if we're really thinking about equitable participation as well as access.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think we, and I personally, remain equally concerned about the current push towards gold open access via transformative agreements as the solution. I think they risk hardwiring the exclusion of many researchers, especially in the global South. And far from being transformative, they run the risk of locking in the high cost of subscriptions to our future, and they reinforce the market dominance of the biggest players.
ALISON MUDDITT: And again, risk further entrenching the inequalities we see in the current system. So what we've been doing over the past couple of years is to really think about how we move beyond this, and how we develop new models that are equitable and regionally appropriate ways to support open access. Our ultimate goal here is to move away from all author-facing fees for all PLOS journals, although that's probably some years away.
ALISON MUDDITT: We started this out with our flat fee agreements, which, in some ways, the least innovative. They look a little bit more like a transformative agreement for a native OA publisher. And they simply streamline and simplify the management of APCs by shifting that cost away from the individual articles to an annual institutional flat fee. The next one was our community action publishing model. This is for two of our most selective titles, but we're actually adding one of the five new launches to this model.
ALISON MUDDITT: I'm not going to go into full detail. You can find that on our website. But essentially, institutions commit to an annual flat fee, ensuring that their researchers have unlimited free publishing opportunities in these journals. But then on Tuesday, as we announce sort of that our new journals were open for submission, we introduce a third model, which we've called our global equity model.
ALISON MUDDITT: And this really aims to empower institutions in every region of the world to provide unlimited open access publication support for their authors through a single annual fee that's both affordable and equitable, and reflects the reality of local regional economies. It's also important to note that researchers in Research for Life countries can publish for free regardless of the size of the institution in any of these models.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think I close by saying that I think there's a key point that, actually, Cameron [INAUDIBLE] made on Twitter after the panel on this on Monday, that I think collectively, and publishers, we can and should do better. And that means designing systems that treat all researchers with dignity, and as equal participants, as well as readers.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. Yeah, I'm reminded, from your comments, I'm reminded to of an early career researcher panel that I was involved in with the National Academies Journal Summit. That they talked about these challenges of getting published and on their timeline, and this idea of treating authors with dignity. And I think that's really worth, as publishers, us exploring. Because we certainly don't think that we're putting any harm toward anyone, but certainly there are barriers to participation that we need to look at.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And Sian, you work directly with researchers from resource-stratified environments, and are an enthusiastic advocate for global participation. And I'm curious if you think these new PLOS models or others that are being trialed elsewhere will open the door to new authors.
SIAN HARRIS: Yes. So I think, first of all, it's really encouraging to hear that publishers like PLOS are taking this issue seriously. It's really exciting to know that people are recognizing these issues, and also talking about the issue of treating researchers with dignity. There was a, now as we heard a couple of weeks ago, an SSP webinar that I was part of about open access around the world.
SIAN HARRIS: And that APC approach has, it's been found, really, not always to work for everybody. And you can just shift the point in the communication process where that inequity happens from the reader's side to the author's side. So it's really great to hear about publishers thinking about this, and looking at other ways. But I think one thing that's kind of important, not just with this particular model that Alison was talking about, but anything, is about clarity and consistency.
SIAN HARRIS: So we did a study. I work for INASP, and we have an author aid project working with early career researchers throughout low and middle income countries particularly. And we found in our survey that 60% of the people who responded had paid their APCs themselves.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah.
SIAN HARRIS: And there was many kind of complex reasons. We can speculate, and we've done and found in other research that some of the kind of answers to this. But the two key things that sort of stood out was that people aren't aware of the options available in some cases. And in other cases, that the bureaucracy around handling the negotiations with publishers, whether it's just sort of sorting out an APC waiver or something else.
SIAN HARRIS: So this is something that our friends at Research for Life have been highlighting recently about the difficulty that researchers sometimes find in finding out exactly how to navigate this system. You know, that the information is not very clear, or it's just different from publisher to publisher. So, yes. It sounds great, but it needs to be clearly communicated, transparent, and ideally, not add to the general volume of different approaches available to authors.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I think that make an excellent point about the difficulty and the bureaucracy that can exist, even for authors who may-- I mean, we hear it all the time. They don't know that their institution has funds set aside to pay APCs. And then if they do, then they realize it's going to take time, and their paper might be delayed from publication, because now they're trying to work through a complicated invoicing process.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so it does seem that the way to solve that problem is to shift back away from the authors as being individuals that are responsible for making these payments. Jasmine, you and I have talked about this a little bit in preparations for today, and you seemed really enthusiastic about new models like this Subscribe to Open, which certainly fits those goals as well. While an APC-free no paywall model may address the equity issues, there's a lot of debate currently on the sustainability of those models.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I'm curious what excites you or concerns you about this particular model, or other trials that you see.
JASMINE WALLACE: Yeah, I'm really-- I've really taken to this S2O model, as they refer to it. I like this model, because I think it does move us towards a more equitable future. Is it sustainable? I think that will come with time to see whether or not it literally is something we can keep up with. But I think it almost represents the epitome of what we like to strive to achieve with open access. And that being that every participant in the publishing ecosystem has access to the highest and most valuable content.
JASMINE WALLACE: And I think that's the mission, right? So I think that model also highlights what happens when the community really starts to engage in their social responsibilities about driving that access of knowledge. And just in general, it gives the largest group of participants access for the smallest amount of money, right? And so I think that gets us away from this APC space, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: How do we get there? And I thought it also helps to foster an environment for collaboration amongst publishers. So it starts to move us away from these transactional relationships that we've always had in the past, right? And then it becomes a matter of not what we want to see and how do we want to get there, but I think this is how you start to make those goals possible. So it's us working this thing out in live time and not so much a distant future.
JASMINE WALLACE: It shifts our priorities. I think it makes us shift our collective priority. I think that is a part of how we get it done-- like, we all have to be on the same page about what we need to be doing. And I think moving away from 2020 and taking something from it, it shows us how to make impossible possible. So what we say we can't do, it's absolutely possible if we're working towards that goal.
JASMINE WALLACE: So I don't think it's a matter of whether these models are sustainable. I think it's a matter of creating a different framework about how we begin to address them, right? That anything can become sustainable. And it makes us shift our resources. It starts to make us shift our ideals behind what we've always known to be.
JASMINE WALLACE: One of the things I think is really important, and that excites me most about this, is that this new model is like an equity based model. If what we had, or what we've always had in the past is an equity based model, where we're coming from the space of we're not trying to be equitable, right? This is our shift towards becoming a more equitable space.
JASMINE WALLACE: And when you start to talk about those things, in time, that space automatically yields more sustainability. So, again, I don't think it's a matter of if it's sustainable, how do we get it done? Those are things we'll just work out, I think, as we move forward and we progress. But I think the S1 model is a really good example, just because it's opening the space up, and it's giving so many people access, again, for these lower costs.
JASMINE WALLACE: Because that APC is not something that is, we know for a fact, sustainable, right? So.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Great, thank you. Staying on the topic of sustainability, this is really in your wheelhouse, Haseeb. What does sustainability look like in scholarly publishing to you?
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Thanks, Angela. Listening to my fellow chefs, I have been thinking that there are three aspects of when we talk about sustainability. The first one is obviously, we need to sustain the scholarly publishing. So the financial sustainability is the first thing to remember. We have already heard a different model to our revenue. Subscription, nexus model, hybrid, some journals in transition.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And there are different types of industry models, as well. All actually contributing to growth, isn't it, in terms of revenue as well as in terms of recognition. Like there are so many different metrics that we use to measure the growth of our individual journal, as well as the publisher. Circulation of individual journals, or a group of journals are not all.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: We often think that certain journals, they are expanding their horizon because of the demand from their readers as well as researchers. As Alison just mentioned that from seven journals, the [INAUDIBLE] has now got 12 titles, isn't it? Five new titles have been added to the portfolio. So all of these things, as well as the merger acquisition we have seen all contributes to their growth financially.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Of course, the mission is always playing an important role here. Whether it is a peer review system, the innovation is there. We have just heard earlier today how publishers are working with preprint archives, and taking things forward, reaching out to researchers. So this is the first one, the economic aspect of sustainability. The second one is, I will call it a non economic or social aspect.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Just that Sian mentioned quite a few things. For example, the accessibility to journals, journal papers, has been really a big crisis 30 years back. That's why INASP, Sian's organization, used to call itself the National Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication. But later on, 20 years back, we have seen Research for Life, which not only making things available, but also accessible.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And publishers that join in. And publishers, despite the fact that FSE can be a burden or kind of a barrier for researchers from the global South, we have already heard that there are waivers as well as discounts for the low and [INAUDIBLE] income countries. And we have been seeing that journals, the editorial boards are shifting. They are becoming more inclusive.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: They're investing resources to build the capacity of the researchers, editors, as well as authors. But importantly, we have seen in this term, like diversity, equity, and inclusion over the last one year, so many strong stand been taken by different scholarly societies like SSP as well as others, as well as publishers. So I see it as a social aspect of sustainability. I will end this particular point by saying we've all seen what happened in March 2020.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: When the pandemic was declared, big publishers, small publishers, they came together and put aside the profitability of profit, and focused more on how to fight the pandemic by making COVID papers that publicly available for everybody, freely accessible to everybody. So these are the social aspects of sustainability [INAUDIBLE].. But the third and the last point is we all live in environment.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: I mean, obviously, we are living in an artificial environment, but you can't deny the contribution of nature. And we all know that it is not only climate change but biodiversity that environment is degrading so much. And it is our journal papers who are putting forward the evidence, such as conducting research and the publishing industry is putting forward and communicating that research clearly.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: But as part of publishing industry, other scholarly publishers, should we be neutral towards those findings? Don't we have a responsibility? Should we internalize those findings? Shouldn't we think of how we are managing our waste, how we are consuming our energy? What's the source of this energy? Whether it is for [INAUDIBLE].
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: What's the carbon footprint or ecological footprint of our industry? How much contribution we are making towards our pollution? So these, the third aspect, which is environmental aspect of sustainability, should be considered quite strongly by us. And it can be done when we link our activity with the globally forward sustainable development goals, which has got 17 goals, as well as 269 targets.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: And higher education institutions are coming forward and trying to link their research to sustainable development goals. So it is high time that the scholarly publishing industry is trying to make that connection. There is no time to be neutral. Thank you.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah, that's a very thought provoking to think about the time being now to really think about not only how we promote climate science in our publications, but also the footprint that we leave behind us as publishers. Certainly, the inability to travel over the last 15 months or so has brought that carbon footprint of in-person conferences, for example, to the forefront. I mean, there were certainly research communities that were already concerned about how much travel is part of their research dissemination and sharing and networking.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And many societies that I talk to expect to move into a hybrid model going forward, once we sort of get back to in-person meetings. And that's really difficult to pull off. Sian, I'm curious if you're hearing with virtual and hybrid conferences, many of our societies that host these conferences, scientific meetings, have talked about a new global community that can now attend the conference because it is largely available online.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And these are conferences that, perhaps, they've not been able to attend in the past due to lack of resources for expensive travel. But what I've really been curious about is whether online or hybrid conferences, if we have yet seen an increase in participation, not just as attendees, but also as content presenters. Just looking at sort of our own ASCO meetings, we've not seen a big increase in abstract submissions from an international audience, which seems a shame, given that the travel barriers are gone.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But what are you hearing about participation in conferences?
SIAN HARRIS: Yeah, well it's a very interesting thing. I mean, I think there's a point about how easy it becomes to be at a conference. I mean, I'm in the UK, currently. It's 9 o'clock. Haseeb, I have no idea what time of night it is. I'm amazed he's still awake. But yes, definitely, there's the great opportunity to participate with a much lower barrier, to participate as attendees.
SIAN HARRIS: And I think at the start of the pandemic last year when the travel restrictions came in, we actually saw not that much change in the speakers in conferences. I think lots of conferences had already lined up the speakers, and so it was the same people, but shifting to how it was delivered. I did notice, which I think was different from your experience, towards the end of last year and into this year, my inbox has been increasingly busy with people in the scholarly publishing sector, particularly saying, is there anyone you can suggest who we could invite to speak?
SIAN HARRIS: We really want to increase the geographical spread. Is there, we're looking particularly for a librarian in Africa, they might say. Or they have kind of quite specific things in order to try and get a spread. And I think it's something that's really exciting. So yes, I have seen since a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a webinar-- I think I started to mention, and I have a feeling I may not have finished mentioning it-- but their speakers were from India, Cameroon and Mexico, and then in the UK.
SIAN HARRIS: And it was an SSP webinar. I think it's really exciting, and that wasn't an isolated example. Personally, I really hope this continues after the pandemic. But I think there's still an important point to note about equity, and we always have to kind of bring in this equity angle. There are still some people who are excluded. Internet availability, stability, and cost are not evenly distributed around the world.
SIAN HARRIS: Or even within countries, there's often greater provision in capital cities than in more rural areas. So it's important, always, to recognize that some people remain excluded from conversations, and so not necessarily to regard to the fact that more people can be speaking at a conference or attending means that everybody is there.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. And I do think that there is, obviously, as we have all said many times over the last couple of days that as wonderful and as engaging as SSP virtual is, we're all at home. We're all virtual. There's no one in person. And I think it gets a little bit more complicated when we start talking about hybrid meetings. So, you know, Jasmine, again, we had been talking a little bit about this and how difficult it is to do hybrid meetings.
ANGELA COCHRAN: No one at home wants to feel like they're watching a conference on their computer. And no one who's traveled to the conference venue wants to walk into a ballroom and watch everyone give presentations on a screen. And so both audiences need to feel served. What opportunities, though, do you think we have with respect to hybrid conferences? I mean, I guess with what Sian was saying, the worst case scenario, if we expand in a hybrid and in a virtual model to include more global voices, that when we inevitably get back to in person, do we close the door again?
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I'm interested in what your thoughts are with hybrid conferences going forward.
JASMINE WALLACE: I don't think-- I mean, first of all, I love virtual conferences. With the exhaustion of Zoom and everything, all of the good and bad, I still really, really like them for all the reasons that we've mentioned. And I think that as we move forward, I don't think we can go back. I don't think that there's a back to go to. So I felt like we really need to think about what it looks like. But again, no one, again, wants to feel like they're at home.
JASMINE WALLACE: They don't want to be at home and vice versa, as you discussed. But I think we have to keep in mind the ultimate benefits to this space, right? Does the good outweigh the bad? The good definitely outweighs the bad, so we have to figure out how to get it done. And I think there's a ton of opportunities. And like Sian has said, it is literally, I think, hybrid meetings are a way of becoming more equitable, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: And again, all of this has to work together. It feeds into each other. So because more people have access to conferences, I think we have to now take our hats off as to what a conference is. And I think that limits us, because we've only ever had conferences in one way. And then there was this push to have virtual conferences, and they were just conferences as we've always known them.
JASMINE WALLACE: How do we make them virtual? But that is not what we should be doing. I think that is a part of the problem. It's starting from the end and then working our way back, right? So like now that we have this virtual space, now that we know the abilities that it offers us, the barriers that are removed because of this, just think don't think of what you've always known, right?
JASMINE WALLACE: And I think that's really hard, because that's not just a shift in thinking a pattern, but that's almost a cultural shift for us to not do conferences the way we've always known them, right? But if you were to do that, if you were to just be able to have in an unimaginable virtual slash hybrid, or I don't even know if we should use hybrid if we're talking about something new and something different, what does it look like?
JASMINE WALLACE: One of the things I think about is the planning process for a conference, right? We usually know the cities that we're going to be going to years in advance. And for some of us, I know working within other organizations, we can't get out of these contracts. So they may be what they are for quite some time if you have an extended contract.
JASMINE WALLACE: But is there a way to renegotiate those contracts and see something different? So let's take, for example, if you have a contract for a Hilton or some other hotel, right? And usually you have it at one city, one meeting. Everyone goes, everyone attends. Maybe it now is, now we have it multiple places. Smaller groups, smaller meetings, smaller settings. And they're not meetings, they're not, they're more like workshops or seminars.
JASMINE WALLACE: And then you offer them at the same time. So we can sort of get into that asynchronous synchronous learning that I think everyone is aware of now they're moving to education space, right? Like honing in on that, and then having them at the exact same time in different cities right. I think about SSP. A lot of the sessions were prerecorded, which is great. Because like Sian has discussed, it gets more voices in there.
JASMINE WALLACE: And they don't have to be up like Haseeb at ungodly hours. You can record them at a standard time. But maybe it's something where we move away from a three day meeting, a two day conference. It's the first week, we give access to everything, right? You just can go and watch at your own leisure, which is really good. Because it's hard. I'm the queen of virtual out of office messages for these meetings, but I am still getting emails right now.
JASMINE WALLACE: So no one respects those boundaries just yet. So you have the first week, and you're doing something like that. The second week are these in-person regional based meetings. I think also what we should consider is where people are. The human aspect of who we are now. Some people do not want to fly. Some people are not comfortable doing that just yet.
JASMINE WALLACE: But if it's a little bit closer, you can drive. Maybe take a train. I know people still ride buses, and if that'll be a thing, but also not sure, right? And then you're having something that's so different. I don't know what I'm experiencing. And you're still having keynotes and closings. And then at the end, you have a collective of like, what have we learned in all these different areas?
JASMINE WALLACE: I think it helps us get more communal in our individual spaces, which we tend to do. Like if you're in the D.C. region, you're going to go to that D.C. conference if it's in Philadelphia. Or if you're down South, maybe it's in Texas and you're coming from the lower parts of Cali, you're going over. But just really just blowing out the window what we've known.
JASMINE WALLACE: And also considering, like, how do we keep our resources low, right? We don't want to spend more money. So a bomb.com hybrid meeting and a bomb.com virtual meeting not really possible. You know, one's going to suffer. So just kind of like expanding that, and thinking about what can we do if we could do anything? And I think that is the excitement that we should have around it.
JASMINE WALLACE: And starting to think about those types of ideas.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I love your approach and enthusiasm to burn the place down and start over. It's helpful and refreshing, I think, for some of us to just think, like, yeah, it doesn't have to look the same. What works about it, and how can we replicate that? We're all talking in our day jobs about this as well. When will we return to our offices? Will we return to our offices? Right now, everybody's talking about how great it's been to work from home, but everybody's working at home.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And again, that dynamic changes if some people are home and some people are in the office. Alison, you've written several times about what our new workplace reality might look like. How are you reimagining the concept of home office for your California and UK offices?
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, first of all, Jasmine, I loved your phrase there. And I think I would the same about going back to the office. There's no back to go to, right? So we need to reinvent a different future. And I think this absolutely connects to the themes of equity and sustainability. So for us at PLOS, we've been able to hire staff in different parts of the country that we never had access to talent there, because they, like many people, couldn't afford to move to the Bay Area, as one example.
ALISON MUDDITT: But we're thinking that this is kind of a couple of stages. And like there's that kind of longer term future that you talked about. What does hybrid look like in the long term? But we're also kind of, I think, in some ways, more focused right now on what that slow emergence from the past year looks like. And I think there's a lot in common with some of the things Jasmine was saying about travel and conferences.
ALISON MUDDITT: There are many of us, I think, who are going to return with unanswered questions, different expectations. We've got staff who are desperate to return to normal, they're re-energized, they can't wait to get back. Others are just exhausted. They're confused and need much more time to process what we've all been through over the last 12 months.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think we've got some who wonder if they should return at all. So I think it's really important for us individually and collectively to understand that emerging from this hugely disruptive experience that we've all been through is going to take time. And so we're trying to answer as much as we can before we reopen our offices, which we're targeting to do in the summer. But it's, at the same time, I think it's likely that most of us are going to need opportunities and time to integrate and reflect and readjust our practices post-pandemic over time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So having said, that I think it's clear to us that the concept of a home office is something that doesn't really exist anymore. We'll still have physical offices in San Francisco and Cambridge. We may have ones elsewhere in the world over time. And we'll still have some staff who go into those offices regularly. But it's highly unlikely that's going to be every day.
ALISON MUDDITT: The survey we did a couple of months ago, there were just four staff out of over 200 at PLOS who said they wanted to be in the office five days a week. So it's been a really big shift there. And most of our staff see those offices primarily as a space for collaboration, either with their team or with other teams. And for the kind of work that we're all finding less easy to do virtually.
ALISON MUDDITT: Things like brainstorming, complex problem solving, and socializing. Actually, kind of hanging out with your colleagues is really important as well. So we're fully embracing this, but I think it's really going to take us time to figure out how to make hybrids successful for us over the long run. And we're going to have to be really deliberate and thoughtful about a whole range of issues.
ALISON MUDDITT: Those things include obvious things like communication and policies and expectations. How we develop more asynchronous work practices, but also things like culture keeping, and how we continue to build and maintain relationships as well as all the tools we can use to effectively support that. So right now we're sort of putting together a task force that's helping us with the sort of immediate questions of reopening.
ALISON MUDDITT: But over time, it's going to have to grow into trying to answer some of these bigger, deeper questions that's going to be a knotty set of problems that we solve together.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. My sense is we will see sort of waves, patterns that occur. That there may be an enthusiastic group that wants to return to the office. Again, probably not five days a week, but they may find that they're sitting at their desk on Zoom calls all day because most of their coworkers are scattered about in different places, and maybe that's not the meaningful-- to me, I would be like, hey, I could have done this at home and not sat in traffic.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so we may see people that are enthusiastic to come back, and then find, like, it actually isn't, it's still a little lonely in the office. And they're still experiencing that Zoom fatigue, who may retreat. And then eventually, I think what we all need to be prepared for is that it might take a little bit of time before we get back to whatever our normal office situation is going to look like.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I have a few more questions for our chef panels, but I want to remind everyone that if you have questions for us, please put them in the chat box on the Pathable platform and we will be starting on those in a few minutes. But I want to ask Haseeb, do you think we're going to see less international travel for things like deal making and customer visits? I mean, it seems a good deal of money and time could be saved with the added benefit of positively impacting the environment.
ANGELA COCHRAN:
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: That is very difficult to answer, isn't it? Because we're still in the middle of a pandemic. But the structure that we have borrowed from the other [INAUDIBLE]. Things [INAUDIBLE] obviously. And when we talk about traveling, when we talk about reducing carbon footprint, I would like to just share a few [INAUDIBLE] facts about the climate change, which can be used together because we're discussing sustainability.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Five years back, all the world leaders, they have agreed upon that, we need to reduce the carbon emissions. It's a must. For example, UK and USA, they have decided that it will not be emitting any carbon by 2050. It might seem like a dream, but they have promise there. And it has made it legal to reach zero carbon by 2050. But how do they make those calculations?
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: How do they know what might happen? How do they predict the future? Every few years, IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on climate change publishes a report. And those reports actually talk about these facts. These figures. IPCC, they don't conduct a research. They, in fact, make all of those analyses based on peer review journal [INAUDIBLE]..
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Which means that all our understanding on climate change, [AUDIO OUT] What we should point [INAUDIBLE],, or what we as a scholarly publishing industry need to look into. Definitely, we should be proud of ourselves that our environmental footprint has been reduced, because almost all the journals are now being published online.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Although some have got hard copies. I'm not talking about not the big publishers, but publishers, small publishers like [INAUDIBLE] Association, which publishes from Bangladesh. Back to where it is
2: 00 AM in Dhaka--
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: AM. [AUDIO OUT] But we need to understand that although we have moved it online, journal publishing, sharing, everything, reviewing, but we need to think of what kind of energy we're consuming. Because our interface would be quite energy consuming. So we need to be looking at that. A second point is, to answer to your question, we need [AUDIO OUT]
ANGELA COCHRAN: You're breaking up a little bit on us, Haseeb.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: [AUDIO OUT] the way we promote our [AUDIO OUT]. Is it better now?
ANGELA COCHRAN: A little bit. Yep.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: So promoting our journals, the business meetings, the conferences, you need to look into our travel plan. Our not only the cost, but our responsibility. What meeting can be done virtually, and what need to be done physically. We need to look into that. The third point is, we not only focus on the publishing industry as a whole, because they'd just be run by people.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: The publishing staff members, our editors, the authors. How could we make them-- all of us, actually-- more climate responsible? And the final point is we need to think of-- I'm not saying that we have to take a stand, but we need to think of whether it is an ethical issue to publish a study in favor of fossil fuel, against renewable energy, against climate change, calling climate change a fake news.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: So we need to think that what should be our stand? Can we talk about climate responsibility of scholarly publishing? Thanks.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah, and I think a lot of societies in particular have, and publishers have learned, that things like our editorial board meetings, where I know a lot of societies that used to hold their editorial board meetings at their annual conference because most people were already there. And then shifted away from that, because everyone who was there was extremely distracted.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And you have people and going to multiple committee meetings, and having to balance that. And so we started having separate meetings, and flying editors from all over the world in for these discussions. And I wrote a little bit about this in the Scholarly Kitchen. Based on my own experience, but also feedback from colleagues and other places, that those meetings in particular are doing really well in the virtual environment.
ANGELA COCHRAN: These are very busy volunteer professionals that don't necessarily need to take three whole days out of their work schedule to come to an editorial board meeting that we could facilitate online. And so I think that there will be less business travel, just because we've proven that it works now. So I want to make sure that we have time to answer some audience questions. And I do have a question for Alison that came in.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Alison, can you talk a little bit about what the difference is between the flat fee model and the global equity model?
ALISON MUDDITT: Sure. I mean, they're both sort of flat fees from institutions. But I think what we've learned as we started rolling out these new models is that although we are, over time, as I said, trying to move away from author-facing payments, we've learned that there are some authors, some funders, some countries that still prefer APCs based on how they're sort of funding and administrating open access. And so the flat fee model is really designed to make that easy and seamless for people by simply providing a way for institutions to cover those fees.
ALISON MUDDITT: What we do there is to kind of look at their publishing history with PLOS develop a flat fee based on the average of their publishing history over, I think, three to five years, and that's their fee for the next few years. And they can publish an unlimited amount once they pay that fee. The global equity model is a brand new one that we're using to apply to new journals, and so this is a different problem from the one we've been trying to solve in the past.
ALISON MUDDITT: Many publishers are trying to move from subscriptions to APCs. We're trying to move from APIs fees to something different and better. But with our new journals, we're sort of thinking about, well, if you're launching a journal from scratch, what would that look like? We don't have that sort of legacy of APCs to transition. So in many ways, I think you could almost think, and this would probably make PLOS's founders turn in their, I was going to say graves, but they're all still alive, turn in their graves to hear me say it's kind of like a subscription, right?
ALISON MUDDITT: In that what we're trying to do here is to figure out what's a fair annual payment for institutions to make to cover open access publishing for their authors. And so the annual fee isn't based on anything historically, because there's no history there. We look at an institution's research output in the relevant subject areas of the journal. And then we're also going to be looking at the country's World Bank lending tier.
ALISON MUDDITT: And then the model itself, the annual price, will therefore allow a large institution in a lower income country, for example, to pay less than one of comparable size in a high income country. If you go and take a look at the blog post on the PLOS blog on Tuesday, you can see a lot more detail about that, including the whole pricing chart.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Great, thank you. So we had a comment, not so much a question, but I have a feeling that I can turn it into a question a little bit, for Sian. You talked about authors who are paying, researchers who have paid the APC themselves. So not coming from their institutions, per se. And Eric is positing that perhaps we should evaluate how many of them had to dip into credit or debt to make that payment, or how many had cash on hand versus literally had to pay for it on credit and pay it off later.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And which made me also think about with that data, like how much of the, even if we framed it as how much of a percentage. So we'll see things on Twitter, particularly with some of the new APCs for things like Nature or other high impact journals that have much higher APCs, really selective journals that have higher APCs.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But even for APCs that we would consider reasonable from a publishing standpoint, you'll see authors from other parts of the world say, well that's my salary for the month, or for half the month. So when you're looking at the APC structure and what it's costing people, what those barriers are, is there data to sort of put it in context to, I get this much funding and this percentage of it has to go to pay for one APC, or salary wise?
SIAN HARRIS: Yeah, it's one of those things. The moment you do a survey and you get the results of the survey, you think, I wish I'd asked that question.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah.
SIAN HARRIS: So we didn't ask, in that survey, I mean, we were sort of somewhat surprised to find there was an interesting finding with that question. We did not actually expect 60% to be the answer to that question. But what we didn't ask is what amount the APCs were. And I think that's a really key question. Because it isn't just about the APC in Nature being higher than the APC in another journal from a big commercial publisher.
SIAN HARRIS: It might be the APC in a journal in the country that they live in, which could be, it's not in the same order of magnitude in terms of their cost. And something Haseeb can talk more about in terms of APC costs for the journals that have them in Bangladesh. But it might be that it's, sort of, essentially a very, very small amount to just sort of keep the things, keep the process going rather than needing to actually pay for anyone's profit.
SIAN HARRIS: So but I think, I've been talking to people in a separate study we did and actually interviewing people. There were some people who just said, it's just the bureaucracy. I know that I probably could get something, like I could get a waiver or something. But I don't know who to talk to at my university, and there's some system, and I don't know what the system is, and I don't know who to talk to.
SIAN HARRIS: And it's, I think quite often, we have, all of us all around the world, if the bureaucracy's too high, the cost to our time to navigate the bureaucracy is higher than the cost to deal with the whatever. But that's, I don't imagine. I don't know, because we didn't ask the question. But I don't imagine we were talking about the kind of level of APCs that we see in some journals.
SIAN HARRIS: I don't know if Haseeb wanted to just follow up with something about actually how much that the costs might be for some journals.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Yeah, in Bangladesh, many of the journals that [INAUDIBLE] because these are all free journals. So they might be asking all of us to pay our membership fee, which would be, say, $25, $30. Not more than that. So you can't call it an APC. And most of the journals are society journals or institution journals. I often tell this story, that many of the society journals are being published in Bangladesh by the funding from the government.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Because the publishing is so minimal. You don't have to expend anything. It's just the printing cost. Because you don't pay much the editors. So that's why we don't see it APC per se in Bangladesh. Just to add to what Sian say. But if you ask that how Bangladeshi researchers, for example, they're publishing in big journals, open access journals, high quality journals.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Often, they don't feel like submitting there. One reason is they don't feel their research is the quality, their research is standard enough. Second is, they often don't know that they might be getting a discount or whatever. They're not aware of it. So awareness is a challenge. The other point is, often, they collaborate with international developed countries.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Because sometimes, they are part of a very big project. So often, those APC issues are being dealt with by the leading developed country professor or principal investigator. So they don't bother about it. So if there are so many different mechanisms and reasons, or avenues that, from my experience, Bangladeshi researchers, they are [INAUDIBLE],, they are trying to [INAUDIBLE] their research for inclusiveness.
HASEEB IRFANULLAH: Thank you.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Thank you. So we are wrapping up on our time. And we have, I think, Lauren is going to pop in to wish us all a farewell. So stay tuned in. But I want to thank you all for joining me today for this panel. I love doing the TSK live plenary at the end of the meeting. And we will be doing a kind of a wrap up in the Scholarly Kitchen.
ANGELA COCHRAN: For those of us who've been attending sessions, are going to be sharing in a future Ask The Chefs session coming up, a post coming up soon, we'll talk about some of our takeaways from this most excellent meeting. So thank you all for participating in the session today. And I'm going to turn it over to you, Lauren.
LAUREN KANE: Thanks so much, Angela. And thank you to this wonderful panel. What a perfect way to wrap up today's educational program for our 43rd annual meeting. Before I go any further, I think we have a video to show again that didn't play properly the first time. But please do stay, because we'll be announcing the poster winners, and I want to say a proper goodbye.
LAUREN KANE: So first, Mary Beth, will you roll that footage?
MARY BETH: Yes, thank you, Lauren. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Hi, this is Mike Bisaccio, Communications Manager with Cabell's. We're really happy to have the opportunity to take part in sponsoring this year's SSP annual meeting, especially the Scholarly Kitchen session, which is always an informative and lively discussion. Of course, we'd prefer to be able to be together with everyone.
MARY BETH: Attending SSP's annual meeting is always one of the highlights of the year for us at Cabell's, especially the cocktail hour, which we were only too happy to sponsor at the 41st annual meeting in San Diego in 2019. So here's to hoping we can safely meet together in the near future. At Cabell's, we provide scholarly analytics to the academic and research communities.
MARY BETH: We curate information about journals to enable researchers, librarians, administrators, institutions, and funders to make confident decisions about journal selection. Journalytics is our curated database of over 11,000 academic journals across 18 disciplines that aids researchers in getting the most impact out of their work. Each journal included in Journalytics has been reviewed and evaluated by our journal specialists, ensuring every journal listed is a trusted and verified publication.
MARY BETH: In addition to basic journal details and logistical information, like editor contact info, helpful links, calls for papers, and ISSNs, each entry provides information on manuscript guidelines, and shows what to expect during the submission and peer review processes. You can also analyze journals using our suite of citation backed metrics to gauge discipline specific journal influence and track citation activity and online attention across the web.
MARY BETH: Users can also compare data from previous years to judge a journal's impact over time. Predatory Reports is the only searchable database that identifies and documents deceptive and exploitative journals. Our journal specialists evaluate suspected publications against over 70 behavioral indicators to flag and report predatory operations.
MARY BETH: Predatory Reports currently includes over 14,000 journals, and each entry includes information on how to identify the publication as well as a comprehensive report of each behavioral indicator that was uncovered in the journal's evaluation. Journalytics and Predatory Reports are valuable tools for stakeholders across academia by safeguarding research on limited budgets and protecting the reputations of academics and their institutions and funding organizations.
MARY BETH: We're also excited about the upcoming launch of our new Journalytics Medicine Resource, which will arrive in Fall 2021, and will feature key intelligence on thousands of verified and predatory. Journalytics Medicine will also include all vital information found in our academic journalistic database, along with some new features and redesigned user interface. So keep an eye out for more on this down the road. Our thanks to SSP for putting together another great program for this year's meeting under difficult circumstances.
MARY BETH: Now we're looking forward to hearing from the chefs. We hope everyone enjoys the session. Thanks, and be well. [END PLAYBACK]
LAUREN KANE: Thanks, thanks so much for that wonderful video and for your sponsorship. So again, thank you so much to this fantastic panel for closing us out. And now I would like to announce the winners from SSP's inaugural poster session. I hope you all got a chance to look at these fantastic submissions. I'd encourage you to do so later if you haven't. The voting was very, very close.
LAUREN KANE: There were so many good submissions. But a few stood out to our audience. So first, for Best Content, and that is that poster that provides an innovative idea or ideas with compelling perspective, clearly laying out the research content objective in a strong distinct presentation. And the winner of Best Content was Gabe Harp from the MIT Press for An OKR Story: Objectives and Key Results at the MIT Press.
LAUREN KANE: So congratulations, Gabe. Next, for Best Poster Design, which shows creative and clear visual display that enhances readability and encourages engagement with the content. The winner here was the Journal of Ethics and Publishing from the George Washington University, submitted by Gabriel Bettencourt Hughes from George Washington University, Lois Jones from the American Psychological Association, and John Warren from George Washington University.
LAUREN KANE: So congratulations all. And then lastly, we have our Best All Around Poster. So this reflects excellence in content, clarity, and visual presentation. Virtual drumroll, the winner is, Is Implicit Bias Impacting Your Users' Experience? Rachel Volentine from the University of Tennessee. Congratulations Rachel on your big win. And congratulations to all the winners and everyone who submitted a poster.
LAUREN KANE: I think posters are something that we hope to have as part of the SSP meeting going forward. They were a great success here. So next, for one final time, I just would like to thank, again, our generous sponsors, staff, meeting co-chairs, and program committee for their many contributions to the success of this event. I would also like to acknowledge our keynote speakers, Dr. Laura Helmuth and Dr. Joseph Williams, as well as our special honored guest, Dr. [INAUDIBLE] from Cast.
LAUREN KANE: Appreciation for the privilege and responsibility we have in scholarly communications to ensure that this is a truly global, diverse, and inclusive industry is something that has resonated throughout this meeting. So I would like to thank every attendee for making space during their busy lives to share in this experience. To not just attend the meeting, but to interact and engage.
LAUREN KANE: I have seen some incredible examples of people in a virtual environment being so welcoming of the very many first time attendees that we had at this meeting. And that really is such a hallmark of the SSP community, and I'm so happy to see that it continued in a virtual environment. So I hope that you enjoyed this event as much as I did. I certainly think that's the case, judging from many of the tremendous comments throughout all the chats.
LAUREN KANE: And that you appreciated the opportunity to engage with those people, organizations, and maybe new ideas that you might not typically. And again, I want to extend a special thanks to those many first time attendees that we had at this year's event. Your participation certainly enhanced the event for us all. So while the session program may be complete, the Marketplace Gallery is still open until 6:00 PM Eastern, and both structured and informal networking is available as well, also through 6:00 PM Eastern.
LAUREN KANE: So please cap off your meeting experience with a visit to both of these spaces. Remember, as well, that all attendees can go back and watch recordings on the platform for the next six months. A great opportunity to catch up on any of the fantastic content that you might have missed. Lastly, please make sure to fill out the post-meeting survey you'll be receiving with your feedback as we continue to strive to provide you with richer programming.
LAUREN KANE: So a sign of a great conference is talking about next year before this year is even through. So with that in mind, I hope that you will plan on joining us in 2022 in Chicago for what we hope and expect will be a grand return to an in-person option. I, for one, cannot wait, and look forward to seeing many of you then, if not before. Thank you so much for being part of this community and for making this year's event so special.
LAUREN KANE:
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode