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Charleston Trendspotting Initiative
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Charleston Trendspotting Initiative
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Segment:0 .
Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. I know there's still some folks making their way in, but we're going to go ahead and get started here. My name is Leah Hynes. I'm the executive director of the Charleston hub, and I'm super happy to welcome all of you to today's Charleston trendspotting initiative session.
Thank you all for being here. I'd like to start with just a little bit of background and context. For those of you who have maybe never heard of the Charleston hub, or have never been to one of our trendspotting sessions before. The hub is the umbrella organization for the Charleston library conference against the grain, Catena magazine, and a host of other resources and news sources for librarians, publishers, and vendors in the scholarly information industry.
The conference was founded in 1980 by Katina strauch. At the time, she was a newly hired collection development librarian at the College of Charleston. She had no travel budget to attend conferences and meetings with the big names in the publishing world, so she couldn't go to them. She invited them to come to her instead and had a small group of thought leaders meet in Charleston, South Carolina.
And that tradition continues now, each year with a collegial gathering in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, each November. It's grown from around 25 people, with her initial meeting to around 2,500 last year. We also have virtual conferences that we call Charleston in between, and a podcast on topics in information science and scholarly communications. Our newest publication is Catena magazine that I mentioned a minute ago.
It's named after our visionary founder, and it's written by and for the global library community. We were acquired by the nonprofit publisher annual reviews in October 2023, and we're super happy to be on board with the team there. The goal of the Charleston hub remains to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues that are important to all of us and to tackle strategies and solutions to approach those issues together collaboratively.
And all of this background information is just to show how this trend spotting initiative really grew out of the goals for the hub being put into action. The Charleston trendspotting initiative started out of a conversation at the conference several years ago that stressed the importance of librarians in particular. But all of us in the industry being proactive instead of reactive about the trends and issues that are coming down the pipelines in the near future that are going to impact the world of libraries and scholarly publishing.
We met for the first time as an organized group in 2017. We called it the future lab project at that time. And then in 2018, we met again with a renewed focus and format and the updated title of the trend lab, and the initiative in its current format has been included at the Charleston annual meetings and SSB since 2018. So some of you may have been here before. But each time we have different topics, different small group activities, different discussions, all with the same mission and goal to discuss the potential impacts of trends and the information industry and scholarly communications.
Last year, we expanded for the first time internationally to host a session at the 2024 Lieber conference in Limassol, Cyprus. So that was really exciting as well. Some of the future thinking tools that we've used in the past have been looking at signals and drivers. We've created a newspaper with headlines from the future.
We've used a structured brainstorming tool called the futures wheel, and we have flipped the future by looking at known facts or trends that are happening now and saying, how do we get here. And what would it take for us to get to the opposite of this fact in the future. We have many repeat attendees that I've mentioned before. I know some of you here have are in the fan club for raise your hand if you've attended a Charleston trendspotting session before.
Awesome Thank you all for being here. Many of the folks that I've talked to before who have attended these sessions say that it's a great opportunity to sit and think deeply and focus on these issues in a conversation with their peers. And I hope you feel that way together after our time together today. Brief look at our agenda.
As usual, Lisa is going to kick us off with looking at futures, thinking 101 for just setting the stage for our discussions together today. And then, in light of recent events and the state of the world that we live in right now, we've adjusted our approach this year to start with finding solid ground. We're going to do a small group activity to remind ourselves of what matters and what will endure.
Then we'll look at some pestle trends to prepare. To persevere. Attempting to identify and mitigate threats. And finally, we'll close with large group discussion and wrap up. And with that, I'll turn things over to Lisa. Thank you very much. Thanks, Leah.
I think it's great that this partnership between SSP and Charleston continues to bring this forward. Now, I know that some of you may have seen this and not read the word workshop in the discussion. So if you're panicking now, I just want you to know that if you decide this isn't the session for you, we take no offense. It's the kind of session that it is and you're going to be dialoguing and discussing.
We're not going to be. I do have a chart of trends to give you, but that's not the point. The point is what do we do in light of the way the world is changing. And so I like to ground this with making sure that we understand what futures thinking is. And futures thinking offers a way for addressing or helping to shape the future.
So it's not about predicting and gazing into a crystal ball of what the future will be, but exploring what it could be in order to try and exercise agency within that, to shape a future that we would like to see. Now, I don't know about you. I think a lot of us are feeling that our agency is suddenly a little bit less strong than it was, and maybe there's a lot of pressures on us, but I think it's really important, especially in times like this, that we take stock of the agency that we do have and the opportunities we do have to shape the future, because otherwise it just gets really, really depressing really fast.
And I think all of us, for both our personal lives, our family, et cetera, we want a hopeful future for ourselves. So our goal is to think about how policies, strategies and actions can promote a desirable future and envision what that desirable future is. And also think about, OK, how do we head off things that are undesirable. Can we see things coming at us and say like, oh, throw a block or something that can help us with that.
So our goal is strategic dialogue, widening our understanding of possibly strengthening leadership and ultimately informing decision making. So ultimately, this is a pretty synthesized thing, which is the goal is identifying, assessing, and perhaps shaping the way systems and relationships develop over time. The aspects of this are careful and thoughtful analysis of current conditions, pressures on the system, risks, resources, and potential implications of current trends.
We need process that reveals potential futures. It doesn't dictate or predict a particular future. And then we can develop strategies, policies, action plans that move us towards those desirable futures while also avoiding undesirable futures. Our goal being purposeful action to increase the probability, plausibility and feasibility of desired futures. Now, one common mistake that I think is actually momentarily less common is conflating how we want the world to be, or how we believe the world should be with the way that the world actually is.
So it is really important in futures thinking work that you are grounded in realities. And so, because the future will emerge from the reality of today, we can have our goals and our aspirations, but we need to make sure were acting and planning on the world as it exists. If not, we can actually have unintended consequences of amplifying undesirable futures because we weren't reality based in the things that we chose.
So, as Leah said, some of the things we've done in the future is predict consequences of current actions. And you could pick like the consequence of this or that governmental thing. But right now it gets to a catastrophe quickly if you start doing that because there's so many things that have been so disrupted. So I went back to the training I've done on foresight, thinking I had the chance to spend a week in what's considered the Cadillac of futures thinking trainings from the Institute on the future.
And I went back to this toolkit that they gave us, and I was like, all right, what tools do you use when things are really unsettled? And it's really hard to see good pathways forward. And I used those and I actually invented this tool. So we'll see if you like it, which is called finding solid ground. So many things are shifting under our feet. It can feel like we're actually trying to walk on water right now, as opposed to on solid ground.
So what I want you to do is imagine with me. Visualize in your head that it's 20 years from now. Now, whether you anticipate that you'll be working in your particular role. But imagine that we are going to have this industry 20 years from now. Our industries, tools, technologies, and services may look very different. It's certainly the case that if we went back 20 years to 2005, we look a lot different now.
I know it's very common. We're like, oh, there's so much the same that we should still be changing, but we do look different. And we will look different. But some things are still going to matter really deeply. So in the face of shifting policies and technological change. What are the elements of our work that you believe will endure over time that are still going to be there.
So in 20 years, and I'll just toss out an example, do you believe that we will still be doing peer review now. Maybe we'll be doing it differently, but fundamentally we'll still have this construct operating. Will we still have editors. Will we still have I mean, what are some of those roles. Will publishers still be about creating a scholarly record that is vetted, or will they be acting more like printers and disseminating knowledge but not trying to vet it.
So what are the current roles that the industry has. Do you see as enduring over those 20 years. And another way to ask yourself this question is, what does society need from this industry. What does it need for us to figure out how to persevere with. OK, so we're going to take some time for you at your tables to each list for yourself 3 to five things that you believe will endure in scholarly publishing over the next 10 to 20 years.
So what are those enduring purposes, values, roles, or relationships. OK, so I'm going to give you some time to think about that for three to come up with your list of 3 to five. And so we'll have semi silence because I know you'll start talking to each other, but I'll give you a signal when it's time to move to a small group discussion at your table.
When you do that at that table, make sure you meet each other. Introduce yourself. Share those. Your goal at the end of your small group discussion is together to identify two to three enduring elements that you all agree on, or that you're willing to agree on for the sake of this afternoon. So start by yourself, 3 to five of your own, that you'll then contribute to your small group discussion, where you'll come to consensus on 2 to three.
Starting to see people pick up their phones. That's usually a sign there's done brainstorming. So your next task at your table is to share with each other the ideas that you came up with. What will endure. You might find some common ground as you're doing the sharing. You might be all over the map. Either way is fine.
There's no right or wrong answer here. But as I said then, your goal is as a group to come up with two or three that you'd like to work with that you feel are really compelling as the enduring roles are what will persevere that solid ground for our industry. You're going to have about 10 minutes to do this. I'm going to be generally monitoring, but you have a little bit of time.
Your groups are kind of big, so make sure you meet each other, share out, and eventually I am going to ask each group to share at least one enduring role with us collectively. So great 10 minutes OK. The exact time to make people stop talking is when they're deep in it. Because you haven't gotten bored yet. Some of you are so deep in it that you're only now hearing my voice, which is great.
Now, you may not have actually been able to come to your two or three at your table yet, and that's all right. I loved hearing some of the dialogue as I was walking around and including the oh, I hope it'll endure and society needs it, but I'm not sure if it'll make it, which is an interesting thing for us to think about then, if we think it's important and society needs it.
Like are there ways we could increase the chances it endures. So yeah, these questions were they're not the same question. But they were just to get you thinking generatively. So, knowing that you may not have come to your top two or three yet, which is totally fine. I would love to hear what some of these things are that sort of came to the fore in your discussions, or that you grappled with in your discussion. So Leah's got a mic that she'll bring to you if anyone's willing to speak for their table, if their table is ready to be spoken for, even just for themselves, if they're not quite ready.
Oh, good. We have a volunteer. Thank you. We had some consensus on two topics for sure. We thought that some form of peer review or validation potentially involving humans would continue to be present. A few of us also mentioned dissemination, hosting, preservation of some sort of content. And then we had a third, much more murky one.
But I'll try to wrap it together. We, a couple of us, mentioned the continued need for authorship. People thinking about ideas, thought leaders, people in the mix. And copyright was mentioned. And I wanted to relate that because if you're going to have authors in the mix, you need to have authors who have rights over their work in some form.
And we were trying to relate editorial independence and attribution to that. That's baggy, but I think you could put it together in some more concise way with more time. OK, great. Thank you. Well, you packed a lot into those 10 minutes. I think we said a lot of the same things, believe it or not.
And I think it was a good arc we came up with print will still be around in some form, including digital. Wait, I just. Let's take a moment. Well, look, they said print was going to be dead. 20 years ago. And it's still around slowly. We said authoritative standards, which is kind of what you guys said before.
And we said consumers that need information. So you're always going to have sick people and you're going to have doctors who need to treat them, and they need to know what kind of content information they need. And we said truth experts, which I think is along the lines of some of the things you said. Did I miss anything. Perfect we did say.
That who's next. Yeah, as we say at ACM. Computers are just a phase. Yeah print, print. Yeah, I think I could just if I had to summarize in one word our table. Everybody said something about humans.
The human element, human aspects. I would like to see humans still be around in 20 years, so. Oh, I see, I see. Did you say content validation is something that will be enduring. Yeah it's OK if they're sort of repeated or related. Then one more in the back there too.
Yeah we said content validation in particularly in the fields of vetting and reproducibility because it's with this industry in place, we can do that at scale, which is a lot more difficult when you have a lot of different of decentralized pockets. Great a couple more in the back. Yeah Leah, just make the rounds. Hi, all. We were talking over here a lot about this theme of integrity and the variety of different ways it would appear, including through strong metadata practices and perhaps even different metadata practices than we have now.
Different kinds of trust indicators indicated through metadata, through the continued usage of strong citational practices, so people can understand where information is coming from and where it's going, and also some form of a continued peer review process. Thank you. Coming to y'all next.
So one thing that hasn't been mentioned that we thought was worth mentioning is I will probably still be around, still be going strong. And then just the need to adapt accessibility to the content being produced. There's always going to be populations that can't access the content in certain ways, and especially people who have different needs.
So just having the ability to adapt to those needs. Anything else. All right. Fantastic thank you. And sorry, I just wanted to add one thing that we touched on a little bit. Things that are not good that may still be around OK great. Like inequality of access to information. OK thank you.
Thank you. Yes we had a number of different things that we thought would still be around where we had consensus. Most of us around the table was around quality control through peer review. Peer review might look very different in 20 years time from what it looks like today, but there has to be some kind of quality control otherwise, why are we all here.
We also think that branding will be important. Whether that's the journal brand, whether that's a journal conglomeration, whether that's a publisher authors will still want to be able to be associated with a brand because that helps to define their career. That might change in terms of is it a journal specific. We think curation and dissemination is an important role.
It may not. There was a disagreement, actually, we were talking about subscription models. And one of my colleagues here thought that the subscription model should exist and others may didn't. So I think how content is being accessed, there will still be a method of access. Who pays for that and how. It's paid for either regional or national and international may change and you can already see it change with reading published deals.
And I think there will also as you know. That's it, that's it. They're the ones. They're the ones we had. They don't miss anything out. No sorry. Oh, yeah. Metrics are will the impact factor be here in 20 years time. Yeah, I think there will be metrics.
Of course, as long as there are humans. And people wanted to measure themselves will be metrics to measure themselves with, whether that's the impact factor or something else we'll have to see. But yeah. OK excuse me. These are really great. Oh, is there one more.
One more. Yeah, yeah. What's it. Yeah, it sounds like there was a lot of consensus across the room here too. But one additional aspect we talked about was governance, governing structures, standards at higher levels that even outside of publishing that would impact as well too.
So great. These are fantastic. And I think already as I was hearing at the tables, you can start to see how even asking ourselves this question puts a different lens on maybe what we're like is coming over our news alerts or the New York Times headlines because it lets us find our feet a little bit and say, oh, wait, we have some very fundamental things that we believe need to continue, will continue and that society needs from us.
But at the same time, we can recognize that some of these things are potentially under threat. But at the same time, there's also trends that might also be supporting them. Continuing so at your tables I gave you a chart. I told you no peeking. Now you're not peeking. Now you're doing the right thing. And pass those out at your table.
There's a pile of white handouts. And on that set of handouts. The PESTLE framework is a categorization taxonomy of trends we can understand happening very generally in the world. So these are not trends that are specific to scholarly communications. These are trends that are happening generally societally. We've got and they're happening not just nationally.
Many of these trends are global. Even if they're not globally agreed upon. They're happening to all of us at the same time. So some of these trends are political trends, some are economic trends, some are social trends, some are technological trends, some are legal trends, and some are environmental trends. Now, just because we're all very people of the word, this is not from any particular place.
This is a list that you compile from doing a lot of readings about trending and trendspotting. So these are things that you'll see people talking about as the general trends across the PESTLE framework. So our next question then is to review that chart of those PESTEL trends and choose one of those categories do all of the PESTEL categories in the next 10 minutes, pick one and identify the degree to which these trends might have industry specific threats to one or more of our enduring roles or responsibilities.
And then at your tables, you could also then discuss how these threats might be mitigated. Now this always gets a little trickier because in reality, our ability to assess a threat is often more at the organizational level than at the industry level. And our response is going to be more organizational than industry. So you have to manage the fact here that this would be a very different conversation back at your own place of work, where you're all in one organization, whereas here you're in multiple organizations, so your respective organizations might not experience the same things as a threat as other organizations do, and you might not have the same capacity for different mitigation strategies.
So here's where we get a little hand-wavy discuss amongst yourself, but recognize that there's just some limitations to how you could mitigate. And then part of mitigation can also be enhancing our readiness to handle what's coming at us. So are there ways we can strengthen our organizations. So we'll go ahead and give you another 10 minutes to think about these enduring roles, think about the threats and which of those might be most pressing and what could be done about them.
OK, there is a lot of good dialogue going on in the room, which is why I'm now going to prevent it from continuing. No I'm not. See, this is how engaged people are. You just keep talking until a bunch of people start to realize, oh, somebody else is talking just a little louder than I am.
So, obviously did not come up with full mitigation strategies or identify, plans of action in great detail in 10 minutes. But I thought we'd go ahead and take some time in our final time together here to reflect on the process or share an insight that you might have had. Or, I mean, if you have a full blown action plan, I think we'd love to hear it too. So if I could invite people who might be willing to share their reflection or their thought from their dialogue at their tables for the good of the whole for us to continue thinking about this a little bit.
So, yeah, we spent a lot of time on risk. We focused on social and some of the things we said that are going to impact us. There's the anti-science agenda. Inequity and content and research. Because if we the researchers, don't have the funding, then we don't have a business to that. We talked about the trend toward the private sector.
So everything is going to be product driven. And like pharma driven, everyone's going to be sponsored and buy in, take $400 million planes. Trust and the lack of science. The lack of trust in science is going to challenge us. And then we see war. And then we said entry level positions being lost to AI.
Sorry we didn't talk. Hi we also spoke a lot about the social aspects and no, we did not even get to mitigation. So still no solutions from table 5 over here. But we spoke a lot about the tension between the rising individuality and lack of community, but the need for connecting and still collaboration and science collaboration across the scholarly enterprise.
But that we lack of return to work and things like this and how that really was two big pieces in opposite tension to each other. I'm not saying it very well, but you all know what I mean. But anybody else at the table want to try on that one. That was the big that was the big piece for us. Yeah so that's interesting in that one. If I can just react to it for a moment is like this tension between which is we're feeling a individualism, a lack of connected, a lack of people having this sense of being part of a community and then saying, OK, but we need that community if we're going to persevere in some of these roles that we're going to have.
Some of the issues around peer review might actually, for example, be related to this. Like when people are starting to say, what's in it for me. If I do peer review as opposed to how do we collectively keep this enterprise going, that's important to all of us. Those are really different frames. And so if you're only addressing it at the level of oh gosh, we just have to find more people. You're not necessarily getting to that common cause.
And so if we thought about it, I mean, I'm totally making this up right now. But if we thought about peer review as a problem of community, would we then come up with a different strategy for addressing this challenge. Would we maybe go towards OK, how do we build communities around peer review. How do we make sure that people are supported in peer review where they get social status from peer reviewing.
I mean, I will tell you, increasingly people are like, that's dumb. Why are you peer reviewing. You're wasting your time. So maybe you've lit upon I don't know. We should do more research, et cetera but that's an interesting thing that if we ask ourselves, OK, if that's causing a problem for peer review, am I trying to solve it by solving individuals issues like, oh, maybe we pay them or whatever.
Or should I be thinking, oh wait, maybe we've lost our community around this. And what does it mean to build community around peer review rather than reinforce an individualism? Still not a full blown mitigation strategy, but it's very provocative to realize that tension between what is and what we need. Other groups. Oh, yes.
Here I'll come to you and then. Yeah, this is kind of a flippant one. I just wanted to say it anyway. We did choose social, and we talked about if we have another health crisis. Pandemic could further erode trust in science. Mitigation strategy. Here's a flippant part. Kill preprint servers.
But serious response is really somehow come up with a kill preprint servers that cause all the misinformation during the last pandemic. A more serious one would be to come up with more effective ways to communicate science to the broader which is kind of a theme of this meeting anyway. Yeah So there's a great example like for our collective public health, we need people to trust in experts in science, in medicine, et cetera.
Even recognizing that people who are in these areas in the sciences sometimes fallible, et cetera. But if we just don't trust it at all, it's going to be really bad. So yeah, if we have that now, if we had another health crisis, which I know some people were a little worried that the flu could still be headed that way, what would it look like this time compared to what it even looked like for COVID, even with all the challenges we had.
Because I think many communities did pull together during COVID and did heroic things together to help people be safe. Would we do that now. Yeah we did talk about technological risks, and one was information oversaturation because there's just too much content that's going to be out there. Second was potential cyber attacks on sensitive research topics.
So if you're studying infectious diseases or new materials and you find if you're bad actors, get in there and get access to that. And with I can do really bad things. And then the final one was just technology. Literacy is that the technology is changing so fast, and it's hard for the industry to keep up with everything that they need to know. So absolutely, it's great to hear somebody chose a category other than social to not that social isn't good, but you never know with this.
Sometimes every table chooses something different. And other times everyone's all in on the same thing. We are almost at the end of our time. So I just want to leave you with this quote from Kierkegaard, which is that ultimately life can only be understood backwards. We can look back. Can ask ourselves, why didn't we see some of these things coming, but we can only live it forwards.
And so hopefully this session here today has helped you find your feet, find solid ground and prepare to persevere. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks everybody. I'll just say as well that as always, Leah and I are happy to stay and talk with people. Also, you are free to use these materials in your own organization if you would like to and if you even want the word version, just email me and it'll be in your inbox.
So thank you so much.
Segment:0 .
Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. I know there's still some folks making their way in, but we're going to go ahead and get started here. My name is Leah Hynes. I'm the executive director of the Charleston hub, and I'm super happy to welcome all of you to today's Charleston trendspotting initiative session.
Thank you all for being here. I'd like to start with just a little bit of background and context. For those of you who have maybe never heard of the Charleston hub, or have never been to one of our trendspotting sessions before. The hub is the umbrella organization for the Charleston library conference against the grain, Catena magazine, and a host of other resources and news sources for librarians, publishers, and vendors in the scholarly information industry.
The conference was founded in 1980 by Katina strauch. At the time, she was a newly hired collection development librarian at the College of Charleston. She had no travel budget to attend conferences and meetings with the big names in the publishing world, so she couldn't go to them. She invited them to come to her instead and had a small group of thought leaders meet in Charleston, South Carolina.
And that tradition continues now, each year with a collegial gathering in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, each November. It's grown from around 25 people, with her initial meeting to around 2,500 last year. We also have virtual conferences that we call Charleston in between, and a podcast on topics in information science and scholarly communications. Our newest publication is Catena magazine that I mentioned a minute ago.
It's named after our visionary founder, and it's written by and for the global library community. We were acquired by the nonprofit publisher annual reviews in October 2023, and we're super happy to be on board with the team there. The goal of the Charleston hub remains to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues that are important to all of us and to tackle strategies and solutions to approach those issues together collaboratively.
And all of this background information is just to show how this trend spotting initiative really grew out of the goals for the hub being put into action. The Charleston trendspotting initiative started out of a conversation at the conference several years ago that stressed the importance of librarians in particular. But all of us in the industry being proactive instead of reactive about the trends and issues that are coming down the pipelines in the near future that are going to impact the world of libraries and scholarly publishing.
We met for the first time as an organized group in 2017. We called it the future lab project at that time. And then in 2018, we met again with a renewed focus and format and the updated title of the trend lab, and the initiative in its current format has been included at the Charleston annual meetings and SSB since 2018. So some of you may have been here before. But each time we have different topics, different small group activities, different discussions, all with the same mission and goal to discuss the potential impacts of trends and the information industry and scholarly communications.
Last year, we expanded for the first time internationally to host a session at the 2024 Lieber conference in Limassol, Cyprus. So that was really exciting as well. Some of the future thinking tools that we've used in the past have been looking at signals and drivers. We've created a newspaper with headlines from the future.
We've used a structured brainstorming tool called the futures wheel, and we have flipped the future by looking at known facts or trends that are happening now and saying, how do we get here. And what would it take for us to get to the opposite of this fact in the future. We have many repeat attendees that I've mentioned before. I know some of you here have are in the fan club for raise your hand if you've attended a Charleston trendspotting session before.
Awesome Thank you all for being here. Many of the folks that I've talked to before who have attended these sessions say that it's a great opportunity to sit and think deeply and focus on these issues in a conversation with their peers. And I hope you feel that way together after our time together today. Brief look at our agenda.
As usual, Lisa is going to kick us off with looking at futures, thinking 101 for just setting the stage for our discussions together today. And then, in light of recent events and the state of the world that we live in right now, we've adjusted our approach this year to start with finding solid ground. We're going to do a small group activity to remind ourselves of what matters and what will endure.
Then we'll look at some pestle trends to prepare. To persevere. Attempting to identify and mitigate threats. And finally, we'll close with large group discussion and wrap up. And with that, I'll turn things over to Lisa. Thank you very much. Thanks, Leah.
I think it's great that this partnership between SSP and Charleston continues to bring this forward. Now, I know that some of you may have seen this and not read the word workshop in the discussion. So if you're panicking now, I just want you to know that if you decide this isn't the session for you, we take no offense. It's the kind of session that it is and you're going to be dialoguing and discussing.
We're not going to be. I do have a chart of trends to give you, but that's not the point. The point is what do we do in light of the way the world is changing. And so I like to ground this with making sure that we understand what futures thinking is. And futures thinking offers a way for addressing or helping to shape the future.
So it's not about predicting and gazing into a crystal ball of what the future will be, but exploring what it could be in order to try and exercise agency within that, to shape a future that we would like to see. Now, I don't know about you. I think a lot of us are feeling that our agency is suddenly a little bit less strong than it was, and maybe there's a lot of pressures on us, but I think it's really important, especially in times like this, that we take stock of the agency that we do have and the opportunities we do have to shape the future, because otherwise it just gets really, really depressing really fast.
And I think all of us, for both our personal lives, our family, et cetera, we want a hopeful future for ourselves. So our goal is to think about how policies, strategies and actions can promote a desirable future and envision what that desirable future is. And also think about, OK, how do we head off things that are undesirable. Can we see things coming at us and say like, oh, throw a block or something that can help us with that.
So our goal is strategic dialogue, widening our understanding of possibly strengthening leadership and ultimately informing decision making. So ultimately, this is a pretty synthesized thing, which is the goal is identifying, assessing, and perhaps shaping the way systems and relationships develop over time. The aspects of this are careful and thoughtful analysis of current conditions, pressures on the system, risks, resources, and potential implications of current trends.
We need process that reveals potential futures. It doesn't dictate or predict a particular future. And then we can develop strategies, policies, action plans that move us towards those desirable futures while also avoiding undesirable futures. Our goal being purposeful action to increase the probability, plausibility and feasibility of desired futures. Now, one common mistake that I think is actually momentarily less common is conflating how we want the world to be, or how we believe the world should be with the way that the world actually is.
So it is really important in futures thinking work that you are grounded in realities. And so, because the future will emerge from the reality of today, we can have our goals and our aspirations, but we need to make sure were acting and planning on the world as it exists. If not, we can actually have unintended consequences of amplifying undesirable futures because we weren't reality based in the things that we chose.
So, as Leah said, some of the things we've done in the future is predict consequences of current actions. And you could pick like the consequence of this or that governmental thing. But right now it gets to a catastrophe quickly if you start doing that because there's so many things that have been so disrupted. So I went back to the training I've done on foresight, thinking I had the chance to spend a week in what's considered the Cadillac of futures thinking trainings from the Institute on the future.
And I went back to this toolkit that they gave us, and I was like, all right, what tools do you use when things are really unsettled? And it's really hard to see good pathways forward. And I used those and I actually invented this tool. So we'll see if you like it, which is called finding solid ground. So many things are shifting under our feet. It can feel like we're actually trying to walk on water right now, as opposed to on solid ground.
So what I want you to do is imagine with me. Visualize in your head that it's 20 years from now. Now, whether you anticipate that you'll be working in your particular role. But imagine that we are going to have this industry 20 years from now. Our industries, tools, technologies, and services may look very different. It's certainly the case that if we went back 20 years to 2005, we look a lot different now.
I know it's very common. We're like, oh, there's so much the same that we should still be changing, but we do look different. And we will look different. But some things are still going to matter really deeply. So in the face of shifting policies and technological change. What are the elements of our work that you believe will endure over time that are still going to be there.
So in 20 years, and I'll just toss out an example, do you believe that we will still be doing peer review now. Maybe we'll be doing it differently, but fundamentally we'll still have this construct operating. Will we still have editors. Will we still have I mean, what are some of those roles. Will publishers still be about creating a scholarly record that is vetted, or will they be acting more like printers and disseminating knowledge but not trying to vet it.
So what are the current roles that the industry has. Do you see as enduring over those 20 years. And another way to ask yourself this question is, what does society need from this industry. What does it need for us to figure out how to persevere with. OK, so we're going to take some time for you at your tables to each list for yourself 3 to five things that you believe will endure in scholarly publishing over the next 10 to 20 years.
So what are those enduring purposes, values, roles, or relationships. OK, so I'm going to give you some time to think about that for three to come up with your list of 3 to five. And so we'll have semi silence because I know you'll start talking to each other, but I'll give you a signal when it's time to move to a small group discussion at your table.
When you do that at that table, make sure you meet each other. Introduce yourself. Share those. Your goal at the end of your small group discussion is together to identify two to three enduring elements that you all agree on, or that you're willing to agree on for the sake of this afternoon. So start by yourself, 3 to five of your own, that you'll then contribute to your small group discussion, where you'll come to consensus on 2 to three.
Starting to see people pick up their phones. That's usually a sign there's done brainstorming. So your next task at your table is to share with each other the ideas that you came up with. What will endure. You might find some common ground as you're doing the sharing. You might be all over the map. Either way is fine.
There's no right or wrong answer here. But as I said then, your goal is as a group to come up with two or three that you'd like to work with that you feel are really compelling as the enduring roles are what will persevere that solid ground for our industry. You're going to have about 10 minutes to do this. I'm going to be generally monitoring, but you have a little bit of time.
Your groups are kind of big, so make sure you meet each other, share out, and eventually I am going to ask each group to share at least one enduring role with us collectively. So great 10 minutes OK. The exact time to make people stop talking is when they're deep in it. Because you haven't gotten bored yet. Some of you are so deep in it that you're only now hearing my voice, which is great.
Now, you may not have actually been able to come to your two or three at your table yet, and that's all right. I loved hearing some of the dialogue as I was walking around and including the oh, I hope it'll endure and society needs it, but I'm not sure if it'll make it, which is an interesting thing for us to think about then, if we think it's important and society needs it.
Like are there ways we could increase the chances it endures. So yeah, these questions were they're not the same question. But they were just to get you thinking generatively. So, knowing that you may not have come to your top two or three yet, which is totally fine. I would love to hear what some of these things are that sort of came to the fore in your discussions, or that you grappled with in your discussion. So Leah's got a mic that she'll bring to you if anyone's willing to speak for their table, if their table is ready to be spoken for, even just for themselves, if they're not quite ready.
Oh, good. We have a volunteer. Thank you. We had some consensus on two topics for sure. We thought that some form of peer review or validation potentially involving humans would continue to be present. A few of us also mentioned dissemination, hosting, preservation of some sort of content. And then we had a third, much more murky one.
But I'll try to wrap it together. We, a couple of us, mentioned the continued need for authorship. People thinking about ideas, thought leaders, people in the mix. And copyright was mentioned. And I wanted to relate that because if you're going to have authors in the mix, you need to have authors who have rights over their work in some form.
And we were trying to relate editorial independence and attribution to that. That's baggy, but I think you could put it together in some more concise way with more time. OK, great. Thank you. Well, you packed a lot into those 10 minutes. I think we said a lot of the same things, believe it or not.
And I think it was a good arc we came up with print will still be around in some form, including digital. Wait, I just. Let's take a moment. Well, look, they said print was going to be dead. 20 years ago. And it's still around slowly. We said authoritative standards, which is kind of what you guys said before.
And we said consumers that need information. So you're always going to have sick people and you're going to have doctors who need to treat them, and they need to know what kind of content information they need. And we said truth experts, which I think is along the lines of some of the things you said. Did I miss anything. Perfect we did say.
That who's next. Yeah, as we say at ACM. Computers are just a phase. Yeah print, print. Yeah, I think I could just if I had to summarize in one word our table. Everybody said something about humans.
The human element, human aspects. I would like to see humans still be around in 20 years, so. Oh, I see, I see. Did you say content validation is something that will be enduring. Yeah it's OK if they're sort of repeated or related. Then one more in the back there too.
Yeah we said content validation in particularly in the fields of vetting and reproducibility because it's with this industry in place, we can do that at scale, which is a lot more difficult when you have a lot of different of decentralized pockets. Great a couple more in the back. Yeah Leah, just make the rounds. Hi, all. We were talking over here a lot about this theme of integrity and the variety of different ways it would appear, including through strong metadata practices and perhaps even different metadata practices than we have now.
Different kinds of trust indicators indicated through metadata, through the continued usage of strong citational practices, so people can understand where information is coming from and where it's going, and also some form of a continued peer review process. Thank you. Coming to y'all next.
So one thing that hasn't been mentioned that we thought was worth mentioning is I will probably still be around, still be going strong. And then just the need to adapt accessibility to the content being produced. There's always going to be populations that can't access the content in certain ways, and especially people who have different needs.
So just having the ability to adapt to those needs. Anything else. All right. Fantastic thank you. And sorry, I just wanted to add one thing that we touched on a little bit. Things that are not good that may still be around OK great. Like inequality of access to information. OK thank you.
Thank you. Yes we had a number of different things that we thought would still be around where we had consensus. Most of us around the table was around quality control through peer review. Peer review might look very different in 20 years time from what it looks like today, but there has to be some kind of quality control otherwise, why are we all here.
We also think that branding will be important. Whether that's the journal brand, whether that's a journal conglomeration, whether that's a publisher authors will still want to be able to be associated with a brand because that helps to define their career. That might change in terms of is it a journal specific. We think curation and dissemination is an important role.
It may not. There was a disagreement, actually, we were talking about subscription models. And one of my colleagues here thought that the subscription model should exist and others may didn't. So I think how content is being accessed, there will still be a method of access. Who pays for that and how. It's paid for either regional or national and international may change and you can already see it change with reading published deals.
And I think there will also as you know. That's it, that's it. They're the ones. They're the ones we had. They don't miss anything out. No sorry. Oh, yeah. Metrics are will the impact factor be here in 20 years time. Yeah, I think there will be metrics.
Of course, as long as there are humans. And people wanted to measure themselves will be metrics to measure themselves with, whether that's the impact factor or something else we'll have to see. But yeah. OK excuse me. These are really great. Oh, is there one more.
One more. Yeah, yeah. What's it. Yeah, it sounds like there was a lot of consensus across the room here too. But one additional aspect we talked about was governance, governing structures, standards at higher levels that even outside of publishing that would impact as well too.
So great. These are fantastic. And I think already as I was hearing at the tables, you can start to see how even asking ourselves this question puts a different lens on maybe what we're like is coming over our news alerts or the New York Times headlines because it lets us find our feet a little bit and say, oh, wait, we have some very fundamental things that we believe need to continue, will continue and that society needs from us.
But at the same time, we can recognize that some of these things are potentially under threat. But at the same time, there's also trends that might also be supporting them. Continuing so at your tables I gave you a chart. I told you no peeking. Now you're not peeking. Now you're doing the right thing. And pass those out at your table.
There's a pile of white handouts. And on that set of handouts. The PESTLE framework is a categorization taxonomy of trends we can understand happening very generally in the world. So these are not trends that are specific to scholarly communications. These are trends that are happening generally societally. We've got and they're happening not just nationally.
Many of these trends are global. Even if they're not globally agreed upon. They're happening to all of us at the same time. So some of these trends are political trends, some are economic trends, some are social trends, some are technological trends, some are legal trends, and some are environmental trends. Now, just because we're all very people of the word, this is not from any particular place.
This is a list that you compile from doing a lot of readings about trending and trendspotting. So these are things that you'll see people talking about as the general trends across the PESTLE framework. So our next question then is to review that chart of those PESTEL trends and choose one of those categories do all of the PESTEL categories in the next 10 minutes, pick one and identify the degree to which these trends might have industry specific threats to one or more of our enduring roles or responsibilities.
And then at your tables, you could also then discuss how these threats might be mitigated. Now this always gets a little trickier because in reality, our ability to assess a threat is often more at the organizational level than at the industry level. And our response is going to be more organizational than industry. So you have to manage the fact here that this would be a very different conversation back at your own place of work, where you're all in one organization, whereas here you're in multiple organizations, so your respective organizations might not experience the same things as a threat as other organizations do, and you might not have the same capacity for different mitigation strategies.
So here's where we get a little hand-wavy discuss amongst yourself, but recognize that there's just some limitations to how you could mitigate. And then part of mitigation can also be enhancing our readiness to handle what's coming at us. So are there ways we can strengthen our organizations. So we'll go ahead and give you another 10 minutes to think about these enduring roles, think about the threats and which of those might be most pressing and what could be done about them.
OK, there is a lot of good dialogue going on in the room, which is why I'm now going to prevent it from continuing. No I'm not. See, this is how engaged people are. You just keep talking until a bunch of people start to realize, oh, somebody else is talking just a little louder than I am.
So, obviously did not come up with full mitigation strategies or identify, plans of action in great detail in 10 minutes. But I thought we'd go ahead and take some time in our final time together here to reflect on the process or share an insight that you might have had. Or, I mean, if you have a full blown action plan, I think we'd love to hear it too. So if I could invite people who might be willing to share their reflection or their thought from their dialogue at their tables for the good of the whole for us to continue thinking about this a little bit.
So, yeah, we spent a lot of time on risk. We focused on social and some of the things we said that are going to impact us. There's the anti-science agenda. Inequity and content and research. Because if we the researchers, don't have the funding, then we don't have a business to that. We talked about the trend toward the private sector.
So everything is going to be product driven. And like pharma driven, everyone's going to be sponsored and buy in, take $400 million planes. Trust and the lack of science. The lack of trust in science is going to challenge us. And then we see war. And then we said entry level positions being lost to AI.
Sorry we didn't talk. Hi we also spoke a lot about the social aspects and no, we did not even get to mitigation. So still no solutions from table 5 over here. But we spoke a lot about the tension between the rising individuality and lack of community, but the need for connecting and still collaboration and science collaboration across the scholarly enterprise.
But that we lack of return to work and things like this and how that really was two big pieces in opposite tension to each other. I'm not saying it very well, but you all know what I mean. But anybody else at the table want to try on that one. That was the big that was the big piece for us. Yeah so that's interesting in that one. If I can just react to it for a moment is like this tension between which is we're feeling a individualism, a lack of connected, a lack of people having this sense of being part of a community and then saying, OK, but we need that community if we're going to persevere in some of these roles that we're going to have.
Some of the issues around peer review might actually, for example, be related to this. Like when people are starting to say, what's in it for me. If I do peer review as opposed to how do we collectively keep this enterprise going, that's important to all of us. Those are really different frames. And so if you're only addressing it at the level of oh gosh, we just have to find more people. You're not necessarily getting to that common cause.
And so if we thought about it, I mean, I'm totally making this up right now. But if we thought about peer review as a problem of community, would we then come up with a different strategy for addressing this challenge. Would we maybe go towards OK, how do we build communities around peer review. How do we make sure that people are supported in peer review where they get social status from peer reviewing.
I mean, I will tell you, increasingly people are like, that's dumb. Why are you peer reviewing. You're wasting your time. So maybe you've lit upon I don't know. We should do more research, et cetera but that's an interesting thing that if we ask ourselves, OK, if that's causing a problem for peer review, am I trying to solve it by solving individuals issues like, oh, maybe we pay them or whatever.
Or should I be thinking, oh wait, maybe we've lost our community around this. And what does it mean to build community around peer review rather than reinforce an individualism? Still not a full blown mitigation strategy, but it's very provocative to realize that tension between what is and what we need. Other groups. Oh, yes.
Here I'll come to you and then. Yeah, this is kind of a flippant one. I just wanted to say it anyway. We did choose social, and we talked about if we have another health crisis. Pandemic could further erode trust in science. Mitigation strategy. Here's a flippant part. Kill preprint servers.
But serious response is really somehow come up with a kill preprint servers that cause all the misinformation during the last pandemic. A more serious one would be to come up with more effective ways to communicate science to the broader which is kind of a theme of this meeting anyway. Yeah So there's a great example like for our collective public health, we need people to trust in experts in science, in medicine, et cetera.
Even recognizing that people who are in these areas in the sciences sometimes fallible, et cetera. But if we just don't trust it at all, it's going to be really bad. So yeah, if we have that now, if we had another health crisis, which I know some people were a little worried that the flu could still be headed that way, what would it look like this time compared to what it even looked like for COVID, even with all the challenges we had.
Because I think many communities did pull together during COVID and did heroic things together to help people be safe. Would we do that now. Yeah we did talk about technological risks, and one was information oversaturation because there's just too much content that's going to be out there. Second was potential cyber attacks on sensitive research topics.
So if you're studying infectious diseases or new materials and you find if you're bad actors, get in there and get access to that. And with I can do really bad things. And then the final one was just technology. Literacy is that the technology is changing so fast, and it's hard for the industry to keep up with everything that they need to know. So absolutely, it's great to hear somebody chose a category other than social to not that social isn't good, but you never know with this.
Sometimes every table chooses something different. And other times everyone's all in on the same thing. We are almost at the end of our time. So I just want to leave you with this quote from Kierkegaard, which is that ultimately life can only be understood backwards. We can look back. Can ask ourselves, why didn't we see some of these things coming, but we can only live it forwards.
And so hopefully this session here today has helped you find your feet, find solid ground and prepare to persevere. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks everybody. I'll just say as well that as always, Leah and I are happy to stay and talk with people. Also, you are free to use these materials in your own organization if you would like to and if you even want the word version, just email me and it'll be in your inbox.
So thank you so much.
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