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The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Three Trends to Be Ready For
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The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Three Trends to Be Ready For
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Segment:0 .
Welcome attendees. We're just giving a moment for everybody to file in.
We have a lot of folks registered for today's webinar. OK looks like the entry gates are slowing down a little bit. Hello Thank you for joining us for today's discussion. The future of publishing the fifth event in SSPS 2022 webinar series. I'm Jason point lead of the sb education committees webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank SSPS 2022 education program sponsors RFA j editorial OpenAthens silver chair 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000.
We are grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the chat feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with speakers and other participants. This one hour session will be recorded and made available to registrants following today's event.
A quick note on SPS code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape the future CSV programming. It's now my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's discussion. Shirley decker, lucky content director for SRN, a division of Elsevier research products group. Shirley and if you can turn off the sharing screen that way, I can share my screen.
We're so delighted to have all of you here with us today. Let me just. Someone's I can't share what other participants. It's not working. The screen should work now. All right. It should show us using.
Think about the future. You can have one. Is that up? It is tricky, but it's. I think you're showing your note screen rather than your presentation screen. Sorry, everybody. So yeah, if you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
And this webinar is a time for us to do just that. Spend some time thinking about the future. We're really excited to have you join us and I know is going to be a super exciting time for everybody. We have some expert people who are going to be exploring their different views on what the future might look like. All of these people have spent a lot of time thinking about it on their own.
At the end of their presentations, there will be 20 minutes for what I hope is a robust Q&A and discussion time. If you have questions during the time, drop them in the chat and we'll be looking at them near the end and we will be doing a couple of quick polls as we go through. So first, let's oops, sorry. First, let's spend a little time getting to our panelists. And Gabriel is senior vice president of global strategic networks at elsevier, a large publishing company.
The team she manages engages with key stakeholders across the research enterprise to establish strategic collaborations, use data analytics to address societal change challenges. She is very closely involved in the work that Elsevier did recently on creating a research Futures report that scopes out possible future scenarios, and she'll be sharing some insights from that report. And from her own perspective.
Patrick sharp is the commercial director of dA that's an academic publishing services company. And his role is centered on understanding how academic publishing market is evolving in a time of continual technological innovation. He created a trends in academic publishing survey and a white paper. He holds roundtables, and he's going to be sharing the results of those reports, holding up a mirror to the industry as a bit of a new site or a new person in the field, since he has just joined this area in the last couple of years.
Liz scarpelli is the founding director and acquiring editor at the University of Cincinnati press and Cincinnati library publishing services, just as sits on the board of the library publisher coalition and the Midwest independent Publishers Association. In her current role, she's really worked to help the press move forward into the future by doing things like expanding journals, moving more into open access, thinking about the opportunities that open access and digital provides for creative, forward.
Thinking about how to better merge the needs of the authors and the readers. She'll be sharing some of the interesting things she's been doing and how she's trying to help her organization meet the future of work at the University Press and within the library world. One thing that we want to do is make sure that what we're talking about is helpful to helpful to you.
And so we want to do we want to do a Po, a quick mentor. So if you have time to please go to menti, I will pull this up in a second. And we want to ask all of you what you see as the future of scholarly publishing, how you're feeling about the future of scholarly publishing. So as I said, if you can go to w-w-what, the panels can do this too, if you want.
I think I'm showing the screen now that shows the pull and. If people can vote, you should start to see some responses. Give it a minute for people to go in and vote. Are you thinking that when you think about the future, you're excited? You think it's going to be great? Or are you worried you're thinking, Oh my gosh, what am I doing in this industry? I got to get out quick.
Or are you worried what people just if you share the code, I know it's at the top of the slide, but we're getting a lot of questions in chat. 744353, four, eight, 6 and 74435348. And we can see those bars kind of jiggling around a little bit at this point. The biggest group are the people who aren't sure.
You're not like. Totally overwhelmed. But you're also not ready to go and run with it. So I think you've got a pretty good sense of that, and I think that will help us as the panelists moves forward to be thinking about how we want to go and address the kind of concerns people have. So now I'd like to hand it over to Anne and you can take us into your thoughts on research Futures.
Fantastic Thank you, Shirley. And while I bring up my slides, I'd just like to say that I too feel uncertain. I think a lot of people feel that way right now. So just give me a second. Can you all see my screen in full presenter mode? Good OK, fantastic. Well, first of all, I'd like to Thank cesp for the opportunity to be here.
I'm an Gabriel. I've been with Elsevier for about 20 years, and before that I was with Cambridge University Press. So I've had experience on the University Press side as well as what you call a large commercial publisher side. And I think the future looks different depending on where you sit. Right it's all relative. And there are opportunities and risks with lots of developments and we've been asked to define I think the number was three trends, right in scholarly publishing.
I wasn't sure if the three trends were divided among us three. But what I've decided to do in terms of our framework is share something that Elsevier has been working on, looking at future trends in the industry, and then embedded within these three broad themes that I'm going to share with you today. I tried to pull out three additional signposts that are kind of indicative of this trend.
So let me just give you a little background on this study. It research Futures 2.0. Back in 2018, Elsevier partnered with Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey, looking at the future of publishing landscape and interviewed more than 2,500 researchers and publishers, as well as interviewed 56 experts and asked them to project what they thought might be major trajectories across a 10 year time horizon.
So now we're in 2022, so we have a little bit of a view about how futuristic this was, and a lot of it, I think, still really applies. I will add in a second, I'm going to share a slide from a refresh of the study that we did in 2020 related to how COVID has impacted this view as well. But the three scenarios that we came up with are brave open world, where publishers are looking at a universe where the subscription model is not something that is as viable as it once was.
That there are trends towards open science, open publication, sharing and sharing of data and robust infrastructures to support these. The second trend that we identified was the trend called tech titans, where significant advances in artificial intelligence were driving innovation, but also changing the way researchers engaged with data, the way higher education taught students, and the way even funders are operating.
And there's also new players in this landscape as well. And the third trend we identified was Eastern ascendance, which built on a trend that's been happening for a long time, where the quantity and quality of research emerging from the apac region is a force in and of itself, and their own publications, policies and metrics are evolving. So I'd like to explore these trends in a little bit more detail, and surely you can keep me to time maybe, and let me know if I've gone a little bit over.
But let's think about what some of the indicators are for these. So brave new world talks about an open world and some of the drivers that we see that have really emerged in support of this trend include the impact of COVID 19 on research workflows and accelerating policies for public access and maturing infrastructures for research and open data. So I wanted to share that refresh of the research Futures 2.0 study that I mentioned in 2020.
We went back and we surveyed more researchers and tried to have a look at what they said about the impact of COVID 19 on their work. And what we're seeing are, is trends towards more flexible working, something probably everyone on this call is experiencing, whether it's with you or your customers, stakeholders, or even with your own institution. We're seeing greater cross discipline, collaboration, and we're also seeing a strong focus on societal impact.
However, COVID has also had some negative impacts, too, and we think researchers believe there will be fewer students at universities, lower enrollments, less in fund, less funding and fewer practical experiments and field work. And we're seeing some of this play out with declining enrollments in nursing schools, among other things. And Elsevier supports a huge nursing business.
So as publishers, we keep our eye on what's happening in the communities we serve with our content. And COVID has definitely had impacts both positive and negative. The second trend in brave open world is really accelerating models for open access. And this is a very, very timely call because many of you will be aware that the office.
The science and Technology Policy just put forward what is now being called the Nelson memo, asking for federally funded research to be published with zero embargo by 2020 or the end of 2024. We have, I think, foreseen this for quite a while. We and many, many other publishers. And I think for those of you that know elsevier, I think 10 years ago, way before we did this study, it would have been hard to envision a world where Elsevier and other large commercial publishers like ourselves were embracing open.
But indeed we are and continue to offer flexible options for all of our researchers depending on how they want to publish. We continue to confirm transformative agreements. We've launched almost 600 open access journals, and authors can publish open access on almost all of our journals. So this theme is something that we are all looking at with a lot of seriousness, but also with a view to collaboration with the agencies as they seek to implement this structure.
And what's going to enable this brave open world are the infrastructures that are maturing among non-for-profit and non-profit enterprises, including the development of Federated service platforms and focus on persistent identifiers. And there's lots of organizations and industry bodies that support this, including STM Association solutions GetFTR Seamless access, which is all about content being able to be easily accessed across a variety of platforms that serve researchers and the persistent identifiers that get us there.
And it's worth noting in that OSTP memo that I just mentioned, there is a call for persistent identifiers in there that recognizes this. I'd also like to say that these last two points that I use to bolster the whole brave open world scenario, I want to give a shout out to Lisa Hinchcliffe and Roger Schoenfeld from Ithaca because some of this these were points that came in the latest council of Science Editors plenary where they presented a framework for recombinant publishing.
So it was interesting to me how some of the data points actually supported the scenarios that we discovered back in 2018. So let's talk about the technology drivers emerging from research Futures 2.0. We looked at some of the things that are supporting this scenario are adoption and acceptance of AI and the potential for AI to embed in the scientific and scholarly communications workflow and innovative and sometimes defensive acquisitions.
So part of our survey showed that using AI to analyze results is common and medicine is more likely to use AI to generate hypotheses than other disciplines. And this is really important for the research community to notice and also the publishing community. Shirley, did you just give me 5 minutes? 5 seconds? OK, fine.
I've got 5 minutes. This is I mean, it's fantastic. We're also looking at ways in which AI is infiltrating or embedding in the skull workflow. And there's lots of interesting experiments out there. This article in Science caught my eye about an artificial intelligence algorithm called GPT three, which wrote an academic thesis on itself in 2 hours.
So you're seeing really pioneering developments in this regard. You're also seeing publishers respond to these trends and become more technically focused in order to support their customers and address needs. In the research workflow, you used to see a lot of acquisitions of publishers acquiring other publishers, so the content base got bigger. Now it's all about how we can use and deploy this content.
Finally, last but not least, the global drivers that contribute to the whole Eastern ascendance scenario that I raise my third of the top three. Some of the signposts we see supporting this include an increase in geopolitical tensions, the shift that I referenced in apac, Asia-Pacific publication priorities from quantity to quality, and also the subsequent challenges to global cooperation.
So we've seen that geopolitical tensions have spilled over to the research, enterprise and higher education, and it's causing disruptions in scientific collaboration and scholarly communications. And we can see with the Ukraine conflict publisher efforts to try to support the scientific enterprise. Right, while making nuanced changes to commercial activity in these regions and also supporting researchers wherever they are.
We see also. Real conscious efforts from China, whose output historically was exponentially increasing in quantity. And now making huge strides in trying to reduce those numbers of papers and really respond to research, evaluation mandates and publish of higher quality. And indeed, we see that collaboration is very challenged and there are alliances being formed relative to funding for, for example, the chips act and all that, all of those enterprises.
And also looking thoughtfully at how joint research can be conducted in an atmosphere of national competitiveness, but also collaboration. So surely I'm going to end it here. I will just say I know I was only allowed three, but outside the three I just wanted to say that there are two other major trends that we incorporate into everything we do at elsevier, which is to focus on sustainability and adaptation of SDG frameworks.
Those are the sustainable development goals and also an active drive for diversity, equity and inclusion in research and as well as in our own enterprise. And so those are common threads that we think will project way into the future. And I'm going to end it there, and I Thank everybody for their time and attention. Thanks so much. And really interesting, I think now we're moving over to subject.
You might know, but you're muted. Can I check? You can see this next level publishing solution screen. OK, fantastic.
Well, firstly Thanks again to the SSP. I'm delighted to be on the panel today. And I also want to respond to a note that came up in the chat about whether this conversation today is going to be about books and journals. And I'm sort of delighted to say that I'm approaching this from a sort of product agnostic point of view, so I hope that's useful. So painter, we rebranded about two years ago, and we coined the phrase next level publishing.
We did this as we believed the industry was at an inflection point, post-covid. The industry looked ready to embrace technology, see content is fluid and adopt decision led, decision making, data led, decision making. In the two years since, digital transformation remains a hot topic and was the number one ranked business goal in our survey. But this inflection point seems yet to arrive.
In the RFP that we respond to. The stakeholders seem eager to innovate and change, but the wider business constraints ensure that time, money and capacity are still the primary focus. So today I wanted to showcase what a digitally transformed academic publishing model might look like and explain why these organizations have changed and how they are changing.
I also wanted to offer some data of our own from our survey on why this industry in particular may be slower to follow than first predicted. And train starts with leaders defining goals and setting their targets. At this page shows the top three and bottom three targets from our 2022 trends in academic publishing survey. But we believe these targets are wrong and the order should be reversed.
Digital transformation is about much more than just saving time and money or digitizing product. It's about reimagining publishing and redefining what's possible. It's about becoming a customer centric business, freeing skilled staff to talk to authors and customers. And it's about using technology to drive efficiencies and produce data at every stage from creation to consumption. The ultimate goal is to use data to adapt, to create new products and find new customers and therefore derive new revenue streams all at speed.
So I wanted to start today by highlighting the key areas targeted for change by publishers who are on this journey. And first and foremost is culture. Publishers are seeding a new mindset across the entire business, which is not easy and it typically conservative industry. This is a customer first mindset, learning about their customers, getting feedback, sharing insights and personalizing their experience.
This is an author experience mindset, seeing authors as an asset for life, and it's a data driven decision making mindset, challenging established hierarchies. And it's also a content as fluid mindset with products. No longer only books shaped multi media, chunking, podcasts, infographics, tweets all have value in this world. And this cultural shift is about control. Control of content, control the relationships and control of data.
And ultimately the control of the publishers. Fate I wanted to share this quote from Carsten burg Reuter on how he sees the future of content. Cost and sees a time when the lines between journals, books and other formats blur or become obsolete. Similarly, I've spoken to Bill dorf, who argues that the next generation will demand content on their phones. Could this be the trigger that finally kills off the PDF and changes our approach to publishing?
Whatever the trigger, there is a cultural shift coming and publishers must decide which side of tradition and innovation they want to be on. Digital first approach is not just about digitizing product. The impacts on workflow are profound, and when content is well structured from the start, new products can be made quickly and easily from a pool of content in XML.
Similarly, metadata management is not just about discovery gathering. Accurate metadata at the outset has a knock on effect through the entire workflow. And when technology can be used to automate rote tasks, workflow timelines and accuracy are impacted. As an example, in the production stage, it's now possible to automate ingestion of content typesetting and copy editing hugely impacting accuracy, speed and the author experience.
And of course, in any change management program, the semantics are important. In the UK, Emerald no longer refer to their content management department. Their focus is not on managing content. It's a focus on relationships and customers. We believe this is a meaningful shift in thinking.
Whilst publishers like Emerald that control data build relationships. A technology backbone is needed to support this effort and this is a serious undertaking, as overcoming legacy tech is often a key blocker to change. Existing systems may be redundant, especially if the tech stack can't talk to each other either internally or externally. And there can be inherent weaknesses and off the shelf.
E-commerce sites also not designed to talk to your tech stack. Online libraries and aggregators hold customer relationships, but typically share sales data, not Customer Intelligence. So publishers are commissioning their own delivery systems, offering direct control of sales and marketing functions. And publishers are investing in cloud based tech and building APIs to align internal and external processes.
But this is expensive and challenging, and perhaps why digital native publishers have had a head start as they can build their tech stack from scratch. But this digital evolution is more than just getting more done more quickly. Digital means data. And with the right tech stack, publishers can now track their at every stage.
They can track customer engagement and sales, and they can promote a culture built on data led decisions, not on traditional hierarchies. Ultimately, publishers can become more agile and start a virtuous circle. Monitor learn. Iterate, repeat. This all sounds great.
But as for the technology challenges, I don't want to suggest that data management is easy. Data is a buzzword too often used and hard to get right. And as Patti sweet from Health Affairs states, despite having the tech and a process to capture data, it's not easy to make the transition to use data for forward planning. But it can be done. Examples from other media companies have made this transition, but it takes time, leadership and skills.
So finally, let's just touch on those skills, because as new skills will be undoubtedly needed to get the job done and possibly to lead the charge, publishers will need to fill competency gaps, and these skills can be either outsourced or recruited, often from non publishing backgrounds. And the technology is automating some of the work is ample opportunity to upskill existing staff.
This shift will help breed an agile culture where cross-departmental groups tackle problems collectively. And this promotion of skill sets and agile way of working is exactly what Emerald is striving for. As you can see from this quote from Sally woolson had a publishing at Emerald who also happens to be from a non publishing background. Emerald has created the concept of a talent platform where individuals from different teams come together to tackle business wide challenges.
This helps bring fresh eyes to a problem, but also helps individuals develop new skills in the process. So having looked at how a digital transformation is managed, I wanted to share a model showing what digital transformation might look like from a workflow perspective, focusing on how publishers can wrest control of data, content and customer relations.
And this first model shows a traditional siloed publishing business. So surely giving me a. One minute. Gosh OK so this shows a production of content is sequential in XML last. If publishers want new product, the process must begin again. And delivery is either via third party or via an off the shelf e-commerce site.
So publishers may get sales data, but precious little about engagement and the lack of connected technologies means department remain in silos. In the second Model X HTML production is first allowing publishers to repurpose content and accelerate publication. Publishers have invested in their own delivery platform, giving them a direct customer relationship to gather data.
Hyperconnected technologies are delivering data to the business. We believe this is a powerful combination and a model for the future of publishing. So I just got three very quick slides. Just want to talk about why this model is not being adopted at pace by the industry. And then our 2022 survey, 30% respondents said that developing a clear strategy in a complex world was their biggest headache.
So some people simply don't know where to start. Generating revenue ranked highly as both a goal and a blocker. But inefficient practices suggest that publishers are struggling to overcome internal challenges. Another factor stifling change is that old school metrics, speed, cost and capacity are still the targets in 2022. There was a prediction that one 80% of people said workflow reviews would be completed.
But it looks like modernising the production workflow has not yet happened and is not part of the brief. Finally, if changing the organizational culture is the first step, there may be inherent challenges in making that happen in academic publishing. In our 2022 survey, the majority agreed that change is happening within some functions, but not across the entire organization. 40% said change happened slowly here.
We have a well-established way of working. But whenever it does happen, the majority of change is happening within the production department. But as per my previous slide, this is not always part of a wider digital transformation program. We believe this is an opportunity missed. Thank you. That's me.
It's wonderful. Thank you so much, Patrick. All right, Liz, now we're on to you. If you want to share your screen and turn on your video and audio. Hi there. OK hang on one second.
I don't know why it's not. Going to slideshow. Let me stop sharing for one quick second. So I can get it into slide show. We go.
OK I think we may. We stuck with this version, and that's fine. So I'm Liz scarpelli, and I am the director of the University of Cincinnati press and Cincinnati library publishing services. And I want to thank Shirley and SP for inviting me. As well. I think what as I was listening to Patrick and Ann, it was really interesting because I think that what I'm talking about really embodies a couple of the things that they talked about and also what they were discussing as far as trends and what keeps them up at night.
It resonates with me with regard to what Patrick said about the next level. Publishing and reimagining, I think is very much what the University of Cincinnati press is about. We are a very small publisher. We started five years ago and we have a staff of three, including myself. So one of the things that I had to think about was what can a very small publisher with very little resources do in this space to differentiate themselves from the typical University press publisher?
And where we started was with something that's been on my mind since I was the marketing and sales director at the universe at Rutgers University press and has continued with me for the past 15 years, and that is to shrink the space between authors and readers. So being at u.c. press now, I have that opportunity to envision what that might look like.
So just a little bit of history on University presses. You know, 20, 30 years ago, we were talking about two separate entities. There would be University presses and library publishers. Currently, we have a variety of relationships with some presses reporting to libraries such as NYU and University of Arizona, press presses and libraries, collaborating together on projects.
And Michigan publishing and Temple University Press are wonderful examples of that. And then we have what is now starting to be talked about between ASU press and library publisher coalition, which is a new term called University publishing and the University of Cincinnati press. And our neighbor to the left, Indiana University press, would be two good examples of that in talking about or thinking about, I should say, the trends that affect me.
I wanted to really focus on one area. And that was acquiring and really developing that relationship with the authors that allows them to utilize open access to do more than they could have done with a traditional textbook in open access. So the trends that I really focus on and that I think about a lot, talk to my colleagues about are, what types of open access platforms can we develop or license?
Well, with a staff of three, I really had to look carefully at how I was going to use my resources, my time, my money. And so I've adopted, licensed, if you will, several platforms that I am experimenting with some of our authors and various projects that we are doing. So development at this particular moment was off the table, although I will say that one of the assets of being a hybrid University publisher is that we do work very closely with the library dev development team and the University development team.
But again, my mission and the mission of the press was to bring authors and readers closer together. And so I wanted to do that through. Really approaching this from the beginning before the author put pen to paper, when they were still assembling their thoughts, when they had completed their research, were formulating their arguments. I wanted to be there at that point.
So that together as an editor and an author, we could envision how not only we could create a more satisfying experience for the author, but also thinking about the consumer, how the author can write in a way that matches the way people consume information today. And that's what we're experimenting with. I'm not going to say that I absolutely have solved any of these problems, but we are exploring this.
This is the space we're working in. And then what we also decided was because there is still concern, especially with certain disciplines, about publishing and open access and what that means, although we do try and educate people all the time, academics in particular, on the differences between different types of open access content. We want it to also have an opportunity to experiment with what open access could do to commercially sold books in terms of resources.
So if I look at it from the author's perspective and my focus is on my author, what I'm really thinking about is how can they change the way they present the information, considering not only the narrative, what they would traditionally be writing, but also incorporating robust media and reader engagement. So what we're talking about is not necessarily creating a book that is open access, but static.
We're not talking about building a platform because, again, I'm not that's not what I'm focused on right now. What we're trying to do is we're trying to build a dynamic environment where authors can write their narrative, their text, formulate their arguments, but that they don't have to do it in a linear fashion and they don't have to do it in only one format. We embed hyperlinks in our books, which is nothing new, many digital books in bed hyperlinks.
But what we're also doing is linking out to different environments. And hopefully if I can get my screen share to work properly, I'll be able to show you some of that. But we link to videos that have been created for the book audio. We link to data sets that are stored within, for instance, our digital scholarship center. And we also put all of this material in the book on a platform we use Manifold.
But there are others out there that allows for reader engagement, reader annotation, so there can be a dialogue between an author and a reader. And much in the same way that social media has conversation threads, we can use conversation threads, whether they be in a private environment or in a public environment. For the publisher being me, one of the things we are wrestling with is we are not website developers and I am not looking to just add noise and bells and whistles.
So there's this really fine line between publishing a book and developing a book and creating a website. And there's a healthy tension there. We are not creating a website. We are perhaps embedding a website within a book and providing readers with very specific directed pathways to find the information so that it can be layered for the reader. But one of the big questions that we haven't answered yet is how do we maintain that?
Who whose responsibility is it to maintain that and keep that dialogue going? And for how long does that happen? Authors move on. They go on to other projects, they go on to different universities. They go they leave academia completely in certain instances. But we have a commitment to the reader to ensure that whatever we start with is going to be a satisfying experience.
Whether they read it the day after the book comes out or 15 years after the book comes out. So that's still a question that we have in terms of. Readers, I like to think of, and I often explain it to my authors as a version of choose your own adventure. What we want to do is we want to meet the reader. Where? the reader. Wants to be engaged.
In other words, if they want to just read the book from cover to cover, you can take an open access book that we publish and you can read it cover to cover. However, if you want to really dig into a certain aspect of what the author is talking about or you want more information, we've created books that actually become instructional and have audio and video demos within them.
And this is something that really is impossible in a traditional book. It's also something that most publishers, at least in the University press space, are not considering when they are looking at open access content. But again, as a way to distinguish ourselves from what we do compared to what some of our peers do. We felt that this was an important aspect of what we wanted to explore.
I want to give a shout out to one of my colleagues at Brown University. Some of you may know her name. Allison Levy is the editor and founding director of Brown University digital publications. She has just published a book with MIT Press. And if you have not seen it, it just came out in August. I really encourage you to take a look at it. A new vision for Islamic pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir.
What she has done here and again, they are not dealing with and out of the box, not using it out of the box piece of software. They have a Mellon grant that has allowed them to develop a very, very complex interactivity for their book. But we are going to try and replicate that through our dev team over here at the University of Cincinnati press using some more simplified methods.
What's really interesting, and this is what relates to the Choose Your own adventure, is they have this networked table of contents that allows the reader to enter the content from a variety of doorways. So you can essentially click on any particular chapter, and it will show you where that information appears in various chapters. So you can alter the.
Information that you're going to be reading in the order you're going to be reading and a little bit more of a Seamless way than flipping through a table of contents or an index. So it really does give you a completely different experience. Oops excuse me. I hate to interrupt, Liz, but we're running out of time. OK, that's fine.
I would just encourage you to take a look at some of the books that we have on our Manifold platform and on the slides, which I'm sure will be part of this. There are some links that will take you to the various types of interactive books that we have out there. I would encourage you to take a look at Blevins, and I would encourage you to take a look at kumara for some of the things that we've been paying attention to.
That's great. Thank you so much and Thank you to all of our panelists. I feel like all of you have so many more things you could have told us and shared with us. And I feel bad about cutting that short a little bit, but I did want to give us a chance to have some Q&A. So I am going to share another mental poll. It's the same place. If you have that still open, you should be getting a review on your screen.
And we just are wondering, from your perspective, now that you've all heard these different ideas and some of them are overlapping, some of them are quite different, what do you see as the most significant future change that you need to be prepared for? And so if you can go in to that mental poll and type in your comments and then as you're filling that out, I guess I'd like to Pose one of the first questions.
And this was something that came in ahead of the webinar for all three of the panelists. What are some blockers to making changes that help an organization align with the future? What would you suggest to someone, a small, scholarly publisher or even other kind of organization do to get ready for one of the key future changes that you've been talking about?
And I don't see anybody filling out the mental poll, but the number again, is 74435348. There it goes. So thank you. And as people are filling that out and it looks like you want to chime in first to respond to that. I will. But I just wanted to maybe give a shout out to something that Patrick said and also what Liz is actively doing.
It's that leap to customer centricity that I think if you don't make, it can really hold you back as an organization. And I think at elsevier, I've been here a long time, but I have seen that we are able to move more quickly and adeptly when we are listening to our customers. And this is something that has really been part of our culture now more than ever, and it's a market change.
If you don't do it, you will not be prepared. So right. Liz, do you have additional thoughts on that question? Sorry sorry. No, no, I think that's great. I guess some of the things we list in our survey that we had evidence back, as I mentioned, is that for some businesses, the sheer complexity of what is out there and what companies should be doing is a real blocker in itself.
I think certainly small organizations might not have the skill sets internally to kind of navigate that larger organizations and may be able to bring in consultants and help them kind of produce a roadmap towards kind of a transition of their business for smaller companies that reliant on the skill sets internally and that can be difficult. So that obviously comes down to sort of things like cost and revenues, but also complexity. But I guess above all, what I've seen is the major force for change is leadership.
And in companies where there's somebody who's prepared to drive this push through, offer a sort of safe haven for people in that organization who are trying to drive transformation, protecting them against others who may be a bit more conservative. I think that's a real force for change. I can just say very quickly specifically for the small publishers, I think the most important thing is to find a partner.
For us, it's our host University and I spend a lot of time making sure that I understand what the mission of the University is and what their goals are. And so if you're at a university, that's something that is in a lot of ways not obvious to publishers. They often tend to stay in the same track that they've been in for four years. If if you're not associated or affiliated with the university, that's where I say find a partner, find a buddy, find someone that believes in what you're doing and bring your resources together if you can.
Thanks so I love that. The question was, what are the blockers? And all three of you didn't even talk about that. You jumped just to solutions that would overcome blockers. So I love that positivity. Thank you very much for that. Great I'm jumping into the chat. There were some questions. So one was Patrick to you about what you consider an old school metric and what could be done, what should be replaced with?
Yeah I guess on that, an old school metric might be considered something like a focus on shaving off costs, shaving off times, or looking at capacity. And as I mentioned in the answer, all of those are still completely valid for any business. You have to still look at those centers. But I think the opportunities that are afforded to organizations, especially publishers, to embrace a digital environment and be much more customer centric and to have their kind of content as fluid, to reach out and be more like a media company than a kind of traditional print based publisher.
Just so the advantages are already manifest and we're seeing that with some people in the industry. So for me, the metric should be more about customer engagement. It's not just about how your business is performing the margins it's making. It's having customers for life and it's having authors for life. And it's about managing that through your business and then also your own staff satisfaction as much as anything.
Thanks I just want to pop back to the word cloud. If people are interested, I'm not surprised to see there's a lot of things that are small. So of course, the word clouds, the phrases that come up multiple times get bigger. But it was open so people could put in anything they want. Obviously, open access, accessibility and subscription models are coming up really big and then a lot of other things are smaller.
Thanks to all of you for sharing your thoughts and insights is super interesting and seems to align a lot with the kinds of things are our expert panelists have been sharing with us. So this is nothing. That's what you were hoping to get my next question that was in the chat. Let me just say one thing. We started a little bit late.
So SSPS is suggested that we just run a few minutes late. So we are going to do that. Apologies if this is inconvenient to anybody. Just a few minutes. But getting onto a question from Rachel Russell and I think this came up with when you were talking, so it might be directed to you or it might be directed to everybody. But the researchers really have the time to engage in that type of conversation.
All the ones I know are far too busy. I think that can be a broad question. How do we help authors give them more work. So I can kick it off? And my answer is that I would say the majority of scholars, researchers, authors that I am talking to have some interest in some level of interactivity and layering of their content.
I would say more than half, let's call it 65% And I'm very specific on what I am looking for. So I'm looking for partners that want to explore this. So I'm in the luxury area of not having to produce 100 or 500 or 1,000 books a year. I can really be very prescriptive in how I want to select my authors. And another question was to Liz, but I think the other panelists might actually have some insights into it, too, about with our push to open access and technology based products, it seems less and less important.
How do we help our organizations? How do we help our authors and our work processes align to the shift from print to electronic? I can just jump in and say that it is a little bit of a leap of faith. Certainly you have to have people and I will speak to journals. I know there's interest in books, but I remember during the transition not only just to open access, but prior to that from print to electronic, we were very, very interested in cultivating a digital first mentality and demonstrating to authors how the additional functionality and accessibility can help them.
I think was a big driver and certainly it's also very discipline specific. So you have some disciplines that are more ready to make that leap than others. But certainly policy is now playing an increasing role. And so perhaps less of a carrot, more of a stick. But we need to go digital in order to democratize access to that data. And I think it's a very important point, particularly where print in certain regions of the globe is not really the transaction of research currency anymore.
So that's also helpful incentives to of course, it takes money and infrastructure. But I'm going to go back to what Liz said about finding partners. I think that's really, really important. And I think that will find that at every point along the academic, scholarly publication spectrum, there are people with expertise in different areas that can help one another out.
So I have lots to say, but I'll stop there. And I think that carrot versus stick is always sort of an interesting way of trying to motivate change. Liz, what's your thoughts, particularly from the book's perspective? So what we do is with most of our books, I would say 80% of our books, even if they're open access, they have a print component.
So these two books, for example, are books that have open access. They're paperback, they're inexpensive to produce, they're small, obviously. And so we do a preprint on demand version. We we think about what the author needs versus what the author wants. I want the author to have a good experience because if I can meet him in the middle, that or her I know that, then we're going to get the best content.
The one thing I will say, I'll just show you two little secrets that we've started to do is for some of our books. For instance, this is a commercially sold book that doesn't have an open access format, but it does have an open access resource site. We put we are now starting to put QR codes in our books and that links from one place to the other and back again. So the open access site will have a link to the book in terms of where you can buy it and it'll have some sample content.
So that is something we're experimenting with. We're getting a lot of good feedback from that and we're actually seeing it drive some sales as well. Anything you wanted to chime in on this? Patrick I guess the only thing I was going to say from our point of view Anne touched on this is that accessibility as a topic, that there's new legislation on both sides of the Atlantic now for publishers to provide all of their content in a more accessible format.
And I think although that may be starting with University presses and their readership there, it's certainly putting pressure on the rest of the ecosystem. And that's going to require that publishers are starting to look at easier ways to get their content into an accessible format, which generally starts with an XML first workflow. Thank you, everybody. I'm mindful of the time.
I feel like we could have had 2 hours easily of interesting conversations. And I have to say, the planning session for this was so fun because when we were talking about this, everybody was able to throw ideas around. And Thank you so much to the three of you for sharing with us your thoughts about the future of scholarly publishing. Give us some ideas for what we could do in the groups that we work in to help to be ready for it.
I think Jason has some closing comments to make. And then we will wrap this up. Sure yeah, great. Thank you, Shirley, and Thank you, everybody who attended today's webinar. Thanks also to the panel for an engaging discussion. And of course, Thanks to our 2022 education sponsors, RFI j editorial open, Athens, silverchair, 67 Brexit and Taylor Francis staff 1,000 attendees.
You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. This is important. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us pick topics for future events. Please also check the cesp website for information on upcoming cesp events, including those shown here the 2022 new directions seminar, the next ask the experts webinar in early October and the next in the spe webinar series three ethical challenges in mid-october.
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Segment:0 .
Welcome attendees. We're just giving a moment for everybody to file in.
We have a lot of folks registered for today's webinar. OK looks like the entry gates are slowing down a little bit. Hello Thank you for joining us for today's discussion. The future of publishing the fifth event in SSPS 2022 webinar series. I'm Jason point lead of the sb education committees webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank SSPS 2022 education program sponsors RFA j editorial OpenAthens silver chair 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000.
We are grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the chat feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with speakers and other participants. This one hour session will be recorded and made available to registrants following today's event.
A quick note on SPS code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape the future CSV programming. It's now my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's discussion. Shirley decker, lucky content director for SRN, a division of Elsevier research products group. Shirley and if you can turn off the sharing screen that way, I can share my screen.
We're so delighted to have all of you here with us today. Let me just. Someone's I can't share what other participants. It's not working. The screen should work now. All right. It should show us using.
Think about the future. You can have one. Is that up? It is tricky, but it's. I think you're showing your note screen rather than your presentation screen. Sorry, everybody. So yeah, if you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
And this webinar is a time for us to do just that. Spend some time thinking about the future. We're really excited to have you join us and I know is going to be a super exciting time for everybody. We have some expert people who are going to be exploring their different views on what the future might look like. All of these people have spent a lot of time thinking about it on their own.
At the end of their presentations, there will be 20 minutes for what I hope is a robust Q&A and discussion time. If you have questions during the time, drop them in the chat and we'll be looking at them near the end and we will be doing a couple of quick polls as we go through. So first, let's oops, sorry. First, let's spend a little time getting to our panelists. And Gabriel is senior vice president of global strategic networks at elsevier, a large publishing company.
The team she manages engages with key stakeholders across the research enterprise to establish strategic collaborations, use data analytics to address societal change challenges. She is very closely involved in the work that Elsevier did recently on creating a research Futures report that scopes out possible future scenarios, and she'll be sharing some insights from that report. And from her own perspective.
Patrick sharp is the commercial director of dA that's an academic publishing services company. And his role is centered on understanding how academic publishing market is evolving in a time of continual technological innovation. He created a trends in academic publishing survey and a white paper. He holds roundtables, and he's going to be sharing the results of those reports, holding up a mirror to the industry as a bit of a new site or a new person in the field, since he has just joined this area in the last couple of years.
Liz scarpelli is the founding director and acquiring editor at the University of Cincinnati press and Cincinnati library publishing services, just as sits on the board of the library publisher coalition and the Midwest independent Publishers Association. In her current role, she's really worked to help the press move forward into the future by doing things like expanding journals, moving more into open access, thinking about the opportunities that open access and digital provides for creative, forward.
Thinking about how to better merge the needs of the authors and the readers. She'll be sharing some of the interesting things she's been doing and how she's trying to help her organization meet the future of work at the University Press and within the library world. One thing that we want to do is make sure that what we're talking about is helpful to helpful to you.
And so we want to do we want to do a Po, a quick mentor. So if you have time to please go to menti, I will pull this up in a second. And we want to ask all of you what you see as the future of scholarly publishing, how you're feeling about the future of scholarly publishing. So as I said, if you can go to w-w-what, the panels can do this too, if you want.
I think I'm showing the screen now that shows the pull and. If people can vote, you should start to see some responses. Give it a minute for people to go in and vote. Are you thinking that when you think about the future, you're excited? You think it's going to be great? Or are you worried you're thinking, Oh my gosh, what am I doing in this industry? I got to get out quick.
Or are you worried what people just if you share the code, I know it's at the top of the slide, but we're getting a lot of questions in chat. 744353, four, eight, 6 and 74435348. And we can see those bars kind of jiggling around a little bit at this point. The biggest group are the people who aren't sure.
You're not like. Totally overwhelmed. But you're also not ready to go and run with it. So I think you've got a pretty good sense of that, and I think that will help us as the panelists moves forward to be thinking about how we want to go and address the kind of concerns people have. So now I'd like to hand it over to Anne and you can take us into your thoughts on research Futures.
Fantastic Thank you, Shirley. And while I bring up my slides, I'd just like to say that I too feel uncertain. I think a lot of people feel that way right now. So just give me a second. Can you all see my screen in full presenter mode? Good OK, fantastic. Well, first of all, I'd like to Thank cesp for the opportunity to be here.
I'm an Gabriel. I've been with Elsevier for about 20 years, and before that I was with Cambridge University Press. So I've had experience on the University Press side as well as what you call a large commercial publisher side. And I think the future looks different depending on where you sit. Right it's all relative. And there are opportunities and risks with lots of developments and we've been asked to define I think the number was three trends, right in scholarly publishing.
I wasn't sure if the three trends were divided among us three. But what I've decided to do in terms of our framework is share something that Elsevier has been working on, looking at future trends in the industry, and then embedded within these three broad themes that I'm going to share with you today. I tried to pull out three additional signposts that are kind of indicative of this trend.
So let me just give you a little background on this study. It research Futures 2.0. Back in 2018, Elsevier partnered with Ipsos MORI to conduct a survey, looking at the future of publishing landscape and interviewed more than 2,500 researchers and publishers, as well as interviewed 56 experts and asked them to project what they thought might be major trajectories across a 10 year time horizon.
So now we're in 2022, so we have a little bit of a view about how futuristic this was, and a lot of it, I think, still really applies. I will add in a second, I'm going to share a slide from a refresh of the study that we did in 2020 related to how COVID has impacted this view as well. But the three scenarios that we came up with are brave open world, where publishers are looking at a universe where the subscription model is not something that is as viable as it once was.
That there are trends towards open science, open publication, sharing and sharing of data and robust infrastructures to support these. The second trend that we identified was the trend called tech titans, where significant advances in artificial intelligence were driving innovation, but also changing the way researchers engaged with data, the way higher education taught students, and the way even funders are operating.
And there's also new players in this landscape as well. And the third trend we identified was Eastern ascendance, which built on a trend that's been happening for a long time, where the quantity and quality of research emerging from the apac region is a force in and of itself, and their own publications, policies and metrics are evolving. So I'd like to explore these trends in a little bit more detail, and surely you can keep me to time maybe, and let me know if I've gone a little bit over.
But let's think about what some of the indicators are for these. So brave new world talks about an open world and some of the drivers that we see that have really emerged in support of this trend include the impact of COVID 19 on research workflows and accelerating policies for public access and maturing infrastructures for research and open data. So I wanted to share that refresh of the research Futures 2.0 study that I mentioned in 2020.
We went back and we surveyed more researchers and tried to have a look at what they said about the impact of COVID 19 on their work. And what we're seeing are, is trends towards more flexible working, something probably everyone on this call is experiencing, whether it's with you or your customers, stakeholders, or even with your own institution. We're seeing greater cross discipline, collaboration, and we're also seeing a strong focus on societal impact.
However, COVID has also had some negative impacts, too, and we think researchers believe there will be fewer students at universities, lower enrollments, less in fund, less funding and fewer practical experiments and field work. And we're seeing some of this play out with declining enrollments in nursing schools, among other things. And Elsevier supports a huge nursing business.
So as publishers, we keep our eye on what's happening in the communities we serve with our content. And COVID has definitely had impacts both positive and negative. The second trend in brave open world is really accelerating models for open access. And this is a very, very timely call because many of you will be aware that the office.
The science and Technology Policy just put forward what is now being called the Nelson memo, asking for federally funded research to be published with zero embargo by 2020 or the end of 2024. We have, I think, foreseen this for quite a while. We and many, many other publishers. And I think for those of you that know elsevier, I think 10 years ago, way before we did this study, it would have been hard to envision a world where Elsevier and other large commercial publishers like ourselves were embracing open.
But indeed we are and continue to offer flexible options for all of our researchers depending on how they want to publish. We continue to confirm transformative agreements. We've launched almost 600 open access journals, and authors can publish open access on almost all of our journals. So this theme is something that we are all looking at with a lot of seriousness, but also with a view to collaboration with the agencies as they seek to implement this structure.
And what's going to enable this brave open world are the infrastructures that are maturing among non-for-profit and non-profit enterprises, including the development of Federated service platforms and focus on persistent identifiers. And there's lots of organizations and industry bodies that support this, including STM Association solutions GetFTR Seamless access, which is all about content being able to be easily accessed across a variety of platforms that serve researchers and the persistent identifiers that get us there.
And it's worth noting in that OSTP memo that I just mentioned, there is a call for persistent identifiers in there that recognizes this. I'd also like to say that these last two points that I use to bolster the whole brave open world scenario, I want to give a shout out to Lisa Hinchcliffe and Roger Schoenfeld from Ithaca because some of this these were points that came in the latest council of Science Editors plenary where they presented a framework for recombinant publishing.
So it was interesting to me how some of the data points actually supported the scenarios that we discovered back in 2018. So let's talk about the technology drivers emerging from research Futures 2.0. We looked at some of the things that are supporting this scenario are adoption and acceptance of AI and the potential for AI to embed in the scientific and scholarly communications workflow and innovative and sometimes defensive acquisitions.
So part of our survey showed that using AI to analyze results is common and medicine is more likely to use AI to generate hypotheses than other disciplines. And this is really important for the research community to notice and also the publishing community. Shirley, did you just give me 5 minutes? 5 seconds? OK, fine.
I've got 5 minutes. This is I mean, it's fantastic. We're also looking at ways in which AI is infiltrating or embedding in the skull workflow. And there's lots of interesting experiments out there. This article in Science caught my eye about an artificial intelligence algorithm called GPT three, which wrote an academic thesis on itself in 2 hours.
So you're seeing really pioneering developments in this regard. You're also seeing publishers respond to these trends and become more technically focused in order to support their customers and address needs. In the research workflow, you used to see a lot of acquisitions of publishers acquiring other publishers, so the content base got bigger. Now it's all about how we can use and deploy this content.
Finally, last but not least, the global drivers that contribute to the whole Eastern ascendance scenario that I raise my third of the top three. Some of the signposts we see supporting this include an increase in geopolitical tensions, the shift that I referenced in apac, Asia-Pacific publication priorities from quantity to quality, and also the subsequent challenges to global cooperation.
So we've seen that geopolitical tensions have spilled over to the research, enterprise and higher education, and it's causing disruptions in scientific collaboration and scholarly communications. And we can see with the Ukraine conflict publisher efforts to try to support the scientific enterprise. Right, while making nuanced changes to commercial activity in these regions and also supporting researchers wherever they are.
We see also. Real conscious efforts from China, whose output historically was exponentially increasing in quantity. And now making huge strides in trying to reduce those numbers of papers and really respond to research, evaluation mandates and publish of higher quality. And indeed, we see that collaboration is very challenged and there are alliances being formed relative to funding for, for example, the chips act and all that, all of those enterprises.
And also looking thoughtfully at how joint research can be conducted in an atmosphere of national competitiveness, but also collaboration. So surely I'm going to end it here. I will just say I know I was only allowed three, but outside the three I just wanted to say that there are two other major trends that we incorporate into everything we do at elsevier, which is to focus on sustainability and adaptation of SDG frameworks.
Those are the sustainable development goals and also an active drive for diversity, equity and inclusion in research and as well as in our own enterprise. And so those are common threads that we think will project way into the future. And I'm going to end it there, and I Thank everybody for their time and attention. Thanks so much. And really interesting, I think now we're moving over to subject.
You might know, but you're muted. Can I check? You can see this next level publishing solution screen. OK, fantastic.
Well, firstly Thanks again to the SSP. I'm delighted to be on the panel today. And I also want to respond to a note that came up in the chat about whether this conversation today is going to be about books and journals. And I'm sort of delighted to say that I'm approaching this from a sort of product agnostic point of view, so I hope that's useful. So painter, we rebranded about two years ago, and we coined the phrase next level publishing.
We did this as we believed the industry was at an inflection point, post-covid. The industry looked ready to embrace technology, see content is fluid and adopt decision led, decision making, data led, decision making. In the two years since, digital transformation remains a hot topic and was the number one ranked business goal in our survey. But this inflection point seems yet to arrive.
In the RFP that we respond to. The stakeholders seem eager to innovate and change, but the wider business constraints ensure that time, money and capacity are still the primary focus. So today I wanted to showcase what a digitally transformed academic publishing model might look like and explain why these organizations have changed and how they are changing.
I also wanted to offer some data of our own from our survey on why this industry in particular may be slower to follow than first predicted. And train starts with leaders defining goals and setting their targets. At this page shows the top three and bottom three targets from our 2022 trends in academic publishing survey. But we believe these targets are wrong and the order should be reversed.
Digital transformation is about much more than just saving time and money or digitizing product. It's about reimagining publishing and redefining what's possible. It's about becoming a customer centric business, freeing skilled staff to talk to authors and customers. And it's about using technology to drive efficiencies and produce data at every stage from creation to consumption. The ultimate goal is to use data to adapt, to create new products and find new customers and therefore derive new revenue streams all at speed.
So I wanted to start today by highlighting the key areas targeted for change by publishers who are on this journey. And first and foremost is culture. Publishers are seeding a new mindset across the entire business, which is not easy and it typically conservative industry. This is a customer first mindset, learning about their customers, getting feedback, sharing insights and personalizing their experience.
This is an author experience mindset, seeing authors as an asset for life, and it's a data driven decision making mindset, challenging established hierarchies. And it's also a content as fluid mindset with products. No longer only books shaped multi media, chunking, podcasts, infographics, tweets all have value in this world. And this cultural shift is about control. Control of content, control the relationships and control of data.
And ultimately the control of the publishers. Fate I wanted to share this quote from Carsten burg Reuter on how he sees the future of content. Cost and sees a time when the lines between journals, books and other formats blur or become obsolete. Similarly, I've spoken to Bill dorf, who argues that the next generation will demand content on their phones. Could this be the trigger that finally kills off the PDF and changes our approach to publishing?
Whatever the trigger, there is a cultural shift coming and publishers must decide which side of tradition and innovation they want to be on. Digital first approach is not just about digitizing product. The impacts on workflow are profound, and when content is well structured from the start, new products can be made quickly and easily from a pool of content in XML.
Similarly, metadata management is not just about discovery gathering. Accurate metadata at the outset has a knock on effect through the entire workflow. And when technology can be used to automate rote tasks, workflow timelines and accuracy are impacted. As an example, in the production stage, it's now possible to automate ingestion of content typesetting and copy editing hugely impacting accuracy, speed and the author experience.
And of course, in any change management program, the semantics are important. In the UK, Emerald no longer refer to their content management department. Their focus is not on managing content. It's a focus on relationships and customers. We believe this is a meaningful shift in thinking.
Whilst publishers like Emerald that control data build relationships. A technology backbone is needed to support this effort and this is a serious undertaking, as overcoming legacy tech is often a key blocker to change. Existing systems may be redundant, especially if the tech stack can't talk to each other either internally or externally. And there can be inherent weaknesses and off the shelf.
E-commerce sites also not designed to talk to your tech stack. Online libraries and aggregators hold customer relationships, but typically share sales data, not Customer Intelligence. So publishers are commissioning their own delivery systems, offering direct control of sales and marketing functions. And publishers are investing in cloud based tech and building APIs to align internal and external processes.
But this is expensive and challenging, and perhaps why digital native publishers have had a head start as they can build their tech stack from scratch. But this digital evolution is more than just getting more done more quickly. Digital means data. And with the right tech stack, publishers can now track their at every stage.
They can track customer engagement and sales, and they can promote a culture built on data led decisions, not on traditional hierarchies. Ultimately, publishers can become more agile and start a virtuous circle. Monitor learn. Iterate, repeat. This all sounds great.
But as for the technology challenges, I don't want to suggest that data management is easy. Data is a buzzword too often used and hard to get right. And as Patti sweet from Health Affairs states, despite having the tech and a process to capture data, it's not easy to make the transition to use data for forward planning. But it can be done. Examples from other media companies have made this transition, but it takes time, leadership and skills.
So finally, let's just touch on those skills, because as new skills will be undoubtedly needed to get the job done and possibly to lead the charge, publishers will need to fill competency gaps, and these skills can be either outsourced or recruited, often from non publishing backgrounds. And the technology is automating some of the work is ample opportunity to upskill existing staff.
This shift will help breed an agile culture where cross-departmental groups tackle problems collectively. And this promotion of skill sets and agile way of working is exactly what Emerald is striving for. As you can see from this quote from Sally woolson had a publishing at Emerald who also happens to be from a non publishing background. Emerald has created the concept of a talent platform where individuals from different teams come together to tackle business wide challenges.
This helps bring fresh eyes to a problem, but also helps individuals develop new skills in the process. So having looked at how a digital transformation is managed, I wanted to share a model showing what digital transformation might look like from a workflow perspective, focusing on how publishers can wrest control of data, content and customer relations.
And this first model shows a traditional siloed publishing business. So surely giving me a. One minute. Gosh OK so this shows a production of content is sequential in XML last. If publishers want new product, the process must begin again. And delivery is either via third party or via an off the shelf e-commerce site.
So publishers may get sales data, but precious little about engagement and the lack of connected technologies means department remain in silos. In the second Model X HTML production is first allowing publishers to repurpose content and accelerate publication. Publishers have invested in their own delivery platform, giving them a direct customer relationship to gather data.
Hyperconnected technologies are delivering data to the business. We believe this is a powerful combination and a model for the future of publishing. So I just got three very quick slides. Just want to talk about why this model is not being adopted at pace by the industry. And then our 2022 survey, 30% respondents said that developing a clear strategy in a complex world was their biggest headache.
So some people simply don't know where to start. Generating revenue ranked highly as both a goal and a blocker. But inefficient practices suggest that publishers are struggling to overcome internal challenges. Another factor stifling change is that old school metrics, speed, cost and capacity are still the targets in 2022. There was a prediction that one 80% of people said workflow reviews would be completed.
But it looks like modernising the production workflow has not yet happened and is not part of the brief. Finally, if changing the organizational culture is the first step, there may be inherent challenges in making that happen in academic publishing. In our 2022 survey, the majority agreed that change is happening within some functions, but not across the entire organization. 40% said change happened slowly here.
We have a well-established way of working. But whenever it does happen, the majority of change is happening within the production department. But as per my previous slide, this is not always part of a wider digital transformation program. We believe this is an opportunity missed. Thank you. That's me.
It's wonderful. Thank you so much, Patrick. All right, Liz, now we're on to you. If you want to share your screen and turn on your video and audio. Hi there. OK hang on one second.
I don't know why it's not. Going to slideshow. Let me stop sharing for one quick second. So I can get it into slide show. We go.
OK I think we may. We stuck with this version, and that's fine. So I'm Liz scarpelli, and I am the director of the University of Cincinnati press and Cincinnati library publishing services. And I want to thank Shirley and SP for inviting me. As well. I think what as I was listening to Patrick and Ann, it was really interesting because I think that what I'm talking about really embodies a couple of the things that they talked about and also what they were discussing as far as trends and what keeps them up at night.
It resonates with me with regard to what Patrick said about the next level. Publishing and reimagining, I think is very much what the University of Cincinnati press is about. We are a very small publisher. We started five years ago and we have a staff of three, including myself. So one of the things that I had to think about was what can a very small publisher with very little resources do in this space to differentiate themselves from the typical University press publisher?
And where we started was with something that's been on my mind since I was the marketing and sales director at the universe at Rutgers University press and has continued with me for the past 15 years, and that is to shrink the space between authors and readers. So being at u.c. press now, I have that opportunity to envision what that might look like.
So just a little bit of history on University presses. You know, 20, 30 years ago, we were talking about two separate entities. There would be University presses and library publishers. Currently, we have a variety of relationships with some presses reporting to libraries such as NYU and University of Arizona, press presses and libraries, collaborating together on projects.
And Michigan publishing and Temple University Press are wonderful examples of that. And then we have what is now starting to be talked about between ASU press and library publisher coalition, which is a new term called University publishing and the University of Cincinnati press. And our neighbor to the left, Indiana University press, would be two good examples of that in talking about or thinking about, I should say, the trends that affect me.
I wanted to really focus on one area. And that was acquiring and really developing that relationship with the authors that allows them to utilize open access to do more than they could have done with a traditional textbook in open access. So the trends that I really focus on and that I think about a lot, talk to my colleagues about are, what types of open access platforms can we develop or license?
Well, with a staff of three, I really had to look carefully at how I was going to use my resources, my time, my money. And so I've adopted, licensed, if you will, several platforms that I am experimenting with some of our authors and various projects that we are doing. So development at this particular moment was off the table, although I will say that one of the assets of being a hybrid University publisher is that we do work very closely with the library dev development team and the University development team.
But again, my mission and the mission of the press was to bring authors and readers closer together. And so I wanted to do that through. Really approaching this from the beginning before the author put pen to paper, when they were still assembling their thoughts, when they had completed their research, were formulating their arguments. I wanted to be there at that point.
So that together as an editor and an author, we could envision how not only we could create a more satisfying experience for the author, but also thinking about the consumer, how the author can write in a way that matches the way people consume information today. And that's what we're experimenting with. I'm not going to say that I absolutely have solved any of these problems, but we are exploring this.
This is the space we're working in. And then what we also decided was because there is still concern, especially with certain disciplines, about publishing and open access and what that means, although we do try and educate people all the time, academics in particular, on the differences between different types of open access content. We want it to also have an opportunity to experiment with what open access could do to commercially sold books in terms of resources.
So if I look at it from the author's perspective and my focus is on my author, what I'm really thinking about is how can they change the way they present the information, considering not only the narrative, what they would traditionally be writing, but also incorporating robust media and reader engagement. So what we're talking about is not necessarily creating a book that is open access, but static.
We're not talking about building a platform because, again, I'm not that's not what I'm focused on right now. What we're trying to do is we're trying to build a dynamic environment where authors can write their narrative, their text, formulate their arguments, but that they don't have to do it in a linear fashion and they don't have to do it in only one format. We embed hyperlinks in our books, which is nothing new, many digital books in bed hyperlinks.
But what we're also doing is linking out to different environments. And hopefully if I can get my screen share to work properly, I'll be able to show you some of that. But we link to videos that have been created for the book audio. We link to data sets that are stored within, for instance, our digital scholarship center. And we also put all of this material in the book on a platform we use Manifold.
But there are others out there that allows for reader engagement, reader annotation, so there can be a dialogue between an author and a reader. And much in the same way that social media has conversation threads, we can use conversation threads, whether they be in a private environment or in a public environment. For the publisher being me, one of the things we are wrestling with is we are not website developers and I am not looking to just add noise and bells and whistles.
So there's this really fine line between publishing a book and developing a book and creating a website. And there's a healthy tension there. We are not creating a website. We are perhaps embedding a website within a book and providing readers with very specific directed pathways to find the information so that it can be layered for the reader. But one of the big questions that we haven't answered yet is how do we maintain that?
Who whose responsibility is it to maintain that and keep that dialogue going? And for how long does that happen? Authors move on. They go on to other projects, they go on to different universities. They go they leave academia completely in certain instances. But we have a commitment to the reader to ensure that whatever we start with is going to be a satisfying experience.
Whether they read it the day after the book comes out or 15 years after the book comes out. So that's still a question that we have in terms of. Readers, I like to think of, and I often explain it to my authors as a version of choose your own adventure. What we want to do is we want to meet the reader. Where? the reader. Wants to be engaged.
In other words, if they want to just read the book from cover to cover, you can take an open access book that we publish and you can read it cover to cover. However, if you want to really dig into a certain aspect of what the author is talking about or you want more information, we've created books that actually become instructional and have audio and video demos within them.
And this is something that really is impossible in a traditional book. It's also something that most publishers, at least in the University press space, are not considering when they are looking at open access content. But again, as a way to distinguish ourselves from what we do compared to what some of our peers do. We felt that this was an important aspect of what we wanted to explore.
I want to give a shout out to one of my colleagues at Brown University. Some of you may know her name. Allison Levy is the editor and founding director of Brown University digital publications. She has just published a book with MIT Press. And if you have not seen it, it just came out in August. I really encourage you to take a look at it. A new vision for Islamic pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir.
What she has done here and again, they are not dealing with and out of the box, not using it out of the box piece of software. They have a Mellon grant that has allowed them to develop a very, very complex interactivity for their book. But we are going to try and replicate that through our dev team over here at the University of Cincinnati press using some more simplified methods.
What's really interesting, and this is what relates to the Choose Your own adventure, is they have this networked table of contents that allows the reader to enter the content from a variety of doorways. So you can essentially click on any particular chapter, and it will show you where that information appears in various chapters. So you can alter the.
Information that you're going to be reading in the order you're going to be reading and a little bit more of a Seamless way than flipping through a table of contents or an index. So it really does give you a completely different experience. Oops excuse me. I hate to interrupt, Liz, but we're running out of time. OK, that's fine.
I would just encourage you to take a look at some of the books that we have on our Manifold platform and on the slides, which I'm sure will be part of this. There are some links that will take you to the various types of interactive books that we have out there. I would encourage you to take a look at Blevins, and I would encourage you to take a look at kumara for some of the things that we've been paying attention to.
That's great. Thank you so much and Thank you to all of our panelists. I feel like all of you have so many more things you could have told us and shared with us. And I feel bad about cutting that short a little bit, but I did want to give us a chance to have some Q&A. So I am going to share another mental poll. It's the same place. If you have that still open, you should be getting a review on your screen.
And we just are wondering, from your perspective, now that you've all heard these different ideas and some of them are overlapping, some of them are quite different, what do you see as the most significant future change that you need to be prepared for? And so if you can go in to that mental poll and type in your comments and then as you're filling that out, I guess I'd like to Pose one of the first questions.
And this was something that came in ahead of the webinar for all three of the panelists. What are some blockers to making changes that help an organization align with the future? What would you suggest to someone, a small, scholarly publisher or even other kind of organization do to get ready for one of the key future changes that you've been talking about?
And I don't see anybody filling out the mental poll, but the number again, is 74435348. There it goes. So thank you. And as people are filling that out and it looks like you want to chime in first to respond to that. I will. But I just wanted to maybe give a shout out to something that Patrick said and also what Liz is actively doing.
It's that leap to customer centricity that I think if you don't make, it can really hold you back as an organization. And I think at elsevier, I've been here a long time, but I have seen that we are able to move more quickly and adeptly when we are listening to our customers. And this is something that has really been part of our culture now more than ever, and it's a market change.
If you don't do it, you will not be prepared. So right. Liz, do you have additional thoughts on that question? Sorry sorry. No, no, I think that's great. I guess some of the things we list in our survey that we had evidence back, as I mentioned, is that for some businesses, the sheer complexity of what is out there and what companies should be doing is a real blocker in itself.
I think certainly small organizations might not have the skill sets internally to kind of navigate that larger organizations and may be able to bring in consultants and help them kind of produce a roadmap towards kind of a transition of their business for smaller companies that reliant on the skill sets internally and that can be difficult. So that obviously comes down to sort of things like cost and revenues, but also complexity. But I guess above all, what I've seen is the major force for change is leadership.
And in companies where there's somebody who's prepared to drive this push through, offer a sort of safe haven for people in that organization who are trying to drive transformation, protecting them against others who may be a bit more conservative. I think that's a real force for change. I can just say very quickly specifically for the small publishers, I think the most important thing is to find a partner.
For us, it's our host University and I spend a lot of time making sure that I understand what the mission of the University is and what their goals are. And so if you're at a university, that's something that is in a lot of ways not obvious to publishers. They often tend to stay in the same track that they've been in for four years. If if you're not associated or affiliated with the university, that's where I say find a partner, find a buddy, find someone that believes in what you're doing and bring your resources together if you can.
Thanks so I love that. The question was, what are the blockers? And all three of you didn't even talk about that. You jumped just to solutions that would overcome blockers. So I love that positivity. Thank you very much for that. Great I'm jumping into the chat. There were some questions. So one was Patrick to you about what you consider an old school metric and what could be done, what should be replaced with?
Yeah I guess on that, an old school metric might be considered something like a focus on shaving off costs, shaving off times, or looking at capacity. And as I mentioned in the answer, all of those are still completely valid for any business. You have to still look at those centers. But I think the opportunities that are afforded to organizations, especially publishers, to embrace a digital environment and be much more customer centric and to have their kind of content as fluid, to reach out and be more like a media company than a kind of traditional print based publisher.
Just so the advantages are already manifest and we're seeing that with some people in the industry. So for me, the metric should be more about customer engagement. It's not just about how your business is performing the margins it's making. It's having customers for life and it's having authors for life. And it's about managing that through your business and then also your own staff satisfaction as much as anything.
Thanks I just want to pop back to the word cloud. If people are interested, I'm not surprised to see there's a lot of things that are small. So of course, the word clouds, the phrases that come up multiple times get bigger. But it was open so people could put in anything they want. Obviously, open access, accessibility and subscription models are coming up really big and then a lot of other things are smaller.
Thanks to all of you for sharing your thoughts and insights is super interesting and seems to align a lot with the kinds of things are our expert panelists have been sharing with us. So this is nothing. That's what you were hoping to get my next question that was in the chat. Let me just say one thing. We started a little bit late.
So SSPS is suggested that we just run a few minutes late. So we are going to do that. Apologies if this is inconvenient to anybody. Just a few minutes. But getting onto a question from Rachel Russell and I think this came up with when you were talking, so it might be directed to you or it might be directed to everybody. But the researchers really have the time to engage in that type of conversation.
All the ones I know are far too busy. I think that can be a broad question. How do we help authors give them more work. So I can kick it off? And my answer is that I would say the majority of scholars, researchers, authors that I am talking to have some interest in some level of interactivity and layering of their content.
I would say more than half, let's call it 65% And I'm very specific on what I am looking for. So I'm looking for partners that want to explore this. So I'm in the luxury area of not having to produce 100 or 500 or 1,000 books a year. I can really be very prescriptive in how I want to select my authors. And another question was to Liz, but I think the other panelists might actually have some insights into it, too, about with our push to open access and technology based products, it seems less and less important.
How do we help our organizations? How do we help our authors and our work processes align to the shift from print to electronic? I can just jump in and say that it is a little bit of a leap of faith. Certainly you have to have people and I will speak to journals. I know there's interest in books, but I remember during the transition not only just to open access, but prior to that from print to electronic, we were very, very interested in cultivating a digital first mentality and demonstrating to authors how the additional functionality and accessibility can help them.
I think was a big driver and certainly it's also very discipline specific. So you have some disciplines that are more ready to make that leap than others. But certainly policy is now playing an increasing role. And so perhaps less of a carrot, more of a stick. But we need to go digital in order to democratize access to that data. And I think it's a very important point, particularly where print in certain regions of the globe is not really the transaction of research currency anymore.
So that's also helpful incentives to of course, it takes money and infrastructure. But I'm going to go back to what Liz said about finding partners. I think that's really, really important. And I think that will find that at every point along the academic, scholarly publication spectrum, there are people with expertise in different areas that can help one another out.
So I have lots to say, but I'll stop there. And I think that carrot versus stick is always sort of an interesting way of trying to motivate change. Liz, what's your thoughts, particularly from the book's perspective? So what we do is with most of our books, I would say 80% of our books, even if they're open access, they have a print component.
So these two books, for example, are books that have open access. They're paperback, they're inexpensive to produce, they're small, obviously. And so we do a preprint on demand version. We we think about what the author needs versus what the author wants. I want the author to have a good experience because if I can meet him in the middle, that or her I know that, then we're going to get the best content.
The one thing I will say, I'll just show you two little secrets that we've started to do is for some of our books. For instance, this is a commercially sold book that doesn't have an open access format, but it does have an open access resource site. We put we are now starting to put QR codes in our books and that links from one place to the other and back again. So the open access site will have a link to the book in terms of where you can buy it and it'll have some sample content.
So that is something we're experimenting with. We're getting a lot of good feedback from that and we're actually seeing it drive some sales as well. Anything you wanted to chime in on this? Patrick I guess the only thing I was going to say from our point of view Anne touched on this is that accessibility as a topic, that there's new legislation on both sides of the Atlantic now for publishers to provide all of their content in a more accessible format.
And I think although that may be starting with University presses and their readership there, it's certainly putting pressure on the rest of the ecosystem. And that's going to require that publishers are starting to look at easier ways to get their content into an accessible format, which generally starts with an XML first workflow. Thank you, everybody. I'm mindful of the time.
I feel like we could have had 2 hours easily of interesting conversations. And I have to say, the planning session for this was so fun because when we were talking about this, everybody was able to throw ideas around. And Thank you so much to the three of you for sharing with us your thoughts about the future of scholarly publishing. Give us some ideas for what we could do in the groups that we work in to help to be ready for it.
I think Jason has some closing comments to make. And then we will wrap this up. Sure yeah, great. Thank you, Shirley, and Thank you, everybody who attended today's webinar. Thanks also to the panel for an engaging discussion. And of course, Thanks to our 2022 education sponsors, RFI j editorial open, Athens, silverchair, 67 Brexit and Taylor Francis staff 1,000 attendees.
You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. This is important. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us pick topics for future events. Please also check the cesp website for information on upcoming cesp events, including those shown here the 2022 new directions seminar, the next ask the experts webinar in early October and the next in the spe webinar series three ethical challenges in mid-october.
Today's discussion was recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it is posted on the cesp website. This concludes our session today. Thank you. Thanks to.
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