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New Directions in Tools for Discoverability, Findability, Shareability, and Impact
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New Directions in Tools for Discoverability, Findability, Shareability, and Impact
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JOHN SHAW: All right. Welcome back from the break, everyone, hopefully that was a good long break for you all. Great sessions this morning, so we're going to try to finish this out, I know, today. Thank you to the new director's working group and our meeting sponsors, we really couldn't have this amazing conference without all of you and all of your efforts and time. And Thank you everyone for joining the session, we appreciate you staying with us for the last session of the 2021 new directions conference.
JOHN SHAW: It's been absolutely fantastic thus far so thank you for all the speakers that have joined us as well. I am John Shaw, CTO of Sage and I'm joined by some esteemed publishing executives today. For the next 60 minutes we're going to have a discussion format where I will be asking the panelists some fairly unrehearsed questions.
JOHN SHAW: We'll chat for about 40 minutes or so and leave 20 minutes for any questions you may have. Of course, we encourage everyone attending the session today to interact using Zoom by entering questions in the Q&A box and Zoom, and we'll respond as we go through that chat. Before we get started, let's go around and meet each one of our panelists, let's start with you, Alix.
ALIX VANCE: OK. Hi, I'm Alix Vance, I'm the CEO at AIP Publishing in New York. I've been there for little more than a year prior to which I was CEO at Geoscience World for about nine years, and in earlier days involved with some startups in e-journals and e-books.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific. Darrell.
DARRELL GUNTER: Darrell Gunter, I'm president and CEO of Gunter Media Group and we've been in business for about 10 years. Prior to that, I was with AIP for a short period of time, and then Elsevier for a number of years launching ScienceDirect and Scopus along with collexis, dealing with semantic technology. And prior to that I was in the financial industry at Dow Jones.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific, let's go to you Lisa.
LISA SHAW: Hi, everyone. My name is Lisa Cueva Shaw, I'm the CEO and managing director at the Center for Open Science. And I've been there just under three months, so fresh perspective in terms of a different kind of infrastructure which we may talk about, but prior to that, I was with Sage for a number of years. So welcome to the session everyone.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific. And Sami, at least not least.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Yeah, thank you. So, I'm Sami, co-founder and CEO at Morressier company start up, yeah, a startup, based in Berlin Washington D.C. In London, kind of a definition problem here right there. But very happy to be here this morning, midday, tonight, wherever you are.
JOHN SHAW: Awesome, great. Thanks, everyone and thank you for joining us, really appreciate it and looking forward to our session and what we're about to talk about. This session has existed for several years now, each year has focused on different topics around technology and how technology can be leveraged across our community. This year we wanted to bring together some CEOs and sea level leaders to provide their perspectives.
JOHN SHAW: These leaders deal with these issues around technology on a daily basis, having to lead their organizations into the future, responding to the users and boards and decide how much of their limited resources, which would be people, time, and money to invest in new technology to help meet their missions. In our preparation for the sessions, a few things keep arising. When looking at new technology, just going through that discussion and how to invest it and why to invest it, kept asking ourselves, well, what are we trying to solve for here?
JOHN SHAW: We kept noting that there are limited funds to spend on new technology, within each of our organizations, really, and in our lives. And we live in a space that largely offers non-competitive technology as compared to what ourselves as consumers experience with the likes of Google, Facebook, your Apple products, whatever it may be. So, when we discuss the slow pace and low demands that exists in academic publishing, combining that with the limited funds, non-competitive technology, we noted how strategic plans always seemed to kind of be the same or not really evolve or push the boundaries as much on a year to year basis.
JOHN SHAW: Do we think that taking all that, that this could actually come back to haunt us at some point? Who wants to take that one? And a lob that one out there for somebody.
DARRELL GUNTER: Well, let me say that we don't want to be Tolerate and a lot of people going, well, who the hell is Tolerate? Tolerate actually had 100% of the marketplace in the financial markets back in the 80s and then Bloomberg came in and not only ate their lunch but really caused the Bancroft family to have to sell their stock in Dow Jones because they took a $2.5 billion bath because they did not invest properly with Tolerate to compete against Bloomberg.
DARRELL GUNTER: So, I think this industry really wants to be mindful but also use a lot of integrity in investment, just don't invest in different technology just because it's the latest hot new thing and try to figure it out. But to really be prudent and really use good diligence in your thought process about, does this new technology make sense? Where is it solving a problem?
DARRELL GUNTER: And how are we going to implement it?
ALIX VANCE: Darrell, can I ask you a question?
DARRELL GUNTER: Absolutely.
ALIX VANCE: So, I mean, but what you say implies that we really do understand the problem, right? That we have a horizon focused vision and that we place ourselves accurately within that, relative to our missions, our capabilities, how would you respond to that? Are we likely to actually assess the landscape accurately so that we can position as you encourage us to?
DARRELL GUNTER: I mean, the thing about it is that we have seen our industry take a long time to adopt things that we think are common sense. For example, in 2001, at a PSB conference, they actually had a panel debating whether or not books were going to be digital or not. And I would say that a lot of publishers held off on digitizing their book content. They said, well, people are saying it's really not going to be important so we shouldn't do that.
DARRELL GUNTER: And so it's a matter of testing out certain things and failing fast and try to do it in an inexpensive way. To say, OK, there was an experiment, a project at Springer, Taylor, Francis, a couple of other publishers got together to explore blockchain for peer review. And I don't think that project went any further but they tried and they said, OK, I don't have any details about what happened but if something positive had happened, we would have heard about the next step with that.
DARRELL GUNTER: And so as those types of projects where it allows us to really explore but where I think the opportunity is for some of these startups that don't have the history, don't have the other challenges that, publishers have real challenges, make no doubt about it, but they are going to introduce something that publishers are going to go, yeah, let's acquire them. And one of my concerns is that sometimes other publishers acquire certain technology and they put it out to pasture because it was competitive fashion.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I love this discussion already there's so many things that I could just dive in immediately. Let me maybe one immediate thought, the element of failing fast because you're right, this is an ingredient really move over and beyond. Quite frankly from my perspective living here in startup city from Europe and Berlin, I would love to define fast for the scholarly industry.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I still see a lot of, let's say, 30 speech style innovation going on and always when I'm speaking to people outside our industry, I'm always referring to that wonderful Forbes article in the 90s, say, the first industry that's going to be disrupted is going to be a scholarly industry. Well, and as a matter of fact, the last one that is still not disrupted is the scholarly industry.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, it is interesting to observe these ideas. And there's numerous reasons, you alluded to a couple but I'm sure that we'll dive into more and more. So I think just from my perspective here, I think we should be a little bit more, let's say, daring to fail and define fast not in terms of destinies but maybe in terms of weeks and months, it's just--
ALIX VANCE: Well, it's interesting because I think that's really relevant. I mean, when you're talking about investments, I think Darrell is really talking about taking a more iterative and agile approach, which really borrows from-- I mean, so the first place I would go is we probably have a number of societies also in our midst. So that the first thing we can talk about is there are disruptive startups, there are large commercial publishers or membership societies, there's some of us who are a mixed animal of some of this.
ALIX VANCE: So, where do we see ourselves performing in this sort of matrix? And one of the questions has been for a long time, our societies, I hate to say this, are we, sort of sitting ducks. Do we actually have the abilities, the structures, the governance, the cape, the technology wherewithal internally to be agile in the way that we need to be? But I think you're right, it's like first let's really think critically about what is the speed needed?
ALIX VANCE: What are the investment levels needed? Things have been very slow in our environment and we get quite exercised about, I remember in, I don't know, 2010 every SSP would have this banner of like the train is coming, the great doom is happening, open is now and we have continued to sort of have time. And I think we do now have this sense that, oh, actually we are being seriously disrupted and encroached upon and we've reached a place where the speed is much more profound and impactful.
ALIX VANCE: But I'd love to think about then how do nonprofits and mission-based organizations, which have an incredibly important role to play in scholarship and scholarly communication, along with institutions and authors and everybody else on our ecosystem, technology companies, how do we actually work together to systemically improve our abilities to succeed, to thrive?
ALIX VANCE: And part of that is, I think, through the technology lens because that's where we're getting a lot of pressure from, is to adopt some more iterative practices in a different time scale but where we're each playing a specific coordinated role. How does that sound?
LISA SHAW: Yeah. I really like that. It was diplomatic actually but I think it's really important because what you're also getting at is we've got, again, this ecosystem with many stakeholders who can play distinct roles. So we've got this distributed system, we've got a research lifecycle overlapping it that is somewhat linear in nature but not exactly. And so what are we trying to do?
LISA SHAW: What are we accomplishing? So I think what you're saying too, kind of brings us back to what are we trying to solve for and who within the system is solving for it. So some of the things that we've talked about or we've heard at the other sessions are greater rigor. So publishers, yes, have always been responsible for curating content, the rigor of the research, and now more than ever, mistrust in science, all of that.
LISA SHAW: We have a responsibility, a shared responsibility, also trying to solve for improved process, efficiency, distribution, and equitable access, discoverability, maybe data analytics. Who handles that? Who should handle that? Why should there be redundancies there? Can libraries really support that or should that be publishers?
LISA SHAW: Funders? So there's so much to solve for and it feels as though we're still not coalescing around, yet we don't need to do that. Let's come together and define, have some form of shared governance where it can be possible. So I think there's still some inefficiencies there that, then essentially exacerbates some of the common problems with technology investment.
DARRELL GUNTER: You know, let me share a story. You know, I grew up in a grocery store and we were on one corner, Harry Miller was the next corner and then down from him was Miss Williams. And we all competed within our respective neighborhoods but when we needed something collectively, we would come together and say, oh, I got to fill this order, do you have a chicken? Or whatever it was. And this industry has this level of distrust which isn't healthy.
DARRELL GUNTER: Back in 1989, Karen Hunter set a, God bless her soul, she's passed on, brilliant mind, suggested to the industry that Elsevier on ScienceDirect will load up everyone's content at no cost and you can charge whatever you want. And there was only a few, very small publishers, like had one journal, that took Elsevier up on that because there was distrust of Elsevier. Because people said we wanted to own the desktop and the answer to that is that the only person who owns the desktop is the user and the user is going to decide how they're going to utilize and what service they're going to utilize.
DARRELL GUNTER: To that point, Barbara Lange who's now with S&PTE, she used to be at IEEE, she was the champion of Sitetopia. Sitetapia was one platform for publishers to come together and it launched, and deep web was the technology provider for it. Unfortunately she got the executive director position with this other society and it died. And that was a great, great initiative because each publisher is a subject matter expert in their area and they have their relationships and that cannot be replicated, that is their intellectual capital.
DARRELL GUNTER: So, it's like let's increase the level of trust and let's talk about what Alix said is around technology, things that we can do that is going to benefit everyone. You look at ORCID you look at Crossref, you look at the DIY, of those things came about because industry said we don't need to have individuals.
LISA SHAW: Actually, just because you brought up ORCID and I know this won't be a PID palooza right now but just to say, I mean, one great example, and this isn't technology specific per se but it's part of the technology ecosystem. One of the, I think, success stories or at least initial success stories of this year was seeing GRID and Roar actually reconcile the fact that we probably don't need these two systems to be perpetuated.
LISA SHAW: And so Digital Science saying, yes, we're going to hand this over to Roar now. Again, that's not technology specific but that's the kind of key principles that we're talking about is where are there redundancies? Where do we have a shared need in the community, who takes the lead on that? And by the way, Roar is community-based. So that's an even better component, in terms of sustainability and kind of the democratization process too which do we agree on some of those key principles.
LISA SHAW: I think that's something to discuss too but.
ALIX VANCE: Well, and I think I totally take this point that we actually need both speed and scale and we need some specificity. I mean, actually someone said to me the other day, I was in a library advisory board meeting , and this is not going to be very diplomatic, but I was talking about commercial scale and they sort of, they poked the question. Like, is commercial scale inherently threatening?
ALIX VANCE: What happens in a commercial organization versus a non-profit organization? What are the attributes, John's asked this too. Why do we-- why fundamentally do we just strongly defend some of the attributes? So say it is a mission, vision orientation versus a shareholder return orientation, how did those manifest actually and what might be pros and cons of each?
ALIX VANCE: One kind of system will drive certain behaviors, another will drive other outcomes. But going back to that point of can we think as an industry, we often think in terms of walled garden well, Darrell, I'm not going to do that thing because Elsevier owns it and I will be subsumed, I will become irrelevant, whatever, that's my fear. But I'm not going to do it with this society over here because we've been fighting about the weeds in our respective gardens for 10 years right or as long as I've lived in this house.
ALIX VANCE: So, is there a place where we start thinking about ourselves as a collective we, which are the things that we really want to, the proprietary rules. Do we have proprietary rules? But to your point, Lisa, it's like what are the common goals? How do we reframe who the challenger is? And then how do we, through some kind of aligned governance structure, how do we then in-build the trust?
ALIX VANCE: Where we each feel that we have an acknowledged role and we're contributing and we're not at risk of being eradicated or subsumed.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And then, again, what I think would, also what Alex and Lisa were talking about, is that idea of thinking about structures, we thinking a lot about how we go forward. Maybe I'm too extreme on that one but I think that there is a need, and especially in our industry, kind of a bias towards action and not biased towards thinking. I think we are very, very good as an industry about thinking a lot and overthinking stuff sometimes very radically.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: If you compare it almost to other industry and if you compare it with highly innovative areas of the world outside of scholarly publishing, then it is trying out rather than thinking about, right? I think the scientists that are publishing all the wonderful journals, that's the way they do things, they try ahead, they fail fast. But it seems like our industry does not adapt this idea of trying out, failing, we talked about that user orientation, would we as a collective almost do is we think about the user but the complexity of how user uses technology, we cannot think it through.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Sometimes people just use technology in completely different ways. So I think the almost the wish towards our industry would be to say, dare to fail and dare to do something that might be against just a general thought process because in the end, you cannot really think it through. And I'm observing that in our daily practice is we need to think about it, we need to think it through and then after a couple of weeks, then we thought it but then at the end we'll try it out and then we learn, OK, this is how--
ALIX VANCE: Well, we haven't despite the fact that the scientists are experimenters, we've been the curators and we seem to have a perfectionism bias, like the control bias, maybe that's working against us, right?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: But it's interesting, is that contradictory? I would love that, that's a very exciting opinion, yeah.
ALIX VANCE: Very theoretical question.
LISA SHAW: But I think from a technology perspective, we're talking about two streams at least, probably many, many of them. But there's the researcher experience, what they need throughout any stage and towards publication and dissemination but then we are actors within this whole system trying to enable certain compliance components among funders, institutions, societies, researcher, all of that.
LISA SHAW: And so which ones need experimentation and rapid iteration and which ones need the planning and like we know that we're going to come together just for sustainability purposes as well and to gain efficiencies. And that's where we've got kind of a very fragmented segmented dynamic going on. And so we can do a better job of selecting where we double down as a community and where we leave marketization and innovation, like that's one of the big challenges for us.
JOHN SHAW: So let me move us, we've got a question that just came in from Anna Jester, which goes into one of our questions. Thank you Anna, you primed it right up. So, her question is in our opinion, what portion of a strategic plan should be specifically designated to innovation and should proactive innovation be prioritized over reactive innovation? Our question went on to how much do you spend, the technical debt versus technology versus new innovation.
JOHN SHAW: So I think, Anna, your question is perfect and this kind of dovetails off of what Lisa was just saying. So, let me, again, lob it out to the group and see how you hit that one.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Fight. So let me just have a first idea, the first impulse that I had when talking about innovation. For me innovation is this buzzword that I don't really understand what it is if you will, and I couldn't know what to say. I spent 10% of my time on innovation or 20% of my time on innovation because quite frankly innovation is almost a thought process, it's almost something that is the foundation for everything that you do in every corner of the company.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, if I'm hearing companies say I spend 20% of my time on innovation, then I'm saying, well, something is wrong because the 80% might be not good at all. So essentially the way I look into innovation is on all ends there needs to be some sort of evolution, there needs to be some sort of next step and in the end, that's exactly what innovation is. So, somehow of a general thought process that you can facilitate within the entire organization, where you can program everybody in the organization to be more innovative, allow the room for innovation but not say, well, everybody please spend 10% of your time on innovation, whatever that means.
ALIX VANCE: I think that's right, it's a mindset and it has processes around it. So you on board those processes and those tendencies and those ways of having conversations and solving problems and engaging in meetings, I think it's interesting. I mean, John mentioned debt, tech debt and I think part of the question was if you have, which many of us would say, OK, I have x amount to spend, and how much do I apply to technology debt?
ALIX VANCE: There was also embedded in the question this thing about proactive versus reactive, and I think what you're saying, Sami, is that proactive experimenting technology flights and MVPs fail fast. All of this is associated with a process of continuous innovation which you do want to onboard throughout, I think, throughout kind of cultivate those processes throughout. Now, some organizations feel like they are also climbing out of a lack of capacities, so how long does it take you?
ALIX VANCE: And is it even appropriate? Should every society become an innovation company? Should every society try to climb out of some infrastructural or technological debt? Can that work? As you try to become more technoligized, you end up incurring more drag that you're carrying with you. So, again, go back to like what is our relationship to innovation and to technology and to creation of technology, maybe ownership of technology versus management of coordinated outsource technology, those sorts of questions.
LISA SHAW: I tend to agree in terms of the mindset piece of it. So I think it's a really great question, Anna, and I do think it should be asked so it's not just like yep, but it's a mindset for the organization, it should be explicitly asked, so I'm glad you raised it. I think the proactive innovation versus or kind of versus reactive innovation is really interesting to me because I could answer that two ways.
LISA SHAW: The first is that in some cases that's actually a false dichotomy. So if we're actually moving quickly, then you've got some proactive but it's pretty quickly met with reactive based on user feedback, hopefully. But I think, and again, interpreting your question, there is kind of a if we have enough insight as an organization that we are meeting a need, we are solving a problem and we've got enough evidence and define enough, that's problematic.
LISA SHAW: But we feel that, yeah, we can be proactive then that's when I would kind of pull the trigger, so to speak, on that. And reactive is when you really don't have a strong sense of things, things are fragmented ambiguous, a little bit unclear or there are a lot of actors kind of in that space, then you want to actually iterate, be a little bit more reactive would be kind of an initial response to that.
LISA SHAW: But it's a problematic comparison in a way because innovation cycles kind of necessarily combine both paradigms that you're describing.
DARRELL GUNTER: Well, it speaks to a very complex issue because, and Sami is right, is innovation just thinking? And you think about the companies like a 3M, which is in the book built to last, which is a classic book that talks about how 3M automatically provides people 25% of the time to think innovatively and not hurt them as far as their professional development. But it starts off with the hypothesis, what problem are we trying to solve?
DARRELL GUNTER: What type of new thing are we trying to do and how that's going to help us to be more productive and whatnot. We got to ask though, what if question, what if we were able to do? What if we were able to do this? OK, so what does that mean? How will that improve the research cycle? I mean, we're all in this research ecosystem and there is a lot of inefficiencies in it but those inefficiencies are not necessarily bad, it's simply because we're all, as Sami said, we're figuring this out as we go along.
DARRELL GUNTER: And almost like if we were driving across the country and we didn't have a map but we wanted to get to California, we're going to eventually going to get there because we're going to figure it out and then, of course, then we create the map for that. And I think companies-- my concern about the scholarly publishing industry, and I love the scholarly publishing industry, that's why I decided to stay in it, is that we get very comfortable and we have our task, our duties, and everything is going well.
DARRELL GUNTER: And I said to Elsevier, when I was still at Elsevier and I said, listen, open access is just a business problem model, we just got to figure out what the model is that we can be profitable. And now folks are figuring out, oh, we can make money off of open access, so here we do deposit accounts and now we're doing quite well. Innovation is really pushing ourselves but also if we were able to do it collectively, how much more stronger and better would we be as an industry, if we were sharing.
DARRELL GUNTER: And a lot of folks are concerned about technology transfer and giving away their IP and the intellectual capital but those are the things that need to be discussed and resolved, as we've done with Crossref, ORCID, DIY, et cetera.
JOHN SHAW: If I can jump in and just go to Anna's first part of the question. Sorry, I'm going to jump in from the organizer down to the panel here, if you don't mind. Sage, we use a model, Sami knows I can't stop, it said we use a model called CAT for innovation. So, core, adjacent, and transformational-- transformative? Now when I forget what a CAT is but it's not the furry thing.
JOHN SHAW: And within that CAT, each organization has to decide what you want to invest in. So, typically and where we put our investment is the large shares in the core, it's not to say that you can't be innovative within the core but the core of your products are the base things that you do. Adjacent is slightly different model from your core business and you would want, it's a diverse portfolio.
JOHN SHAW: So you want some adjacent products, so a little more upstream, and then you have the transformational or they're totally different, that's like getting into some different models. So Sage in the past few years has gotten into teaching and learning technology so invested in companies like Talis or Lean Library, and getting into the library products. And so that for us is the transformational side.
JOHN SHAW: We largely, like I said, keep a percentage highly in the transformational, or sorry, in the core and a bit in the middle adjacent, and a smaller percentage in the transformational bucket. And we have to decide each year what we feel that percentage is, that's good for our business model. And then going to Sami's point, we're going to be innovative everywhere but the truly it's not set to transformational, it's innovative, it's just different from what our core is.
JOHN SHAW: But innovation is in each one of those and then that's how we divide, how do we invest.
LISA SHAW: The benefit of that model has been that it's-- yeah, we're reacting to the CAT, we all love the CAT. But just to say from an organizational perspective, it's a great organizing framework. It forces you to say what problem are we trying to solve, who are our audiences, those are things that organizations lose sight of because you get all wrapped up in all the disruptions around you saying, we've got to do that. So it's a great model, but the other thing that it does is really push you to think about if we're not having enough percentage in adjacent and transformative, who can we partner with or how do we accelerate that or is there someone else out there doing something?
LISA SHAW: So it, it can kind of accelerate that process of defining potential collaborations too. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
ALIX VANCE: [INAUDIBLE] fundamentally acknowledges this thing of what we didn't do is we're talking about innovation, we never actually said, what the heck it is and how many forms does it have. So one of the things that I hear, John, in that model is an acknowledgment that continuous improvement of your core business is in fact innovation. I mean, we get kind of seduced into thinking that it has to be a new, shiny object versus a reapplication of something you already do in a slightly new space.
ALIX VANCE: Anyway, other people, I'll just wait of it.
DARRELL GUNTER: But Alix, it speaks to performance measurements. What are we measuring? What are our KPIs? Because you're right, you improve the critical path of a particular situation, it's improving your response to your customers and your needs and stuff. And it's allowing your company to have a higher return on their already existing investment because you've improved the process.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And that's why I want to introduce the DOG model, DOG, no, I'm just joking.
JOHN SHAW: Here you have that.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Sorry, I was just-- so, one thing that, just to combine almost all the points and it's a big observation that we're doing, is that there is a lot of publishers in societies that have, it seemingly the urge to be a technology company and it speaks a little bit to what we all are saying. And I'm not sure if that's really necessary, I'm not sure if the main product of a society or a publisher should be the technology or should be something completely else.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So you can be innovative in so many different things than just technology but the brand or peer review processes or whatever it is, just to name two. And the focus of it, the technology company is not to be a publisher or try to be a publisher but really be the technology company. So I feel that there is almost a need of reassessing of who is focusing on what and it comes to the point that you mentioned John on saying, where do we invest?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Where do we really focus our investments into not say innovation. So, I'm investing in technology and I'm investing in a partner that is innovative and I'm innovative as a whole in the core of my business, and I feel that this is something that needs sort of a re-calibration almost.
JOHN SHAW: Yeah. Angela has thrown in then the technology [INAUDIBLE] group which then goes to ask the question of handle immediate radical innovation and then I think Darrell or Sami said earlier, you innovate and then all of a sudden you just stop. So, that's where I think you're going Angela, it's all good until then.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: It's a great point Angela and I think that describes a little bit also the problematic overall structure of that industry where there is not, in every segment, massive companies that are basically almost owning that segment in that one industry right. I think one thing that happened with the acquisition from Procaps to Claravis, it almost, that is a technology company that is massive and should focus on innovation within technology.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, just to add up to that point and to pinpoint to Angela's point, maybe technology companies should be sold to other technology companies such as Claravis and not to publishers and create basically dedicated segments.
ALIX VANCE: Well, that's interesting because the ones who have the wherewithal to purchase the technology startups are the larger publishers. So one point to Angela's seat is the societies who may be in our audience here, really don't have the wherewithal to do that so much and so what difference does that make?
DARRELL GUNTER: But Alix, the societies could actually create an entity to make these purchases.
ALIX VANCE: Well, and do they know how to do that? Does it lean into their skills? We could do that, you could, you could create a collective R&D pool but are we fooling ourselves? Do we know how to do that? The other question I would ask is, and I think the answer is different depending on the entity, are large publishers buying technology companies because they don't want to be in the content business?
ALIX VANCE: Do they want to be publishers? Do they want to be service businesses? Do they want to be technology company? Do they want to be data companies? So that also goes to how do you see yourself? What is the role you see yourself playing in the long [INAUDIBLE].
DARRELL GUNTER: a couple of years ago when the Elsevier CEO says we are now a data company, a lot of people in the scholarly publishing industry, like, oh yeah, now they're a data company, who else did they think they are? But the fact is that data is very important and data and publishing yeah, they go together, data is the new oil.
ALIX VANCE: But that goes to I think is are we in a state of existential threat? How much can we cruise? How much can we continue to behave as we have? I don't know.
JOHN SHAW: Alix, can I ask you a question? Because it dovetails right into Anna's whatever question and where Angela is going and this discussion of consortium of publishers. So, geoscience world, you have experience here working on behalf of publishers and you had maybe those opportunities in front of you. You had to work on behalf of the money that you had, make good investments for those publishers, you maybe could have made decisions like this.
JOHN SHAW: Did that ever come up or is that something--
ALIX VANCE: All the time, all the time. Within the publishers that we had, the 30 plus publishers at GSW and have tried to start these conversations more broadly because obviously you started looking at scale outside of one domain, one subject matter or even the realm of geosciences. And I think the trick is, I mean, I started shifting into this idea of how can you create coalitions of the truly willing? Because what I did see over the span of time at GSW was as people develop more of a sense of urgency, they were willing to entertain new ideas.
ALIX VANCE: They were willing to drop some of the kind of conventional thinking maybe in order to say let's think about taking risks together or actually even visualizing what risks and opportunities look like outside of the ways that we've traditionally done as membership societies who protect their members from encroachment from other camps. So, motivators and urgency really important, governance really important, but I think at the end of the day you care more about having a shared mentality and commitment to what we've talked about, common goals and processes.
ALIX VANCE: So if you can dissolve some of the perceptual barriers about territory and the threat we know versus the bigger risks, we can create truly cross organizational teams. But the trick is always actually, whenever I've had these real conversations, is are you willing to put skin in the game? Are you willing to get uncomfortable? Are you willing to disrupt some things in your business for the collective whole?
ALIX VANCE: And if you can, and I think also now we're in really a place of are you willing to look at unconventional partnerships with people who you might not have looked at before? I personally think it's actually very high time, but then really think, as Sami said, think about the systems of governance and running those new orgs and how you're going to make those work equitably.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And just on, just one little thought here. I think if you look into the technology companies, the large technology companies that really keep on innovative, keep on being innovative, their mantra is exactly what you said Alix, is disrupt your own business before someone else does it for you and then you're out of business. So essentially I think that should be some, let's say new idea that everybody in the industry, at least should think about, I guess, from that perspective.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Lisa, sorry.
LISA SHAW: No, that's OK. I was just going to go back to kind of the experience geoscience world consortia coming together in terms of nonprofits and all that. And the, again, I'm going to sound like an idealist here but, hey, what are we here for but if not to be idealist. But just, again, to think about mission and the bigger existential threats or the bigger problems we're trying to solve because if we only focus on scale and efficiencies through technology, there are these unintended consequences of perpetuating rewards and incentive systems that actually should be changed or that are outdated.
LISA SHAW: But those big companies may not have the drive or the urgency to change it because they're able to scale, able to solve for the existing and then we perpetuate some of those things. And so the beauty of kind of nonprofits in the traditional sense, mission driven is that you're looking out for some different public good, looking for the research, the benefit of kind of advancing research in positive ways.
LISA SHAW: And so that needs to be balanced, we can't kind of just focus on scale and only on efficiencies, only on pace and speed. Again, it comes back to what are we trying to solve for and what are our shared values in all of this.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: For sure and, sorry, I'm annoying with my-- just one more thing. Lisa, I think if you look into other industries, there are actually industries that are highly regulated, because there is a need for regulation, but still manage to pair it with constant innovation. And in a sense, it is exactly what you were mentioning. I think we definitely, that almost ethical idea that we all need to keep, and I fully agree to your point, can be paired with highly innovative cycles.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And there are best practices out there I think it's, again, that idea of daring and trying out and maybe just decoupling things, trying out on certain areas and moving there quicker. There are ways to do that, I think it's about just that almost mentality if you will.
LISA SHAW: I agree. And just to say I don't think they should be mutually exclusive, like, let's get out of our own way too and really look outside of, let's not be insular as much as we have in the past but let's also keep the good stuff too.
ALIX VANCE: I think that's right. I mean, Tim Lloyd just said in the chat, I think he's right. I mean, some of our structures, as he said, are full of cells that attack the unknown, I think that's right. But to your point, I mean, what we're really getting to here is we want to perform effectively, we want to utilize those drivers that frankly will enable us to compete and thrive and survive. And completely agree, Lisa, which is really we differentiate ourselves as a community by having strong values based in societal objectives.
ALIX VANCE: So that's the core of what we do and what we are, we're trying to solve the world's biggest problems through science or medicine or what have you, through research. That's fundamentally important and we don't want that to be carried away by desire for pleasing investors, generating more profit, what have you. So that's really important.
ALIX VANCE: But to Tim's question, like do we need to create new structures that take both into account so that we're not trying to work with legacy structures that are hostile? I mean, just throwing that out there.
DARRELL GUNTER: If you look at the work that [INAUDIBLE] Schmidt is doing with STM, where she brings folks together to brainstorm and then, of course, some projects, industry projects come out of that, which is a very good thing. And it doesn't mean that STM needs to have the ownership of something like this because there's a lot of great organizations out there, but to follow that model and to set goals for it and give it some money so it can achieve, you'll see that the industry can come together to do these innovative things, that's going to benefit everyone.
DARRELL GUNTER: Where it's not just one winner, it's like the industry wins, which means the research wins.
ALIX VANCE: So that's great actually too. That's really interesting to me, can we come up with examples to use as poster children, if you will, and demonstrate to ourselves, within our community that these are the success stories, what can we learn from them? How can we create more of these models? One of the things, let's see, at the mercy of commercial partners, I'm reading Angela's thing. Because it's too much, yeah, it's too much for society.
ALIX VANCE: So now you can create society collaboratives, cross society collaboratives, you probably need to also reach outside for some of the elements that have not natively existed within those. I think governance really is a challenge for societies because the governance is not always existing within the strategic core of the organization. So how much authority does the society itself have? Really in its own governance, that's a relevant question, do you need to create another entity?
ALIX VANCE: But the other thing, I was sort of thinking about earlier is we were talking about innovation cycles and continuous market research, do we each need to have little groups that are doing the same market research over and over with the same people? There are a million examples like that.
JOHN SHAW: Yeah. And Heather and Angela are putting great examples out there, good FTRs, Seamless Access, what STM is content creation, onsight citation. I think back to the days of high-wire where it was founded up through the library system, societies trusted what their mission was and collectively trying to build new technology and innovate technology to push forward, that's changed over the years. But ultimately it comes down to trust, which we talked about early on, trust of each other and trust of whatever the entity is.
JOHN SHAW: Angela, you say mercy of the commercial partners, so yeah, that comes out of the word trust. And then still it comes down to investment, how much are you willing to invest. Because even if STM puts something forward or in the past a crossref would put ideas out there, some of these things need heavy investment or more investment than your yearly fees. And so are we willing to invest in that as a collective or as an organization?
JOHN SHAW: Those will continue to be the core questions I think of when we're--
DARRELL GUNTER: Think about like a conundrum registration, they want to do repairs, so they want to add on something new, the members they will vote on it, they'll agree to it and they'll build it. And I know with STM, they have the membership fees but I've seen where there's projects where they go around the table and say, OK, this is what we need from all the publishers if we're going to do this.
JOHN SHAW: So, how do you fit into that Cat model and use, it's a we shouldn't be doing this. So one, I trust this and let's give this amount of money per year to invest in this type of technology.
ALIX VANCE: And specific to the GSW example, like that was viewed as a sort of shared risk reward model but inherent in that was the idea that some of the largers would either invest more or take less and some of the smallers might benefit a little more. Not in kind of quantitative hard dollars but that you would be willing to give more to the community. I think part of that, and that's actually one of the ways, one of the mechanisms that you can create that trust.
ALIX VANCE: I think one of the anxieties is OK, you contribute more and am I just kind of a hanger on, or what is the evidence? So there are actually some ways to build these things into your business and core engagement models that you can demonstrate goodwill in practical ways and in results based ways. And that that actually might be, for example, one of. In addition to the poster children, it might be also what are the elements of the models that sustain trust and collaboration over time.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I want to add two very brief points. The one being it feels like there are all these great examples and it's good that we have those great examples but for me just looking also from just the topic of innovation, we are not even close to where we should be actually as an industry. Because Alix, you said it very clearly and I just want to be very direct, you said it clear, we are in such an important industry and what we do as an industry is incredibly relevant for the entire world.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, yes, we have poster childs and we have nice activities but it's not close to where we should be in terms of innovation on how to distribute scholarly research, how to actually give content to pour up parts of the world to the global societies, if you will. All of these ideas it's not solved, it's not even close to be solved. And I think that goes to the point of innovation, I want to make a little bit more extreme, John pushed me to be extreme, I'm just going to pinpoint you.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So the point on innovation on saying, well, do we invest in investment? Do we invest really enough? Do we invest enough as the players within the industry and do we have enough companies that emerge within the industry from the outside, with new energy, with new thought process. And I'm looking a little bit from the perspective of the venture capital, for example, we don't see too many companies with venture capital entering the industry on a regular basis.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I think that, yes, I agree to all the elements of trust and we need rigor and all of that is very important and I think we have that, that is a very core element but we really need to incentivize companies from the outside entering that industry with investments outside, in order to innovate, in order to offer new ideas, to offer new perspectives. If we take them or not, it's a different element, we need to try out and let researchers and authors and just every stakeholder in the industry really try things out and be bold, be open about new things.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So I feel that, and looking back at the eighteen last month, I think things moved a little bit, got shaking up. I would have wished that it goes a little bit more extreme when it comes to innovation. And I very much hope that we're not sitting here in a year and said what changed throughout COVID, and we say, well, not much. We have our small little great examples but it is the opportunity for us as an industry to really, really innovate and allow things to come in.
ALIX VANCE: So, let me ask you a question, I just wanted to give you this. In that I agree with you, bolder and why bolder. I was sitting with someone who was with an unnamed social media foundation something and they were talking about us, our industry. And it was, well, don't you understand that if bla, bla went on Facebook, we get this audience and really we should be taking this over because we can command the eyeballs, we can get to the K through 12 people.
ALIX VANCE: Like, we are the people who democratize science and get the pa, pa, pa, pa. But ultimately I said, well, what is it? Because there was sort of this like you need to be disrupted, you don't get it, you don't get science, you don't get the power of science, you don't get the way younger people want to receive science. And I said, what is it about us that makes you think we don't get it, we're not interested, and we won't engage?
ALIX VANCE: Now, I about climbed over my dinner table but I was like really receiving this as like you guys don't understand the business that you are in, and that felt very threatening to me. But I think to your point, are we really having those Boulder conversations are we meeting around those tables because those are the people who will disrupt us I think.
JOHN SHAW: Let me take it too. So we're in our bonus time, we've been moving in through questions and still having our conversation, we've got four minutes. So, in four minutes I'd like to go up to Sophie's question that she's asked. And it says, can you speak to any new technology in our industry that has received really good adherence from our main users, researchers, librarians, authors, peer reviewers, society members.
JOHN SHAW: It would be so interesting to hear collective thoughts on current success stories. So, quickly around the virtual room here, do you have any examples?
LISA SHAW: I don't-- actually I will go first because mine is broad and then maybe we'll get more specific, so I'm taking the easy way out. I wanted to actually connect the dots between Sophie's and Tim's, which I don't want to speak for you Tim but just to reflect. Again, I agree with you Sami that we're not where we need to be but what I will say is all is not lost because if you look at the way that we're increasingly constructing things using modularized formats, we're not just building the big platform, or maybe we have that, that some legacy systems.
LISA SHAW: But from what I can see, a lot of organizations are thinking about structuring things very differently, and I think that's really critical to us being able to move faster and to take advantage of and be more dynamic. So I think that's a positive trend that doesn't get at specific technology but I'll leave that to my colleagues. That could be a nice segue into blockchain, Darrell, but I'll just, yeah.
JOHN SHAW: Couldn't get away from it.
LISA SHAW: Couldn't get away from it.
JOHN SHAW: She primed it up Darrell, go for it.
DARRELL GUNTER: When I look at this, I think we have siloed, our industry have siloed ourselves to the point where when is the last time you've heard about a Starling publishing executives meeting with executives from other industries to garner and get ideas for that? And I think too often we criticize what we don't understand. I mean, it's a natural reaction when someone says, oh, we should think about doing this, someone says, oh, like blockchain, they go, oh, what is blockchain?
DARRELL GUNTER: Is it a solution looking for a problem to solve? But it's like because we don't understand it, we don't engage with it. Keep in mind, I actually had a librarian from University of Utah in 1999 tell me that the internet was going to go away and Science Track was going to fail, and print was going to prevail. Now, that probably was just an excuse because they didn't want to subscribe at the time but it is that type of thought that really hurts the thing.
DARRELL GUNTER: So when you think about what are some of the things that are currently going on, you look at what Sami is doing in Marressier, you look at what Underlying is doing, you look at what Rapida is doing, and having an algorithm to help folks to discern if their content is accessible and discoverable. So you have these little pockets of innovation that are happening but our community needs to be more open to them, and not just dismiss them.
DARRELL GUNTER: And I think part of the issue is that the board of directors have got to give the societies more leeway, if you will, more opportunity, more direction in regards to what they will allow the CEO to do. Because I've been in some of these board meetings, some of the governance, it's very tight. It's like, did you make your number? Oh, you're not going to make your number, you're not going to be able to do this over there.
ALIX VANCE: But maybe you need more people on the boards themselves, right? And now the question is why would someone in that position and someone in Silicon Valley want to be on x board? But I think it's like actually you can look at the board composition and oftentimes the strategic alignment is reflected in by that mix.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Isn't it interesting that on the question of tell me about a success story in our industry, we all were saying, I was pointing at ourselves, obviously I needed to. But it is very, very tough, which brings back the point what is actually, shouldn't we all be alert by that idea? I think we can identify success stories in every other industry, at least one or two things that we start to use within the last 18 months.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Oh, wow, the digitization, we work very closely with an education tech investor that invested in incredible companies that are supporting kids to learn throughout the time, and an incredible successes. Now, we are here with still, I think, at the very beginning, and I want to sound too negative, I think we have all the ingredients, all the ingredients, we've all the bright minds and it comes back to the very first point that I mentioned.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I think we should really, really dare to do things and dare to also do mistakes and dare to say, well, it wasn't good what I tried but at least I try out but the next thing that I did was actually very successful. So I think we should be more in that mentality almost.
JOHN SHAW: And we we're going to stop it at that statement, I think we all agree with you. We have hit our hour, plus two. Thank you so much for everyone and all your contributions in this session. I think it's safe to say we could carry on this topic for a couple of hours, which is how the session goes every year, I suspect we'll do it on our own. I'm going to hand this over now back to Mary Beth to close us out for this new directions conference.
MARY BETH: Thanks so much John and, yes, I was very sorry to cut you all off, I think everyone could have listened a bit longer. Thank you so much, everybody, that does conclude our new direction seminar, what a way to end it. Thanks for attending, for all the insightful comments in the chat. I want to thank our amazing speakers on this panel and on those that preceded it, and also heartfelt thanks to our education committee volunteers, which includes Sophie Reisz, Alexa Colella, Vanessa Fairhurst, Sylvia Hunter, Ben Mudrak, John Shaw, Heather Staines, and Simone Taylor.
MARY BETH: Also shout out to my colleagues on the SSP staff, they've been behind the scenes working busily, so thank you so much to Melanie Dahl, Jackie Lord, Christina Derose, and Becky Carroll. We've got our sponsors to thank here as well. Thanks so much Access Innovations, Atypon, Cadmore Media, eJournal's Press, Impact Journals, Taylor & Francis, F1000, Silverchair, Straive and, oh, I hope I didn't forget anyone.
MARY BETH: Jack Farrell & Associates, I'll say your name twice if I think I missed you. Thanks so much for your support. I think most of you know how to get in touch with us, right? Scholarly Kitchen, our website and you can also follow us on social media, please. I want to mention we have an evaluation that will go out and I think Jackie is going to put that into the chat.
MARY BETH: And last but not least, we have a lot of events this fall so if you want more information and great professional development resources from SSP, we've got several webinars coming up. We have our pre-conference at Charleston on open access monographs and there are also a number of regional events in the works. So, again, thanks so much, that concludes our seminar. And I hope I see you all next year in person.
MARY BETH: Take care everyone.
JOHN SHAW: All right, thank you Mary Beth.
Segment:0 .
JOHN SHAW: All right. Welcome back from the break, everyone, hopefully that was a good long break for you all. Great sessions this morning, so we're going to try to finish this out, I know, today. Thank you to the new director's working group and our meeting sponsors, we really couldn't have this amazing conference without all of you and all of your efforts and time. And Thank you everyone for joining the session, we appreciate you staying with us for the last session of the 2021 new directions conference.
JOHN SHAW: It's been absolutely fantastic thus far so thank you for all the speakers that have joined us as well. I am John Shaw, CTO of Sage and I'm joined by some esteemed publishing executives today. For the next 60 minutes we're going to have a discussion format where I will be asking the panelists some fairly unrehearsed questions.
JOHN SHAW: We'll chat for about 40 minutes or so and leave 20 minutes for any questions you may have. Of course, we encourage everyone attending the session today to interact using Zoom by entering questions in the Q&A box and Zoom, and we'll respond as we go through that chat. Before we get started, let's go around and meet each one of our panelists, let's start with you, Alix.
ALIX VANCE: OK. Hi, I'm Alix Vance, I'm the CEO at AIP Publishing in New York. I've been there for little more than a year prior to which I was CEO at Geoscience World for about nine years, and in earlier days involved with some startups in e-journals and e-books.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific. Darrell.
DARRELL GUNTER: Darrell Gunter, I'm president and CEO of Gunter Media Group and we've been in business for about 10 years. Prior to that, I was with AIP for a short period of time, and then Elsevier for a number of years launching ScienceDirect and Scopus along with collexis, dealing with semantic technology. And prior to that I was in the financial industry at Dow Jones.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific, let's go to you Lisa.
LISA SHAW: Hi, everyone. My name is Lisa Cueva Shaw, I'm the CEO and managing director at the Center for Open Science. And I've been there just under three months, so fresh perspective in terms of a different kind of infrastructure which we may talk about, but prior to that, I was with Sage for a number of years. So welcome to the session everyone.
JOHN SHAW: Terrific. And Sami, at least not least.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Yeah, thank you. So, I'm Sami, co-founder and CEO at Morressier company start up, yeah, a startup, based in Berlin Washington D.C. In London, kind of a definition problem here right there. But very happy to be here this morning, midday, tonight, wherever you are.
JOHN SHAW: Awesome, great. Thanks, everyone and thank you for joining us, really appreciate it and looking forward to our session and what we're about to talk about. This session has existed for several years now, each year has focused on different topics around technology and how technology can be leveraged across our community. This year we wanted to bring together some CEOs and sea level leaders to provide their perspectives.
JOHN SHAW: These leaders deal with these issues around technology on a daily basis, having to lead their organizations into the future, responding to the users and boards and decide how much of their limited resources, which would be people, time, and money to invest in new technology to help meet their missions. In our preparation for the sessions, a few things keep arising. When looking at new technology, just going through that discussion and how to invest it and why to invest it, kept asking ourselves, well, what are we trying to solve for here?
JOHN SHAW: We kept noting that there are limited funds to spend on new technology, within each of our organizations, really, and in our lives. And we live in a space that largely offers non-competitive technology as compared to what ourselves as consumers experience with the likes of Google, Facebook, your Apple products, whatever it may be. So, when we discuss the slow pace and low demands that exists in academic publishing, combining that with the limited funds, non-competitive technology, we noted how strategic plans always seemed to kind of be the same or not really evolve or push the boundaries as much on a year to year basis.
JOHN SHAW: Do we think that taking all that, that this could actually come back to haunt us at some point? Who wants to take that one? And a lob that one out there for somebody.
DARRELL GUNTER: Well, let me say that we don't want to be Tolerate and a lot of people going, well, who the hell is Tolerate? Tolerate actually had 100% of the marketplace in the financial markets back in the 80s and then Bloomberg came in and not only ate their lunch but really caused the Bancroft family to have to sell their stock in Dow Jones because they took a $2.5 billion bath because they did not invest properly with Tolerate to compete against Bloomberg.
DARRELL GUNTER: So, I think this industry really wants to be mindful but also use a lot of integrity in investment, just don't invest in different technology just because it's the latest hot new thing and try to figure it out. But to really be prudent and really use good diligence in your thought process about, does this new technology make sense? Where is it solving a problem?
DARRELL GUNTER: And how are we going to implement it?
ALIX VANCE: Darrell, can I ask you a question?
DARRELL GUNTER: Absolutely.
ALIX VANCE: So, I mean, but what you say implies that we really do understand the problem, right? That we have a horizon focused vision and that we place ourselves accurately within that, relative to our missions, our capabilities, how would you respond to that? Are we likely to actually assess the landscape accurately so that we can position as you encourage us to?
DARRELL GUNTER: I mean, the thing about it is that we have seen our industry take a long time to adopt things that we think are common sense. For example, in 2001, at a PSB conference, they actually had a panel debating whether or not books were going to be digital or not. And I would say that a lot of publishers held off on digitizing their book content. They said, well, people are saying it's really not going to be important so we shouldn't do that.
DARRELL GUNTER: And so it's a matter of testing out certain things and failing fast and try to do it in an inexpensive way. To say, OK, there was an experiment, a project at Springer, Taylor, Francis, a couple of other publishers got together to explore blockchain for peer review. And I don't think that project went any further but they tried and they said, OK, I don't have any details about what happened but if something positive had happened, we would have heard about the next step with that.
DARRELL GUNTER: And so as those types of projects where it allows us to really explore but where I think the opportunity is for some of these startups that don't have the history, don't have the other challenges that, publishers have real challenges, make no doubt about it, but they are going to introduce something that publishers are going to go, yeah, let's acquire them. And one of my concerns is that sometimes other publishers acquire certain technology and they put it out to pasture because it was competitive fashion.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I love this discussion already there's so many things that I could just dive in immediately. Let me maybe one immediate thought, the element of failing fast because you're right, this is an ingredient really move over and beyond. Quite frankly from my perspective living here in startup city from Europe and Berlin, I would love to define fast for the scholarly industry.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I still see a lot of, let's say, 30 speech style innovation going on and always when I'm speaking to people outside our industry, I'm always referring to that wonderful Forbes article in the 90s, say, the first industry that's going to be disrupted is going to be a scholarly industry. Well, and as a matter of fact, the last one that is still not disrupted is the scholarly industry.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, it is interesting to observe these ideas. And there's numerous reasons, you alluded to a couple but I'm sure that we'll dive into more and more. So I think just from my perspective here, I think we should be a little bit more, let's say, daring to fail and define fast not in terms of destinies but maybe in terms of weeks and months, it's just--
ALIX VANCE: Well, it's interesting because I think that's really relevant. I mean, when you're talking about investments, I think Darrell is really talking about taking a more iterative and agile approach, which really borrows from-- I mean, so the first place I would go is we probably have a number of societies also in our midst. So that the first thing we can talk about is there are disruptive startups, there are large commercial publishers or membership societies, there's some of us who are a mixed animal of some of this.
ALIX VANCE: So, where do we see ourselves performing in this sort of matrix? And one of the questions has been for a long time, our societies, I hate to say this, are we, sort of sitting ducks. Do we actually have the abilities, the structures, the governance, the cape, the technology wherewithal internally to be agile in the way that we need to be? But I think you're right, it's like first let's really think critically about what is the speed needed?
ALIX VANCE: What are the investment levels needed? Things have been very slow in our environment and we get quite exercised about, I remember in, I don't know, 2010 every SSP would have this banner of like the train is coming, the great doom is happening, open is now and we have continued to sort of have time. And I think we do now have this sense that, oh, actually we are being seriously disrupted and encroached upon and we've reached a place where the speed is much more profound and impactful.
ALIX VANCE: But I'd love to think about then how do nonprofits and mission-based organizations, which have an incredibly important role to play in scholarship and scholarly communication, along with institutions and authors and everybody else on our ecosystem, technology companies, how do we actually work together to systemically improve our abilities to succeed, to thrive?
ALIX VANCE: And part of that is, I think, through the technology lens because that's where we're getting a lot of pressure from, is to adopt some more iterative practices in a different time scale but where we're each playing a specific coordinated role. How does that sound?
LISA SHAW: Yeah. I really like that. It was diplomatic actually but I think it's really important because what you're also getting at is we've got, again, this ecosystem with many stakeholders who can play distinct roles. So we've got this distributed system, we've got a research lifecycle overlapping it that is somewhat linear in nature but not exactly. And so what are we trying to do?
LISA SHAW: What are we accomplishing? So I think what you're saying too, kind of brings us back to what are we trying to solve for and who within the system is solving for it. So some of the things that we've talked about or we've heard at the other sessions are greater rigor. So publishers, yes, have always been responsible for curating content, the rigor of the research, and now more than ever, mistrust in science, all of that.
LISA SHAW: We have a responsibility, a shared responsibility, also trying to solve for improved process, efficiency, distribution, and equitable access, discoverability, maybe data analytics. Who handles that? Who should handle that? Why should there be redundancies there? Can libraries really support that or should that be publishers?
LISA SHAW: Funders? So there's so much to solve for and it feels as though we're still not coalescing around, yet we don't need to do that. Let's come together and define, have some form of shared governance where it can be possible. So I think there's still some inefficiencies there that, then essentially exacerbates some of the common problems with technology investment.
DARRELL GUNTER: You know, let me share a story. You know, I grew up in a grocery store and we were on one corner, Harry Miller was the next corner and then down from him was Miss Williams. And we all competed within our respective neighborhoods but when we needed something collectively, we would come together and say, oh, I got to fill this order, do you have a chicken? Or whatever it was. And this industry has this level of distrust which isn't healthy.
DARRELL GUNTER: Back in 1989, Karen Hunter set a, God bless her soul, she's passed on, brilliant mind, suggested to the industry that Elsevier on ScienceDirect will load up everyone's content at no cost and you can charge whatever you want. And there was only a few, very small publishers, like had one journal, that took Elsevier up on that because there was distrust of Elsevier. Because people said we wanted to own the desktop and the answer to that is that the only person who owns the desktop is the user and the user is going to decide how they're going to utilize and what service they're going to utilize.
DARRELL GUNTER: To that point, Barbara Lange who's now with S&PTE, she used to be at IEEE, she was the champion of Sitetopia. Sitetapia was one platform for publishers to come together and it launched, and deep web was the technology provider for it. Unfortunately she got the executive director position with this other society and it died. And that was a great, great initiative because each publisher is a subject matter expert in their area and they have their relationships and that cannot be replicated, that is their intellectual capital.
DARRELL GUNTER: So, it's like let's increase the level of trust and let's talk about what Alix said is around technology, things that we can do that is going to benefit everyone. You look at ORCID you look at Crossref, you look at the DIY, of those things came about because industry said we don't need to have individuals.
LISA SHAW: Actually, just because you brought up ORCID and I know this won't be a PID palooza right now but just to say, I mean, one great example, and this isn't technology specific per se but it's part of the technology ecosystem. One of the, I think, success stories or at least initial success stories of this year was seeing GRID and Roar actually reconcile the fact that we probably don't need these two systems to be perpetuated.
LISA SHAW: And so Digital Science saying, yes, we're going to hand this over to Roar now. Again, that's not technology specific but that's the kind of key principles that we're talking about is where are there redundancies? Where do we have a shared need in the community, who takes the lead on that? And by the way, Roar is community-based. So that's an even better component, in terms of sustainability and kind of the democratization process too which do we agree on some of those key principles.
LISA SHAW: I think that's something to discuss too but.
ALIX VANCE: Well, and I think I totally take this point that we actually need both speed and scale and we need some specificity. I mean, actually someone said to me the other day, I was in a library advisory board meeting , and this is not going to be very diplomatic, but I was talking about commercial scale and they sort of, they poked the question. Like, is commercial scale inherently threatening?
ALIX VANCE: What happens in a commercial organization versus a non-profit organization? What are the attributes, John's asked this too. Why do we-- why fundamentally do we just strongly defend some of the attributes? So say it is a mission, vision orientation versus a shareholder return orientation, how did those manifest actually and what might be pros and cons of each?
ALIX VANCE: One kind of system will drive certain behaviors, another will drive other outcomes. But going back to that point of can we think as an industry, we often think in terms of walled garden well, Darrell, I'm not going to do that thing because Elsevier owns it and I will be subsumed, I will become irrelevant, whatever, that's my fear. But I'm not going to do it with this society over here because we've been fighting about the weeds in our respective gardens for 10 years right or as long as I've lived in this house.
ALIX VANCE: So, is there a place where we start thinking about ourselves as a collective we, which are the things that we really want to, the proprietary rules. Do we have proprietary rules? But to your point, Lisa, it's like what are the common goals? How do we reframe who the challenger is? And then how do we, through some kind of aligned governance structure, how do we then in-build the trust?
ALIX VANCE: Where we each feel that we have an acknowledged role and we're contributing and we're not at risk of being eradicated or subsumed.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And then, again, what I think would, also what Alex and Lisa were talking about, is that idea of thinking about structures, we thinking a lot about how we go forward. Maybe I'm too extreme on that one but I think that there is a need, and especially in our industry, kind of a bias towards action and not biased towards thinking. I think we are very, very good as an industry about thinking a lot and overthinking stuff sometimes very radically.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: If you compare it almost to other industry and if you compare it with highly innovative areas of the world outside of scholarly publishing, then it is trying out rather than thinking about, right? I think the scientists that are publishing all the wonderful journals, that's the way they do things, they try ahead, they fail fast. But it seems like our industry does not adapt this idea of trying out, failing, we talked about that user orientation, would we as a collective almost do is we think about the user but the complexity of how user uses technology, we cannot think it through.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Sometimes people just use technology in completely different ways. So I think the almost the wish towards our industry would be to say, dare to fail and dare to do something that might be against just a general thought process because in the end, you cannot really think it through. And I'm observing that in our daily practice is we need to think about it, we need to think it through and then after a couple of weeks, then we thought it but then at the end we'll try it out and then we learn, OK, this is how--
ALIX VANCE: Well, we haven't despite the fact that the scientists are experimenters, we've been the curators and we seem to have a perfectionism bias, like the control bias, maybe that's working against us, right?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: But it's interesting, is that contradictory? I would love that, that's a very exciting opinion, yeah.
ALIX VANCE: Very theoretical question.
LISA SHAW: But I think from a technology perspective, we're talking about two streams at least, probably many, many of them. But there's the researcher experience, what they need throughout any stage and towards publication and dissemination but then we are actors within this whole system trying to enable certain compliance components among funders, institutions, societies, researcher, all of that.
LISA SHAW: And so which ones need experimentation and rapid iteration and which ones need the planning and like we know that we're going to come together just for sustainability purposes as well and to gain efficiencies. And that's where we've got kind of a very fragmented segmented dynamic going on. And so we can do a better job of selecting where we double down as a community and where we leave marketization and innovation, like that's one of the big challenges for us.
JOHN SHAW: So let me move us, we've got a question that just came in from Anna Jester, which goes into one of our questions. Thank you Anna, you primed it right up. So, her question is in our opinion, what portion of a strategic plan should be specifically designated to innovation and should proactive innovation be prioritized over reactive innovation? Our question went on to how much do you spend, the technical debt versus technology versus new innovation.
JOHN SHAW: So I think, Anna, your question is perfect and this kind of dovetails off of what Lisa was just saying. So, let me, again, lob it out to the group and see how you hit that one.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Fight. So let me just have a first idea, the first impulse that I had when talking about innovation. For me innovation is this buzzword that I don't really understand what it is if you will, and I couldn't know what to say. I spent 10% of my time on innovation or 20% of my time on innovation because quite frankly innovation is almost a thought process, it's almost something that is the foundation for everything that you do in every corner of the company.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, if I'm hearing companies say I spend 20% of my time on innovation, then I'm saying, well, something is wrong because the 80% might be not good at all. So essentially the way I look into innovation is on all ends there needs to be some sort of evolution, there needs to be some sort of next step and in the end, that's exactly what innovation is. So, somehow of a general thought process that you can facilitate within the entire organization, where you can program everybody in the organization to be more innovative, allow the room for innovation but not say, well, everybody please spend 10% of your time on innovation, whatever that means.
ALIX VANCE: I think that's right, it's a mindset and it has processes around it. So you on board those processes and those tendencies and those ways of having conversations and solving problems and engaging in meetings, I think it's interesting. I mean, John mentioned debt, tech debt and I think part of the question was if you have, which many of us would say, OK, I have x amount to spend, and how much do I apply to technology debt?
ALIX VANCE: There was also embedded in the question this thing about proactive versus reactive, and I think what you're saying, Sami, is that proactive experimenting technology flights and MVPs fail fast. All of this is associated with a process of continuous innovation which you do want to onboard throughout, I think, throughout kind of cultivate those processes throughout. Now, some organizations feel like they are also climbing out of a lack of capacities, so how long does it take you?
ALIX VANCE: And is it even appropriate? Should every society become an innovation company? Should every society try to climb out of some infrastructural or technological debt? Can that work? As you try to become more technoligized, you end up incurring more drag that you're carrying with you. So, again, go back to like what is our relationship to innovation and to technology and to creation of technology, maybe ownership of technology versus management of coordinated outsource technology, those sorts of questions.
LISA SHAW: I tend to agree in terms of the mindset piece of it. So I think it's a really great question, Anna, and I do think it should be asked so it's not just like yep, but it's a mindset for the organization, it should be explicitly asked, so I'm glad you raised it. I think the proactive innovation versus or kind of versus reactive innovation is really interesting to me because I could answer that two ways.
LISA SHAW: The first is that in some cases that's actually a false dichotomy. So if we're actually moving quickly, then you've got some proactive but it's pretty quickly met with reactive based on user feedback, hopefully. But I think, and again, interpreting your question, there is kind of a if we have enough insight as an organization that we are meeting a need, we are solving a problem and we've got enough evidence and define enough, that's problematic.
LISA SHAW: But we feel that, yeah, we can be proactive then that's when I would kind of pull the trigger, so to speak, on that. And reactive is when you really don't have a strong sense of things, things are fragmented ambiguous, a little bit unclear or there are a lot of actors kind of in that space, then you want to actually iterate, be a little bit more reactive would be kind of an initial response to that.
LISA SHAW: But it's a problematic comparison in a way because innovation cycles kind of necessarily combine both paradigms that you're describing.
DARRELL GUNTER: Well, it speaks to a very complex issue because, and Sami is right, is innovation just thinking? And you think about the companies like a 3M, which is in the book built to last, which is a classic book that talks about how 3M automatically provides people 25% of the time to think innovatively and not hurt them as far as their professional development. But it starts off with the hypothesis, what problem are we trying to solve?
DARRELL GUNTER: What type of new thing are we trying to do and how that's going to help us to be more productive and whatnot. We got to ask though, what if question, what if we were able to do? What if we were able to do this? OK, so what does that mean? How will that improve the research cycle? I mean, we're all in this research ecosystem and there is a lot of inefficiencies in it but those inefficiencies are not necessarily bad, it's simply because we're all, as Sami said, we're figuring this out as we go along.
DARRELL GUNTER: And almost like if we were driving across the country and we didn't have a map but we wanted to get to California, we're going to eventually going to get there because we're going to figure it out and then, of course, then we create the map for that. And I think companies-- my concern about the scholarly publishing industry, and I love the scholarly publishing industry, that's why I decided to stay in it, is that we get very comfortable and we have our task, our duties, and everything is going well.
DARRELL GUNTER: And I said to Elsevier, when I was still at Elsevier and I said, listen, open access is just a business problem model, we just got to figure out what the model is that we can be profitable. And now folks are figuring out, oh, we can make money off of open access, so here we do deposit accounts and now we're doing quite well. Innovation is really pushing ourselves but also if we were able to do it collectively, how much more stronger and better would we be as an industry, if we were sharing.
DARRELL GUNTER: And a lot of folks are concerned about technology transfer and giving away their IP and the intellectual capital but those are the things that need to be discussed and resolved, as we've done with Crossref, ORCID, DIY, et cetera.
JOHN SHAW: If I can jump in and just go to Anna's first part of the question. Sorry, I'm going to jump in from the organizer down to the panel here, if you don't mind. Sage, we use a model, Sami knows I can't stop, it said we use a model called CAT for innovation. So, core, adjacent, and transformational-- transformative? Now when I forget what a CAT is but it's not the furry thing.
JOHN SHAW: And within that CAT, each organization has to decide what you want to invest in. So, typically and where we put our investment is the large shares in the core, it's not to say that you can't be innovative within the core but the core of your products are the base things that you do. Adjacent is slightly different model from your core business and you would want, it's a diverse portfolio.
JOHN SHAW: So you want some adjacent products, so a little more upstream, and then you have the transformational or they're totally different, that's like getting into some different models. So Sage in the past few years has gotten into teaching and learning technology so invested in companies like Talis or Lean Library, and getting into the library products. And so that for us is the transformational side.
JOHN SHAW: We largely, like I said, keep a percentage highly in the transformational, or sorry, in the core and a bit in the middle adjacent, and a smaller percentage in the transformational bucket. And we have to decide each year what we feel that percentage is, that's good for our business model. And then going to Sami's point, we're going to be innovative everywhere but the truly it's not set to transformational, it's innovative, it's just different from what our core is.
JOHN SHAW: But innovation is in each one of those and then that's how we divide, how do we invest.
LISA SHAW: The benefit of that model has been that it's-- yeah, we're reacting to the CAT, we all love the CAT. But just to say from an organizational perspective, it's a great organizing framework. It forces you to say what problem are we trying to solve, who are our audiences, those are things that organizations lose sight of because you get all wrapped up in all the disruptions around you saying, we've got to do that. So it's a great model, but the other thing that it does is really push you to think about if we're not having enough percentage in adjacent and transformative, who can we partner with or how do we accelerate that or is there someone else out there doing something?
LISA SHAW: So it, it can kind of accelerate that process of defining potential collaborations too. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
ALIX VANCE: [INAUDIBLE] fundamentally acknowledges this thing of what we didn't do is we're talking about innovation, we never actually said, what the heck it is and how many forms does it have. So one of the things that I hear, John, in that model is an acknowledgment that continuous improvement of your core business is in fact innovation. I mean, we get kind of seduced into thinking that it has to be a new, shiny object versus a reapplication of something you already do in a slightly new space.
ALIX VANCE: Anyway, other people, I'll just wait of it.
DARRELL GUNTER: But Alix, it speaks to performance measurements. What are we measuring? What are our KPIs? Because you're right, you improve the critical path of a particular situation, it's improving your response to your customers and your needs and stuff. And it's allowing your company to have a higher return on their already existing investment because you've improved the process.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And that's why I want to introduce the DOG model, DOG, no, I'm just joking.
JOHN SHAW: Here you have that.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Sorry, I was just-- so, one thing that, just to combine almost all the points and it's a big observation that we're doing, is that there is a lot of publishers in societies that have, it seemingly the urge to be a technology company and it speaks a little bit to what we all are saying. And I'm not sure if that's really necessary, I'm not sure if the main product of a society or a publisher should be the technology or should be something completely else.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So you can be innovative in so many different things than just technology but the brand or peer review processes or whatever it is, just to name two. And the focus of it, the technology company is not to be a publisher or try to be a publisher but really be the technology company. So I feel that there is almost a need of reassessing of who is focusing on what and it comes to the point that you mentioned John on saying, where do we invest?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Where do we really focus our investments into not say innovation. So, I'm investing in technology and I'm investing in a partner that is innovative and I'm innovative as a whole in the core of my business, and I feel that this is something that needs sort of a re-calibration almost.
JOHN SHAW: Yeah. Angela has thrown in then the technology [INAUDIBLE] group which then goes to ask the question of handle immediate radical innovation and then I think Darrell or Sami said earlier, you innovate and then all of a sudden you just stop. So, that's where I think you're going Angela, it's all good until then.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: It's a great point Angela and I think that describes a little bit also the problematic overall structure of that industry where there is not, in every segment, massive companies that are basically almost owning that segment in that one industry right. I think one thing that happened with the acquisition from Procaps to Claravis, it almost, that is a technology company that is massive and should focus on innovation within technology.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, just to add up to that point and to pinpoint to Angela's point, maybe technology companies should be sold to other technology companies such as Claravis and not to publishers and create basically dedicated segments.
ALIX VANCE: Well, that's interesting because the ones who have the wherewithal to purchase the technology startups are the larger publishers. So one point to Angela's seat is the societies who may be in our audience here, really don't have the wherewithal to do that so much and so what difference does that make?
DARRELL GUNTER: But Alix, the societies could actually create an entity to make these purchases.
ALIX VANCE: Well, and do they know how to do that? Does it lean into their skills? We could do that, you could, you could create a collective R&D pool but are we fooling ourselves? Do we know how to do that? The other question I would ask is, and I think the answer is different depending on the entity, are large publishers buying technology companies because they don't want to be in the content business?
ALIX VANCE: Do they want to be publishers? Do they want to be service businesses? Do they want to be technology company? Do they want to be data companies? So that also goes to how do you see yourself? What is the role you see yourself playing in the long [INAUDIBLE].
DARRELL GUNTER: a couple of years ago when the Elsevier CEO says we are now a data company, a lot of people in the scholarly publishing industry, like, oh yeah, now they're a data company, who else did they think they are? But the fact is that data is very important and data and publishing yeah, they go together, data is the new oil.
ALIX VANCE: But that goes to I think is are we in a state of existential threat? How much can we cruise? How much can we continue to behave as we have? I don't know.
JOHN SHAW: Alix, can I ask you a question? Because it dovetails right into Anna's whatever question and where Angela is going and this discussion of consortium of publishers. So, geoscience world, you have experience here working on behalf of publishers and you had maybe those opportunities in front of you. You had to work on behalf of the money that you had, make good investments for those publishers, you maybe could have made decisions like this.
JOHN SHAW: Did that ever come up or is that something--
ALIX VANCE: All the time, all the time. Within the publishers that we had, the 30 plus publishers at GSW and have tried to start these conversations more broadly because obviously you started looking at scale outside of one domain, one subject matter or even the realm of geosciences. And I think the trick is, I mean, I started shifting into this idea of how can you create coalitions of the truly willing? Because what I did see over the span of time at GSW was as people develop more of a sense of urgency, they were willing to entertain new ideas.
ALIX VANCE: They were willing to drop some of the kind of conventional thinking maybe in order to say let's think about taking risks together or actually even visualizing what risks and opportunities look like outside of the ways that we've traditionally done as membership societies who protect their members from encroachment from other camps. So, motivators and urgency really important, governance really important, but I think at the end of the day you care more about having a shared mentality and commitment to what we've talked about, common goals and processes.
ALIX VANCE: So if you can dissolve some of the perceptual barriers about territory and the threat we know versus the bigger risks, we can create truly cross organizational teams. But the trick is always actually, whenever I've had these real conversations, is are you willing to put skin in the game? Are you willing to get uncomfortable? Are you willing to disrupt some things in your business for the collective whole?
ALIX VANCE: And if you can, and I think also now we're in really a place of are you willing to look at unconventional partnerships with people who you might not have looked at before? I personally think it's actually very high time, but then really think, as Sami said, think about the systems of governance and running those new orgs and how you're going to make those work equitably.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And just on, just one little thought here. I think if you look into the technology companies, the large technology companies that really keep on innovative, keep on being innovative, their mantra is exactly what you said Alix, is disrupt your own business before someone else does it for you and then you're out of business. So essentially I think that should be some, let's say new idea that everybody in the industry, at least should think about, I guess, from that perspective.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Lisa, sorry.
LISA SHAW: No, that's OK. I was just going to go back to kind of the experience geoscience world consortia coming together in terms of nonprofits and all that. And the, again, I'm going to sound like an idealist here but, hey, what are we here for but if not to be idealist. But just, again, to think about mission and the bigger existential threats or the bigger problems we're trying to solve because if we only focus on scale and efficiencies through technology, there are these unintended consequences of perpetuating rewards and incentive systems that actually should be changed or that are outdated.
LISA SHAW: But those big companies may not have the drive or the urgency to change it because they're able to scale, able to solve for the existing and then we perpetuate some of those things. And so the beauty of kind of nonprofits in the traditional sense, mission driven is that you're looking out for some different public good, looking for the research, the benefit of kind of advancing research in positive ways.
LISA SHAW: And so that needs to be balanced, we can't kind of just focus on scale and only on efficiencies, only on pace and speed. Again, it comes back to what are we trying to solve for and what are our shared values in all of this.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: For sure and, sorry, I'm annoying with my-- just one more thing. Lisa, I think if you look into other industries, there are actually industries that are highly regulated, because there is a need for regulation, but still manage to pair it with constant innovation. And in a sense, it is exactly what you were mentioning. I think we definitely, that almost ethical idea that we all need to keep, and I fully agree to your point, can be paired with highly innovative cycles.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And there are best practices out there I think it's, again, that idea of daring and trying out and maybe just decoupling things, trying out on certain areas and moving there quicker. There are ways to do that, I think it's about just that almost mentality if you will.
LISA SHAW: I agree. And just to say I don't think they should be mutually exclusive, like, let's get out of our own way too and really look outside of, let's not be insular as much as we have in the past but let's also keep the good stuff too.
ALIX VANCE: I think that's right. I mean, Tim Lloyd just said in the chat, I think he's right. I mean, some of our structures, as he said, are full of cells that attack the unknown, I think that's right. But to your point, I mean, what we're really getting to here is we want to perform effectively, we want to utilize those drivers that frankly will enable us to compete and thrive and survive. And completely agree, Lisa, which is really we differentiate ourselves as a community by having strong values based in societal objectives.
ALIX VANCE: So that's the core of what we do and what we are, we're trying to solve the world's biggest problems through science or medicine or what have you, through research. That's fundamentally important and we don't want that to be carried away by desire for pleasing investors, generating more profit, what have you. So that's really important.
ALIX VANCE: But to Tim's question, like do we need to create new structures that take both into account so that we're not trying to work with legacy structures that are hostile? I mean, just throwing that out there.
DARRELL GUNTER: If you look at the work that [INAUDIBLE] Schmidt is doing with STM, where she brings folks together to brainstorm and then, of course, some projects, industry projects come out of that, which is a very good thing. And it doesn't mean that STM needs to have the ownership of something like this because there's a lot of great organizations out there, but to follow that model and to set goals for it and give it some money so it can achieve, you'll see that the industry can come together to do these innovative things, that's going to benefit everyone.
DARRELL GUNTER: Where it's not just one winner, it's like the industry wins, which means the research wins.
ALIX VANCE: So that's great actually too. That's really interesting to me, can we come up with examples to use as poster children, if you will, and demonstrate to ourselves, within our community that these are the success stories, what can we learn from them? How can we create more of these models? One of the things, let's see, at the mercy of commercial partners, I'm reading Angela's thing. Because it's too much, yeah, it's too much for society.
ALIX VANCE: So now you can create society collaboratives, cross society collaboratives, you probably need to also reach outside for some of the elements that have not natively existed within those. I think governance really is a challenge for societies because the governance is not always existing within the strategic core of the organization. So how much authority does the society itself have? Really in its own governance, that's a relevant question, do you need to create another entity?
ALIX VANCE: But the other thing, I was sort of thinking about earlier is we were talking about innovation cycles and continuous market research, do we each need to have little groups that are doing the same market research over and over with the same people? There are a million examples like that.
JOHN SHAW: Yeah. And Heather and Angela are putting great examples out there, good FTRs, Seamless Access, what STM is content creation, onsight citation. I think back to the days of high-wire where it was founded up through the library system, societies trusted what their mission was and collectively trying to build new technology and innovate technology to push forward, that's changed over the years. But ultimately it comes down to trust, which we talked about early on, trust of each other and trust of whatever the entity is.
JOHN SHAW: Angela, you say mercy of the commercial partners, so yeah, that comes out of the word trust. And then still it comes down to investment, how much are you willing to invest. Because even if STM puts something forward or in the past a crossref would put ideas out there, some of these things need heavy investment or more investment than your yearly fees. And so are we willing to invest in that as a collective or as an organization?
JOHN SHAW: Those will continue to be the core questions I think of when we're--
DARRELL GUNTER: Think about like a conundrum registration, they want to do repairs, so they want to add on something new, the members they will vote on it, they'll agree to it and they'll build it. And I know with STM, they have the membership fees but I've seen where there's projects where they go around the table and say, OK, this is what we need from all the publishers if we're going to do this.
JOHN SHAW: So, how do you fit into that Cat model and use, it's a we shouldn't be doing this. So one, I trust this and let's give this amount of money per year to invest in this type of technology.
ALIX VANCE: And specific to the GSW example, like that was viewed as a sort of shared risk reward model but inherent in that was the idea that some of the largers would either invest more or take less and some of the smallers might benefit a little more. Not in kind of quantitative hard dollars but that you would be willing to give more to the community. I think part of that, and that's actually one of the ways, one of the mechanisms that you can create that trust.
ALIX VANCE: I think one of the anxieties is OK, you contribute more and am I just kind of a hanger on, or what is the evidence? So there are actually some ways to build these things into your business and core engagement models that you can demonstrate goodwill in practical ways and in results based ways. And that that actually might be, for example, one of. In addition to the poster children, it might be also what are the elements of the models that sustain trust and collaboration over time.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I want to add two very brief points. The one being it feels like there are all these great examples and it's good that we have those great examples but for me just looking also from just the topic of innovation, we are not even close to where we should be actually as an industry. Because Alix, you said it very clearly and I just want to be very direct, you said it clear, we are in such an important industry and what we do as an industry is incredibly relevant for the entire world.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So, yes, we have poster childs and we have nice activities but it's not close to where we should be in terms of innovation on how to distribute scholarly research, how to actually give content to pour up parts of the world to the global societies, if you will. All of these ideas it's not solved, it's not even close to be solved. And I think that goes to the point of innovation, I want to make a little bit more extreme, John pushed me to be extreme, I'm just going to pinpoint you.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So the point on innovation on saying, well, do we invest in investment? Do we invest really enough? Do we invest enough as the players within the industry and do we have enough companies that emerge within the industry from the outside, with new energy, with new thought process. And I'm looking a little bit from the perspective of the venture capital, for example, we don't see too many companies with venture capital entering the industry on a regular basis.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I think that, yes, I agree to all the elements of trust and we need rigor and all of that is very important and I think we have that, that is a very core element but we really need to incentivize companies from the outside entering that industry with investments outside, in order to innovate, in order to offer new ideas, to offer new perspectives. If we take them or not, it's a different element, we need to try out and let researchers and authors and just every stakeholder in the industry really try things out and be bold, be open about new things.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So I feel that, and looking back at the eighteen last month, I think things moved a little bit, got shaking up. I would have wished that it goes a little bit more extreme when it comes to innovation. And I very much hope that we're not sitting here in a year and said what changed throughout COVID, and we say, well, not much. We have our small little great examples but it is the opportunity for us as an industry to really, really innovate and allow things to come in.
ALIX VANCE: So, let me ask you a question, I just wanted to give you this. In that I agree with you, bolder and why bolder. I was sitting with someone who was with an unnamed social media foundation something and they were talking about us, our industry. And it was, well, don't you understand that if bla, bla went on Facebook, we get this audience and really we should be taking this over because we can command the eyeballs, we can get to the K through 12 people.
ALIX VANCE: Like, we are the people who democratize science and get the pa, pa, pa, pa. But ultimately I said, well, what is it? Because there was sort of this like you need to be disrupted, you don't get it, you don't get science, you don't get the power of science, you don't get the way younger people want to receive science. And I said, what is it about us that makes you think we don't get it, we're not interested, and we won't engage?
ALIX VANCE: Now, I about climbed over my dinner table but I was like really receiving this as like you guys don't understand the business that you are in, and that felt very threatening to me. But I think to your point, are we really having those Boulder conversations are we meeting around those tables because those are the people who will disrupt us I think.
JOHN SHAW: Let me take it too. So we're in our bonus time, we've been moving in through questions and still having our conversation, we've got four minutes. So, in four minutes I'd like to go up to Sophie's question that she's asked. And it says, can you speak to any new technology in our industry that has received really good adherence from our main users, researchers, librarians, authors, peer reviewers, society members.
JOHN SHAW: It would be so interesting to hear collective thoughts on current success stories. So, quickly around the virtual room here, do you have any examples?
LISA SHAW: I don't-- actually I will go first because mine is broad and then maybe we'll get more specific, so I'm taking the easy way out. I wanted to actually connect the dots between Sophie's and Tim's, which I don't want to speak for you Tim but just to reflect. Again, I agree with you Sami that we're not where we need to be but what I will say is all is not lost because if you look at the way that we're increasingly constructing things using modularized formats, we're not just building the big platform, or maybe we have that, that some legacy systems.
LISA SHAW: But from what I can see, a lot of organizations are thinking about structuring things very differently, and I think that's really critical to us being able to move faster and to take advantage of and be more dynamic. So I think that's a positive trend that doesn't get at specific technology but I'll leave that to my colleagues. That could be a nice segue into blockchain, Darrell, but I'll just, yeah.
JOHN SHAW: Couldn't get away from it.
LISA SHAW: Couldn't get away from it.
JOHN SHAW: She primed it up Darrell, go for it.
DARRELL GUNTER: When I look at this, I think we have siloed, our industry have siloed ourselves to the point where when is the last time you've heard about a Starling publishing executives meeting with executives from other industries to garner and get ideas for that? And I think too often we criticize what we don't understand. I mean, it's a natural reaction when someone says, oh, we should think about doing this, someone says, oh, like blockchain, they go, oh, what is blockchain?
DARRELL GUNTER: Is it a solution looking for a problem to solve? But it's like because we don't understand it, we don't engage with it. Keep in mind, I actually had a librarian from University of Utah in 1999 tell me that the internet was going to go away and Science Track was going to fail, and print was going to prevail. Now, that probably was just an excuse because they didn't want to subscribe at the time but it is that type of thought that really hurts the thing.
DARRELL GUNTER: So when you think about what are some of the things that are currently going on, you look at what Sami is doing in Marressier, you look at what Underlying is doing, you look at what Rapida is doing, and having an algorithm to help folks to discern if their content is accessible and discoverable. So you have these little pockets of innovation that are happening but our community needs to be more open to them, and not just dismiss them.
DARRELL GUNTER: And I think part of the issue is that the board of directors have got to give the societies more leeway, if you will, more opportunity, more direction in regards to what they will allow the CEO to do. Because I've been in some of these board meetings, some of the governance, it's very tight. It's like, did you make your number? Oh, you're not going to make your number, you're not going to be able to do this over there.
ALIX VANCE: But maybe you need more people on the boards themselves, right? And now the question is why would someone in that position and someone in Silicon Valley want to be on x board? But I think it's like actually you can look at the board composition and oftentimes the strategic alignment is reflected in by that mix.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Isn't it interesting that on the question of tell me about a success story in our industry, we all were saying, I was pointing at ourselves, obviously I needed to. But it is very, very tough, which brings back the point what is actually, shouldn't we all be alert by that idea? I think we can identify success stories in every other industry, at least one or two things that we start to use within the last 18 months.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Oh, wow, the digitization, we work very closely with an education tech investor that invested in incredible companies that are supporting kids to learn throughout the time, and an incredible successes. Now, we are here with still, I think, at the very beginning, and I want to sound too negative, I think we have all the ingredients, all the ingredients, we've all the bright minds and it comes back to the very first point that I mentioned.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: I think we should really, really dare to do things and dare to also do mistakes and dare to say, well, it wasn't good what I tried but at least I try out but the next thing that I did was actually very successful. So I think we should be more in that mentality almost.
JOHN SHAW: And we we're going to stop it at that statement, I think we all agree with you. We have hit our hour, plus two. Thank you so much for everyone and all your contributions in this session. I think it's safe to say we could carry on this topic for a couple of hours, which is how the session goes every year, I suspect we'll do it on our own. I'm going to hand this over now back to Mary Beth to close us out for this new directions conference.
MARY BETH: Thanks so much John and, yes, I was very sorry to cut you all off, I think everyone could have listened a bit longer. Thank you so much, everybody, that does conclude our new direction seminar, what a way to end it. Thanks for attending, for all the insightful comments in the chat. I want to thank our amazing speakers on this panel and on those that preceded it, and also heartfelt thanks to our education committee volunteers, which includes Sophie Reisz, Alexa Colella, Vanessa Fairhurst, Sylvia Hunter, Ben Mudrak, John Shaw, Heather Staines, and Simone Taylor.
MARY BETH: Also shout out to my colleagues on the SSP staff, they've been behind the scenes working busily, so thank you so much to Melanie Dahl, Jackie Lord, Christina Derose, and Becky Carroll. We've got our sponsors to thank here as well. Thanks so much Access Innovations, Atypon, Cadmore Media, eJournal's Press, Impact Journals, Taylor & Francis, F1000, Silverchair, Straive and, oh, I hope I didn't forget anyone.
MARY BETH: Jack Farrell & Associates, I'll say your name twice if I think I missed you. Thanks so much for your support. I think most of you know how to get in touch with us, right? Scholarly Kitchen, our website and you can also follow us on social media, please. I want to mention we have an evaluation that will go out and I think Jackie is going to put that into the chat.
MARY BETH: And last but not least, we have a lot of events this fall so if you want more information and great professional development resources from SSP, we've got several webinars coming up. We have our pre-conference at Charleston on open access monographs and there are also a number of regional events in the works. So, again, thanks so much, that concludes our seminar. And I hope I see you all next year in person.
MARY BETH: Take care everyone.
JOHN SHAW: All right, thank you Mary Beth.
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