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Small, But Mighty: The Role of Societies and Smaller Presses in the Scholarly Publishing Environment
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Small, But Mighty: The Role of Societies and Smaller Presses in the Scholarly Publishing Environment
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JEFF LANG: Hello everyone and welcome to the first SSP webinar of 2021. You are joining us for the discussion titled Small, But Mighty-- The Role of Societies and Smaller Presses in the Scholarly Publishing Environment. I'm Jeff Lang with the American Chemical Society, the chair of the SSP Webinars working group, and we're pleased that you could join us today. In a moment we'll get started and you'll hear from our panelists.
JEFF LANG: You'll be seeing information about our session and our sponsors as we start the session. Your audio will be muted in consideration of your panelists. And you'll be seeing information as we go here. Please add your questions in the Q&A feature to send them in and use the chat if you have any technical difficulties. The moderator will review your questions and present them to the panelists.
JEFF LANG: Please help them by specifying to which presenter you'd like your question directed. Please also send your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback so that we can continually improve the SSP Webinar program.
JEFF LANG: You'll also receive a link to the email of this-- I'm sorry, you'll receive a link via email to the recorded broadcast. Our moderator today is David Myers, Senior Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Now over to you, David, to introduce yourself and our panelists.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you, Jeff. Welcome everybody. As Jeff said, my name is David Myers. I'm a Senior Medical Journal Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Wolters Kluwer is not a small organization, but I do have my own experience working with smaller companies having been a manager at a publishing program at American College of Physicians and I was the production manager for the Current Science Group when they were still independent.
DAVID MYERS: We have a great panel today of very distinguished publishing professionals. Mary Rose Muccie is the Director of Temple University Press. Kivmars Bowling is Publications Director at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Christine [INAUDIBLE] is VP and Publisher at American Association for Cancer Research. Like me, all of our panelists are Philadelphia based. That was not originally intended, but I think it's appropriate because Philadelphia has a tradition of independent publishing that goes back to before Ben Franklin's day.
DAVID MYERS: So for today's webinar, each panelist will give a brief overview of their organization. We'll then move on to a series of prepared questions. And as Jeff noted, please put your questions in the question box and I will be taking a look at that and pass them along to the panelists. And we'll begin with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Thank you, David. As David said, I am the Director of Temple University Press. I've been the director for seven years. We are a very small press. We have a staff of 11. We publish two journals annually, two journals and about 45 to 50 books annually. Our publishing areas are in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. We don't publish stuff with a lot of numbers.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So we're known for publishing books in political science and criminology in urban studies. A lot of ethnic studies titles. We were one of the first university presses, one of the first publishers in general to publish in the field of Asian-American studies. We publish in women's studies, gender studies. So definitely these humanities and qualitative social science disciplines.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We are also, I think of us as the city's publisher. We are the premier publisher of books on the city of Philadelphia and on the local area and the region. We do a lot of those books in partnership with local organizations-- arts, historical, cultural organizations-- in the region. I am also the Scholarly Communications Officer in Temple University libraries.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: The press reports into the library. So my boss is the Dean of Libraries. And you'll hear a little bit more later on about some of the stuff that the press and the library, what some of the things we do together. But the Scholarly Communications program in general is designed to support Temple faculty and students. There is a whole library publishing program there. We have an open journal system platform where we support faculty and student journals.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Right now there are five journals on that platform. We support the institutional repository at Temple. We have an open access publishing fund. And we also have a joint press library in print for open textbooks. So I think that's it for me.
DAVID MYERS: Great. If we can advance this slide and then Kiv can introduce SIAM.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Hello, everyone. I'm Kivmars Bowling. I'm the publications director here at SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. I'm wearing a shirt, I'm not wearing sweatpants. So this is a momentous day. And I hope everyone's doing well who's watching this. So SIAM founded 1952, we have over 14,000 members across over 100 countries. My publications staff here are around 26 people.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And we have 18 journals, the newest of which is the SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science, which has just taken off massively really strongly in terms of submissions, readership, and all of that, perhaps unsurprisingly given the area. So we're very excited about that journal. We also publish 15 to 20 textbooks and monographs a year. And recently, we published our first book with an accompanying Jupiter notebook, so we're trying to enhance our digital offerings on that front.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And we also publish eight proceedings a year. And yeah. The society focuses on applied mathematics, computational science, data science, and really that's about using mathematics to solve real world problems. So whether you're trying to model how much time do we have left to fix climate change, how do we build the algorithms that will run self-driving cars, or how do you model how a pandemic is playing out and how you're going to predict what measures will restrict it and help with that.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: All of that is underpinned and driven by applied mathematics. And so you can see on the slide here, I listed all of the other disciplines that it intersects with. So yeah. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Great. And if we can advance the slide, and Christine and talk about AACR.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Sure. Thanks. Thanks, David. So I'm Christine Battle. And I'm publisher and VP of scientific publications at the American Association for Cancer Research. The American Association for Cancer Research is the first and largest cancer research organization dedicated to accelerating the conquest of cancer. It was founded in 1907.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: These data are actually so last week apparently. There are now 48,000 plus individual members from 127 countries. The current publication staff is 52 people, including in-house professional editors as well as staff for editorial operations, marketing and sales, digital, online, and print production, news writings, sort of everything that we need to support the program.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: The program is currently nine scientific scholarly peer reviewed journals that you're all familiar with. Plus we publish meeting abstracts as online only supplements to the journals. The organization actually also publishes a couple of magazines. Cancer Today and Leading Discoveries, those are not included in the publications division but are communications that come out of the AACR.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Our most recent journal is Blood Cancer Discovery just launched a few months ago. We're very excited about it. It underscores the interest of the AACR in the hematologic malignancies. You see our audiences here. Scientists and physicians in really every aspect of cancer research as well as young investigators in a variety of scientific and clinical areas, patient advocates, agencies that support regulatory science and policy.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So and a number of audiences related to these. So that's the summary of the AACR and its publishing program. Back to you, David.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. Jeff, if you could show the first question. So we'll start with a broad general question. And I hope will go in the same order. So what do you see as the major operational advantages and disadvantages of being a smaller organization versus being a large corporation like Wolters Kluwer or Elsevier or Wiley? So I'll start with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So this is an interesting question for me because the press is a very small organization. But we're embedded within the library, which has a staff of 150 I think. And then that's embedded within the university which is a massive bureaucratic machine. I mean, you might expect a-- and it's a state affiliated university, which actually adds another layer of bureaucracy on top of that. But for the press itself, I would say that the biggest advantage we have as a publisher, as a press, is that every person in the press touches every title in some way, some much more directly than others.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But even in terms of our acquisitions editors, they have their own lists. But all come together in a new project meeting every week. And we all give input on everyone's projects. So I think that is actually a huge operational advantage for us because we have a number of staff who have a really deep knowledge of the titles on the list. And for some of them going back decades. And that I think helps a lot when we're having conversations with people in the community, with prospective authors, people can represent the press at all levels very, very well.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Now if I have to think of an operational disadvantage, I would say that you saw we're a staff of 11. And that means I don't really have a ladder structure to move people along to promote people to the next highest position and the next highest position. I think back to when I started a really long time ago what was then JB Lippincott. I started as a production editor. Well, then there was a senior production editor.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Then there was a associate managing editor, and then there was a managing editor. And I just don't have that for the staff at the press. Now I'm very fortunate that they work because they care very deeply about the press and the work that we do and being embedded in the city of Philadelphia. But I do think that that is a disadvantage for a publisher as small as we are.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So I think probably our biggest advantage is that we're a small organization with a really defined and focused identity. And I think the closeness that we have with our membership, the fact that we're volunteer led, basically that relationship means I think we get good advice when we're trying to do, especially new projects, if we're trying to launch a new journal, or do something with ebooks, or move into a new area of the discipline, foster it.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We know we can get advice from the people we're meant to be serving. And I think basically we go down fewer dead ends because of our proximity to the people we're here to serve. So that's definitely a big advantage. I think I will say as well, previously I had worked in large commercial publishers. SIAM has its own hierarchy as well. But generally I think there seems to be fewer people I need to persuade of an idea that, let's do this.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And if we can get the right people on board, we can kind of, let's do this, and move ahead instead of-- Sometimes I used to feel you get kind of lost in the machine a little bit in the larger organizations. Disadvantages I think I relate certainly to what Mary Rose was saying. You have a smaller staff. So there's a limit to what you can achieve with a smaller headcount.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We see limits I guess in terms of costs when you're trying to buy things. We don't have the economies of scale obviously when we're buying platforms, or services, or whatever it might be. And also in terms of sales. So we're always trying to get a seat at the table, especially with all this open access, all the transformative agreement negotiations and things like that.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So we have to supplement that with sales agents and networks beyond ourselves. So getting that broader reach I guess is a disadvantage of being a smaller organization obviously.
DAVID MYERS: And we'll talk more about partnering in a couple questions coming up. Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I would echo many of those things. Really valid. Thank you. Advantages, I think of the close working relationship we have with editors, authors, and generally with key opinion leaders in the fields, most of whom are AACR members. So that's just fantastic for us. We also have the opportunity to reach out to any non-member authors to present them with the opportunity of becoming members in the organization.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I think having those non-member authors in the program is an opportunity for the AACR to help grow membership. I think there are instituting operational efficiencies. For example, decreasing turnaround times for authors. I think that those are accomplished in a reasonable period of time. I think there are fewer hoops to trying to get some of those operational efficiencies accomplished.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And just in general, there's more control over improving content quality and speed to publication, at least in my experience. I noticed this question. It seems that we have sort of a comparison contrast because a lot of us have been with larger publishers. The main thing that came to mind for me in terms of disadvantages was because we are a self publishing organization, we obviously have a lot of vendors who assist us in various aspects of what we do.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And I think just the vendor management and contract negotiation is-- it's time consuming. And it adds an administrative complexity to what we do. So that was maybe key under my disadvantages column.
DAVID MYERS: So it seems like a big advantage for everybody is kind of an ear to the ground type of thing, is that everybody feels very close to their audience whether it's the member of the society, or being involved with the city in the case of Temple. Since you all mentioned something like that, would you think that-- I don't want to put any words in your mouth. But is that one of the biggest advantages, the fact that you are so close to your audience?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Oh yeah.
DAVID MYERS: I'll throw that includes anybody.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I'd say yes.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: I think it's tough for me because our audience is in the broadest sense, it's scholars and students because we publish research monographs and we publish books for undergraduate and graduate level courses. Now we're certainly close to our authors who are scholars. And we hopefully will once again be going to academic conferences where we make other connections with other scholars. But I'm not exactly sure that we're close to them in the way you mean.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We certainly have those connections within the city though, David. You're absolutely correct there. So and we benefit a lot from those.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And to add to that, I think where the closeness is going to really help us is when we are facing challenges and issues, whether that's trying to get subscription renewals in during a pandemic year, or trying to navigate all of these open access issues. We know we have a group of people who they have genuine affection for SIAM. And in some cases, I would even say a kind of love for the organization based on when you hear them talk about the first conference they went to as grad students at SIAM and what impact it had on their careers.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And to stat that affection for the organization means we have fantastic advocates who can go into bat for an independent society when we are facing some of these headwinds.
DAVID MYERS: All right. Well, thank you. So we'll move on to the next question if we could advance the slide. So how has your organization responded to industry changes? And I listed a few but it's not limited to this. Open access to read and published deals, digital first, or digital only. So again, we'll start with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Yeah. So I alluded to a little bit of this before. But and I'm going to talk about the press and open access. So about 3 and 1/2 years, the press and the library founded a joint imprint called North Broad Press. And it is dedicated to publishing open textbooks by Temple faculty. Initially, targeted around a specific course that they might be teaching that has either a very expensive commercial textbook or for which there really is no textbook available.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And ideally, it can be used more broadly as well, that it has some applications to other courses and other universities. And these are open access. So we've had three calls for proposals so far. We have two books published at this point. We have one in production right now that should be published within the next couple of months. And we have I think 10 more in process right now.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Authors get a $5,000 stipend for writing these books. And these are originally authored books. They're not kind of put together by using open access articles or other things that are produced under Creative Commons license. They get a $5,000 stipend. This is provided by the library. We can fund-- we fund five projects a year. They get the stipend when they sign the Creative Commons license half and then half when the final manuscript comes in.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we accept it. And we've had a tremendous response to these calls for proposals. The first two years we got 17 proposals in one year and 19 in the next. And we can only fund five. So there's a tremendous response among the Temple across the Temple community actually for these. The books are peer reviewed, they're professionally copy edited and typeset.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we put them up on the press website. And also we have an instance of the publishing platform Manifold which some of you may have heard of. It's from the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding out of CUNY. So they're up there in PDF and EPUB. And we also sell POD versions for $10. So it's basically cost plus shipping. And as I said, we've gotten a tremendous response to this.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So it's a little different entree into open access than an open access journal or a hybrid journal. Although we do have an open access journal as well that's funded by a society.
DAVID MYERS: So just to clarify that, the funding does come from Temple to pay for all the production costs and the author stipends. The authors aren't contributing anything.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: The authors are not contributing anything other than their work. The stipend comes from the library. And the funding from the library. We get a flat amount a year. And we are able to partition that up to pay also for the copyediting and a very small honorarium for the peer reviewers. The type setting's done by staff.
DAVID MYERS: OK. OK. All right. Thank you. Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So not surprisingly we're going to talk about open access. So yeah. I mean the SIAM for years has had very liberal green open access policy. So we allow the author to post the accepted manuscripts immediately in an institutional repository or on the archives. We even allow the author to post a version of record on their own website, which is very liberal. We've had hybrid LA for a good six, seven years now, and it's had very modest take up in this field.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I don't think there's a lot of ABC revenue kind of floating around. And with these new read and publish deals, I would say we're exploring them. We're in talks with various organizations. A big first step that we're still working on is we're setting up a data warehouse just to try and combine our data sets and really disambiguate and find out who is doing what.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And even if we sign a few read and publish deals, I think the big question is for us here is how will it scale across all of our institutions. And the heart of it seems to be the publish institutions, we have to ask them to pay a little bit more, and in some cases maybe a lot more. Are they willing and able to do that? Is that feasible? What is that number?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And then you have this long tail of institutions who maybe pay less or maybe even nothing including corporations. And their assets as an independent society, the danger is I think that it just becomes much more complex to manage. Let's say all of the institutions that can afford it want read and publish. They want open access, this gold route, but then a number of other institutions they kind of want to stick with subscriptions or maybe who knows which direction China will go in eventually?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And so the danger is that we end up with we're selling one way over here, another way over there, and we're just trying to manage all of this the administrative burden. And also the key thing is to remain financially sustainable. That's really what most concerns me. And I guess on a slightly personal note, I sometimes feel like am I going to spend the rest of my career talking about open access?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: It feels like Brexit, that it goes on forever and you're never quite sure when is the final end point. And the benefits always seem a little more complicated when you look at them, unintended consequences, all of those things. So yeah. That's more work to be done on that. But definitely a massive focus for us at SIAM right now.
DAVID MYERS: Has that been something that authors have asked about? Have you got questions saying, well, can my institution pay for this?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: You know what? We get occasional questions about open access. And there is definitely some members and some volunteers who are more clued in to that and really I would describe as advocates. But I think for most people, it doesn't seem to be massively high on their list of priorities. And I think when we see surveys across the industry, across different fields, in terms of what do you think about when you're going to publish, open access is on the list.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: But it's usually lower down when they're choosing their journals. And some of that may also in applied mathematics have to do with the fact that the archive, the pre-print repository, has been around for, I think 30 years now. So there's already a very healthy culture of sharing content anyway. And so maybe there's not as much energy around driving down this Gold OA route.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So yeah. We hear things. But it's not a wave of people flooding my inbox.
DAVID MYERS: OK. And Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. I just was listening to you. It seems like there's-- I guess this varies by field-- but it seems like there's still a lot of confusion in a number of areas of the author communities that we serve. I mean some people are very, very sophisticated. That's not the word I wanted to use. But they're very knowledgeable perhaps about what the open access options are, what that means, what their funder requirements are.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And in other areas, author communities just seem to need a lot more support from publishers and a lot more information, maybe in different forms. So just a general comment, we have had certainly we published-- you had a note here about online first, online only content, David. Certainly our accepted manuscripts are all posted online first unless there are specific embargoes.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: All of our journals have for quite a number of years had a free to read upon publication option that the authors can choose, not to be confused with a gold open access option. So not a Creative Commons licensing option, although we're introducing that, are in the process of introducing that. The read and published deals, we're getting a few inquiries from a few institutions.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's not bubbling up at least. As of now, it's not bubbling up from the authors in any great numbers. So we're not engaging in any of those quite yet. But I imagine that that will be an ongoing discussion. And administratively, I don't know that we are in a position to have a large volume of those kinds of deals at this time. I think that's something that we would really have to think about how to manage that.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So again, only a handful of institutions are starting to ask questions along those lines. But only one or two of those institutions might have a sufficient number of author researchers where that kind of an arrangement would make sense. So those are the comments that I would add to what's already been said.
DAVID MYERS: And we just got a question through the chat that was addressing that. It was for Kivmars. But Christine, what you were saying also applies, I think they said. Can you address how a small publisher would do this, exploring for read and publish deals? Would you have a dedicated sales staff doing these including the analysis? Are you reaching out?
DAVID MYERS: I think Christine, you sort of answered that, that at this point you don't but you would look at a case by case basis. Kiv, did you have anything you wanted to add about technical aspects of how you're dealing with it?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So it's definitely more of either they're reaching out to us, or we may have a sales agent that says, you know what? There could be an opportunity here. Let's have a conversation. But again, going back to I guess the point the question is getting at is, how does this scale up? If we want to do these for hundreds institutions or wherever it might be, how does that work? I mean we have very small sales staff here at the moment.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And whatever we do has to be simple to negotiate, simple to understand, and simple to administer. I don't want to get-- some of these deals when I look at them, they're getting into counting articles and what's going to be carried over and all these-- what's the corresponding author? What's the-- all of these calculations I think for us realistically, we need something much simpler that is-- And I think librarians also are looking for that as well.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: When I've seen librarians talk about these deals, they're also looking for simplicity. So that's the only way I can see it really being feasible for us. The other thing I would add just briefly is we seen a lot of-- well, we've seen some, maybe a lot of societies, start to migrate to commercial publishers the last few years. And some of the conversations I've had and some of the public press releases, it seems that getting a seat at the open access table was part of the reason that's happening because they know now, OK.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I can be part of a project deal. Or I will have a sales staff who can go and negotiate these deals. And so one of the unintended consequences of all this is the large commercial publishers will end up with more content and more market power, kind of sucking it all into the black hole, if you will. And it will be harder to be independent I think. And I'm not sure that was a intended consequence or goal of what some of these early advocates are pushing for.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING:
DAVID MYERS: And that does lead a bit into the next question, of something that was touched on. So we can advance the slide about partnering. And this is saying when and how do you decide to work with other organizations for issues like sales, other kinds of distribution, book distribution for instance, making an online platform other services? We also received an interesting question from the chat. Should small publishers and presses collaborate more closely together?
DAVID MYERS: And how do you think that that might work? So if you have any examples of working with another small organization, not just a smaller press, if you could share that. Why don't we start with Christine this time so she doesn't wind up answering the last person, being the last person to answer.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's fine. So answering this question about small publishers, should they collaborate, I mean I think that's a great idea. I think that we do ourselves a disservice by not being as organized as the big fish in some ways. I know there was an initiative out of, I want to say it was Duke. I want to say it was Duke University. But don't quote me. There was the editor in chief of a society journal.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I think it was in genetics. It was really trying to gather the smaller publishers and presses. And essentially the main message was we should collaborate because what we have in common is that we as smaller society publishers, anything that we-- any surplus in the commercial world is profit. But any surplus really is reinvested back into the research enterprise.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So the thinking is if we could just be more visible about that to our author communities, that the authors would realize that, oh. It is a much better way for them to spend their time, energy, expertise, and investing in some of these smaller society publishers. And the publishers that are really serving there, the broader needs of those research communities. So I mean, I love this idea.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I think we just have not been able to get ourselves organized around this.
DAVID MYERS: And then what about just more traditional partnering? As you mentioned, you had a lot of vendors. What type of contracts do you have with different vendors? The services.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I'm sorry. Is this kind of back to the main question about--
DAVID MYERS: How do you decide to work with other organizations for distribution of online platforms or other services? So you mentioned that they're juggling vendors. So that's one of the challenges--
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. So this question is the classic build or buy dilemma. So the question is, what expertise is worth obtaining externally? And what will that cost as opposed to really trying to nurture it or build it internally? And the example I have here is online platforms. For me, this is sort of a great example. The technology is advancing so rapidly. Scale is really required.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's this very specialized thing in scholarly publishing. So building that expertise internally really doesn't make sense, at least for us. So for me, that's a classic example of you really do need that external expertise. So--
DAVID MYERS: I think that is probably the biggest one for all organizations, given many large organizations don't have their own platforms. They purchase them. So Mary Rose, if you could address both if you've collaborated with other university presses and just in general, how you dealt with-- do you work with book distributors, commercial book distributors, how do you do your online platform or any other services?
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Sure. So we have not formally collaborated with any other university presses. The Association of University Presses is a very collaborative organization. So we share a lot of information with each other. It's interesting, because in certain list areas, we compete for authors and for titles and things like that. But in general, I think that we are much more collaborative than competitive.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: However, at Temple, we do have some partnerships with other scholarly organizations. We have a book series that we do at the Pennsylvania Historical Association. And we publish a journal on behalf of the Pennsylvania Political Science Association. So we do those kinds of partnerships. It's with organizations with, I don't want to say similar values.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But these are other not for profit scholarly organizations that publish or work in the areas in which we publish, in which we have publishing strengths. We also do some book distribution deals sometimes. We just did sales, and marketing, and distribution for a book by the Winterthur Museum here. They wrote they actually did all of the work on the book, all of the production and everything like that.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we did the sales and marketing. In terms of actual distribution though, we work with University of Chicago Press. They have a very large distribution arm called Chicago Distribution Center, CDC. And they do all our warehousing and distribution for us. We are much too small to be able to do anything like that. Although interestingly enough, I think as recently as 12 years ago, the press did do their own distribution.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: They had a warehouse somewhere on Temple's campus and did it. And that's kind of inconceivable to me right now. So we do warehousing and distribution with CDC. We work with, I mentioned before, we use the Manifold platform for our open access titles. That's the press open access titles as well as the North Broad Press titles. And that's University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Yeah. These are the kinds of things that we could never undertake ourselves. We're very small. And even being part of the library and the university, these aren't things that-- they don't have expertise in these things. So--
DAVID MYERS: OK. And Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So I would say, one of the things that really struck me when I moved in into society publishing is how much societies talk to each other, even with technically you may be somewhat competitive. But there's a lot of information sharing which was just really valued. And I mention a couple of kind of groupings, organizations, that we've joined in the last six months. So one is the Society Publishers Coalition or known as SOCPC which Rod who asked the question will be very familiar with obviously.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And that's a great forum. If people aren't a part of that, I recommend looking that up and considering joining. There's been some good conversations happening there between societies. The other thing is the Royal Society of chemistry started this joint-- get the name right. The Joint Commitment on the Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I think I didn't mangle that too much. And there are working groups as part of that and filtering out to the main group to basically look at how we baseline data around DEI and actually improve our record on that as an industry. So I see those as really positive forums that we're part of. And to go back to what Christine was saying, kind of about the advocacy, and making the point that when we do make surpluses that that gets reinvested into the communities.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I really agree with that point. I think I've seen faculty make the point to librarians that when you subscribe to SIAM, you're not just getting-- it's not just about a journal subscription but about the support that we provide to their students and faculty through travel grants. I mean conferences and so on. So that advocacy piece I think could be a really positive thing for us to push more.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And final note on that, during the pandemic, I think out of the UK there was a letter which I think was UUK, Universities UK, the letter that asked for a kind of blanket I think it was 25% discount from all publishers on subscriptions given the pandemic. And sometimes I get the feeling we're all lumped-- SIAM is the same as Elsevier. We're kind of lumped in together.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And I think we do need to probably make the point more forcefully that we aren't the same as the large commercial publishers. And that's a good thing. And we should have certain accommodations made because of our non-profit status. So yeah.
DAVID MYERS: Great. If we can advance to the next question. This is an obligatory social media question. So how do you feel that social media-- or do you feel that social media has helped level the playing field with larger organizations? Because everybody could be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And how is your organization using social media, specifically the publishing division of your organization? And since Kiv I see are you still there, I'll start with you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: OK. Yeah. So I'm not sure I go so far as to say it levels it. But it definitely is an important tool for us. So we are active on the usual suspects of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, all of those places. We do paid advertising on those platforms as well. And this is across SIAM. And as part of that, the publications would also be promoted if there were particular articles we wanted to boost.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We did a epidemiology collection last year where we gathered all of our relevant content across our journals into a collection. And then that got promoted heavily across social media. I know what our marketing director and our marketing team love about social media is you can really-- you can target really specifically, which is we have very niche audiences for some parts of our membership.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So that's very important. And also you can just track in real time and see how the ad budget that you're spending, is it working? No, just the advert. Or pull the advert. And that kind of control I know is valued a lot. So I would describe it as definitely an important tool in our toolbox if you want the other things like email marketing are still very important I would say.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING:
DAVID MYERS: Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I totally agree with that. But I think it's a really important tool. And to find really smart ways of leveraging these aspects are really important. So the AACR has for example over 87,000 followers on Twitter. Of course, the individual journals have their own Twitter handles. So that's really useful to us in terms of our ability to amplify specific scientific advances that have been published in an article or to highlight specific authors and their work.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: To be able to do that for authors, I think is important. Our relationship with our internal communications group is very good. So there's a lot of collaborative work there in terms of their assisting with various messages that we'd like to amplify. We've also found it helpful, for example, when we're launching a new journal to have paid campaigns on Twitter to help drive followers to that new journal launch and help raise awareness, and we hope raise in the early days to raise the number of submissions, quality submissions, to a new launch.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So those are all I think important levers for us. I agree that it needs to be done in collaboration with other initiatives that we have going on in terms of getting the message out. But I think it's really critical.
DAVID MYERS: Mary Rose?
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So I would say that we are not particularly adept at using social media. And this is by no means a reflection of our publicity manager and the work that he tries to do. So we have Twitter, Facebook, we have a WordPress blog. And we have done paid advertising on Facebook as well. We don't post more than probably a few times a week.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: A lot of our posts are about work that the authors are doing, about new book releases. I will occasionally go on the press Twitter account and post something that's happening in the industry or things like that. But we don't really have the time to devote to leveraging social media. Most of our followers are former authors. A lot of university presses follow each other.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: A lot of our followers or other university presses. It's definitely something that I wish we had the time and also sort of the inclination to invest in more and to see if we could get more out of it. It's just not something that we've really spent a lot of time on. We have it. We use it. But there's no plan I think is fair.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And as I said, this is not a reflection on Gary, our publicity manager at all. I mean, it's just one of the many, many things he does in handling all of the publicity for us.
DAVID MYERS: And I think Mary Rose, you're at a bit of a disadvantage because you publish in such a broad, so many broad areas, that each area that you focus on could be its own Facebook account unlike AACR which is very focused, SIAM which is still has different audiences but it's also more narrowly focused. So that's interesting. And if you're publishing in a lot of different areas, it may be more difficult to leverage social media. Before we move on to my last question, we got a great question that's so good, I wish I thought of it.
DAVID MYERS: And I want to be sure that we get to it. So it says, how do you navigate association parent organization expectations, especially financial where they may not always grasp the intricacies of non-profit or small budget society publishing? And since Mary Rose is up, I'll start with you.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Oh. Well, we kind of live this at the press being part of the university. They don't understand us pretty much at all. I think that's fair. We are actually very lucky right now that the current provost was a member of our faculty editorial board some years ago. So she has some familiarity with what we do and why we do it. But really I mean, we are just a minuscule part of this massive machine that is Temple University.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Our budget conversations are very different than the kinds of conversations they have with anybody else. Ironically they see us as revenue generating. And yes, we generate revenue. We don't have a positive P&L. But many university presses, we're not exactly making a tremendous amount of surplus off what we do.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So there are a lot of problems with our conversations with the university. We don't have many, which is actually OK. But and the way that they look at us, and when they're doing their budget evaluations with like the billion dollar, hundreds of millions of dollars with the university budget. And we're this, as I said, minuscule part of it. In some ways, we're low hanging fruit in those conversations.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But in other ways, we're so small that maybe they can just skip over us. I'm very, very fortunate though that we are part of the library and that my boss is a huge proponent of the press. He's a big advocate for us. He reports to the provost. And that definitely helps us in some ways. But in others, we're just not connected well. We don't-- yeah.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE:
DAVID MYERS: Christine?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. I love this question. I think what I read in this question from the person who submitted it is like, how can I the person who's asking navigate this? Which is tricky. So I know that I've gotten-- talking about financials is going to be difficult for any publisher. However many associations do produce an annual report that just gives a general sense for what the main revenue drivers are, what the main costs are.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So that might be a good place to start. I will get calls from individual counterparts in other associations asking very specific questions about, for example, how does my organization allocate revenues from, say, membership dues to the publications? Because actually that varies widely. And in fact, I've talked with some other organizations where even though the journals are a member benefit, they're not getting any of the membership dues allocation.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I also feel really fortunate because my supervisor who's the CEO started out at the organization in publishing. So she sort of totally gets it at a level that maybe not every CEO does. So to the person who asked this question, I think reaching out to your counterparts in other organizations that are about your size in terms of the publishing program, I think that would yield a lot of really good comparison or comparative data that you might be able to pass along to your parent organization.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I hope that's helpful.
DAVID MYERS: And Kivmars?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So great question. Yeah. Luckily, I don't feel that disconnect with we report ultimately up to the SIAM board. And there's also a financial management committee. And because publications, so I think it's about 60% of the society's revenue, I would say they're pretty well versed in what's at stake, and the issues.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: You do obviously have to work hard to make sure anyone can get lost in all these open access nuances. And so really doing regular and kind of quite basic intros, just in terminology. We have this whole lexicon of gold, and green, and diamond, and all of these things, and all of the CCBY license. All these things need to be explained carefully. And to Christine's point about the looking at other societies, and when questions come up, I will nearly always be asked, OK.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: What is x society doing? What are they doing? There's a lot of that that goes on. So certainly finding out how other societies are approaching these issues helps. But yeah. I don't envy you, Mary Rose, based on what you were describing. Luckily, I don't feel that dynamic here.
DAVID MYERS: And you recently I believe had an executive top level executive change at the organization. So how is that in terms of making sure that person understood what you were doing and the importance of it?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So we had Susie Weeks joined us as a new executive director, which we were very happy and excited about. And she took over from Jim Crowley who had been here for I think 20 years by the end. And so yeah. So it's a massive transition. But from my point of view, as I think anyone in any job, when you have a change in management, your first priority is to really just explain how it all works.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And what are the main issues that you're worried about? And be quite open and honest about those so that everyone knows what you as a group have to tackle. So yeah. That's kind of been how I've approached that.
DAVID MYERS: OK. So we can advance the slide. I had one final question. But then we also got a good question that came in. So maybe the last about eight minutes or so, I'll just ask you to address both. One was my question on a personal note, I know you've all worked for larger organizations. What are you finding most satisfying or frustrating about working in a small organization?
DAVID MYERS: Is there something you wish you knew before you got in or that surprised you? In case there are people in our audience who might be thinking, oh, it would be nice to work at a small organization. And the other question that just came in was about what can smaller publisher organizations do to make a difference in terms of inclusion and diversity? What do you think are steps that we must do to improve the current situation?
DAVID MYERS: And since Kiv is up, I will start with you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So on diversity and inclusion, I think the must do that we are working through here is, how do you collect data in a meaningful and trusted way? So we're having a lot of discussions about what you ask authors for example, and how do you make sure that if an author provides data, that they don't feel that is going to in any way bias the peer review process. So how much you ask and for it in order for you to make comparisons over time.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: How do you store the data? You might be getting very sensitive data from some people. How do you anonymize it? All these things. So I think, yeah. That's really the key focus for us is, what can we ask our communities to provide to us so we can start to measure these and see what trends are going on.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: On your notes about things that were different, or I wasn't expecting, I mean I think the satisfying thing is for better or worse you have an impact. So if you have an idea or project, you can usually make that happen. But also then you're kind of on the hook for any question that comes up. And that is very satisfying.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I think the other thing I would mention is you kind of have many bosses if you will, people that you are responsible to. So you have your actual staff hierarchy. But any high profile volunteers or members that may come to you with a question or committee members, all these people I always treat as kind of like a boss that you have to make sure that they are and what they're looking for is satisfied and you're hearing what's being said.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So that's maybe something that's different to having worked at commercial publishers.
DAVID MYERS: Christine?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. Just a comment on the diversity question. I think there's a lot of discussion about how we gather this information and how we diversify our author communities in a lot of ways. But I think that it's also important to be focusing at the society leadership level in the journal leadership level. Right? I mean how diversified are the editors in chief and the more senior editorial teams on our journals.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And I think that that's a very visible sign to the author communities in terms of how important that a priority that is. In terms of just this last question, I think working in a mission driven organization, it's just so satisfying. And as opposed to just having the profit motive in mind all the time, which I think is certainly very much my mindset when I was in commercial publishing, and I think, does affect a number of decisions that you make and why you make those decisions.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So for me, that's incredibly satisfying. In terms of frustrating, just that we don't have the size as I mentioned before to sort of build some of the capabilities that we might want to build that serve the publishing organization. And really, we don't have the size to negotiate the kinds of rates that larger organizations can negotiate.
DAVID MYERS: And now Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So in terms of the diversity, equity, and inclusion question, we have-- because of the list areas in which we publish, we have a fairly diverse author pool already. And the titles we publish, in a lot of ways I think at our heart, we're a social justice press. A lot of the things we publish touch in different areas of social justice, anti-racism, criminal justice reform, LGBTQ+ studies, things like that.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So we are starting out by looking at our peer review guidelines to make sure that they are-- that the language is fair and equitable and things like that. One of the things I said actually in a meeting with other AU presses directors on this topic was for Temple, I think it's very important for us to practice what we publish. So we're going to be looking at this in a more targeted way.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Again though, we're part of the overall university. So and they actually have a formal program on addressing racism and things like that. So we'll be doing things that are in some ways guided by the university. But I actually think we could absolutely be better for sure. I know that. But I think we've got a good base on which to build. And in terms of the question, so I would say that the most frustrating piece of being part of a very small organization like the press is actually on the budget side.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We just don't have the funds to be able to do some of the things that I know we would really wish we could do. And even when it comes down to perhaps competing with a larger press for an author, a press that could offer a higher royalty percentage, or an advance, or something like that. But on the other hand, on the flip side of that, we-- and me personally, I've been able to make some really deep connections with some of the authors with whom we work.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: I'm able to do that with more of them because we are smaller. Our list is x number of titles and x number of areas. And I've really appreciated that. And I've also appreciated my ability personally to contribute to the reputation of the press in a really important-- in important ways, not that I didn't feel like I was able to do that in some of the other places where I worked, but I was-- I mean it probably doesn't sound too great.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But I was part of a much larger group that did that. And here, I'm part of a much smaller group and I'm actually, thanks to my position and the great favor I have in having it, I'm able to lead that group. So that's been personally very, very rewarding.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. I want to thank all of our panelists. I thought this was a really great discussion. I'm going to turn it back over to Jeff for a closing.
JEFF LANG: And thank you to David, to Christine, Kivmars, and Mary Rose for leading a mighty discussion here. Thanks to ARPHA also as our sponsor today and for all of you for attending. Once again, please do take the time to respond to our webinar evaluation, which you'll receive over email. Your feedback helps us to continually improve the webinar's program. Also join us for the next SSP webinar entitled Small But Mighty, The Role Of Societies.
JEFF LANG: Excuse me. That's it. Next session will be up, we'll be talking about books on March 16. Check out all publication opportunities with SSP as well. With that, we are concluded. And enjoy the rest of your day.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Thank you.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Thank you.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.
DAVID MYERS: Bye-bye.
Segment:0 .
JEFF LANG: Hello everyone and welcome to the first SSP webinar of 2021. You are joining us for the discussion titled Small, But Mighty-- The Role of Societies and Smaller Presses in the Scholarly Publishing Environment. I'm Jeff Lang with the American Chemical Society, the chair of the SSP Webinars working group, and we're pleased that you could join us today. In a moment we'll get started and you'll hear from our panelists.
JEFF LANG: You'll be seeing information about our session and our sponsors as we start the session. Your audio will be muted in consideration of your panelists. And you'll be seeing information as we go here. Please add your questions in the Q&A feature to send them in and use the chat if you have any technical difficulties. The moderator will review your questions and present them to the panelists.
JEFF LANG: Please help them by specifying to which presenter you'd like your question directed. Please also send your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback so that we can continually improve the SSP Webinar program.
JEFF LANG: You'll also receive a link to the email of this-- I'm sorry, you'll receive a link via email to the recorded broadcast. Our moderator today is David Myers, Senior Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Now over to you, David, to introduce yourself and our panelists.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you, Jeff. Welcome everybody. As Jeff said, my name is David Myers. I'm a Senior Medical Journal Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Wolters Kluwer is not a small organization, but I do have my own experience working with smaller companies having been a manager at a publishing program at American College of Physicians and I was the production manager for the Current Science Group when they were still independent.
DAVID MYERS: We have a great panel today of very distinguished publishing professionals. Mary Rose Muccie is the Director of Temple University Press. Kivmars Bowling is Publications Director at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Christine [INAUDIBLE] is VP and Publisher at American Association for Cancer Research. Like me, all of our panelists are Philadelphia based. That was not originally intended, but I think it's appropriate because Philadelphia has a tradition of independent publishing that goes back to before Ben Franklin's day.
DAVID MYERS: So for today's webinar, each panelist will give a brief overview of their organization. We'll then move on to a series of prepared questions. And as Jeff noted, please put your questions in the question box and I will be taking a look at that and pass them along to the panelists. And we'll begin with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Thank you, David. As David said, I am the Director of Temple University Press. I've been the director for seven years. We are a very small press. We have a staff of 11. We publish two journals annually, two journals and about 45 to 50 books annually. Our publishing areas are in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. We don't publish stuff with a lot of numbers.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So we're known for publishing books in political science and criminology in urban studies. A lot of ethnic studies titles. We were one of the first university presses, one of the first publishers in general to publish in the field of Asian-American studies. We publish in women's studies, gender studies. So definitely these humanities and qualitative social science disciplines.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We are also, I think of us as the city's publisher. We are the premier publisher of books on the city of Philadelphia and on the local area and the region. We do a lot of those books in partnership with local organizations-- arts, historical, cultural organizations-- in the region. I am also the Scholarly Communications Officer in Temple University libraries.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: The press reports into the library. So my boss is the Dean of Libraries. And you'll hear a little bit more later on about some of the stuff that the press and the library, what some of the things we do together. But the Scholarly Communications program in general is designed to support Temple faculty and students. There is a whole library publishing program there. We have an open journal system platform where we support faculty and student journals.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Right now there are five journals on that platform. We support the institutional repository at Temple. We have an open access publishing fund. And we also have a joint press library in print for open textbooks. So I think that's it for me.
DAVID MYERS: Great. If we can advance this slide and then Kiv can introduce SIAM.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Hello, everyone. I'm Kivmars Bowling. I'm the publications director here at SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. I'm wearing a shirt, I'm not wearing sweatpants. So this is a momentous day. And I hope everyone's doing well who's watching this. So SIAM founded 1952, we have over 14,000 members across over 100 countries. My publications staff here are around 26 people.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And we have 18 journals, the newest of which is the SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science, which has just taken off massively really strongly in terms of submissions, readership, and all of that, perhaps unsurprisingly given the area. So we're very excited about that journal. We also publish 15 to 20 textbooks and monographs a year. And recently, we published our first book with an accompanying Jupiter notebook, so we're trying to enhance our digital offerings on that front.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And we also publish eight proceedings a year. And yeah. The society focuses on applied mathematics, computational science, data science, and really that's about using mathematics to solve real world problems. So whether you're trying to model how much time do we have left to fix climate change, how do we build the algorithms that will run self-driving cars, or how do you model how a pandemic is playing out and how you're going to predict what measures will restrict it and help with that.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: All of that is underpinned and driven by applied mathematics. And so you can see on the slide here, I listed all of the other disciplines that it intersects with. So yeah. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Great. And if we can advance the slide, and Christine and talk about AACR.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Sure. Thanks. Thanks, David. So I'm Christine Battle. And I'm publisher and VP of scientific publications at the American Association for Cancer Research. The American Association for Cancer Research is the first and largest cancer research organization dedicated to accelerating the conquest of cancer. It was founded in 1907.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: These data are actually so last week apparently. There are now 48,000 plus individual members from 127 countries. The current publication staff is 52 people, including in-house professional editors as well as staff for editorial operations, marketing and sales, digital, online, and print production, news writings, sort of everything that we need to support the program.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: The program is currently nine scientific scholarly peer reviewed journals that you're all familiar with. Plus we publish meeting abstracts as online only supplements to the journals. The organization actually also publishes a couple of magazines. Cancer Today and Leading Discoveries, those are not included in the publications division but are communications that come out of the AACR.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Our most recent journal is Blood Cancer Discovery just launched a few months ago. We're very excited about it. It underscores the interest of the AACR in the hematologic malignancies. You see our audiences here. Scientists and physicians in really every aspect of cancer research as well as young investigators in a variety of scientific and clinical areas, patient advocates, agencies that support regulatory science and policy.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So and a number of audiences related to these. So that's the summary of the AACR and its publishing program. Back to you, David.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. Jeff, if you could show the first question. So we'll start with a broad general question. And I hope will go in the same order. So what do you see as the major operational advantages and disadvantages of being a smaller organization versus being a large corporation like Wolters Kluwer or Elsevier or Wiley? So I'll start with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So this is an interesting question for me because the press is a very small organization. But we're embedded within the library, which has a staff of 150 I think. And then that's embedded within the university which is a massive bureaucratic machine. I mean, you might expect a-- and it's a state affiliated university, which actually adds another layer of bureaucracy on top of that. But for the press itself, I would say that the biggest advantage we have as a publisher, as a press, is that every person in the press touches every title in some way, some much more directly than others.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But even in terms of our acquisitions editors, they have their own lists. But all come together in a new project meeting every week. And we all give input on everyone's projects. So I think that is actually a huge operational advantage for us because we have a number of staff who have a really deep knowledge of the titles on the list. And for some of them going back decades. And that I think helps a lot when we're having conversations with people in the community, with prospective authors, people can represent the press at all levels very, very well.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Now if I have to think of an operational disadvantage, I would say that you saw we're a staff of 11. And that means I don't really have a ladder structure to move people along to promote people to the next highest position and the next highest position. I think back to when I started a really long time ago what was then JB Lippincott. I started as a production editor. Well, then there was a senior production editor.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Then there was a associate managing editor, and then there was a managing editor. And I just don't have that for the staff at the press. Now I'm very fortunate that they work because they care very deeply about the press and the work that we do and being embedded in the city of Philadelphia. But I do think that that is a disadvantage for a publisher as small as we are.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So I think probably our biggest advantage is that we're a small organization with a really defined and focused identity. And I think the closeness that we have with our membership, the fact that we're volunteer led, basically that relationship means I think we get good advice when we're trying to do, especially new projects, if we're trying to launch a new journal, or do something with ebooks, or move into a new area of the discipline, foster it.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We know we can get advice from the people we're meant to be serving. And I think basically we go down fewer dead ends because of our proximity to the people we're here to serve. So that's definitely a big advantage. I think I will say as well, previously I had worked in large commercial publishers. SIAM has its own hierarchy as well. But generally I think there seems to be fewer people I need to persuade of an idea that, let's do this.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And if we can get the right people on board, we can kind of, let's do this, and move ahead instead of-- Sometimes I used to feel you get kind of lost in the machine a little bit in the larger organizations. Disadvantages I think I relate certainly to what Mary Rose was saying. You have a smaller staff. So there's a limit to what you can achieve with a smaller headcount.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We see limits I guess in terms of costs when you're trying to buy things. We don't have the economies of scale obviously when we're buying platforms, or services, or whatever it might be. And also in terms of sales. So we're always trying to get a seat at the table, especially with all this open access, all the transformative agreement negotiations and things like that.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So we have to supplement that with sales agents and networks beyond ourselves. So getting that broader reach I guess is a disadvantage of being a smaller organization obviously.
DAVID MYERS: And we'll talk more about partnering in a couple questions coming up. Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I would echo many of those things. Really valid. Thank you. Advantages, I think of the close working relationship we have with editors, authors, and generally with key opinion leaders in the fields, most of whom are AACR members. So that's just fantastic for us. We also have the opportunity to reach out to any non-member authors to present them with the opportunity of becoming members in the organization.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I think having those non-member authors in the program is an opportunity for the AACR to help grow membership. I think there are instituting operational efficiencies. For example, decreasing turnaround times for authors. I think that those are accomplished in a reasonable period of time. I think there are fewer hoops to trying to get some of those operational efficiencies accomplished.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And just in general, there's more control over improving content quality and speed to publication, at least in my experience. I noticed this question. It seems that we have sort of a comparison contrast because a lot of us have been with larger publishers. The main thing that came to mind for me in terms of disadvantages was because we are a self publishing organization, we obviously have a lot of vendors who assist us in various aspects of what we do.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And I think just the vendor management and contract negotiation is-- it's time consuming. And it adds an administrative complexity to what we do. So that was maybe key under my disadvantages column.
DAVID MYERS: So it seems like a big advantage for everybody is kind of an ear to the ground type of thing, is that everybody feels very close to their audience whether it's the member of the society, or being involved with the city in the case of Temple. Since you all mentioned something like that, would you think that-- I don't want to put any words in your mouth. But is that one of the biggest advantages, the fact that you are so close to your audience?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Oh yeah.
DAVID MYERS: I'll throw that includes anybody.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I'd say yes.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: I think it's tough for me because our audience is in the broadest sense, it's scholars and students because we publish research monographs and we publish books for undergraduate and graduate level courses. Now we're certainly close to our authors who are scholars. And we hopefully will once again be going to academic conferences where we make other connections with other scholars. But I'm not exactly sure that we're close to them in the way you mean.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We certainly have those connections within the city though, David. You're absolutely correct there. So and we benefit a lot from those.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And to add to that, I think where the closeness is going to really help us is when we are facing challenges and issues, whether that's trying to get subscription renewals in during a pandemic year, or trying to navigate all of these open access issues. We know we have a group of people who they have genuine affection for SIAM. And in some cases, I would even say a kind of love for the organization based on when you hear them talk about the first conference they went to as grad students at SIAM and what impact it had on their careers.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And to stat that affection for the organization means we have fantastic advocates who can go into bat for an independent society when we are facing some of these headwinds.
DAVID MYERS: All right. Well, thank you. So we'll move on to the next question if we could advance the slide. So how has your organization responded to industry changes? And I listed a few but it's not limited to this. Open access to read and published deals, digital first, or digital only. So again, we'll start with Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Yeah. So I alluded to a little bit of this before. But and I'm going to talk about the press and open access. So about 3 and 1/2 years, the press and the library founded a joint imprint called North Broad Press. And it is dedicated to publishing open textbooks by Temple faculty. Initially, targeted around a specific course that they might be teaching that has either a very expensive commercial textbook or for which there really is no textbook available.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And ideally, it can be used more broadly as well, that it has some applications to other courses and other universities. And these are open access. So we've had three calls for proposals so far. We have two books published at this point. We have one in production right now that should be published within the next couple of months. And we have I think 10 more in process right now.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Authors get a $5,000 stipend for writing these books. And these are originally authored books. They're not kind of put together by using open access articles or other things that are produced under Creative Commons license. They get a $5,000 stipend. This is provided by the library. We can fund-- we fund five projects a year. They get the stipend when they sign the Creative Commons license half and then half when the final manuscript comes in.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we accept it. And we've had a tremendous response to these calls for proposals. The first two years we got 17 proposals in one year and 19 in the next. And we can only fund five. So there's a tremendous response among the Temple across the Temple community actually for these. The books are peer reviewed, they're professionally copy edited and typeset.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we put them up on the press website. And also we have an instance of the publishing platform Manifold which some of you may have heard of. It's from the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding out of CUNY. So they're up there in PDF and EPUB. And we also sell POD versions for $10. So it's basically cost plus shipping. And as I said, we've gotten a tremendous response to this.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So it's a little different entree into open access than an open access journal or a hybrid journal. Although we do have an open access journal as well that's funded by a society.
DAVID MYERS: So just to clarify that, the funding does come from Temple to pay for all the production costs and the author stipends. The authors aren't contributing anything.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: The authors are not contributing anything other than their work. The stipend comes from the library. And the funding from the library. We get a flat amount a year. And we are able to partition that up to pay also for the copyediting and a very small honorarium for the peer reviewers. The type setting's done by staff.
DAVID MYERS: OK. OK. All right. Thank you. Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So not surprisingly we're going to talk about open access. So yeah. I mean the SIAM for years has had very liberal green open access policy. So we allow the author to post the accepted manuscripts immediately in an institutional repository or on the archives. We even allow the author to post a version of record on their own website, which is very liberal. We've had hybrid LA for a good six, seven years now, and it's had very modest take up in this field.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I don't think there's a lot of ABC revenue kind of floating around. And with these new read and publish deals, I would say we're exploring them. We're in talks with various organizations. A big first step that we're still working on is we're setting up a data warehouse just to try and combine our data sets and really disambiguate and find out who is doing what.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And even if we sign a few read and publish deals, I think the big question is for us here is how will it scale across all of our institutions. And the heart of it seems to be the publish institutions, we have to ask them to pay a little bit more, and in some cases maybe a lot more. Are they willing and able to do that? Is that feasible? What is that number?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And then you have this long tail of institutions who maybe pay less or maybe even nothing including corporations. And their assets as an independent society, the danger is I think that it just becomes much more complex to manage. Let's say all of the institutions that can afford it want read and publish. They want open access, this gold route, but then a number of other institutions they kind of want to stick with subscriptions or maybe who knows which direction China will go in eventually?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And so the danger is that we end up with we're selling one way over here, another way over there, and we're just trying to manage all of this the administrative burden. And also the key thing is to remain financially sustainable. That's really what most concerns me. And I guess on a slightly personal note, I sometimes feel like am I going to spend the rest of my career talking about open access?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: It feels like Brexit, that it goes on forever and you're never quite sure when is the final end point. And the benefits always seem a little more complicated when you look at them, unintended consequences, all of those things. So yeah. That's more work to be done on that. But definitely a massive focus for us at SIAM right now.
DAVID MYERS: Has that been something that authors have asked about? Have you got questions saying, well, can my institution pay for this?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: You know what? We get occasional questions about open access. And there is definitely some members and some volunteers who are more clued in to that and really I would describe as advocates. But I think for most people, it doesn't seem to be massively high on their list of priorities. And I think when we see surveys across the industry, across different fields, in terms of what do you think about when you're going to publish, open access is on the list.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: But it's usually lower down when they're choosing their journals. And some of that may also in applied mathematics have to do with the fact that the archive, the pre-print repository, has been around for, I think 30 years now. So there's already a very healthy culture of sharing content anyway. And so maybe there's not as much energy around driving down this Gold OA route.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So yeah. We hear things. But it's not a wave of people flooding my inbox.
DAVID MYERS: OK. And Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. I just was listening to you. It seems like there's-- I guess this varies by field-- but it seems like there's still a lot of confusion in a number of areas of the author communities that we serve. I mean some people are very, very sophisticated. That's not the word I wanted to use. But they're very knowledgeable perhaps about what the open access options are, what that means, what their funder requirements are.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And in other areas, author communities just seem to need a lot more support from publishers and a lot more information, maybe in different forms. So just a general comment, we have had certainly we published-- you had a note here about online first, online only content, David. Certainly our accepted manuscripts are all posted online first unless there are specific embargoes.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: All of our journals have for quite a number of years had a free to read upon publication option that the authors can choose, not to be confused with a gold open access option. So not a Creative Commons licensing option, although we're introducing that, are in the process of introducing that. The read and published deals, we're getting a few inquiries from a few institutions.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's not bubbling up at least. As of now, it's not bubbling up from the authors in any great numbers. So we're not engaging in any of those quite yet. But I imagine that that will be an ongoing discussion. And administratively, I don't know that we are in a position to have a large volume of those kinds of deals at this time. I think that's something that we would really have to think about how to manage that.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So again, only a handful of institutions are starting to ask questions along those lines. But only one or two of those institutions might have a sufficient number of author researchers where that kind of an arrangement would make sense. So those are the comments that I would add to what's already been said.
DAVID MYERS: And we just got a question through the chat that was addressing that. It was for Kivmars. But Christine, what you were saying also applies, I think they said. Can you address how a small publisher would do this, exploring for read and publish deals? Would you have a dedicated sales staff doing these including the analysis? Are you reaching out?
DAVID MYERS: I think Christine, you sort of answered that, that at this point you don't but you would look at a case by case basis. Kiv, did you have anything you wanted to add about technical aspects of how you're dealing with it?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So it's definitely more of either they're reaching out to us, or we may have a sales agent that says, you know what? There could be an opportunity here. Let's have a conversation. But again, going back to I guess the point the question is getting at is, how does this scale up? If we want to do these for hundreds institutions or wherever it might be, how does that work? I mean we have very small sales staff here at the moment.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And whatever we do has to be simple to negotiate, simple to understand, and simple to administer. I don't want to get-- some of these deals when I look at them, they're getting into counting articles and what's going to be carried over and all these-- what's the corresponding author? What's the-- all of these calculations I think for us realistically, we need something much simpler that is-- And I think librarians also are looking for that as well.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: When I've seen librarians talk about these deals, they're also looking for simplicity. So that's the only way I can see it really being feasible for us. The other thing I would add just briefly is we seen a lot of-- well, we've seen some, maybe a lot of societies, start to migrate to commercial publishers the last few years. And some of the conversations I've had and some of the public press releases, it seems that getting a seat at the open access table was part of the reason that's happening because they know now, OK.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I can be part of a project deal. Or I will have a sales staff who can go and negotiate these deals. And so one of the unintended consequences of all this is the large commercial publishers will end up with more content and more market power, kind of sucking it all into the black hole, if you will. And it will be harder to be independent I think. And I'm not sure that was a intended consequence or goal of what some of these early advocates are pushing for.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING:
DAVID MYERS: And that does lead a bit into the next question, of something that was touched on. So we can advance the slide about partnering. And this is saying when and how do you decide to work with other organizations for issues like sales, other kinds of distribution, book distribution for instance, making an online platform other services? We also received an interesting question from the chat. Should small publishers and presses collaborate more closely together?
DAVID MYERS: And how do you think that that might work? So if you have any examples of working with another small organization, not just a smaller press, if you could share that. Why don't we start with Christine this time so she doesn't wind up answering the last person, being the last person to answer.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's fine. So answering this question about small publishers, should they collaborate, I mean I think that's a great idea. I think that we do ourselves a disservice by not being as organized as the big fish in some ways. I know there was an initiative out of, I want to say it was Duke. I want to say it was Duke University. But don't quote me. There was the editor in chief of a society journal.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I think it was in genetics. It was really trying to gather the smaller publishers and presses. And essentially the main message was we should collaborate because what we have in common is that we as smaller society publishers, anything that we-- any surplus in the commercial world is profit. But any surplus really is reinvested back into the research enterprise.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So the thinking is if we could just be more visible about that to our author communities, that the authors would realize that, oh. It is a much better way for them to spend their time, energy, expertise, and investing in some of these smaller society publishers. And the publishers that are really serving there, the broader needs of those research communities. So I mean, I love this idea.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I think we just have not been able to get ourselves organized around this.
DAVID MYERS: And then what about just more traditional partnering? As you mentioned, you had a lot of vendors. What type of contracts do you have with different vendors? The services.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I'm sorry. Is this kind of back to the main question about--
DAVID MYERS: How do you decide to work with other organizations for distribution of online platforms or other services? So you mentioned that they're juggling vendors. So that's one of the challenges--
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. So this question is the classic build or buy dilemma. So the question is, what expertise is worth obtaining externally? And what will that cost as opposed to really trying to nurture it or build it internally? And the example I have here is online platforms. For me, this is sort of a great example. The technology is advancing so rapidly. Scale is really required.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: It's this very specialized thing in scholarly publishing. So building that expertise internally really doesn't make sense, at least for us. So for me, that's a classic example of you really do need that external expertise. So--
DAVID MYERS: I think that is probably the biggest one for all organizations, given many large organizations don't have their own platforms. They purchase them. So Mary Rose, if you could address both if you've collaborated with other university presses and just in general, how you dealt with-- do you work with book distributors, commercial book distributors, how do you do your online platform or any other services?
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Sure. So we have not formally collaborated with any other university presses. The Association of University Presses is a very collaborative organization. So we share a lot of information with each other. It's interesting, because in certain list areas, we compete for authors and for titles and things like that. But in general, I think that we are much more collaborative than competitive.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: However, at Temple, we do have some partnerships with other scholarly organizations. We have a book series that we do at the Pennsylvania Historical Association. And we publish a journal on behalf of the Pennsylvania Political Science Association. So we do those kinds of partnerships. It's with organizations with, I don't want to say similar values.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But these are other not for profit scholarly organizations that publish or work in the areas in which we publish, in which we have publishing strengths. We also do some book distribution deals sometimes. We just did sales, and marketing, and distribution for a book by the Winterthur Museum here. They wrote they actually did all of the work on the book, all of the production and everything like that.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And we did the sales and marketing. In terms of actual distribution though, we work with University of Chicago Press. They have a very large distribution arm called Chicago Distribution Center, CDC. And they do all our warehousing and distribution for us. We are much too small to be able to do anything like that. Although interestingly enough, I think as recently as 12 years ago, the press did do their own distribution.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: They had a warehouse somewhere on Temple's campus and did it. And that's kind of inconceivable to me right now. So we do warehousing and distribution with CDC. We work with, I mentioned before, we use the Manifold platform for our open access titles. That's the press open access titles as well as the North Broad Press titles. And that's University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Yeah. These are the kinds of things that we could never undertake ourselves. We're very small. And even being part of the library and the university, these aren't things that-- they don't have expertise in these things. So--
DAVID MYERS: OK. And Kivmars.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So I would say, one of the things that really struck me when I moved in into society publishing is how much societies talk to each other, even with technically you may be somewhat competitive. But there's a lot of information sharing which was just really valued. And I mention a couple of kind of groupings, organizations, that we've joined in the last six months. So one is the Society Publishers Coalition or known as SOCPC which Rod who asked the question will be very familiar with obviously.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And that's a great forum. If people aren't a part of that, I recommend looking that up and considering joining. There's been some good conversations happening there between societies. The other thing is the Royal Society of chemistry started this joint-- get the name right. The Joint Commitment on the Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I think I didn't mangle that too much. And there are working groups as part of that and filtering out to the main group to basically look at how we baseline data around DEI and actually improve our record on that as an industry. So I see those as really positive forums that we're part of. And to go back to what Christine was saying, kind of about the advocacy, and making the point that when we do make surpluses that that gets reinvested into the communities.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I really agree with that point. I think I've seen faculty make the point to librarians that when you subscribe to SIAM, you're not just getting-- it's not just about a journal subscription but about the support that we provide to their students and faculty through travel grants. I mean conferences and so on. So that advocacy piece I think could be a really positive thing for us to push more.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And final note on that, during the pandemic, I think out of the UK there was a letter which I think was UUK, Universities UK, the letter that asked for a kind of blanket I think it was 25% discount from all publishers on subscriptions given the pandemic. And sometimes I get the feeling we're all lumped-- SIAM is the same as Elsevier. We're kind of lumped in together.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And I think we do need to probably make the point more forcefully that we aren't the same as the large commercial publishers. And that's a good thing. And we should have certain accommodations made because of our non-profit status. So yeah.
DAVID MYERS: Great. If we can advance to the next question. This is an obligatory social media question. So how do you feel that social media-- or do you feel that social media has helped level the playing field with larger organizations? Because everybody could be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And how is your organization using social media, specifically the publishing division of your organization? And since Kiv I see are you still there, I'll start with you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: OK. Yeah. So I'm not sure I go so far as to say it levels it. But it definitely is an important tool for us. So we are active on the usual suspects of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, all of those places. We do paid advertising on those platforms as well. And this is across SIAM. And as part of that, the publications would also be promoted if there were particular articles we wanted to boost.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: We did a epidemiology collection last year where we gathered all of our relevant content across our journals into a collection. And then that got promoted heavily across social media. I know what our marketing director and our marketing team love about social media is you can really-- you can target really specifically, which is we have very niche audiences for some parts of our membership.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So that's very important. And also you can just track in real time and see how the ad budget that you're spending, is it working? No, just the advert. Or pull the advert. And that kind of control I know is valued a lot. So I would describe it as definitely an important tool in our toolbox if you want the other things like email marketing are still very important I would say.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING:
DAVID MYERS: Christine.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I totally agree with that. But I think it's a really important tool. And to find really smart ways of leveraging these aspects are really important. So the AACR has for example over 87,000 followers on Twitter. Of course, the individual journals have their own Twitter handles. So that's really useful to us in terms of our ability to amplify specific scientific advances that have been published in an article or to highlight specific authors and their work.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: To be able to do that for authors, I think is important. Our relationship with our internal communications group is very good. So there's a lot of collaborative work there in terms of their assisting with various messages that we'd like to amplify. We've also found it helpful, for example, when we're launching a new journal to have paid campaigns on Twitter to help drive followers to that new journal launch and help raise awareness, and we hope raise in the early days to raise the number of submissions, quality submissions, to a new launch.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So those are all I think important levers for us. I agree that it needs to be done in collaboration with other initiatives that we have going on in terms of getting the message out. But I think it's really critical.
DAVID MYERS: Mary Rose?
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So I would say that we are not particularly adept at using social media. And this is by no means a reflection of our publicity manager and the work that he tries to do. So we have Twitter, Facebook, we have a WordPress blog. And we have done paid advertising on Facebook as well. We don't post more than probably a few times a week.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: A lot of our posts are about work that the authors are doing, about new book releases. I will occasionally go on the press Twitter account and post something that's happening in the industry or things like that. But we don't really have the time to devote to leveraging social media. Most of our followers are former authors. A lot of university presses follow each other.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: A lot of our followers or other university presses. It's definitely something that I wish we had the time and also sort of the inclination to invest in more and to see if we could get more out of it. It's just not something that we've really spent a lot of time on. We have it. We use it. But there's no plan I think is fair.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: And as I said, this is not a reflection on Gary, our publicity manager at all. I mean, it's just one of the many, many things he does in handling all of the publicity for us.
DAVID MYERS: And I think Mary Rose, you're at a bit of a disadvantage because you publish in such a broad, so many broad areas, that each area that you focus on could be its own Facebook account unlike AACR which is very focused, SIAM which is still has different audiences but it's also more narrowly focused. So that's interesting. And if you're publishing in a lot of different areas, it may be more difficult to leverage social media. Before we move on to my last question, we got a great question that's so good, I wish I thought of it.
DAVID MYERS: And I want to be sure that we get to it. So it says, how do you navigate association parent organization expectations, especially financial where they may not always grasp the intricacies of non-profit or small budget society publishing? And since Mary Rose is up, I'll start with you.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Oh. Well, we kind of live this at the press being part of the university. They don't understand us pretty much at all. I think that's fair. We are actually very lucky right now that the current provost was a member of our faculty editorial board some years ago. So she has some familiarity with what we do and why we do it. But really I mean, we are just a minuscule part of this massive machine that is Temple University.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Our budget conversations are very different than the kinds of conversations they have with anybody else. Ironically they see us as revenue generating. And yes, we generate revenue. We don't have a positive P&L. But many university presses, we're not exactly making a tremendous amount of surplus off what we do.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So there are a lot of problems with our conversations with the university. We don't have many, which is actually OK. But and the way that they look at us, and when they're doing their budget evaluations with like the billion dollar, hundreds of millions of dollars with the university budget. And we're this, as I said, minuscule part of it. In some ways, we're low hanging fruit in those conversations.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But in other ways, we're so small that maybe they can just skip over us. I'm very, very fortunate though that we are part of the library and that my boss is a huge proponent of the press. He's a big advocate for us. He reports to the provost. And that definitely helps us in some ways. But in others, we're just not connected well. We don't-- yeah.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE:
DAVID MYERS: Christine?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. I love this question. I think what I read in this question from the person who submitted it is like, how can I the person who's asking navigate this? Which is tricky. So I know that I've gotten-- talking about financials is going to be difficult for any publisher. However many associations do produce an annual report that just gives a general sense for what the main revenue drivers are, what the main costs are.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So that might be a good place to start. I will get calls from individual counterparts in other associations asking very specific questions about, for example, how does my organization allocate revenues from, say, membership dues to the publications? Because actually that varies widely. And in fact, I've talked with some other organizations where even though the journals are a member benefit, they're not getting any of the membership dues allocation.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: I also feel really fortunate because my supervisor who's the CEO started out at the organization in publishing. So she sort of totally gets it at a level that maybe not every CEO does. So to the person who asked this question, I think reaching out to your counterparts in other organizations that are about your size in terms of the publishing program, I think that would yield a lot of really good comparison or comparative data that you might be able to pass along to your parent organization.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So I hope that's helpful.
DAVID MYERS: And Kivmars?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So great question. Yeah. Luckily, I don't feel that disconnect with we report ultimately up to the SIAM board. And there's also a financial management committee. And because publications, so I think it's about 60% of the society's revenue, I would say they're pretty well versed in what's at stake, and the issues.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: You do obviously have to work hard to make sure anyone can get lost in all these open access nuances. And so really doing regular and kind of quite basic intros, just in terminology. We have this whole lexicon of gold, and green, and diamond, and all of these things, and all of the CCBY license. All these things need to be explained carefully. And to Christine's point about the looking at other societies, and when questions come up, I will nearly always be asked, OK.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: What is x society doing? What are they doing? There's a lot of that that goes on. So certainly finding out how other societies are approaching these issues helps. But yeah. I don't envy you, Mary Rose, based on what you were describing. Luckily, I don't feel that dynamic here.
DAVID MYERS: And you recently I believe had an executive top level executive change at the organization. So how is that in terms of making sure that person understood what you were doing and the importance of it?
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So we had Susie Weeks joined us as a new executive director, which we were very happy and excited about. And she took over from Jim Crowley who had been here for I think 20 years by the end. And so yeah. So it's a massive transition. But from my point of view, as I think anyone in any job, when you have a change in management, your first priority is to really just explain how it all works.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: And what are the main issues that you're worried about? And be quite open and honest about those so that everyone knows what you as a group have to tackle. So yeah. That's kind of been how I've approached that.
DAVID MYERS: OK. So we can advance the slide. I had one final question. But then we also got a good question that came in. So maybe the last about eight minutes or so, I'll just ask you to address both. One was my question on a personal note, I know you've all worked for larger organizations. What are you finding most satisfying or frustrating about working in a small organization?
DAVID MYERS: Is there something you wish you knew before you got in or that surprised you? In case there are people in our audience who might be thinking, oh, it would be nice to work at a small organization. And the other question that just came in was about what can smaller publisher organizations do to make a difference in terms of inclusion and diversity? What do you think are steps that we must do to improve the current situation?
DAVID MYERS: And since Kiv is up, I will start with you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Yeah. So on diversity and inclusion, I think the must do that we are working through here is, how do you collect data in a meaningful and trusted way? So we're having a lot of discussions about what you ask authors for example, and how do you make sure that if an author provides data, that they don't feel that is going to in any way bias the peer review process. So how much you ask and for it in order for you to make comparisons over time.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: How do you store the data? You might be getting very sensitive data from some people. How do you anonymize it? All these things. So I think, yeah. That's really the key focus for us is, what can we ask our communities to provide to us so we can start to measure these and see what trends are going on.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: On your notes about things that were different, or I wasn't expecting, I mean I think the satisfying thing is for better or worse you have an impact. So if you have an idea or project, you can usually make that happen. But also then you're kind of on the hook for any question that comes up. And that is very satisfying.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: I think the other thing I would mention is you kind of have many bosses if you will, people that you are responsible to. So you have your actual staff hierarchy. But any high profile volunteers or members that may come to you with a question or committee members, all these people I always treat as kind of like a boss that you have to make sure that they are and what they're looking for is satisfied and you're hearing what's being said.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: So that's maybe something that's different to having worked at commercial publishers.
DAVID MYERS: Christine?
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Yeah. Just a comment on the diversity question. I think there's a lot of discussion about how we gather this information and how we diversify our author communities in a lot of ways. But I think that it's also important to be focusing at the society leadership level in the journal leadership level. Right? I mean how diversified are the editors in chief and the more senior editorial teams on our journals.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: And I think that that's a very visible sign to the author communities in terms of how important that a priority that is. In terms of just this last question, I think working in a mission driven organization, it's just so satisfying. And as opposed to just having the profit motive in mind all the time, which I think is certainly very much my mindset when I was in commercial publishing, and I think, does affect a number of decisions that you make and why you make those decisions.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: So for me, that's incredibly satisfying. In terms of frustrating, just that we don't have the size as I mentioned before to sort of build some of the capabilities that we might want to build that serve the publishing organization. And really, we don't have the size to negotiate the kinds of rates that larger organizations can negotiate.
DAVID MYERS: And now Mary Rose.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So in terms of the diversity, equity, and inclusion question, we have-- because of the list areas in which we publish, we have a fairly diverse author pool already. And the titles we publish, in a lot of ways I think at our heart, we're a social justice press. A lot of the things we publish touch in different areas of social justice, anti-racism, criminal justice reform, LGBTQ+ studies, things like that.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: So we are starting out by looking at our peer review guidelines to make sure that they are-- that the language is fair and equitable and things like that. One of the things I said actually in a meeting with other AU presses directors on this topic was for Temple, I think it's very important for us to practice what we publish. So we're going to be looking at this in a more targeted way.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Again though, we're part of the overall university. So and they actually have a formal program on addressing racism and things like that. So we'll be doing things that are in some ways guided by the university. But I actually think we could absolutely be better for sure. I know that. But I think we've got a good base on which to build. And in terms of the question, so I would say that the most frustrating piece of being part of a very small organization like the press is actually on the budget side.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: We just don't have the funds to be able to do some of the things that I know we would really wish we could do. And even when it comes down to perhaps competing with a larger press for an author, a press that could offer a higher royalty percentage, or an advance, or something like that. But on the other hand, on the flip side of that, we-- and me personally, I've been able to make some really deep connections with some of the authors with whom we work.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: I'm able to do that with more of them because we are smaller. Our list is x number of titles and x number of areas. And I've really appreciated that. And I've also appreciated my ability personally to contribute to the reputation of the press in a really important-- in important ways, not that I didn't feel like I was able to do that in some of the other places where I worked, but I was-- I mean it probably doesn't sound too great.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: But I was part of a much larger group that did that. And here, I'm part of a much smaller group and I'm actually, thanks to my position and the great favor I have in having it, I'm able to lead that group. So that's been personally very, very rewarding.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you. I want to thank all of our panelists. I thought this was a really great discussion. I'm going to turn it back over to Jeff for a closing.
JEFF LANG: And thank you to David, to Christine, Kivmars, and Mary Rose for leading a mighty discussion here. Thanks to ARPHA also as our sponsor today and for all of you for attending. Once again, please do take the time to respond to our webinar evaluation, which you'll receive over email. Your feedback helps us to continually improve the webinar's program. Also join us for the next SSP webinar entitled Small But Mighty, The Role Of Societies.
JEFF LANG: Excuse me. That's it. Next session will be up, we'll be talking about books on March 16. Check out all publication opportunities with SSP as well. With that, we are concluded. And enjoy the rest of your day.
CHRISTINE BATTLE: Thank you.
MARY ROSE MUCCIE: Thank you.
DAVID MYERS: Thank you.
KIVMARS H. BOWLING: Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.
DAVID MYERS: Bye-bye.
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