Cadmore media player playing video Kriyadocs: Help Your Authors Put Their Best Foot Forward
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Kriyadocs: Help Your Authors Put Their Best Foot Forward
Description:
Kriyadocs: Help Your Authors Put Their Best Foot Forward
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/6554bbea-996c-4971-81ee-56a2ad6613dc/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T00H29M48S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/6554bbea-996c-4971-81ee-56a2ad6613dc
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/6554bbea-996c-4971-81ee-56a2ad6613dc/industry_breakout__kriyadocs_2024-05-29 (1080p).mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=CSS%2BV5e2mBZCBNW0EuDE8vmSk50b3HzC3oj9SYhe8VM%3D&st=2025-06-25T06%3A29%3A37Z&se=2025-06-25T08%3A34%3A37Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-12-03T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Hi good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our session about helping your authors put their best foot forward. I'm saumya Mahadevan. I'm the chief orchestrator at creador. I think Thank you so much to mark who gave us a shout out on the app. But as you see, we have some quirky titles in our office before we get into the content of the session, my marketing manager has told me that I have to start every session by talking about ourselves and our company.
So that's what I'm going to do. Take a few minutes, tell you a little bit about who we are. I come from Korea, and I think this pretty much captures what we are as a company. We have about over 20 years we've been in this business and our purpose has been our vision has always been to make publishing as simple as possible, as simple as clicking a button. I think we honestly believe that there's too much complication, and there is a lot of scope for making it really simple by bringing all the stakeholders together into one collaborative environment.
And that's exactly what we've been after for the last several years. We started off in 2004 as a pre-press provider, and the reason I'm talking about our experience within this particular industry is because we have had countless conversations with publishers. We understand what authors are looking for, we understand what publishers are looking for. And it is with that sort of an insight.
We started developing our platform, our end to end platform called docs. And where we are today is we have such a good collaboration with all of our customers to foster agility. I think you've heard multiple times that publishing is facing a lot of changes, and the one thing that publishers have to become is more agile, more receptive to changes, and more quick to keep up with all the changes that are coming.
And what docs is an agility partner for publishers. This is a slide I think we all love showing because I love that ball going around. But really what it encapsulates is through a co-creation we create this trust and transparency with our publishers. It's the publishers in the center to deliver improved author experience. At the end of the day, the authors are who matters.
So they are the ones that make this industry actually function. When you have better author experience, you have repeat authors, you have author referrals and increased submissions, which basically leads to a lot of mutual growth. And this is something that we have actually seen come to life. And I'm talking here with a lot of data that we have done with the close collaboration that we've had with several of our partners at creador, we have a culture of turning ideas into reality by continuous discovery, continuous delivery.
We have constant good feedback loops with our publishers. We take author surveys who use our platform to make sure that what we deliver to our authors they're having a fantastic experience. So where we are, we have an end to end unified publishing ecosystem all the way from submission to delivery. And today we are going to talk about another extension to this. But we have a one single interface for all your stakeholders, all your publishing stakeholders, for all your publishing processes, including your submission, peer review, production as well as delivery.
And I do want to Thank all of our customers who have participated in this sort of a community driven initiative, because the wonderful feedback that we have received, the participation that we have received from each and every one of our customers, has actually gone to making our platform that much more resilient and that much more feature rich. And this is one example of a wonderful collaboration that we had with this journal called Med wave.
And we ended up winning the award at alpsp last year for innovation. But the reason why I really love this particular case story is case study is because Vivienne, who's the chief editor of this particular journal, was actually an author at BMJ and she loved her experience on cria docs with the BMJ that she reached out to us and said, hey, can I use your system for my journal as well. And that's actually how this particular partnership came to life and ended up in us winning and winning an award.
I'm now going to invite Ravi to talk about what lies ahead for publishers, and what are we actually facing at the moment. Over to you, Ravi. Thank you. Samya I think what we wanted to basically show you is we have years of experience trying to build a collaboration. So we see ourselves at the center of this publisher universe, where we have lots of things that publishers want to do.
And I think we want to be the catalyst to make things happen. And what we have done with our customers is provide a forum for them to voice their ideas. We love to listen to their ideas and come up with ways by which we can make them come to life. One of the ways we do this is through our publisher speak conference, where we got lots of great ideas last week, and this is something we heard last week as well, which is if we continue to face this challenge of three constraints your volume going up, you have necessary speed also has to go up.
And the big problem of today is the quality and integrity. So we all know about the paper mill menace. We have an issue today where we've got a challenge where there's some bad actors in the system and they're causing everybody to get a bad name. Now the question before us is who's responsible. Who's responsible for the problem and who's responsible for the solution. It feels like at times, the publishers are unfairly being blamed for what's going on.
I think we need to figure out a way to come together to solve this issue. And what's happening is this last year we had over 10,000 retractions, and this is what's publicly retracted. Obviously, we have a lot more that we weren't able to find or issues that we see in our papers that we haven't been able to determine. So it is in some ways an existential threat. And the reason it is I think publishers are seen by the community as custodians, as people who are going to make sure that good science is going to be published and available to the readers across the world.
So then we have that responsibility, but we also are now blamed for not doing our job when, with so many publications coming in, so many submissions coming in, how do you solve this problem. So I want you to just take a second and think about this. We're so eager to blame the authors. We're so eager to say, hey, let's find a way to stop the authors. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, but do realize there's not enough room in jail.
And this is a true fact, across the world. Jails are full. Taxpayers money is going towards all these criminals taking care of them. But Meanwhile, we have a problem. So how do we solve this problem. I think the solution may be to look at prioritizing deterrence over penalty. Let's look at number of submissions that we had last year.
I think it's in excess of 5 million submissions that we have in journal submissions across the world. That's a big number. Now, if you want to go run, research integrity checks on all of these. You can't do it by yourself. You can't have big enough teams. The bigger publishers have big teams. Smaller publishers do not have enough teams.
So how do we go about solving this problem. I think this is good in some situations, to look at other problems at scale that have happened in public knowledge. This is a campaign that was run in Canada a few years ago about basically safety on the road and clicking your seat belt. So they did a really concerted campaign. They realized that, hey, this is a problem.
I can stop the drivers, give them a ticket for not wearing it. But there's also a need for basically building awareness, building sensitization of the public as to what happens if you do not follow the rules. And they brought in a bunch of different things. They had billboards, they had signs on the road, they had emails going out. And they use multiple mechanisms to get to the audience, which is the public.
What had happened is it resulted in 91.9% belt usage in 2023. I think this is, again, something that's been going on over the years that you're talking about, about close to a billion drivers or more across the world who are driving actively at any point in time. So this is a big problem. Now, this is how they went ahead and solved that. So how can we learn from that in terms of how we should operate. I just think this traffic analogy a little further.
They don't just give you a ticket for not breaking the rules or for breaking the rules, but they also give you these kinds of signs. These signs basically tell you how fast you're going and that you're over the speed limit. And here's what you need to do to come down. I think this is something we can take a lot of inspiration from, is it's not just enough to catch them in the act. How can we prevent them from making the problem.
How can you involve them in solving the problem. Because the fact of the matter is a vast majority of authors are actually good players. It's only a small minority, which are the problem. And so in order to solve the minority, if we go make everybody's life difficult, it seems like that's the wrong approach. So we contend that I think, we have done in traffic safety and speed limits and things like that is to come up with a combination of self-regulatory aides that our community can use to build greater awareness of what this means, and also not awareness just at the author level, but also at institutions.
I think there's a lot of talk that I've seen in conferences, in research integrity around institutions. What's their responsibility. Obviously, many of these authors or researchers work at these institutions. They also share a part in making sure that this is done well. I think it's also important to build awareness at institutions and say, hey, we need to catch this, nip this in the bud right at the beginning.
And finally, setting standards, setting standards for what it means to produce a good publication, what it means to have a good article and be more of everybody in this process. We talk about speed limit, wearing seat belts. This is all something that's being done in full public view. So what can we do. I think a key point that we contend is we should lead with trust.
We're in this business because of authors. If we didn't have authors, we would not have a job. I think it's important to understand that and accept that, but also to say, hey, now we have an opportunity to lead and say, hey, we need to build trust back in the system. We need to get these authors to participate in this effort, the editors to participate and find a way to lead from that front. There's a great story that we had in our own world, which is with jats.
So several years ago, we had a problem where we were all publishing lots of content, but we couldn't find a good way to talk to each other. And what happened is there was a community effort in our industry where a bunch of publishers, a bunch of people in technology, Bruce Rosenblum was one of them, bless his soul. He passed away, but he was involved in creating this great standard. What this standard has allowed us to do has allowed us to communicate.
So just communicate across different systems, be able to exchange data. It's also allowed us to set standards as to what is considered good tagging and what is not. Of course, there's a school of thought that says it's only going to suggest what to do. The following is still up to the publisher to do that, but it's given us a very good framework that we can all learn and inspire.
Get inspired by what XML can do for us if we just think about applying it for our problem. Is can the use of XML submission help you identify duplicate submissions? This, of course, is going to require subscription from a variety of publishers with some sort of community effort. Where these submissions come in, we have full text XML from these submissions, where it becomes very easy to determine if this is a duplicate submission, some author submitting it over here, but just because they want to get accepted, submitting to a bunch of other places as well.
Catching fabricated data. Now imagine when you go evaluate your Western blots. Maybe Western blot is not a good example, but suppose you have charts and other things and you have data to back it. You can actually now go verify that this chart actually matches the data. And I think with Nelson memo coming in next year, we now have to go even closer.
Look at the data. So how does XML help us in this particular problem. Upholding research integrity at scale. This is a problem that's not going to reduce. We're not going to have fewer publications just because we wished it. It's in our benefit to have more publications. So given that we've got to see, how can we then work together to make sure we address this at scale, because we do want publications to grow.
Finally, also think of your content as not just the research article. I think this is a big learning. I think we can probably learn from the books world. In the books world, a book was written. It was one from cover to cover, and that was what was sold. But then they decided, hey, can these books be sold piecemeal? Can we sell a chapter. Can we bundle them together.
Can bundle them differently. If you apply that same analogy to journals, can we start to look at the article as different pieces. Potentially can I just have the setting up, the experiment, the method, be it something that you can publish. Could it also be my negative results. Hey, I went down this path. I didn't get a successful result, but can I actually publish that.
And the reason to do this is also to bring in more opportunities for people to get published. And not that we're not going to publish seminal research. At end of the day, you may not be ready and we don't want you to fabricate. Instead, we want to provide more mechanisms for you to participate in this publication process because obviously it's important for your academic future. So what I would like to do is to present our idea, which is called Create pre-submit.
So create pre-submit is a submission platform, or rather a pre-submission platform that allows authors to effectively upload their article, will then go analyze it on various measures. One of them would be on the structural aspects language quality and research integrity. And the idea here is we're not asking the authors to do more work. Instead, we're going to be the authors friend in analyzing their manuscript for identifying issues that may be there and popping them up for them to go address.
And in doing so, we're also going to be bringing in various levels of checks. Suppose we're working with a particular journal, bring in Publisher level checks, journal level checks, and Article level checks. And the idea here is, again, is to not throw more work at the author. I think the way to think about this is I know there's been a lot of effort to make submission as quick as possible.
Let's do it in 10 minutes. Let's do it in five minutes. But I think what we're not measuring is what happens downstream. How much more time are you spending in the process. How much. How much longer is the check happening. How much longer is peer review taking. I think you have to take all that into account and say, hey, if we present a system to the authors where they are being presented, all the issues that are there in their manuscripts, including things like self citations, retracted citations, image manipulation issues, how do we bring that to the fore over here.
Again, for some of you it's like, hey, how can we take our tools and present them to the author. Guess what. They already know we're not doing something that they don't know already. Instead, by doing it with them, you now have a chance of tackling this problem. Because then you don't have to employ somebody to do it yourself.
The system does it along with them, and you will get the evidence as to what exactly happened. We're also offering real time author collaboration, and the idea here is when I'm submitting, I may not know all the answers. I have many, many, many cases, several collaborators. So how could they also be invited to the process and participate and help us fill out the different pieces. But a bigger thing happens here is we're also now encouraging the authors to come and identify themselves.
So in terms of when you have paper Mills and you have fake authors, how do you bring those authors to the fore? You have them identify themselves, establish provenance and that aspect, who is submitting to you. At the end of the day, what we're going to be offering the authors is a cleaned up word file. With all these issues identified and cleaned up that they can take away, we're not guaranteeing that they will be accepted, but still depends on the quality of their submission.
But what we are giving them is something that they can take away and say, I went through this, I got something of value. My submission is going through. Hopefully my submission will be accepted, but if not, I know I have something I can take away. What we were able to offer our publishers is a detailed screening report of not what was found in the article, what the authors did to solve this.
So in some ways, it's an analogy my colleague Jason likes to say, is shining like daylight is the best disinfectant. We're basically having them do all these checks, all these steps in full public view, or rather in the pre-submit view. And that audit report is now available to publishers. You can then review this and say, hey, is this a behavior that you will see from a good actor, or is this behavior that looks a little suspicious.
And you can track that. The other benefit we're going to have at the end of this process is full XML submission. I know many of us have been thinking about this. We have full XML production. We see the advantages that we're able to get from that particular scenario. How can we get full XML submission that now allows you to do multiple things.
Choosing the right journal for this particular article. Finding better sources of evidence for reviewers to go locate this. So I think the opportunities are tremendous. So by adding the rigorous technical language and research integrity checks and also integrating with the best in class research integrity tools, while we have a lot of AI models and automation around our software, we also realize that we're not able to address all of the different questions that need to be answered.
So instead, we've decided to become the platform that will integrate with great tools like clear skies, Global Campus, and several others which are bringing into the system. And the idea here is, again, make these tools plagiarism checking all that available at this particular point. So when it comes into your desk review, you can then focus on the science. You can make a informed decision and you can decide, hey, this is still not good enough to publish, and that's fine, but you don't have to spend all that time doing so.
Meanwhile, also allows you to do this for every article. Think about that. If you take research integrity right now, you're able to check a fraction of the articles that are submitted to you. Now imagine doing this for every article. I think that's what it's going to take. It's going to take all of us coming together, deciding what these rules are and how we can all work together to solve this problem together.
Finally, this full text XML and rich metadata from the get go. A huge advantage I can see besides being able to cite journals and all of that is assuming everything went well. This is a good case scenario. This is really good research. It's fit for publication. We've already done the language quality check. Guess what happens at acceptance.
You can publish. You don't have to wait for a whole set of other days for this to happen. When authors come to you guys and submit to journals they're not expecting to get first, get reviewed, and then get produced or get published. They're expecting this to be one step process. How can you make this author experience a lot easier in many sessions earlier today also.
We're talking about making this process streamlined, giving one interface to authors, making it easy for them. I think this is what will happen if you do things upstream and you involve the authors in that process. The benefits are tremendous for publishers as well as authors, and that's the case, we're making for today. And we have basically started this particular tool in alpha. We launched it in alpha in London book fair just a month ago or a couple of months ago.
And what we've done is recruited authors, editors, publishers to participate in the testing of this process. Many some of you are in this room today, and what we're trying to do out of this is to establish that this will be a piece of software that we can encourage authors to use. Assuming, hey, your authors are very senior and we did that. We did interviews with senior authors, and they came back and said, if I was a early career researcher, I would use something like this.
But right now I don't have to do this. I'll just throw it across to the wall to the publisher. That's what they're there for. So again, we know how difficult it is to do that. So what I would recommend to you is if you have a case like that can make it optional. Have your editorial teams do it instead. So you can use a combination of either you're doing it or your editorial team's doing it.
But the key thing I think is we just definitely need to build awareness. We need to let the authors know these things are happening and make our lives easier so that we can actually keep up to what we're expected to do is to uphold trust in research. So what we've done is we built this pre-submit module that can either connect up to our unified platform, or can also go into other peer review platforms. So you're not tied into choosing docs for your peer review and journal production.
You can now take an export, which will be a mega package, which can then be exported to a scholar. One could be exported to an ejb to export, exported to editorial manager or any peer review system that you may be using. And this is something that we can again, leverage a industry standard, which we have introduced for Meca to allow for transfers between journals.
Why don't we use that. And this will have all of the data that's available. And whether those systems are able to use the XML effectively or not that you've got gone through these checks. These reports will be available that you can take advantage of further down in the process. So yeah, so that's the opportunity. I think this is definitely something that requires a community effort.
The reason we didn't just launch this tool is we wanted to be right. I think everybody is concerned about giving more work to the authors. I think it's also about addressing this problem at the same time. So why don't we do this together. What we have done with our publishers is they've come to us and say, these are the rules.
I want you to check for. These are the things I want you to check for. And they've also come back with some really intelligent suggestions, which is don't do all the checks at once. Do a few checks in the beginning and as the manuscript goes down in the process, do more just so that it doesn't appear like the author has to do a lot of work at the beginning. And as the manuscript goes through the review process, you can decide, I want to do these checks at that particular stage.
So you can work with the authors through that particular process. XML also means when you have revisions, comparing revisions becomes a lot easier. I think you also get more reviewers start using the system. So I know I'm presenting a Shangri-La out there, but I think that's what everybody expected when they started off working with jats. And look at what we're all everybody in this room is using jats.
I think that's the power and success of that particular effort. How can we make a similar effort. We're not the only ones working on this. I'm sure there's other systems also building things like this. I think publishers need to get behind these systems, collaborate with these partners and find a way to address this problem, because we understand what you're facing, and we want to work with you.
So I think what we're here today is to basically ask you to join us in this alpha. Help us test this product. Help us make it better. So that we get benefits for everybody. With that, I would like to take questions from the audience, if there's any. The backdrop.
Hi, Ravi. Can you talk a little bit more about what your process is for generating XML at submission. Is it completely automated or are there checks by humans involved. So for those of you who work with XML. XML, I think automation of XML is the ideal we want to work for.
There's always some small thing that prevents you from doing that. And those small things are what we have teams of people in India or Philippines or various countries doing so. What we're doing is we're going through this manuscript, applying a lot of AI and automation to find out what's the missing piece, presenting those missing pieces to the author.
So the authors help us clarify those missing pieces, and once they clarify it, we have it ready to go. Hey, Ravi, I've got the mic, I think. So I'll ask you first with the sort of pre-submit layer and then you can pass to other peer review systems. How is that kind of integrated with the publisher's site. Like the authors are going to go to the publisher's site to submit.
How's that working Practically, that's sort of thing. So what we're anticipating here is at the end of submission, we will have a full jats XML ready to go, which has all the metadata necessary for any submission process. So we'll be able to then flow that into the peer review system. They can pick up this XML, not have the author fill out another form.
They can just proceed down the peer review process. Hi, Ravi. Fantastic job with pre-submit. It looks already very good. Have you tested its effectiveness at identifying human sourced versus AI. Generative AI sourced content. A really good question. Last week, I published this week we had an AI expert come and talk to the audience.
And he made a very interesting point. He said a lot of these companies like, say, ChatGPT or OpenAI, who are building these tools to generate content, are also being the ones who are building the checks. So in some ways, as much as we're building checking tools, they will also build tools for you to overcome the checking tools. I think if any of you have done testing, you'll see ChatGPT four cannot catch the issues of ChatGPT 4 and catch the issue of ChatGPT three.
So always building like that because they have both audiences. I don't think there's a foolproof way, but what we're trying to do is to integrate with those systems. Some of them will work better than others. Sometimes you may need to work with a kind of a composite or a mix and say, OK, for these sorts of things, check with this tool. And so on.
And I think the key thing again is awareness, right. So you can go do all the checking. You still will not find it. I think these tools are going to get better and better. The fact that you can now create video is just freaking amazing. Nobody expected that, and it's going at such a fast rate that we can't keep up. I think the only way to keep up is to tell the authors, hey, we're doing we're doing this together with you.
This is what we're doing. This is the secret sauce. Guess what. We're also watching you. So if you choose to be a bad player, then you're doing it knowing fully well you may be caught and be shamed. Is there any idea about keeping track of bad actors or any way of flagging things, retractions, anything like that.
So that if they submit in the future, there might be some opportunity to say, hey, they've had three retractions. Great question. One of the checks that we have with reference is actually goes off to retraction watch and goes and checks those particular references and sees if it exists on retraction watch. Let me flag those.
We're also going to be presenting enough evidence where integrating with orcid trust markers, which we feel is again, is a very worthy project because that allows us to verify that this particular author actually wrote this article or reviewed this article. And so on, and bringing all those evidences also back. And I think it's a matter of collaborating with publishers saying, hey, when this particular scenario happens, let's actively submit to retraction watch and other such systems to make sure that everybody gets their benefit.
I don't think we should sit here saying, I'm going to take care of myself and not the others. In fact, I will also say the big publishers need to get the small publishers working as well. We're only going to be as strong as our weakest link. You can't just say, I've taken care of myself, I don't. Everybody else takes care of for themselves. I don't think that's going to be a strategy we can all adopt. We need to get everybody involved because you I mean, you may be referring an article that comes from a journal, which is not a Q1 or Q2 journal, but may still be worthy of reference.
And if that particular article had had an issue, then all the articles that are referred to that will be pulled down. So I think we need to come together. And this is why we're saying this needs to be a community effort Repeat the question where do you imagine this tool set with the author at a University or city, with the publisher or the journals.
I think you're presenting several great options here where we see actually happening to begin with is ahead of the journal where before the submission happens. But it could also be used with the authors where authors could go use this to check their publication before they submit at all. But I think a really nice use case that you talked about is at universities.
This is where it all starts. How can we build a culture of research over there. How can publishers go sponsor these programs and say, hey, start using this within your own departments. Educate your students about the importance of following the rules and what would benefit from there. I'm actually attending a course on Harvard online. And they keep talking about the code of conduct, the importance for not plagiarizing.
I think they realize the only way to stop this is to keep saying it, and you keep saying it the first time. Maybe not. They won't get it, but the 10th time somebody will get it. And I think that's where publishers, we can step in and say, how can we use tools like this. Work with universities like you suggested, and get that culture starting right from the very beginning.
Jennifer Thanks, Ravi. Thanks, sowmya. Really great presentation. So you are our trusted partner in helping us to curate data that we publish at Dryad. So you must have asked yourselves at what point to start asking the authors about the data in connection with their article. Some of the publishers that we support have been taking the position that if it's ready for submission, the data had better be buttoned up and ready.
So is that something you've thought about with respect to the metadata collection in this project. Well, absolutely. Great question. I think there is never it's never too early to start asking these questions. In fact, I think some days they'll be systems where this will be part of the research process. So rather than say, hey, this is my end of my research and writing an article.
How can people start writing as they do the work. And so I think as they collect data, how can these data sources be plugged in so that I can get it and figshare can get it, and whoever else needs to get this sort of data. But I think asking these questions upfront and bringing those checks in there, and this is where I think publishers can educate, depending on the type of journal, to start asking these questions ahead of time, which means that you're mentally prepared and you start to now collect this data and present it.
I think the more we share, the better it's going to be. And so yeah, I think as early as possible in the process for sure. Perhaps one last question. If we run out of time. Great hey Thank you so much. Really appreciate your attention.
We have a booth in the Hall. So if you would like to hear more, see the software in action, please do stop by. We'd love to have a chat with you. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Hi good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our session about helping your authors put their best foot forward. I'm saumya Mahadevan. I'm the chief orchestrator at creador. I think Thank you so much to mark who gave us a shout out on the app. But as you see, we have some quirky titles in our office before we get into the content of the session, my marketing manager has told me that I have to start every session by talking about ourselves and our company.
So that's what I'm going to do. Take a few minutes, tell you a little bit about who we are. I come from Korea, and I think this pretty much captures what we are as a company. We have about over 20 years we've been in this business and our purpose has been our vision has always been to make publishing as simple as possible, as simple as clicking a button. I think we honestly believe that there's too much complication, and there is a lot of scope for making it really simple by bringing all the stakeholders together into one collaborative environment.
And that's exactly what we've been after for the last several years. We started off in 2004 as a pre-press provider, and the reason I'm talking about our experience within this particular industry is because we have had countless conversations with publishers. We understand what authors are looking for, we understand what publishers are looking for. And it is with that sort of an insight.
We started developing our platform, our end to end platform called docs. And where we are today is we have such a good collaboration with all of our customers to foster agility. I think you've heard multiple times that publishing is facing a lot of changes, and the one thing that publishers have to become is more agile, more receptive to changes, and more quick to keep up with all the changes that are coming.
And what docs is an agility partner for publishers. This is a slide I think we all love showing because I love that ball going around. But really what it encapsulates is through a co-creation we create this trust and transparency with our publishers. It's the publishers in the center to deliver improved author experience. At the end of the day, the authors are who matters.
So they are the ones that make this industry actually function. When you have better author experience, you have repeat authors, you have author referrals and increased submissions, which basically leads to a lot of mutual growth. And this is something that we have actually seen come to life. And I'm talking here with a lot of data that we have done with the close collaboration that we've had with several of our partners at creador, we have a culture of turning ideas into reality by continuous discovery, continuous delivery.
We have constant good feedback loops with our publishers. We take author surveys who use our platform to make sure that what we deliver to our authors they're having a fantastic experience. So where we are, we have an end to end unified publishing ecosystem all the way from submission to delivery. And today we are going to talk about another extension to this. But we have a one single interface for all your stakeholders, all your publishing stakeholders, for all your publishing processes, including your submission, peer review, production as well as delivery.
And I do want to Thank all of our customers who have participated in this sort of a community driven initiative, because the wonderful feedback that we have received, the participation that we have received from each and every one of our customers, has actually gone to making our platform that much more resilient and that much more feature rich. And this is one example of a wonderful collaboration that we had with this journal called Med wave.
And we ended up winning the award at alpsp last year for innovation. But the reason why I really love this particular case story is case study is because Vivienne, who's the chief editor of this particular journal, was actually an author at BMJ and she loved her experience on cria docs with the BMJ that she reached out to us and said, hey, can I use your system for my journal as well. And that's actually how this particular partnership came to life and ended up in us winning and winning an award.
I'm now going to invite Ravi to talk about what lies ahead for publishers, and what are we actually facing at the moment. Over to you, Ravi. Thank you. Samya I think what we wanted to basically show you is we have years of experience trying to build a collaboration. So we see ourselves at the center of this publisher universe, where we have lots of things that publishers want to do.
And I think we want to be the catalyst to make things happen. And what we have done with our customers is provide a forum for them to voice their ideas. We love to listen to their ideas and come up with ways by which we can make them come to life. One of the ways we do this is through our publisher speak conference, where we got lots of great ideas last week, and this is something we heard last week as well, which is if we continue to face this challenge of three constraints your volume going up, you have necessary speed also has to go up.
And the big problem of today is the quality and integrity. So we all know about the paper mill menace. We have an issue today where we've got a challenge where there's some bad actors in the system and they're causing everybody to get a bad name. Now the question before us is who's responsible. Who's responsible for the problem and who's responsible for the solution. It feels like at times, the publishers are unfairly being blamed for what's going on.
I think we need to figure out a way to come together to solve this issue. And what's happening is this last year we had over 10,000 retractions, and this is what's publicly retracted. Obviously, we have a lot more that we weren't able to find or issues that we see in our papers that we haven't been able to determine. So it is in some ways an existential threat. And the reason it is I think publishers are seen by the community as custodians, as people who are going to make sure that good science is going to be published and available to the readers across the world.
So then we have that responsibility, but we also are now blamed for not doing our job when, with so many publications coming in, so many submissions coming in, how do you solve this problem. So I want you to just take a second and think about this. We're so eager to blame the authors. We're so eager to say, hey, let's find a way to stop the authors. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, but do realize there's not enough room in jail.
And this is a true fact, across the world. Jails are full. Taxpayers money is going towards all these criminals taking care of them. But Meanwhile, we have a problem. So how do we solve this problem. I think the solution may be to look at prioritizing deterrence over penalty. Let's look at number of submissions that we had last year.
I think it's in excess of 5 million submissions that we have in journal submissions across the world. That's a big number. Now, if you want to go run, research integrity checks on all of these. You can't do it by yourself. You can't have big enough teams. The bigger publishers have big teams. Smaller publishers do not have enough teams.
So how do we go about solving this problem. I think this is good in some situations, to look at other problems at scale that have happened in public knowledge. This is a campaign that was run in Canada a few years ago about basically safety on the road and clicking your seat belt. So they did a really concerted campaign. They realized that, hey, this is a problem.
I can stop the drivers, give them a ticket for not wearing it. But there's also a need for basically building awareness, building sensitization of the public as to what happens if you do not follow the rules. And they brought in a bunch of different things. They had billboards, they had signs on the road, they had emails going out. And they use multiple mechanisms to get to the audience, which is the public.
What had happened is it resulted in 91.9% belt usage in 2023. I think this is, again, something that's been going on over the years that you're talking about, about close to a billion drivers or more across the world who are driving actively at any point in time. So this is a big problem. Now, this is how they went ahead and solved that. So how can we learn from that in terms of how we should operate. I just think this traffic analogy a little further.
They don't just give you a ticket for not breaking the rules or for breaking the rules, but they also give you these kinds of signs. These signs basically tell you how fast you're going and that you're over the speed limit. And here's what you need to do to come down. I think this is something we can take a lot of inspiration from, is it's not just enough to catch them in the act. How can we prevent them from making the problem.
How can you involve them in solving the problem. Because the fact of the matter is a vast majority of authors are actually good players. It's only a small minority, which are the problem. And so in order to solve the minority, if we go make everybody's life difficult, it seems like that's the wrong approach. So we contend that I think, we have done in traffic safety and speed limits and things like that is to come up with a combination of self-regulatory aides that our community can use to build greater awareness of what this means, and also not awareness just at the author level, but also at institutions.
I think there's a lot of talk that I've seen in conferences, in research integrity around institutions. What's their responsibility. Obviously, many of these authors or researchers work at these institutions. They also share a part in making sure that this is done well. I think it's also important to build awareness at institutions and say, hey, we need to catch this, nip this in the bud right at the beginning.
And finally, setting standards, setting standards for what it means to produce a good publication, what it means to have a good article and be more of everybody in this process. We talk about speed limit, wearing seat belts. This is all something that's being done in full public view. So what can we do. I think a key point that we contend is we should lead with trust.
We're in this business because of authors. If we didn't have authors, we would not have a job. I think it's important to understand that and accept that, but also to say, hey, now we have an opportunity to lead and say, hey, we need to build trust back in the system. We need to get these authors to participate in this effort, the editors to participate and find a way to lead from that front. There's a great story that we had in our own world, which is with jats.
So several years ago, we had a problem where we were all publishing lots of content, but we couldn't find a good way to talk to each other. And what happened is there was a community effort in our industry where a bunch of publishers, a bunch of people in technology, Bruce Rosenblum was one of them, bless his soul. He passed away, but he was involved in creating this great standard. What this standard has allowed us to do has allowed us to communicate.
So just communicate across different systems, be able to exchange data. It's also allowed us to set standards as to what is considered good tagging and what is not. Of course, there's a school of thought that says it's only going to suggest what to do. The following is still up to the publisher to do that, but it's given us a very good framework that we can all learn and inspire.
Get inspired by what XML can do for us if we just think about applying it for our problem. Is can the use of XML submission help you identify duplicate submissions? This, of course, is going to require subscription from a variety of publishers with some sort of community effort. Where these submissions come in, we have full text XML from these submissions, where it becomes very easy to determine if this is a duplicate submission, some author submitting it over here, but just because they want to get accepted, submitting to a bunch of other places as well.
Catching fabricated data. Now imagine when you go evaluate your Western blots. Maybe Western blot is not a good example, but suppose you have charts and other things and you have data to back it. You can actually now go verify that this chart actually matches the data. And I think with Nelson memo coming in next year, we now have to go even closer.
Look at the data. So how does XML help us in this particular problem. Upholding research integrity at scale. This is a problem that's not going to reduce. We're not going to have fewer publications just because we wished it. It's in our benefit to have more publications. So given that we've got to see, how can we then work together to make sure we address this at scale, because we do want publications to grow.
Finally, also think of your content as not just the research article. I think this is a big learning. I think we can probably learn from the books world. In the books world, a book was written. It was one from cover to cover, and that was what was sold. But then they decided, hey, can these books be sold piecemeal? Can we sell a chapter. Can we bundle them together.
Can bundle them differently. If you apply that same analogy to journals, can we start to look at the article as different pieces. Potentially can I just have the setting up, the experiment, the method, be it something that you can publish. Could it also be my negative results. Hey, I went down this path. I didn't get a successful result, but can I actually publish that.
And the reason to do this is also to bring in more opportunities for people to get published. And not that we're not going to publish seminal research. At end of the day, you may not be ready and we don't want you to fabricate. Instead, we want to provide more mechanisms for you to participate in this publication process because obviously it's important for your academic future. So what I would like to do is to present our idea, which is called Create pre-submit.
So create pre-submit is a submission platform, or rather a pre-submission platform that allows authors to effectively upload their article, will then go analyze it on various measures. One of them would be on the structural aspects language quality and research integrity. And the idea here is we're not asking the authors to do more work. Instead, we're going to be the authors friend in analyzing their manuscript for identifying issues that may be there and popping them up for them to go address.
And in doing so, we're also going to be bringing in various levels of checks. Suppose we're working with a particular journal, bring in Publisher level checks, journal level checks, and Article level checks. And the idea here is, again, is to not throw more work at the author. I think the way to think about this is I know there's been a lot of effort to make submission as quick as possible.
Let's do it in 10 minutes. Let's do it in five minutes. But I think what we're not measuring is what happens downstream. How much more time are you spending in the process. How much. How much longer is the check happening. How much longer is peer review taking. I think you have to take all that into account and say, hey, if we present a system to the authors where they are being presented, all the issues that are there in their manuscripts, including things like self citations, retracted citations, image manipulation issues, how do we bring that to the fore over here.
Again, for some of you it's like, hey, how can we take our tools and present them to the author. Guess what. They already know we're not doing something that they don't know already. Instead, by doing it with them, you now have a chance of tackling this problem. Because then you don't have to employ somebody to do it yourself.
The system does it along with them, and you will get the evidence as to what exactly happened. We're also offering real time author collaboration, and the idea here is when I'm submitting, I may not know all the answers. I have many, many, many cases, several collaborators. So how could they also be invited to the process and participate and help us fill out the different pieces. But a bigger thing happens here is we're also now encouraging the authors to come and identify themselves.
So in terms of when you have paper Mills and you have fake authors, how do you bring those authors to the fore? You have them identify themselves, establish provenance and that aspect, who is submitting to you. At the end of the day, what we're going to be offering the authors is a cleaned up word file. With all these issues identified and cleaned up that they can take away, we're not guaranteeing that they will be accepted, but still depends on the quality of their submission.
But what we are giving them is something that they can take away and say, I went through this, I got something of value. My submission is going through. Hopefully my submission will be accepted, but if not, I know I have something I can take away. What we were able to offer our publishers is a detailed screening report of not what was found in the article, what the authors did to solve this.
So in some ways, it's an analogy my colleague Jason likes to say, is shining like daylight is the best disinfectant. We're basically having them do all these checks, all these steps in full public view, or rather in the pre-submit view. And that audit report is now available to publishers. You can then review this and say, hey, is this a behavior that you will see from a good actor, or is this behavior that looks a little suspicious.
And you can track that. The other benefit we're going to have at the end of this process is full XML submission. I know many of us have been thinking about this. We have full XML production. We see the advantages that we're able to get from that particular scenario. How can we get full XML submission that now allows you to do multiple things.
Choosing the right journal for this particular article. Finding better sources of evidence for reviewers to go locate this. So I think the opportunities are tremendous. So by adding the rigorous technical language and research integrity checks and also integrating with the best in class research integrity tools, while we have a lot of AI models and automation around our software, we also realize that we're not able to address all of the different questions that need to be answered.
So instead, we've decided to become the platform that will integrate with great tools like clear skies, Global Campus, and several others which are bringing into the system. And the idea here is, again, make these tools plagiarism checking all that available at this particular point. So when it comes into your desk review, you can then focus on the science. You can make a informed decision and you can decide, hey, this is still not good enough to publish, and that's fine, but you don't have to spend all that time doing so.
Meanwhile, also allows you to do this for every article. Think about that. If you take research integrity right now, you're able to check a fraction of the articles that are submitted to you. Now imagine doing this for every article. I think that's what it's going to take. It's going to take all of us coming together, deciding what these rules are and how we can all work together to solve this problem together.
Finally, this full text XML and rich metadata from the get go. A huge advantage I can see besides being able to cite journals and all of that is assuming everything went well. This is a good case scenario. This is really good research. It's fit for publication. We've already done the language quality check. Guess what happens at acceptance.
You can publish. You don't have to wait for a whole set of other days for this to happen. When authors come to you guys and submit to journals they're not expecting to get first, get reviewed, and then get produced or get published. They're expecting this to be one step process. How can you make this author experience a lot easier in many sessions earlier today also.
We're talking about making this process streamlined, giving one interface to authors, making it easy for them. I think this is what will happen if you do things upstream and you involve the authors in that process. The benefits are tremendous for publishers as well as authors, and that's the case, we're making for today. And we have basically started this particular tool in alpha. We launched it in alpha in London book fair just a month ago or a couple of months ago.
And what we've done is recruited authors, editors, publishers to participate in the testing of this process. Many some of you are in this room today, and what we're trying to do out of this is to establish that this will be a piece of software that we can encourage authors to use. Assuming, hey, your authors are very senior and we did that. We did interviews with senior authors, and they came back and said, if I was a early career researcher, I would use something like this.
But right now I don't have to do this. I'll just throw it across to the wall to the publisher. That's what they're there for. So again, we know how difficult it is to do that. So what I would recommend to you is if you have a case like that can make it optional. Have your editorial teams do it instead. So you can use a combination of either you're doing it or your editorial team's doing it.
But the key thing I think is we just definitely need to build awareness. We need to let the authors know these things are happening and make our lives easier so that we can actually keep up to what we're expected to do is to uphold trust in research. So what we've done is we built this pre-submit module that can either connect up to our unified platform, or can also go into other peer review platforms. So you're not tied into choosing docs for your peer review and journal production.
You can now take an export, which will be a mega package, which can then be exported to a scholar. One could be exported to an ejb to export, exported to editorial manager or any peer review system that you may be using. And this is something that we can again, leverage a industry standard, which we have introduced for Meca to allow for transfers between journals.
Why don't we use that. And this will have all of the data that's available. And whether those systems are able to use the XML effectively or not that you've got gone through these checks. These reports will be available that you can take advantage of further down in the process. So yeah, so that's the opportunity. I think this is definitely something that requires a community effort.
The reason we didn't just launch this tool is we wanted to be right. I think everybody is concerned about giving more work to the authors. I think it's also about addressing this problem at the same time. So why don't we do this together. What we have done with our publishers is they've come to us and say, these are the rules.
I want you to check for. These are the things I want you to check for. And they've also come back with some really intelligent suggestions, which is don't do all the checks at once. Do a few checks in the beginning and as the manuscript goes down in the process, do more just so that it doesn't appear like the author has to do a lot of work at the beginning. And as the manuscript goes through the review process, you can decide, I want to do these checks at that particular stage.
So you can work with the authors through that particular process. XML also means when you have revisions, comparing revisions becomes a lot easier. I think you also get more reviewers start using the system. So I know I'm presenting a Shangri-La out there, but I think that's what everybody expected when they started off working with jats. And look at what we're all everybody in this room is using jats.
I think that's the power and success of that particular effort. How can we make a similar effort. We're not the only ones working on this. I'm sure there's other systems also building things like this. I think publishers need to get behind these systems, collaborate with these partners and find a way to address this problem, because we understand what you're facing, and we want to work with you.
So I think what we're here today is to basically ask you to join us in this alpha. Help us test this product. Help us make it better. So that we get benefits for everybody. With that, I would like to take questions from the audience, if there's any. The backdrop.
Hi, Ravi. Can you talk a little bit more about what your process is for generating XML at submission. Is it completely automated or are there checks by humans involved. So for those of you who work with XML. XML, I think automation of XML is the ideal we want to work for.
There's always some small thing that prevents you from doing that. And those small things are what we have teams of people in India or Philippines or various countries doing so. What we're doing is we're going through this manuscript, applying a lot of AI and automation to find out what's the missing piece, presenting those missing pieces to the author.
So the authors help us clarify those missing pieces, and once they clarify it, we have it ready to go. Hey, Ravi, I've got the mic, I think. So I'll ask you first with the sort of pre-submit layer and then you can pass to other peer review systems. How is that kind of integrated with the publisher's site. Like the authors are going to go to the publisher's site to submit.
How's that working Practically, that's sort of thing. So what we're anticipating here is at the end of submission, we will have a full jats XML ready to go, which has all the metadata necessary for any submission process. So we'll be able to then flow that into the peer review system. They can pick up this XML, not have the author fill out another form.
They can just proceed down the peer review process. Hi, Ravi. Fantastic job with pre-submit. It looks already very good. Have you tested its effectiveness at identifying human sourced versus AI. Generative AI sourced content. A really good question. Last week, I published this week we had an AI expert come and talk to the audience.
And he made a very interesting point. He said a lot of these companies like, say, ChatGPT or OpenAI, who are building these tools to generate content, are also being the ones who are building the checks. So in some ways, as much as we're building checking tools, they will also build tools for you to overcome the checking tools. I think if any of you have done testing, you'll see ChatGPT four cannot catch the issues of ChatGPT 4 and catch the issue of ChatGPT three.
So always building like that because they have both audiences. I don't think there's a foolproof way, but what we're trying to do is to integrate with those systems. Some of them will work better than others. Sometimes you may need to work with a kind of a composite or a mix and say, OK, for these sorts of things, check with this tool. And so on.
And I think the key thing again is awareness, right. So you can go do all the checking. You still will not find it. I think these tools are going to get better and better. The fact that you can now create video is just freaking amazing. Nobody expected that, and it's going at such a fast rate that we can't keep up. I think the only way to keep up is to tell the authors, hey, we're doing we're doing this together with you.
This is what we're doing. This is the secret sauce. Guess what. We're also watching you. So if you choose to be a bad player, then you're doing it knowing fully well you may be caught and be shamed. Is there any idea about keeping track of bad actors or any way of flagging things, retractions, anything like that.
So that if they submit in the future, there might be some opportunity to say, hey, they've had three retractions. Great question. One of the checks that we have with reference is actually goes off to retraction watch and goes and checks those particular references and sees if it exists on retraction watch. Let me flag those.
We're also going to be presenting enough evidence where integrating with orcid trust markers, which we feel is again, is a very worthy project because that allows us to verify that this particular author actually wrote this article or reviewed this article. And so on, and bringing all those evidences also back. And I think it's a matter of collaborating with publishers saying, hey, when this particular scenario happens, let's actively submit to retraction watch and other such systems to make sure that everybody gets their benefit.
I don't think we should sit here saying, I'm going to take care of myself and not the others. In fact, I will also say the big publishers need to get the small publishers working as well. We're only going to be as strong as our weakest link. You can't just say, I've taken care of myself, I don't. Everybody else takes care of for themselves. I don't think that's going to be a strategy we can all adopt. We need to get everybody involved because you I mean, you may be referring an article that comes from a journal, which is not a Q1 or Q2 journal, but may still be worthy of reference.
And if that particular article had had an issue, then all the articles that are referred to that will be pulled down. So I think we need to come together. And this is why we're saying this needs to be a community effort Repeat the question where do you imagine this tool set with the author at a University or city, with the publisher or the journals.
I think you're presenting several great options here where we see actually happening to begin with is ahead of the journal where before the submission happens. But it could also be used with the authors where authors could go use this to check their publication before they submit at all. But I think a really nice use case that you talked about is at universities.
This is where it all starts. How can we build a culture of research over there. How can publishers go sponsor these programs and say, hey, start using this within your own departments. Educate your students about the importance of following the rules and what would benefit from there. I'm actually attending a course on Harvard online. And they keep talking about the code of conduct, the importance for not plagiarizing.
I think they realize the only way to stop this is to keep saying it, and you keep saying it the first time. Maybe not. They won't get it, but the 10th time somebody will get it. And I think that's where publishers, we can step in and say, how can we use tools like this. Work with universities like you suggested, and get that culture starting right from the very beginning.
Jennifer Thanks, Ravi. Thanks, sowmya. Really great presentation. So you are our trusted partner in helping us to curate data that we publish at Dryad. So you must have asked yourselves at what point to start asking the authors about the data in connection with their article. Some of the publishers that we support have been taking the position that if it's ready for submission, the data had better be buttoned up and ready.
So is that something you've thought about with respect to the metadata collection in this project. Well, absolutely. Great question. I think there is never it's never too early to start asking these questions. In fact, I think some days they'll be systems where this will be part of the research process. So rather than say, hey, this is my end of my research and writing an article.
How can people start writing as they do the work. And so I think as they collect data, how can these data sources be plugged in so that I can get it and figshare can get it, and whoever else needs to get this sort of data. But I think asking these questions upfront and bringing those checks in there, and this is where I think publishers can educate, depending on the type of journal, to start asking these questions ahead of time, which means that you're mentally prepared and you start to now collect this data and present it.
I think the more we share, the better it's going to be. And so yeah, I think as early as possible in the process for sure. Perhaps one last question. If we run out of time. Great hey Thank you so much. Really appreciate your attention.
We have a booth in the Hall. So if you would like to hear more, see the software in action, please do stop by. We'd love to have a chat with you. Thank you.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode