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It Takes a Scholarly Publishing Village
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It Takes a Scholarly Publishing Village
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Segment:0 .
Passivity and integrity. And we're trying to model all of these for you and ask the same of you. We do have the SSP code of conduct that's been mentioned a few times. The society for Scholarly Publishing is committed to diversity, equity, providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We would really love participation today. So I think it's important to note that final note that I think there's a couple of different technologies out there at the moment. If you're watching online, we'd love for you to ask your questions in the whova app. We've got a colleague right here who's going to be monitoring that and we'll make sure those questions get asked and/or your viewpoints as well.
Over to you. Awesome hi, everybody. This is really cool. So I'm Alexa and I'm going to be moderating today. We unfortunately lost two of our panelists or my fellow moderator, Jennifer rogala and Dominique Moore, who is our panelists from the University of Illinois press. So I'm going to be speaking on behalf of both of them today also.
You're going to hear a lot from me. It's very, very happy about that. So we are so excited to be back in person at SSP for the first time in two years. During that time, some central themes arose that were foundational to common understanding of the conversations that continued to develop as these themes arose. We felt that it was important to have a conversation about the central grounding concepts that are driving the agreement conflict and nuance in the ways we will move forward as a community.
I mentioned this before, but I have bad news. My co moderator, Jennifer rogala won't be able to make the conference, but I do want to recognize all the hard work and brilliance she contributed to this session. She's an incredible force in our community of positivity, constructivity and support. I have appreciated her friendship and mentorship very much and I know many of you can say the same.
Um, it's easy to get caught up in the new tools and tech and models, but it's because and it's because they are interesting and fun and they help us make progress. But we should remember our foundational values. Our core values are where we start and finish. So let's talk let's talk about them today. We hope that by focusing on the core values that we all Bookshare and finding common ground that allows us to center those values, we can come together as a community to build a build a better scholarly communication village.
We have pulled together a panel of awesome professionals who engage with these concepts and values in their work to discuss how they think, feel and execute on their own interpretation of them. Well, SSP recently determined their own organizational values, as Ben mentioned, community adaptability, inclusivity and integrity. They're a little bit different words than ours, but I think they point to some similar themes and we are going to discuss a little differently based on how we as a group feel our community is grounded.
One thing that I think we want to mention is that these panelists were chosen because together we represent the breadth of this ecosystem. The diversity in our roles, backgrounds, experiences and perspective is by design. To illustrate that, despite our differences and even disagreements, we are all connected by our mission to serve the core values we discussed today and illustrate that our core values not only represent the good things we believe, but that they are inherent anchor in our ecosystem.
We need each other to serve them. We also want to say that we hope everybody in the audience and in our community at large understands that they belong. That's the special thing about scholarly publishing. This group up here, most of us had not met before yesterday. I met Ben once, but we connected in various ways over the years, and the foundation of that connection was listening to one another. So please take away from this session that we all want, that we want all of you to experience this foundational feeling of community despite different backgrounds and experiences.
And I personally want to note, especially for attendees that have not submitted a proposal or spoken at SSP, I hope you do a core value that isn't part of this session, but I highly value is bravery. I'm always scared to speak in front of people. I don't know if you can tell and lay out my perspective, but it's worth it if the only people who ever spoke were the ones unafraid to do so are, discourse would be very boring.
And I want to thank these amazing panelists for being brave up here with me, because the dirty little secret is there aren't a lot of people for whom this comes easily. So we're going to start by introducing them. First is Michelle whiting, editor in chief of Research Square company. Michelle has served. I'm going to. Do this first.
Michelle has served as the editor in chief of the preprint platform Research Square since 2020. She is responsible for the editorial policy and the preprint content and is a critical stakeholder in the progressive development of the preprint platform. Michelle has been with Research Square company for nearly 10 years, serving in a number of diverse roles, from academic editor to operations director.
Before joining the company, she earned her PhD in medical science and performed research in cancer biology and toxicology. Next is Dominic Moore, who unfortunately cannot be here today. But she's amazing. She's an acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois press. She acquires an American ethnic studies Black Studies and women and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Illinois press.
Previously, she worked as an assistant editor at the University of North Carolina Press and was the 2019 Mellon diversity fellow at the Ohio State University press. Her academic background includes in English with a minor in gender and women's studies at uiuc and an Ma in African-American studies, with a literary focus from UCLA. Currently, Dominique serves on the press, equity, justice and Inclusion Committee and along with Becca bostock, the Ohio State up, she put together the press buddy system networking program, which had its inaugural year in 2021.
Her work also includes why we should all care about early career pay, equity and inclusion. An interview with Becca Bostock and Dominique j Moore and show me the money. Talking about in a way that makes more sense. I think that's awesome. Dr. Ben mudrak, senior product manager at archive American Chemical Society. Ben is a senior author, senior author, product manager at the American Chemical society, where he oversees services and resources for authors and reviewers.
He is responsible for combining user feedback and business needs into a roadmap for a suite of authoring services and author journal cover program and several online educational courses. Ben is also senior product manager for the open pre-print platform Cam archive, which is jointly operated by 5 chemistry societies from around the world. Before entering scholar scholarly publishing, he received a PhD in molecular genetics and microbiology from Duke University and carried out microbiology research for almost 10 years.
Now we have Willa Tavernier. Research and impact. Research impact and open scholarship librarian at Indiana University. Willa is the research and research impact and open scholarship librarian in the scholarly communication department at Indiana university, Bloomington. She provides publication data and data analysis to library administration, as well as colleagues, colleges, colleges and departments for institutional decision making.
Willa works with faculty and graduate students in managing their research profiles and tracking and demonstrating the impact of their scholarly work. Her research interests are equitable, scholarly communication, governance and sustainability. Wila is committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in her work and research. She develops scholarly communication bibliometric dashboards to support humanities scholarship, an area underserved by conventional bibliometrics.
Wila has recently worked on copyright clearance center's town hall. What's ahead for libraries and researchers? The diversity resident toolkit as part of the residency interest group and the 2021 presentation openness in our institutions, countering cultural isolation in library and information services. And finally, our moderators, Jennifer rogala, who is the director of publications and Executive Editor at the American neurological Association.
She is a she oversees the scholarly publications program, which includes two peer reviewed journals the organization's newsletter membership, digital ecosystem, annual meeting related publications and a CME product. Currently, Jennifer is managing the launch of open plus a new gold open access journal that will begin publication in 2023. Jennifer is also overseeing the implementation of open peer review for the Journal of urology, the aoa's flagship journal.
Jennifer is the co-chair of SSPS marketing and Communications Committee and the SSP regional subcommittee. She has worked in scholarly publication for more than 20 years at Cadmus Sheridan, the American Society of Plant Biologists. Jennifer's personal motto is it's free to be nice and comb your hair and wish you were here. I'm Alexa Colella, product manager for professional services at Research Square company.
Professionally, I'm interested in helping researchers improve their work. And enable success throughout the research communication timeline, particularly in how researchers reach lay audiences. Personally, am committed to helping advance the humanities as a critical part of a broader discourse. I'm interested in how scholarly communication initiatives can raise and support all disciplines in tandem.
Now that I've introduced everybody, we're going to start with the most basic argument that we have. We discussed as a group and in our meetings we realized that the thing that we all share in the most fundamental way is that research should be communicated in some way. But how? And beyond that, things get a little messy.
So for the next 80 or so minutes, although I just talked for forever, we are going to be discussing these core values and we want to know what you think. Each of our panelists is going to introduce a core value and discuss it from their perspective. And then we are going to discuss as a group in roundtable format, the core values we identified for discussion.
And we can't do them all because there's a lot of things that we value our accessibility, transparency, labor, maximizing usage and equity. So let's begin with a poll. Um, OK, so if you could please respond to. I'm going to give this to you for a second. Where's the mouse?
There it is. Oh, you guys already did it. OK, well, don't need me. If that's awesome. So if you could just take a minute to use a word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of the core value that we have on the screen. We're going to start with accessibility. So thank you for already doing this and we're going to save these words.
Word clouds, because we're probably going to see if we can publish on Scholarly Kitchen and get some mileage out of this. So we'll move on to the next one. Let's see. Those will save. I think. Ask me later.
OK, so what comes to mind when you hear transparency? And feel free to talk amongst yourselves. We'll leave this up for about three minutes and, you know, chat about it because that makes things more fun. I think. Did you activate the question? I didn't.
Thank you, Gabe. There we go. I would think they would have helpers. Mr Rogers always said, look for the helpers, right for the helpers. And Neil up here looking for the helpers. Yeah this is.
Don't we'll just wait for that to get a little bit. Accessibility the accessibility, please.
It's full. Oh, did you did you add 3 words? It looks like our poll is full. So I hope that I don't have a limit on this. We'll find out. OK so I'm going to it takes a small village, a little, little tiny, little tiny village.
OK, I'm going to go ahead and deactivate this one and move on to the next one. OK what comes to mind when you hear the word labor? Yeah got this. OK I mean, not wrong.
Yes pool. OK it might be. I don't.
I don't think. The I at the top next. Yeah how people can respond. I don't love this. Well, we will adapt.
Thank you, SSP and just shout. Just shout the things. Just yell at me. OK. I'm going to close this one. And we only have two more. So what comes to mind when you hear maximizing usage?
I think it might just be allowing a limited amount for each question. What used up all the responses. Thanks, Ben. That's fine. This one's looking. This one's looking better.
So anybody's guess. OK, well, we're going to do this last one. No, that's not it.
What comes to mind when you hear equity?
Well, while those responses are coming in, I finally get to pass the mic to somebody else and you get to hear from other people. We're going to start with Ben. He's going to be talking about accessibility and then we're going to Michelle and Willa are going to contribute their thoughts after that. And then we'll take some turns. All right.
Thank you very much. Um, so, yeah, I was asked to talk a little bit about accessibility, and I feel as though I've been set up nicely by some of the conversations we've already had at this meeting, people talking about some of the aspects of accessibility that we had on the list. And and you definitely hear it come up and I think hear it used in different ways.
And in my breakdown, I thought of three really three levels of accessibility. The first is the basil ability to interact with some sort of content or something. And so this can be obviously technological things, right? I mean, just being like, are you able to click a link? Are you able to see something? This is about accommodations to, you know, readers who may have disabilities, but that's sort of just basic ability.
Can you see it? Can you or perceive it? Can you interpret it? Actually, that's the next piece is maybe you can find a piece of content, maybe you can download a PDF of a paper, but can you understand it? Can you appreciate the nature of the new information that's in it?
And so I think that's what we spoke more about this morning, sort of the accessibility of science in terms of it being understandable and appreciated, not necessarily the technical pieces of being able to actually get to it. And the third is can you pay for the content? So the accessibility in terms of being able to afford something, and I think that will hold a little of that discussion for some of our talking about maximizing usage and some of the other kind of areas.
But so that that basil ability to interact with content. I feel as though this is a super easy concept for everyone I speak to agree on. In principle, but really hard to define. And that's why there are competing guidelines for web usage and web design to be inclusive. And there are different levels of that. And people sort strive for different areas based on who they believe their audience is and all these other kinds of questions.
And so it's a very unifying principle. But when you get down to it, you know, we're talking about very, very nitty gritty things that can take a long time to go back and change. So if you're looking at the design just of how a web page loads, how the information is presented there. Right there's several different standards. You want to make sure that the HTML code underlying what we see on a typical browser is tagged appropriately.
If someone's using a screen reader, if someone needs to use only keyboard navigation to get through the page, there's a lot of those sort of back end features that are completely invisible and therefore can be really hard sometimes to even to, to advocate for and to resource for because there's not an obvious change to what you're seeing and how it's presented. Um, things like color contrast, you know, there are groups may, you may have had a logo designed for 100 years, but if you present it in a way that it would be unreadable to someone who has color blindness and is something that just wasn't sort of talked about, I didn't think about for, for a very long time and providing things like Alt text to images.
So someone who may be interacting with that content only through spoken word can still have an appreciation for what graphics and images are put there. So this takes time and effort. It takes intention. I think that's probably the biggest thing. It's a thing that you have to say we want to do. It takes constant and this is something that I've been working through on the archive platform.
We have really wonderful partners at Cambridge that that host the platform and they have been doing accessibility audits and we keep uncovering new things and we struggle with something like a box where someone's going to put in multiple affiliations like they work, they have two affiliations. And how do you how do you set that up so that if they're not using a mouse to click the Add New affiliation button and they can still then type and search in the field, and it's just it isn't a simple solution.
And so I think it lives in conflict with the constant desire to streamline and reduce costs. We want to make it easier to put the piece of content online and not necessarily to have to think so heavily about the Alt text or something like that. And so there's a little bit of struggle between the emotional desire, which I think is shared and the practical effects and the resources and the costs. So yeah, that's, that's something that I think is the oftentimes what people might think of when we think of accessibility.
But the flip side of that is, is the second piece. Can people understand what they've been able to access? And so I think that again, that if you, if you speak to the sort of stakeholders and the people on the panel and others, there's a general desire to say, well, yeah, we want more people to appreciate research, you know, and whether it be in the humanities, whether it be in the sciences, whether it be medical people, to understand the importance and understand the root finding, like what did you finally determine?
How does that change our world, our society? And I think that the again, the question is then, well, how do you do that? And and I think there's a lot of lack of incentive in this area. So there are some particular like National Science Foundation grants that will say, OK, well, how did you engage the community? There's a sort of box you fill in that, but it's much more sort of check the box in terms of any sort of official incentive around it.
And so you then you become you're put in a situation of identifying who's ultimately responsible for that is the person who did the research responsible for also conveying it in a separate format alongside the sort of traditional one, something that I can I'll speak only about myself, but I wasn't good at that. When I was in the lab. I could tell you the specific amino acids I had mutated.
But in terms of taking that step back and saying, well, why was I even in the lab doing that? It was a struggle. And so I think it's something that researchers aren't necessarily trained to do and they aren't rewarded for in any sort of specific way beyond the general desire to have their work be appreciated. So then are the platforms that publish the work, should they be responsible for this or should.
Journalists or other sort of communicators be responsible. And I think this is the place where we're at right now. There's a lot of infrastructure, new infrastructure to add a lay summary, to add some new material, to make a short video and post it alongside research. But it isn't yet sort of an ingrained part of the cycle. And I think that part of that is the lack of, you know, like a RACI chart for, for science communication to say like, well, what's my role, what's, what's your role among the various stakeholders?
I do want to note something that came up as Michelle and I were talking a little bit about preprints is that the sort of peer reviewed literature that everything I talked about, I think fully applies to that. I think there is still some skepticism around preprints and living much earlier and before that, that peer review process and the not that anything's ever final, not that everything's ever foolproof, but they are such an early draft that there's a danger in some cases for them being completely open and completely accessible to the public.
And I think it's not necessarily a reason to shut that down, but it's something just to be just to be aware of making sure people understand the nuance between we found this, but we're still know, we're still working through it versus we found this and we at least had some other people really critically, critically look at it. So I think that's. Just a Yeah there's a nuances to all this.
Yeah so the final one is about the ability to pay for content. And I won't, I won't spend too much time because like Alexa, I feel like I've talked too long, but I think it isn't just so much. The obvious one is literally a paywall for a piece of content, right? So that was what dilla talked about. Sometimes you don't have an affiliation with an institution that has subscription set up.
There's a cost to literally just looking at something, but I think there's a lot of hidden cost across the world. And I'm reminded of a trip I took to an institution in Columbia and was giving a workshop and talking with the researchers, and they had some of the students were comfortable writing in English and others really not. And and for the pi to, to allow a student to write in Spanish, you know, then they would have to translate it.
And you know, she noted that if she wanted to go to a service that could do it professionally and really write it in. Beautiful English at the end, you know, it would cost her almost her month's salary. Right and so there's just there's an imbalance sometimes. And I think the things that I took for granted that I had software, that I had computer access to, things I had internet, right.
I mean, things that you don't always have around the world. And so there's some of those costs, I think are also play into accessibility. Yeah, that's my spiel, so I'm going to pass it along. Yeah um, what I'm going to add to this are just my observations, so please feel free to jump in at any time and tell me if I'm wrong. So the, the key to understanding the needs of groups who are different from us is, is contact.
And that contact can happen in a number of ways. So one of the things that I've observed in libraries is that in our workforce it's very homogeneous. And because we don't have people, many people with a range of different abilities or disabilities, however you want to refer to it, we don't think about how what we are producing, um, whether it can be considered assumed by people who are not like me, who have full scite hearing, et cetera, I have no physical limitations.
So part of what the solution may be is to make an intentional effort in our hiring practices to make sure that we are not erecting barriers to people coming into our workforces who have different abilities. And I think we've started to do that with some of the language in our job description. Um, but I think there's a lot more work to be done, especially in terms of working arrangements that are flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of people.
So if we have more people in the workforce that have to deal with this on a daily basis, then we have people who can say, wait a minute, this isn't going to work for x, y and z reasons. So that's from the people perspective, from the systems perspective, um, what I found we're doing is we're dealing with accessibility as an afterthought. So we are creating our lesson plans, our pedagogies, our workshop material, our information that goes out to researchers, and then we're doing an accessibility check at the back end, or we're building our repositories that, um, you know, only accept certain types of format and only when some sort of legal change or policy change from our institution comes through, then we think about how can we make this compliant.
And a better approach would be to be inclusive from the very beginning. So as Ben said, intentional um, delivery, taking things in a variety of formats. So accessible text. Yes, but maybe also add audio to that. Um, there are different I've seen journals who have the view for dyslexia, for example. And when I've clicked on this and I'm like, why isn't this just the default?
Because I don't have dyslexia, but this is just so much easier to read. And that goes back to even things you said about logo design and colors. Um, so I think moving the conversation about accessibility to the beginning rather than the end of our processes would be a great advancement. Thanks, Willa. Um, I hope it's OK that I just have a bunch of disjointed thoughts about this that I'll share.
Um, I think touching on all of the three themes that Ben just introduced, um, OK. From a technical perspective, technical accessibility, I haven't looked behind me much to look at the transcription. But that's intentional so that you don't get into a giggle fit here and that I can't contain.
That's happened several sessions that I've been to already. I don't know if you all have noticed, but the transcription is less than perfect and this is OK because it's better than nothing. But I'm wondering like, how does this in what ways does this hurt? And this is a way that technology can kind of almost run afoul of equity at some point because this is creating a weird division for people who are hard of hearing or deaf.
And I never really noticed it. I actually am a little hard of hearing, so I probably should have. But when you can hear somebody and you can see the difference between what's being transcribed up there and what they're actually saying and the fact that it can completely distract you from the topic at hand, that's a concern. So that's just like one thought about technical accessibility that's been on my mind since I've been at this conference.
Conceptual accessibility is something that I spend a lot of my time thinking about and have for many years been will remember because he was with me at Research Square. I think at the time that we started up the video service which Alexa is now responsible for. It's kind of a crazy world, but when we started up this video service, the whole idea was to create a accessible, conceptually accessible, open access content that accompanies a open access or a paid article and combines visuals with text and music in some cases.
I think. Ben, you actually did the narration on maybe the first video that we ever created that's just had that memory and thinking about what it actually means to break something down to the point that, you know, anybody with a reasonable level of education can pretty much understand it or understand why it's important. So that's basically lay summaries, right? Like we're talking about the same thing here, lay summaries with visual accompaniment.
And it was wildly popular. I mean, even before we made it good, it was not good at first. It was just a PowerPoint presentation that advanced on its own with some guy from the company doing the narration. And and it was still better than just, you know, certainly better than reading an abstract. And people just loved it. They loved it.
Have some piece of content that they can now share with their mother, share with social media to a multidisciplinary crowd and have them have some appreciation for what they're doing. And it's entertaining to boot. So that was my kind of that was my first Foray into thinking about accessibility and conceptual accessibility. The other one has been with preprints, and this has been a really interesting territory for the last couple of years in particular has been kind of already alluded to.
Um, it's I didn't appreciate at first how important it was going to be to have, in many cases, a lay summary, an explanation of what a preprint, what a given preprint actually means. But it's extremely important and has been during the pandemic, especially because we've had a huge amount of traffic to preprints on our platform on all of the platforms of people just trying to get information about what's going on with this virus.
And they're going to read minimally the article itself and come away with whatever impression they come away with. And as you all know, articles in science are written. Almost impenetrably. And so I, you know, started kind of tracking what was going on with the Twitter discourse. Mostly Twitter, reddit, other places like that. What are people taking away from these articles?
And it was horrifying how people can take what they want from it, you know, and deliver that message to a large group of followers who will take it for granted that they've understood that they've properly understood the science in the article. And this you know, I'm just going to give an example. This is the example, I think I always give. So if you've ever listened to me, give a talk before, you've probably heard it.
Sorry, but it's the one where in the very beginning, March I think 2020, there was a great article about t-cell immunity that we have leftover. We have kind of a latent immunity from our exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold and how we can leverage this existing immunity for potential for vaccines, which were still a distant thought at that point and for treatments for this disease.
But what instead most people came away with for this particular preprint is that 80% of people have immunity to COVID 19. And there are people dying everywhere from this disease and people manage to convince themselves, yeah, it's just like it's just like we thought this is just a hoax. And it's, you know, 80% of us have immunity. Everybody needs to calm down. And this was most of the altmetric.
It had a huge altmetric score. Within days, most of that traffic was the Herd. The Herd immunity crowd spreading this narrative about this preprint that was categorically false, like fundamentally false and was like, what am I going to do about this? There's nothing wrong with this paper. It was written beautifully. It ended up getting published in Nature immunology, I think, and almost identical form to the preprint.
There was nothing actually wrong with it, but what it needed was an was an accompaniment to make sure that people are coming away with the conclusion that the author actually intended for them to come away with. So so we worked on I'm not an immunologist, but I had someone on my team, luckily, who was that was able to write a really nice, accessible lay summary that I posted as an editorial note on it.
And I can't say for sure that this stopped that activity in its tracks. It maybe it didn't, you know, stop it immediately. But what I do know is that people started screen capturing that editorial note and putting it in those Twitter threads so people would go crazy talking about 80% of overall immune. They're like, read the display summary that's here. That's not what they're trying to say.
And so, you know, at least I could see some tangible positive outcome from that. So that's the conceptual accessibility. Should I keep going? The last one is the Pay access thing, and I just have a very, like kind of tangential thing to say about this that is not a fully formed thought at all. And I'm really curious. I'm going to throw this out there and I'm curious to hear if there's anyone in the audience that has some thoughts on this.
But I recently. I'm not going to name names. I recently read a take about open access that basically, you know, it's not one person that thinks this, but one person said this, that, you know, really there is no it's much harder to get value out of something that is free. When something is free, you can generally assume it's crap.
And this is an argument that's used to say like, OK, you have a podcast or a, um, a substack or whatever that you follow that you, that has massive value in terms of like this is a person who's like amazing, you know, thoughts and, and opens my mind about everything. You're willing to pay some monthly or annual fee to get that content. Most of you probably have some kind of subscription like that just to get the thoughts inside somebody's head into your own head.
And I just I think that that's true for opinion content. But when it comes to science, we don't want heavily curated thoughts. We want every thought. Right because we don't know what's going to end up working in the end. We need all of it so that we can work it out. We don't need the most impactful thoughts, the most sexy thoughts, right?
There's something about that argument that just breaks down when you think about research and science to me, and I haven't fully like, I want to write about this. I want to say something about this that's more coherent than what I just said. But I'm curious to know if, like there is agreement here about that, that idea, that subscription content is inherently going to be more valuable than open content when it comes to, you know, opinions and whether you think it diverges when it comes to just empirical research.
All right. So I'm going to stop talking now. You actually. Oh, I get to keep talking. Oh, god, these poor people. So there's a question in the Q&A. You want to take it now? A while.
Sure OK. So this. You want to sneak into the analysis? Oh, Yeah. So this is a question from Susan Wilner. Um, can any of you address best practices for accessibility via the pdf? We all are tired of the PDF, but it's here to stay.
I'm particularly interested in things like adding navigation metadata into the PDF and how to make tables in PDFS accessible to visually impaired. I hope this question makes sense. We're struggling with converting our highly medical scientific charts to something that is accessible. I have zero experience in this area.
I'm going to start and say that just that I have thought the same thing that I feel like it's getting a little better in terms of being able to even, you know, the newer versions of the PDF allow you to like cut and paste the text. It identifies it as text. It used to be it was like a scanned copy of a book, right? But we're reliant on Adobe to, to do this the right way. So I don't have an answer for that.
I think that would be a great like working session or something. But if someone figures it out, the problem then is if you figure out the standard, will you get everyone to develop their content in a way that uses it, or then it is another layer of cost and time, which is I think worth it. But this gets to our point of like the labor, it's all intertwined.
We have to consider that there's, there's finite resources. There's like, you know, how do we get to these? How do we meet these goals that we truly need to be an equitable community, but also identify the challenges in getting there? I think that's a perfect example of one. Do you agree that PDFS are here to stay?
I kind of have a problem with that notion, although I do see authors gravitating toward the PDF. They like to download the PDF. We have the HTML here for you. What do you want with the pdf? They like to have it maybe on their hard drives. But beyond that I don't really understand the attachment to PDFS.
Does anybody else? Does anybody who likes pdfs? All right. It's like that. Oh, you. You Yeah. Talk about it. No, let.
Let's let someone else tell us. I am a moderator. Toby, I'm just going to run around. You're like, I'm on the Ellen Show talking about the OECD. We we made a huge effort to make all our works available in EPUB alongside the PDF. The data in terms of access was like 99 to 1.
PDF to EPUB. The only EPUB files that people liked were the summaries multilingual summaries because we made these multilingual summaries and they were basically the only things that people took away in EPUB and it just they just zero interest. And I think the reason why people like PDF is because it's standard for everybody. It's dead easy.
And the other huge advantage of PDF is you're looking at the same page as everybody else. So you can go. I'm going to go to page 2023 and hey, someone else is looking at page 23 and they're looking at the same page, which you can't do in HTML. And I think that's one of the key reasons why PDF is still so, so, so useful is that it's stable and fixed and you can discuss it around page numbers.
Thanks, Toby. So the next. Oh, we've got another question. There's another question. I'll just stay down here. So this is from Andrew Harmon. What is the discussion, if any, on accessibility for the neurodivergent?
The to. I'm hoping that there may be someone in the village that can contribute as well. Um, there is some discussion discussion happening around that and it is, like I said, things like different views, but also, Different layouts of the text on the page.
For some people. For some people with newer divergences, it can't be too crowded. There is the w3c. They have a great section on accessibility, including that on the web that I have found is an excellent resource. We are going to move on to our next value just in the service of time.
That is transparency. So Michelle is going to keep going. Can you hear me? Is this working? OK OK. I think this is an interesting one because as with all of these values, we can't take it for granted that there is widespread agreement about specific aspects of transparency.
But the goal here is to zero in on shared values. And to me that means understanding what it is that we collectively, really care about when we're thinking about this topic. So all right. So when I think about transparency as it relates to academic publishing, I consider it the basis of trust, at least in at least four different points along the continuum of research.
So that's from the formulation of the hypothesis to the long term stability of its conclusions. Hi level these points are the planning and the conduct of the study, the drafting of the manuscript, the publication of the manuscript, and then whatever activities might happen in Association with that work going forward. So when it comes to the conduct, this is not going to be news to anybody.
Like this is I'm kind of this is review. But when it comes to conduct of the study, it's the transparency around the methodology. The planned experiments was the protocol preregistered and then transparency around what was actually done. Was there a careful and accurate recording, insufficient detail to allow for reproducibility on the drafting? Are the results reported selectively or exhaustively?
Are the methods consistent with the pre-registered protocol? If there is one? How do they compare to the expected results? In which ways do they deviate? And is the raw data freely available? On the publication of the paper. It's around mostly around what the review process was like. Were the reviewers qualified? Who were they?
What did they actually say about the work? How did it change from its original state? Once once it was published, essentially, what were the circumstances under which this study's, you know, effective endorsement by the journal? And then the part that I think is often overlooked is transparency beyond the point of publication. What do we know about what happens downstream?
I think there's a general understanding now that science is a process and that publication in a journal is not a fixed end point. So if there are corrections or significant problems that are found down the line, we want to be made aware of those. We want to understand how the research holds up over time. So we need transparency around that. I think you'd be hard pressed to find disagreement on the importance of transparency in those areas.
And yet where we run into problems is in thinking about the practical implications of maximum transparency. So, for example, some people don't think preregistration is practical or sufficient to address issues with reproducibility, or they argue that mandating something like preregistration could actually lead to new problems, like it just becomes too restrictive.
It stifles creativity. It places disproportionate pressure on tenured faculty. These are all arguments that I've read against preregistration when you would have thought that this is just an unalloyed good. But these are reasonable points to bring up. Posting a preprint. OK, that's my pet topic. It's generally considered an act of transparency because you're sharing an early version of your manuscript that is likely to undergo some revisions and probably don't need to tell this group about the concerns around preprints.
But suffice it to say, there is plenty of debate as to whether this is actually an appropriate practice, and I think some of the arguments against are fair and valid and we need to consider them. And then here's another one. Transparent peer review. Completely transparent peer review. At a glance that seems like a paragon of peer review ethics and is also not an indisputable good.
So, for example, as an early career researcher, how do you guard against retribution for a critical review? As with so many things, it seems more and more likely that the right answers here are somewhere in between the extremes and that we need compromise. Even in the areas where we broadly agree on the basic value. Anyone want to talk about.
So the thing I want to talk about in relation to transparency is that libraries, vendors and publishers need to have deeper discussions about transparency, um, about data collection on the platforms that we use. Um, and to make these clear to our patrons. So there is, there are measures in place when users are authenticating onto vendor platforms to ensure that only the necessary data is passed.
However, on many platforms to access greater functionality, you also have to create an account in addition to the access that your library provides. Um, there's not a lot of transparency. I think libraries are now beginning to understand that there's a concern about what data is collected when researchers use that. And how we've approached it so far is to explain when we get a question or when we do a workshop that when you do this, your data is no longer under the control of the library's technical systems.
But I don't think we fully understand how that data is then used by vendors and publishers. So we are not we're only now starting to have those conversations and some of the conversations are alarmist, but it would be more productive to sit down and talk about what the standards should be and how users should be warned. But to be fair, some of the concerns raised have been very, very serious concerns about how data is shared with different corporate branches of publishers or vendors, and then onsold to third parties, government entities and the like.
So I think that there needs to be agreement on what standards are applied and how that's communicated to the patrons, preferably at the point of use at the point at which you're creating the account the same way we see the cookie notices pop up, for example. And at the point of, for example, when you're downloading a PDF to know that there is a tracker embedded in this PDF that can show.
Um, that can transmit information back to the vendor or the publisher on how you use and share that particular PDF. The other area of transparency that. Needs that needs more attention is the issue of interoperability. Um, Uh, on a lot of the majority of vendor or publisher platforms, which, you know, they, they provide so many useful services end to end, you know, vertical in the academic enterprise.
The issue is, however, when you're changing from one system to another, often it's very difficult to get the data out and into another system. So there needs to be more discussion on the front end of. Is this what are the best ways to transfer data within systems? So that's another area that we need more transparency about transformation, transfer of information between systems or from one system to another.
That needs to be clear and explicit. Um, I'm just going to summarize to say that I think this will be a theme. I feel like the conflict between incentives and what people want in their hearts is on display here as well. You know, in the lab, the concept of document everything like, you know, the old the lab notebook, you write everything down.
That was always the standard. But when it came down to it, did everybody take did I take the time to literally do what I would really think? The spirit of that rule is not always because you could still you could still muddle through the process. Right and not necessarily take the time to be transparent about the steps you took at every stage. And so until the incentives change.
Practically as much as you want something. Sometimes it just you don't you aren't given the time and the resource and the money to do it. Dom Yeah. OK so like we had mentioned before, Dom is not here, but I. I have some notes that I'd like to say on her behalf and about her. So this space was for Dominique Moore, who we already said is an acquiring editor at the University of Illinois press.
She was unable to make it today she's safe and healthy. Wanted to mention that. So nobody worries. She's fine. Um, I struggled last night about how to make sure she was represented. Her perspective is one that I think is underrepresented here, and I can't not do it justice. But at 3 a.m., after accidentally fully drinking a fully caffeinated coffee after dinner, I tried to write down what I know about her because she's incredible and maybe some of Dom would come through.
I was lucky to work with her during my time at the University of Illinois press and invited her to do this panel because as an acquiring editor, she serves disciplines in many ways that in ways that many in STEM publishing do not understand. As an acquiring editor, Dom is the first line of curatorial and editorial discretion similar to peer review for academic monographs. She reviews manuscripts and proposals on their merit and works collaboratively with the acquisitions department to validate and move forward proposals with promise.
Her expertise is incredibly valuable to book publishing in the humanities and the humanities is only recently represented or represented set of disciplines here at SSP. Having long been an organization that represented STEM journals and interests, having strong perspective was something that was important to me as the moderator of this panel. If you have spent 30s with me, this. A lot of you are probably laughing and rolling your eyes right now because this like oozes out of my skin.
And I most frequently see Labor of humanists, particularly humanist publishers, marginalized when we discuss the role of publishers in our ecosystem. To be clear, the role of acquiring editors, editorial assistants and editorial boards and humanities publishing, particularly monographs, is critical to the sustainability and quality of books coming out of the humanities. And I think knowing Dom, she would have remarked on pay inequity and she did in her bioRxiv.
So that was redundant. Um, having recently been an editorial assistant, she would have worked 50 hour weeks doing much of the labor that allows acquiring editors to do the intellectual labor required to assess manuscripts. They work on permissions and other tasks that must be done to publish a book. It is hard work by virtue of the fact that University presses are not well funded and do not often operate in the Black.
It is also extremely underpaid. I have heard her argue for better wages for the people that assist her pulling people up as she rises. I have heard her only recently an editorial assistant herself bravely addressed the presses professional organization to advocate for pay, equity and living wages. I wish she was here to deliver her this deliver this herself, because all I can speak is what I have seen and am positive that she could better describe her.
Why she also doesn't mince words. So we're going to get some of hers at the end here and it's going to be really fun. Um, fortunately, as I was wrapping up this little love note to Dom, she texted me at 458 some bullet points and am happy to say that I got a few things right, but I wanted to share her thoughts in her own words. She wanted to say in this industry, the people who make this work happen are often undervalued and the most underutilized resource in particularly, we need to create collaborative spaces for those who are least visible in the process.
This includes our peers and less public facing departments and administrative roles. They are the least likely to be at the table where decisions are made, but most likely to be in critical, to be critical in implementing those initiatives and are often poorly compensated. What would it mean to imagine a brainstorming process that centered those who engage in the most essential labor of our organizations?
We must also build processes that preserve institutional knowledge, not just what or the how, but the why, not having legible and easily accessible roadmaps regarding our processes, I believe greatly Hinders our ability to maintain accessibility, transparency and usage. I hope our conversations can create redress by pushing back against the impulse to make this labor invisible through our silence about it, or worse, our nod I. Typos this is why I can't get through this.
Or worse, nod our heads at the fact that we know we must do more, while usually in very conveniently, very rarely doing very much at all, which thus tacitly justifies how poorly compensated that labor is. So that's from Dom. And it was brilliant. Wants to go first.
Following on from what Dom said, there's also a perception that the people who do this kind of work, academic work, whether in libraries, in publishing houses, et cetera. Do it for the love or it's a calling, or that they're serving a higher noble purpose and that that is part of the compensation. However, you really can't take that to the grocery store is what I said to the group.
This morning. The fact is it's a means of justifying lower wages. And a lot of the times institutions operate on what is the lowest figure that I can get this person in for, rather than asking, um, do our workers remuneration provide a standard of living that affords them dignity? And that should really be the question with labor. There's also the issue of diversity and inclusion.
But if you have an environment that's already fundamentally inequitable. You're going to get a lot of pushback. When you want to do. Redress, the lack of diversity or the lack of inclusion in your system. And that's something I've seen firsthand. We do have to ask those questions about diversity in the labor force and inclusion.
We have to ask about what barriers discourage or prevent the participation, the participation of persons from particular backgrounds or cultures. Um, our work environments, balanced and flexible. Are they safe. And inclusive? Do people feel free to speak up if there's an issue? Do they have a sense of dignity and belonging? Can people be confident that any disputes or problems will be handled in a procedurally and essentially just manner?
We also have to talk about opportunity hoarding. Um, a lot of the times when we talk about not expanding opportunities for indigenous people, Black people, people of color, women. We hear they're not that many in this or that field. And many times the reason we see that is that when you're looking at a certain circle, people have been historically excluded from those circles.
We have to be willing to say, here's somebody who might not have what I have in my head as the best qualifications or the best fit. What training can I provide to that person? Um, what opportunities can I give that person to allow them to advance so that we strengthen the pipeline? Otherwise we just keep replicating a system where opportunities are given to the same set of people because they fit our concept of the best candidate.
Even though the research has shown over and over again that the strongest teams who present the best work, who come up with the who produce the best work, are diverse and inclusive teams. So the next point that we want to discuss is maximizing usage and have to say to the audience that when we were listing the points originally, what we had here was open access and we had a lot of discussions about is the shared value, open access?
Is that what the shared value is? Because there's a lot of different viewpoints about that. So having provoked that discussion, what we came up with a value, what we came up with as a value that's unequivocally shared by researchers, librarians, publishers, vendors and so on, is that you want to maximize usage of the content. Researchers definitely want to show that their work is being used and shared because that indicates it's valuable.
It has made a contribution to the field. Libraries want to make sure that the collections that they spend millions on are being used. Um, journals want to show that what they're publishing is valuable and they show that because it's being used and cited. And of course readers want access to information so that they can use it in a variety of ways. So how each sector goes about pursuing that goal of maximizing usage is going to be different, and even the same person will have different strategies depending on their needs at different points in time.
So so vendors and publishers and open source developers and libraries help maximize usage by investment in and curation of content on electronic databases, on the indexing, on the search engines, bibliometric platforms and researcher information management systems. Of course, open access can play a role in maximizing usage. Um, even just from the authors rights perspective of allowing the author to use their work in ways that would be prohibited by traditional copyright transfer.
And that's actually one of the core features of open access that tends to get overlooked in the discussion, um, or get conflated with free to read, which is understandable. But one, one of the core features is that open licensing, which gives the author more control over how their work is used so they can reuse it and they can share it in ways that traditionally they would have had to get the permission of the publisher for.
these days with self-archiving or green open access. A lot of those permissions are set out in the publisher self-archiving policy. But these permissions only go to prior versions, not the version of record. But that green open access is also a way. Preprints, of course, are vastly popular of maximizing usage.
Um, so open access certainly had great promise conceptually, especially as an entry point for those operating outside of closed networks of knowledge production in the global North or even those in less well funded institutions in, in what we think of as the global North in terms of being able to access more scholarly work, if that work is open access, and especially so for researchers seeking access outside of the global North.
So we're thinking about Latin America, Africa, Asia, and they looked at open access as a means for inclusion in access. But there's also the issue of inclusion in knowledge production. And there's scholars are really pointing out now that the model, the models that have dominated open access gold, open access, where the author pays a fee or transformative agreements, where your institution covers the cost of open access publishing, um, that it really has turned out to exclude those same people in the global South from the Centers of knowledge production because they, they and their institutions are not able to have their work published.
Open access under the types of models that have now prevailed. And so in a lot of those societies, they've taken a different approach to open access. I'd recommend the work of scholars like Reggie rajoo, um, Dennis albornoz, Leslie Chan. Um, they're pointing out that researchers outside of these elite knowledge production centers, they are just as marginalized in open access publishing.
They are not getting their work into, Into the open. The primarily are the dominant open access venues because of the barriers. so the process of open divorced from sort of the values of open why we wanted open in the first place can divide and exclude rather than building community around researchers globally.
So we need to explore a lot of different models because just in the same way that, um, big deals ate up library budgets, transformative agreements, also eating up library budgets in much of the same way. And excluding folks who can't afford those type of agreements. So what I would say is that I support the movement toward a values based publication ecosystem where our academic libraries support vendors and publishers.
Um, where there's an alignment of values. And this is likely to increase connections between the different parts of the scholarly ecosystem. And we won't always get it right, but if we're willing to try and support different models. Um, and, and publishing that is mission based, we can work towards, Uh, a system where we get maximum usage both at the point of knowledge production and knowledge consumption.
And, and Rachel Caldwell of the University of Tennessee has proposed an interesting approach to this towards a value system and is actually putting together an advisory council to do further work on this. So I would, if you haven't seen her work, I'd recommend taking a look at it. Um, at IU Bloomington, we recently expanded our agreement with plos because they were offering this global equity model.
Um, so there are a package of journals under the global equity model which ensures that institutional pricing reflects the regional economy of where the institution or the researcher is, as well as offering an additional equity equity seat where we pay extra money into the system to help us further reduce costs for authors in low and low to middle income countries.
And if it wasn't for that program, we probably would not have expanded our publishing agreements with plus. So I think, um, talking more about the shared values. And what we want to see from publishers and, and vendors is definitely the way to go. so we only have 13 minutes left.
And are there questions coming in? Neil? yes. Um, there is one question from Gabe, but he's sitting right next to me, so maybe he should just ask it. Thank you all so much. I don't know if I should read my question or try to remember it.
This has been great. Can you maybe share what you think organizations sometimes get wrong in establishing core values? Not right this second. Go wild. Well, I think I would say mindset. Right so we from the start very helpfully had this. What was the word?
Lodestar that's too fancy. We had this guiding. Yeah guiding. Guiding point of like, it takes a village. Right? and I think that. Let's be honest, we all have. We all have jobs. We all work at organizations that have specific needs. They need to.
They need to grow. They need to be sustainable. But the core values that you identify internally are going to miss out on a lot of the conversation that we just had. Right and so I think even if you have to understand, there will need to be things to keep a business running. But maybe there's a second stage where you can say, well, what are those other everyone else that's involved, everyone else that participates?
You know, none of us have a job that is solely ours, right? Like everything, it relies on someone to give us content, someone to read the content. Right? so take a step back and think about everyone there and then say maybe how do we align our core values? That might be what I'm thinking. there's this.
Approach of, you know, mission, vision, values. And I think I don't think I've worked in enough institutions to say, here's where you go wrong. But I think that if you start at the point of considering your mission, what you're there to do, your vision, where do you want to be at x point from now, that really helps you calibrate your values.
And I think also, um, being honest. A lot of the times its do find that in discussions or conversations, there is work to be done on really acknowledging, listen, we've been doing this badly. Um, is looking at in the face and saying. The way we've been doing it is not working.
We need to rethink and also not being able to marry the ideal with the practical. So I think it's really I think that part is really important because, A lot of the times the. As I was quoting from the process, it goes wrong in the process. So we have to think about how we are going to implement things while we are thinking about what that vision is.
Otherwise, it won't. It has the potential to go really off, off course or off kilter. So being willing to. Being willing to know that even if we try something, it might not always work out. But having that sort of roadmap, OK, we have this vision of what is ideal, but how will we practically do it is really important.
And I think that when you then if you have all those things in mind, um, it will become easier to, to set out your values. I'm going to riff off of you a little bit because the honesty piece, what I think of immediately is just avoiding platitudes, because I think that has to be I'm not speaking for my organization at all because our core values are perfect and we live we live them every day.
Right but avoiding platitudes, making sure you're actually being honest about what you're capable of as an organization. And that also means being adaptable and able to pivot on them and think, you know, this is something we should think about, too, in our organization like it was. It's not the same place that it was 10 years ago.
And maybe our core values need to change with that. It's not you know, companies grow and what it was when it was 50, a little baby, 50 people and didn't have a preprint platform or whatever, might be something different from what it is now. So I think adaptability and willingness to reconsider them is important to. Actually I'm sorry. Gabe was a little rude.
I actually think one of the things organizations get wrong is that when they adopt a core value, they think of it as like an abusable or uncritically. That once you adopt it, that's what you are. And in order to call yourself something, you have to align your behavior with what you call yourself, which may be integrity. Um, and so I think, I think one of the things when organizations do this wrong is that they say we are innovative, we say we are this thing and their behavior doesn't reflect it.
And I think that that is a really big pitfall. So when we identify core values in our organizations, when we want to live by them, I think it's something that we need to center before we make tactical decisions. When we make the tactical decision, we have to say, does this serve this core value? And if it doesn't, then that is an uncritical, positive, hopeful thing that we've put out into the world.
That is not actually true. It is not a core value. Um, I want to say one really quick thing about equity, because that was something we missed. It's going to 30s. We want to talk about equity today. And the reason is because it's at the end is because I hope what you saw from our brilliant panelists is that it kind of nutshells everything that we talked about.
It's almost like a filter core value. It has to go along with everything that we talked about. It's a concept that's infused in the core values we identified. Accessibility enables equity, transparency helps build it. Labor goes hand in hand with it. And maximizing usage means that we are trying to measure it. I'm going to be brief because you don't need to hear any more from me in this session is kind of heavy.
So now that I've said that thing, the thing where we recognize that the common thread in all of what we do points back to equity, and I'm going to let our panelists talk about what that means in their work unless we don't have time, because I don't think we do. Yeah. Do we have any questions from this audience?
Um, yeah, I tried to put it in whova, but it was too long. So now I have to speak publicly. It's so fun, isn't it? Right Megan McDevitt I'm a managing editor with origin editorial, so I'd like to just go back to the points about looking outside the typical circle. Even if the candidate has less experience.
You see this a lot with the editorial boards where it's like, oh, well, I want to residency with him, so that's fine. Or even worse, which I've seen is I want to residency with his father. So that's, you know, he's fine. So just and I fully support like there has to be training, mentorship, support. Otherwise you're setting up that person you bring in to fail and that's terrible as well.
So I guess just my question is like, how can journals make sure or other organizations and startups make sure that those potential new editor candidates or other candidates are receiving the proper support? And who's that? Who's responsible for that? Is that the journal level, the publisher level, the institution? You know, how what's the infrastructure like of that?
Yeah no, I think that in terms of who eventually does it, that's always going to be dependent a little on how much. How much is the publisher typically handle operations at a journal. What's the relationship between the editors and others? But but I think it I feel like a broken record proverbially goes back to incentives. And this is something that I can't I cannot speak to specifics at our organization.
But but we have recently thought long and hard about how do you measure the behavior you want to see in a journal? Do you the diversity of the people involved in that journal and changing and saying, look, when an editor in chief comes in. We expect this and this is how we're going to measure it. And this is how we know when people are going to review how the health of the journal.
It's not simply going to be a number, you know, the impact factor that it's going to involve this as well. And when you can take a step like that and say, here's what we're asking of you, here are a lot of resources. So it is important, of course, if you come and you tell someone, I expect you to change the world, see you in a few years.
You know, that's tough. I'm not going to work. But come with, come to them and today we're here to help, but we expect this and we're going to measure you on it. And I think that probably is what the biggest step would be. Yeah so so the setting expectations piece is really good, but also I think industry associations have a role to play in providing some of these resources. Depending on the size of who's publishing the journal.
You may not have all the resources in house, that you can tap into industry organizations like SSP and other disciplinary organizations to help get somebody mentored. Oh, gosh. Thank you. So my name is Ryan Ryan with the strategic management society.
We publish three business and academic journals. So one thing I've been thinking about your question you asked earlier about like the intersection of value and open access. And I've been thinking about accessibility and all that. One phenomena we're observing with our journals is that people are reading more of the open access journals. The article downloads are up. Everything seems to be great on that front, but the revenue for our journals is flat or slightly decreasing, which is OK for now.
But if I'm having this conversation three, five, 10 years down the road, the journal won't be sustainable and everything will fail. So I guess I'm just curious what your thoughts are in terms of the business of open access and accessibility because. Right, like if everything folds, then the research that our academics are putting out is not sustainable and it will cease to be accessible.
So just curious what your thoughts were on that. So the sustainability piece is a big piece. Well, um, can I ask if the open access journals, if they're charging an APC to publish or if it's, if APC is APC based? Well, one, one thing is calibrating your APC. Of course. The other thing is looking at, um, other lines of support.
So there's, there are some other models that we've seen out there, whether it's institution supported, donor supported. Um, we've seen Subscribe to open. So I think that the, the issue of sustainability is one that can be solved in a number of ways. But I'm really glad that you raised that point because people often think that open access is free, but there's costs involved served to, um, to publishing.
Like you're not just putting, um, an electronic file on the internet. Um, so there has to be, there has to be a way of covering those costs. No, I was just going to say, I think I'll personally open access is great and I think it's great that more research is getting out there in all the fields.
But professionally, it's kind of challenging because there has to be a revenue model to sustain it. All right. Because it won't serve anybody. It won't serve anybody if eventually the journal goes under because then there's no access. There's no usage. Think a little of this stems from also having to transition from something that exists to something that, you know.
So you're thinking not you. Many of us, all of us think very like, I need to recreate what I'm doing now, but the author needs to pay for it. And I think sometimes that as a group, there's and there's some of this that's, I think, popping up. These new models, new ideas that can help mitigate it. But that can definitely be a challenge. Just just it puts you in a real tough place.
So time for one more. I am happy to stay here as long as people are asking questions that seems like an easy decision. I see. I see no objections. Let's do it. OK this isn't a question. This is a challenge. You and you suggested that the journal dies.
Then the authors have no channel to publish. They do. It's called the internet. They can put their stuff on a website. I'm currently building a platform that harvests, would you believe, 100,000 reports a month? That have been put on the internet. Informally, it's research. It just isn't in a journal.
There's an awful lot of research that does not appear in journals today. If journals die, it doesn't mean to say that this research can't still find an audience. It can. It's just that the Avenue to get there will be different. That's all. OK so journals don't have to exist. And that's something that I think a lot of journal publishers and a lot of journal owners are going to have to wrestle with because I think as I see the future, I don't see journals, a lot of journals surviving because the money isn't there to keep them going because they're too expensive.
That's the fundamental problem. So there are. Someone has to maintain that platform as well. But you're right, that is another possibility. That is another model. There is a colleague of mine runs a platform called C3 in Sweden, and one of the things that they're exploring with one of the Swedish universities is for the University to have its faculty publish their research directly on a platform, on a platform that's, say, will provide, it will be branded with the University branding.
And so the, um, I guess the prestige factor will come from that rather from being enclosed in the container that is a journal. So that is, that may be another route. So we agree with you. I think, though, it illustrates that, you know, we can be serving the same core value and have drastically different results based on how we apply it, which I think makes this panel very interesting and the work that we do.
Um, so since there are no more questions, I do want people to fill out the exit poll because I'm curious to know if you have any takeaways and what you're going to do to apply a core values in your work and center them. I think that's all from us. I can speak for all the panelists when I say we want to Thank you for coming, for being part of this community and for contributing to our panel.
We hope that you are inspired by our panelists and the responses from your colleagues. And we can't see can't wait to see what you do with what you took from today. So thank you so much.
Segment:0 .
Passivity and integrity. And we're trying to model all of these for you and ask the same of you. We do have the SSP code of conduct that's been mentioned a few times. The society for Scholarly Publishing is committed to diversity, equity, providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We would really love participation today. So I think it's important to note that final note that I think there's a couple of different technologies out there at the moment. If you're watching online, we'd love for you to ask your questions in the whova app. We've got a colleague right here who's going to be monitoring that and we'll make sure those questions get asked and/or your viewpoints as well.
Over to you. Awesome hi, everybody. This is really cool. So I'm Alexa and I'm going to be moderating today. We unfortunately lost two of our panelists or my fellow moderator, Jennifer rogala and Dominique Moore, who is our panelists from the University of Illinois press. So I'm going to be speaking on behalf of both of them today also.
You're going to hear a lot from me. It's very, very happy about that. So we are so excited to be back in person at SSP for the first time in two years. During that time, some central themes arose that were foundational to common understanding of the conversations that continued to develop as these themes arose. We felt that it was important to have a conversation about the central grounding concepts that are driving the agreement conflict and nuance in the ways we will move forward as a community.
I mentioned this before, but I have bad news. My co moderator, Jennifer rogala won't be able to make the conference, but I do want to recognize all the hard work and brilliance she contributed to this session. She's an incredible force in our community of positivity, constructivity and support. I have appreciated her friendship and mentorship very much and I know many of you can say the same.
Um, it's easy to get caught up in the new tools and tech and models, but it's because and it's because they are interesting and fun and they help us make progress. But we should remember our foundational values. Our core values are where we start and finish. So let's talk let's talk about them today. We hope that by focusing on the core values that we all Bookshare and finding common ground that allows us to center those values, we can come together as a community to build a build a better scholarly communication village.
We have pulled together a panel of awesome professionals who engage with these concepts and values in their work to discuss how they think, feel and execute on their own interpretation of them. Well, SSP recently determined their own organizational values, as Ben mentioned, community adaptability, inclusivity and integrity. They're a little bit different words than ours, but I think they point to some similar themes and we are going to discuss a little differently based on how we as a group feel our community is grounded.
One thing that I think we want to mention is that these panelists were chosen because together we represent the breadth of this ecosystem. The diversity in our roles, backgrounds, experiences and perspective is by design. To illustrate that, despite our differences and even disagreements, we are all connected by our mission to serve the core values we discussed today and illustrate that our core values not only represent the good things we believe, but that they are inherent anchor in our ecosystem.
We need each other to serve them. We also want to say that we hope everybody in the audience and in our community at large understands that they belong. That's the special thing about scholarly publishing. This group up here, most of us had not met before yesterday. I met Ben once, but we connected in various ways over the years, and the foundation of that connection was listening to one another. So please take away from this session that we all want, that we want all of you to experience this foundational feeling of community despite different backgrounds and experiences.
And I personally want to note, especially for attendees that have not submitted a proposal or spoken at SSP, I hope you do a core value that isn't part of this session, but I highly value is bravery. I'm always scared to speak in front of people. I don't know if you can tell and lay out my perspective, but it's worth it if the only people who ever spoke were the ones unafraid to do so are, discourse would be very boring.
And I want to thank these amazing panelists for being brave up here with me, because the dirty little secret is there aren't a lot of people for whom this comes easily. So we're going to start by introducing them. First is Michelle whiting, editor in chief of Research Square company. Michelle has served. I'm going to. Do this first.
Michelle has served as the editor in chief of the preprint platform Research Square since 2020. She is responsible for the editorial policy and the preprint content and is a critical stakeholder in the progressive development of the preprint platform. Michelle has been with Research Square company for nearly 10 years, serving in a number of diverse roles, from academic editor to operations director.
Before joining the company, she earned her PhD in medical science and performed research in cancer biology and toxicology. Next is Dominic Moore, who unfortunately cannot be here today. But she's amazing. She's an acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois press. She acquires an American ethnic studies Black Studies and women and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Illinois press.
Previously, she worked as an assistant editor at the University of North Carolina Press and was the 2019 Mellon diversity fellow at the Ohio State University press. Her academic background includes in English with a minor in gender and women's studies at uiuc and an Ma in African-American studies, with a literary focus from UCLA. Currently, Dominique serves on the press, equity, justice and Inclusion Committee and along with Becca bostock, the Ohio State up, she put together the press buddy system networking program, which had its inaugural year in 2021.
Her work also includes why we should all care about early career pay, equity and inclusion. An interview with Becca Bostock and Dominique j Moore and show me the money. Talking about in a way that makes more sense. I think that's awesome. Dr. Ben mudrak, senior product manager at archive American Chemical Society. Ben is a senior author, senior author, product manager at the American Chemical society, where he oversees services and resources for authors and reviewers.
He is responsible for combining user feedback and business needs into a roadmap for a suite of authoring services and author journal cover program and several online educational courses. Ben is also senior product manager for the open pre-print platform Cam archive, which is jointly operated by 5 chemistry societies from around the world. Before entering scholar scholarly publishing, he received a PhD in molecular genetics and microbiology from Duke University and carried out microbiology research for almost 10 years.
Now we have Willa Tavernier. Research and impact. Research impact and open scholarship librarian at Indiana University. Willa is the research and research impact and open scholarship librarian in the scholarly communication department at Indiana university, Bloomington. She provides publication data and data analysis to library administration, as well as colleagues, colleges, colleges and departments for institutional decision making.
Willa works with faculty and graduate students in managing their research profiles and tracking and demonstrating the impact of their scholarly work. Her research interests are equitable, scholarly communication, governance and sustainability. Wila is committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in her work and research. She develops scholarly communication bibliometric dashboards to support humanities scholarship, an area underserved by conventional bibliometrics.
Wila has recently worked on copyright clearance center's town hall. What's ahead for libraries and researchers? The diversity resident toolkit as part of the residency interest group and the 2021 presentation openness in our institutions, countering cultural isolation in library and information services. And finally, our moderators, Jennifer rogala, who is the director of publications and Executive Editor at the American neurological Association.
She is a she oversees the scholarly publications program, which includes two peer reviewed journals the organization's newsletter membership, digital ecosystem, annual meeting related publications and a CME product. Currently, Jennifer is managing the launch of open plus a new gold open access journal that will begin publication in 2023. Jennifer is also overseeing the implementation of open peer review for the Journal of urology, the aoa's flagship journal.
Jennifer is the co-chair of SSPS marketing and Communications Committee and the SSP regional subcommittee. She has worked in scholarly publication for more than 20 years at Cadmus Sheridan, the American Society of Plant Biologists. Jennifer's personal motto is it's free to be nice and comb your hair and wish you were here. I'm Alexa Colella, product manager for professional services at Research Square company.
Professionally, I'm interested in helping researchers improve their work. And enable success throughout the research communication timeline, particularly in how researchers reach lay audiences. Personally, am committed to helping advance the humanities as a critical part of a broader discourse. I'm interested in how scholarly communication initiatives can raise and support all disciplines in tandem.
Now that I've introduced everybody, we're going to start with the most basic argument that we have. We discussed as a group and in our meetings we realized that the thing that we all share in the most fundamental way is that research should be communicated in some way. But how? And beyond that, things get a little messy.
So for the next 80 or so minutes, although I just talked for forever, we are going to be discussing these core values and we want to know what you think. Each of our panelists is going to introduce a core value and discuss it from their perspective. And then we are going to discuss as a group in roundtable format, the core values we identified for discussion.
And we can't do them all because there's a lot of things that we value our accessibility, transparency, labor, maximizing usage and equity. So let's begin with a poll. Um, OK, so if you could please respond to. I'm going to give this to you for a second. Where's the mouse?
There it is. Oh, you guys already did it. OK, well, don't need me. If that's awesome. So if you could just take a minute to use a word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of the core value that we have on the screen. We're going to start with accessibility. So thank you for already doing this and we're going to save these words.
Word clouds, because we're probably going to see if we can publish on Scholarly Kitchen and get some mileage out of this. So we'll move on to the next one. Let's see. Those will save. I think. Ask me later.
OK, so what comes to mind when you hear transparency? And feel free to talk amongst yourselves. We'll leave this up for about three minutes and, you know, chat about it because that makes things more fun. I think. Did you activate the question? I didn't.
Thank you, Gabe. There we go. I would think they would have helpers. Mr Rogers always said, look for the helpers, right for the helpers. And Neil up here looking for the helpers. Yeah this is.
Don't we'll just wait for that to get a little bit. Accessibility the accessibility, please.
It's full. Oh, did you did you add 3 words? It looks like our poll is full. So I hope that I don't have a limit on this. We'll find out. OK so I'm going to it takes a small village, a little, little tiny, little tiny village.
OK, I'm going to go ahead and deactivate this one and move on to the next one. OK what comes to mind when you hear the word labor? Yeah got this. OK I mean, not wrong.
Yes pool. OK it might be. I don't.
I don't think. The I at the top next. Yeah how people can respond. I don't love this. Well, we will adapt.
Thank you, SSP and just shout. Just shout the things. Just yell at me. OK. I'm going to close this one. And we only have two more. So what comes to mind when you hear maximizing usage?
I think it might just be allowing a limited amount for each question. What used up all the responses. Thanks, Ben. That's fine. This one's looking. This one's looking better.
So anybody's guess. OK, well, we're going to do this last one. No, that's not it.
What comes to mind when you hear equity?
Well, while those responses are coming in, I finally get to pass the mic to somebody else and you get to hear from other people. We're going to start with Ben. He's going to be talking about accessibility and then we're going to Michelle and Willa are going to contribute their thoughts after that. And then we'll take some turns. All right.
Thank you very much. Um, so, yeah, I was asked to talk a little bit about accessibility, and I feel as though I've been set up nicely by some of the conversations we've already had at this meeting, people talking about some of the aspects of accessibility that we had on the list. And and you definitely hear it come up and I think hear it used in different ways.
And in my breakdown, I thought of three really three levels of accessibility. The first is the basil ability to interact with some sort of content or something. And so this can be obviously technological things, right? I mean, just being like, are you able to click a link? Are you able to see something? This is about accommodations to, you know, readers who may have disabilities, but that's sort of just basic ability.
Can you see it? Can you or perceive it? Can you interpret it? Actually, that's the next piece is maybe you can find a piece of content, maybe you can download a PDF of a paper, but can you understand it? Can you appreciate the nature of the new information that's in it?
And so I think that's what we spoke more about this morning, sort of the accessibility of science in terms of it being understandable and appreciated, not necessarily the technical pieces of being able to actually get to it. And the third is can you pay for the content? So the accessibility in terms of being able to afford something, and I think that will hold a little of that discussion for some of our talking about maximizing usage and some of the other kind of areas.
But so that that basil ability to interact with content. I feel as though this is a super easy concept for everyone I speak to agree on. In principle, but really hard to define. And that's why there are competing guidelines for web usage and web design to be inclusive. And there are different levels of that. And people sort strive for different areas based on who they believe their audience is and all these other kinds of questions.
And so it's a very unifying principle. But when you get down to it, you know, we're talking about very, very nitty gritty things that can take a long time to go back and change. So if you're looking at the design just of how a web page loads, how the information is presented there. Right there's several different standards. You want to make sure that the HTML code underlying what we see on a typical browser is tagged appropriately.
If someone's using a screen reader, if someone needs to use only keyboard navigation to get through the page, there's a lot of those sort of back end features that are completely invisible and therefore can be really hard sometimes to even to, to advocate for and to resource for because there's not an obvious change to what you're seeing and how it's presented. Um, things like color contrast, you know, there are groups may, you may have had a logo designed for 100 years, but if you present it in a way that it would be unreadable to someone who has color blindness and is something that just wasn't sort of talked about, I didn't think about for, for a very long time and providing things like Alt text to images.
So someone who may be interacting with that content only through spoken word can still have an appreciation for what graphics and images are put there. So this takes time and effort. It takes intention. I think that's probably the biggest thing. It's a thing that you have to say we want to do. It takes constant and this is something that I've been working through on the archive platform.
We have really wonderful partners at Cambridge that that host the platform and they have been doing accessibility audits and we keep uncovering new things and we struggle with something like a box where someone's going to put in multiple affiliations like they work, they have two affiliations. And how do you how do you set that up so that if they're not using a mouse to click the Add New affiliation button and they can still then type and search in the field, and it's just it isn't a simple solution.
And so I think it lives in conflict with the constant desire to streamline and reduce costs. We want to make it easier to put the piece of content online and not necessarily to have to think so heavily about the Alt text or something like that. And so there's a little bit of struggle between the emotional desire, which I think is shared and the practical effects and the resources and the costs. So yeah, that's, that's something that I think is the oftentimes what people might think of when we think of accessibility.
But the flip side of that is, is the second piece. Can people understand what they've been able to access? And so I think that again, that if you, if you speak to the sort of stakeholders and the people on the panel and others, there's a general desire to say, well, yeah, we want more people to appreciate research, you know, and whether it be in the humanities, whether it be in the sciences, whether it be medical people, to understand the importance and understand the root finding, like what did you finally determine?
How does that change our world, our society? And I think that the again, the question is then, well, how do you do that? And and I think there's a lot of lack of incentive in this area. So there are some particular like National Science Foundation grants that will say, OK, well, how did you engage the community? There's a sort of box you fill in that, but it's much more sort of check the box in terms of any sort of official incentive around it.
And so you then you become you're put in a situation of identifying who's ultimately responsible for that is the person who did the research responsible for also conveying it in a separate format alongside the sort of traditional one, something that I can I'll speak only about myself, but I wasn't good at that. When I was in the lab. I could tell you the specific amino acids I had mutated.
But in terms of taking that step back and saying, well, why was I even in the lab doing that? It was a struggle. And so I think it's something that researchers aren't necessarily trained to do and they aren't rewarded for in any sort of specific way beyond the general desire to have their work be appreciated. So then are the platforms that publish the work, should they be responsible for this or should.
Journalists or other sort of communicators be responsible. And I think this is the place where we're at right now. There's a lot of infrastructure, new infrastructure to add a lay summary, to add some new material, to make a short video and post it alongside research. But it isn't yet sort of an ingrained part of the cycle. And I think that part of that is the lack of, you know, like a RACI chart for, for science communication to say like, well, what's my role, what's, what's your role among the various stakeholders?
I do want to note something that came up as Michelle and I were talking a little bit about preprints is that the sort of peer reviewed literature that everything I talked about, I think fully applies to that. I think there is still some skepticism around preprints and living much earlier and before that, that peer review process and the not that anything's ever final, not that everything's ever foolproof, but they are such an early draft that there's a danger in some cases for them being completely open and completely accessible to the public.
And I think it's not necessarily a reason to shut that down, but it's something just to be just to be aware of making sure people understand the nuance between we found this, but we're still know, we're still working through it versus we found this and we at least had some other people really critically, critically look at it. So I think that's. Just a Yeah there's a nuances to all this.
Yeah so the final one is about the ability to pay for content. And I won't, I won't spend too much time because like Alexa, I feel like I've talked too long, but I think it isn't just so much. The obvious one is literally a paywall for a piece of content, right? So that was what dilla talked about. Sometimes you don't have an affiliation with an institution that has subscription set up.
There's a cost to literally just looking at something, but I think there's a lot of hidden cost across the world. And I'm reminded of a trip I took to an institution in Columbia and was giving a workshop and talking with the researchers, and they had some of the students were comfortable writing in English and others really not. And and for the pi to, to allow a student to write in Spanish, you know, then they would have to translate it.
And you know, she noted that if she wanted to go to a service that could do it professionally and really write it in. Beautiful English at the end, you know, it would cost her almost her month's salary. Right and so there's just there's an imbalance sometimes. And I think the things that I took for granted that I had software, that I had computer access to, things I had internet, right.
I mean, things that you don't always have around the world. And so there's some of those costs, I think are also play into accessibility. Yeah, that's my spiel, so I'm going to pass it along. Yeah um, what I'm going to add to this are just my observations, so please feel free to jump in at any time and tell me if I'm wrong. So the, the key to understanding the needs of groups who are different from us is, is contact.
And that contact can happen in a number of ways. So one of the things that I've observed in libraries is that in our workforce it's very homogeneous. And because we don't have people, many people with a range of different abilities or disabilities, however you want to refer to it, we don't think about how what we are producing, um, whether it can be considered assumed by people who are not like me, who have full scite hearing, et cetera, I have no physical limitations.
So part of what the solution may be is to make an intentional effort in our hiring practices to make sure that we are not erecting barriers to people coming into our workforces who have different abilities. And I think we've started to do that with some of the language in our job description. Um, but I think there's a lot more work to be done, especially in terms of working arrangements that are flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of people.
So if we have more people in the workforce that have to deal with this on a daily basis, then we have people who can say, wait a minute, this isn't going to work for x, y and z reasons. So that's from the people perspective, from the systems perspective, um, what I found we're doing is we're dealing with accessibility as an afterthought. So we are creating our lesson plans, our pedagogies, our workshop material, our information that goes out to researchers, and then we're doing an accessibility check at the back end, or we're building our repositories that, um, you know, only accept certain types of format and only when some sort of legal change or policy change from our institution comes through, then we think about how can we make this compliant.
And a better approach would be to be inclusive from the very beginning. So as Ben said, intentional um, delivery, taking things in a variety of formats. So accessible text. Yes, but maybe also add audio to that. Um, there are different I've seen journals who have the view for dyslexia, for example. And when I've clicked on this and I'm like, why isn't this just the default?
Because I don't have dyslexia, but this is just so much easier to read. And that goes back to even things you said about logo design and colors. Um, so I think moving the conversation about accessibility to the beginning rather than the end of our processes would be a great advancement. Thanks, Willa. Um, I hope it's OK that I just have a bunch of disjointed thoughts about this that I'll share.
Um, I think touching on all of the three themes that Ben just introduced, um, OK. From a technical perspective, technical accessibility, I haven't looked behind me much to look at the transcription. But that's intentional so that you don't get into a giggle fit here and that I can't contain.
That's happened several sessions that I've been to already. I don't know if you all have noticed, but the transcription is less than perfect and this is OK because it's better than nothing. But I'm wondering like, how does this in what ways does this hurt? And this is a way that technology can kind of almost run afoul of equity at some point because this is creating a weird division for people who are hard of hearing or deaf.
And I never really noticed it. I actually am a little hard of hearing, so I probably should have. But when you can hear somebody and you can see the difference between what's being transcribed up there and what they're actually saying and the fact that it can completely distract you from the topic at hand, that's a concern. So that's just like one thought about technical accessibility that's been on my mind since I've been at this conference.
Conceptual accessibility is something that I spend a lot of my time thinking about and have for many years been will remember because he was with me at Research Square. I think at the time that we started up the video service which Alexa is now responsible for. It's kind of a crazy world, but when we started up this video service, the whole idea was to create a accessible, conceptually accessible, open access content that accompanies a open access or a paid article and combines visuals with text and music in some cases.
I think. Ben, you actually did the narration on maybe the first video that we ever created that's just had that memory and thinking about what it actually means to break something down to the point that, you know, anybody with a reasonable level of education can pretty much understand it or understand why it's important. So that's basically lay summaries, right? Like we're talking about the same thing here, lay summaries with visual accompaniment.
And it was wildly popular. I mean, even before we made it good, it was not good at first. It was just a PowerPoint presentation that advanced on its own with some guy from the company doing the narration. And and it was still better than just, you know, certainly better than reading an abstract. And people just loved it. They loved it.
Have some piece of content that they can now share with their mother, share with social media to a multidisciplinary crowd and have them have some appreciation for what they're doing. And it's entertaining to boot. So that was my kind of that was my first Foray into thinking about accessibility and conceptual accessibility. The other one has been with preprints, and this has been a really interesting territory for the last couple of years in particular has been kind of already alluded to.
Um, it's I didn't appreciate at first how important it was going to be to have, in many cases, a lay summary, an explanation of what a preprint, what a given preprint actually means. But it's extremely important and has been during the pandemic, especially because we've had a huge amount of traffic to preprints on our platform on all of the platforms of people just trying to get information about what's going on with this virus.
And they're going to read minimally the article itself and come away with whatever impression they come away with. And as you all know, articles in science are written. Almost impenetrably. And so I, you know, started kind of tracking what was going on with the Twitter discourse. Mostly Twitter, reddit, other places like that. What are people taking away from these articles?
And it was horrifying how people can take what they want from it, you know, and deliver that message to a large group of followers who will take it for granted that they've understood that they've properly understood the science in the article. And this you know, I'm just going to give an example. This is the example, I think I always give. So if you've ever listened to me, give a talk before, you've probably heard it.
Sorry, but it's the one where in the very beginning, March I think 2020, there was a great article about t-cell immunity that we have leftover. We have kind of a latent immunity from our exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold and how we can leverage this existing immunity for potential for vaccines, which were still a distant thought at that point and for treatments for this disease.
But what instead most people came away with for this particular preprint is that 80% of people have immunity to COVID 19. And there are people dying everywhere from this disease and people manage to convince themselves, yeah, it's just like it's just like we thought this is just a hoax. And it's, you know, 80% of us have immunity. Everybody needs to calm down. And this was most of the altmetric.
It had a huge altmetric score. Within days, most of that traffic was the Herd. The Herd immunity crowd spreading this narrative about this preprint that was categorically false, like fundamentally false and was like, what am I going to do about this? There's nothing wrong with this paper. It was written beautifully. It ended up getting published in Nature immunology, I think, and almost identical form to the preprint.
There was nothing actually wrong with it, but what it needed was an was an accompaniment to make sure that people are coming away with the conclusion that the author actually intended for them to come away with. So so we worked on I'm not an immunologist, but I had someone on my team, luckily, who was that was able to write a really nice, accessible lay summary that I posted as an editorial note on it.
And I can't say for sure that this stopped that activity in its tracks. It maybe it didn't, you know, stop it immediately. But what I do know is that people started screen capturing that editorial note and putting it in those Twitter threads so people would go crazy talking about 80% of overall immune. They're like, read the display summary that's here. That's not what they're trying to say.
And so, you know, at least I could see some tangible positive outcome from that. So that's the conceptual accessibility. Should I keep going? The last one is the Pay access thing, and I just have a very, like kind of tangential thing to say about this that is not a fully formed thought at all. And I'm really curious. I'm going to throw this out there and I'm curious to hear if there's anyone in the audience that has some thoughts on this.
But I recently. I'm not going to name names. I recently read a take about open access that basically, you know, it's not one person that thinks this, but one person said this, that, you know, really there is no it's much harder to get value out of something that is free. When something is free, you can generally assume it's crap.
And this is an argument that's used to say like, OK, you have a podcast or a, um, a substack or whatever that you follow that you, that has massive value in terms of like this is a person who's like amazing, you know, thoughts and, and opens my mind about everything. You're willing to pay some monthly or annual fee to get that content. Most of you probably have some kind of subscription like that just to get the thoughts inside somebody's head into your own head.
And I just I think that that's true for opinion content. But when it comes to science, we don't want heavily curated thoughts. We want every thought. Right because we don't know what's going to end up working in the end. We need all of it so that we can work it out. We don't need the most impactful thoughts, the most sexy thoughts, right?
There's something about that argument that just breaks down when you think about research and science to me, and I haven't fully like, I want to write about this. I want to say something about this that's more coherent than what I just said. But I'm curious to know if, like there is agreement here about that, that idea, that subscription content is inherently going to be more valuable than open content when it comes to, you know, opinions and whether you think it diverges when it comes to just empirical research.
All right. So I'm going to stop talking now. You actually. Oh, I get to keep talking. Oh, god, these poor people. So there's a question in the Q&A. You want to take it now? A while.
Sure OK. So this. You want to sneak into the analysis? Oh, Yeah. So this is a question from Susan Wilner. Um, can any of you address best practices for accessibility via the pdf? We all are tired of the PDF, but it's here to stay.
I'm particularly interested in things like adding navigation metadata into the PDF and how to make tables in PDFS accessible to visually impaired. I hope this question makes sense. We're struggling with converting our highly medical scientific charts to something that is accessible. I have zero experience in this area.
I'm going to start and say that just that I have thought the same thing that I feel like it's getting a little better in terms of being able to even, you know, the newer versions of the PDF allow you to like cut and paste the text. It identifies it as text. It used to be it was like a scanned copy of a book, right? But we're reliant on Adobe to, to do this the right way. So I don't have an answer for that.
I think that would be a great like working session or something. But if someone figures it out, the problem then is if you figure out the standard, will you get everyone to develop their content in a way that uses it, or then it is another layer of cost and time, which is I think worth it. But this gets to our point of like the labor, it's all intertwined.
We have to consider that there's, there's finite resources. There's like, you know, how do we get to these? How do we meet these goals that we truly need to be an equitable community, but also identify the challenges in getting there? I think that's a perfect example of one. Do you agree that PDFS are here to stay?
I kind of have a problem with that notion, although I do see authors gravitating toward the PDF. They like to download the PDF. We have the HTML here for you. What do you want with the pdf? They like to have it maybe on their hard drives. But beyond that I don't really understand the attachment to PDFS.
Does anybody else? Does anybody who likes pdfs? All right. It's like that. Oh, you. You Yeah. Talk about it. No, let.
Let's let someone else tell us. I am a moderator. Toby, I'm just going to run around. You're like, I'm on the Ellen Show talking about the OECD. We we made a huge effort to make all our works available in EPUB alongside the PDF. The data in terms of access was like 99 to 1.
PDF to EPUB. The only EPUB files that people liked were the summaries multilingual summaries because we made these multilingual summaries and they were basically the only things that people took away in EPUB and it just they just zero interest. And I think the reason why people like PDF is because it's standard for everybody. It's dead easy.
And the other huge advantage of PDF is you're looking at the same page as everybody else. So you can go. I'm going to go to page 2023 and hey, someone else is looking at page 23 and they're looking at the same page, which you can't do in HTML. And I think that's one of the key reasons why PDF is still so, so, so useful is that it's stable and fixed and you can discuss it around page numbers.
Thanks, Toby. So the next. Oh, we've got another question. There's another question. I'll just stay down here. So this is from Andrew Harmon. What is the discussion, if any, on accessibility for the neurodivergent?
The to. I'm hoping that there may be someone in the village that can contribute as well. Um, there is some discussion discussion happening around that and it is, like I said, things like different views, but also, Different layouts of the text on the page.
For some people. For some people with newer divergences, it can't be too crowded. There is the w3c. They have a great section on accessibility, including that on the web that I have found is an excellent resource. We are going to move on to our next value just in the service of time.
That is transparency. So Michelle is going to keep going. Can you hear me? Is this working? OK OK. I think this is an interesting one because as with all of these values, we can't take it for granted that there is widespread agreement about specific aspects of transparency.
But the goal here is to zero in on shared values. And to me that means understanding what it is that we collectively, really care about when we're thinking about this topic. So all right. So when I think about transparency as it relates to academic publishing, I consider it the basis of trust, at least in at least four different points along the continuum of research.
So that's from the formulation of the hypothesis to the long term stability of its conclusions. Hi level these points are the planning and the conduct of the study, the drafting of the manuscript, the publication of the manuscript, and then whatever activities might happen in Association with that work going forward. So when it comes to the conduct, this is not going to be news to anybody.
Like this is I'm kind of this is review. But when it comes to conduct of the study, it's the transparency around the methodology. The planned experiments was the protocol preregistered and then transparency around what was actually done. Was there a careful and accurate recording, insufficient detail to allow for reproducibility on the drafting? Are the results reported selectively or exhaustively?
Are the methods consistent with the pre-registered protocol? If there is one? How do they compare to the expected results? In which ways do they deviate? And is the raw data freely available? On the publication of the paper. It's around mostly around what the review process was like. Were the reviewers qualified? Who were they?
What did they actually say about the work? How did it change from its original state? Once once it was published, essentially, what were the circumstances under which this study's, you know, effective endorsement by the journal? And then the part that I think is often overlooked is transparency beyond the point of publication. What do we know about what happens downstream?
I think there's a general understanding now that science is a process and that publication in a journal is not a fixed end point. So if there are corrections or significant problems that are found down the line, we want to be made aware of those. We want to understand how the research holds up over time. So we need transparency around that. I think you'd be hard pressed to find disagreement on the importance of transparency in those areas.
And yet where we run into problems is in thinking about the practical implications of maximum transparency. So, for example, some people don't think preregistration is practical or sufficient to address issues with reproducibility, or they argue that mandating something like preregistration could actually lead to new problems, like it just becomes too restrictive.
It stifles creativity. It places disproportionate pressure on tenured faculty. These are all arguments that I've read against preregistration when you would have thought that this is just an unalloyed good. But these are reasonable points to bring up. Posting a preprint. OK, that's my pet topic. It's generally considered an act of transparency because you're sharing an early version of your manuscript that is likely to undergo some revisions and probably don't need to tell this group about the concerns around preprints.
But suffice it to say, there is plenty of debate as to whether this is actually an appropriate practice, and I think some of the arguments against are fair and valid and we need to consider them. And then here's another one. Transparent peer review. Completely transparent peer review. At a glance that seems like a paragon of peer review ethics and is also not an indisputable good.
So, for example, as an early career researcher, how do you guard against retribution for a critical review? As with so many things, it seems more and more likely that the right answers here are somewhere in between the extremes and that we need compromise. Even in the areas where we broadly agree on the basic value. Anyone want to talk about.
So the thing I want to talk about in relation to transparency is that libraries, vendors and publishers need to have deeper discussions about transparency, um, about data collection on the platforms that we use. Um, and to make these clear to our patrons. So there is, there are measures in place when users are authenticating onto vendor platforms to ensure that only the necessary data is passed.
However, on many platforms to access greater functionality, you also have to create an account in addition to the access that your library provides. Um, there's not a lot of transparency. I think libraries are now beginning to understand that there's a concern about what data is collected when researchers use that. And how we've approached it so far is to explain when we get a question or when we do a workshop that when you do this, your data is no longer under the control of the library's technical systems.
But I don't think we fully understand how that data is then used by vendors and publishers. So we are not we're only now starting to have those conversations and some of the conversations are alarmist, but it would be more productive to sit down and talk about what the standards should be and how users should be warned. But to be fair, some of the concerns raised have been very, very serious concerns about how data is shared with different corporate branches of publishers or vendors, and then onsold to third parties, government entities and the like.
So I think that there needs to be agreement on what standards are applied and how that's communicated to the patrons, preferably at the point of use at the point at which you're creating the account the same way we see the cookie notices pop up, for example. And at the point of, for example, when you're downloading a PDF to know that there is a tracker embedded in this PDF that can show.
Um, that can transmit information back to the vendor or the publisher on how you use and share that particular PDF. The other area of transparency that. Needs that needs more attention is the issue of interoperability. Um, Uh, on a lot of the majority of vendor or publisher platforms, which, you know, they, they provide so many useful services end to end, you know, vertical in the academic enterprise.
The issue is, however, when you're changing from one system to another, often it's very difficult to get the data out and into another system. So there needs to be more discussion on the front end of. Is this what are the best ways to transfer data within systems? So that's another area that we need more transparency about transformation, transfer of information between systems or from one system to another.
That needs to be clear and explicit. Um, I'm just going to summarize to say that I think this will be a theme. I feel like the conflict between incentives and what people want in their hearts is on display here as well. You know, in the lab, the concept of document everything like, you know, the old the lab notebook, you write everything down.
That was always the standard. But when it came down to it, did everybody take did I take the time to literally do what I would really think? The spirit of that rule is not always because you could still you could still muddle through the process. Right and not necessarily take the time to be transparent about the steps you took at every stage. And so until the incentives change.
Practically as much as you want something. Sometimes it just you don't you aren't given the time and the resource and the money to do it. Dom Yeah. OK so like we had mentioned before, Dom is not here, but I. I have some notes that I'd like to say on her behalf and about her. So this space was for Dominique Moore, who we already said is an acquiring editor at the University of Illinois press.
She was unable to make it today she's safe and healthy. Wanted to mention that. So nobody worries. She's fine. Um, I struggled last night about how to make sure she was represented. Her perspective is one that I think is underrepresented here, and I can't not do it justice. But at 3 a.m., after accidentally fully drinking a fully caffeinated coffee after dinner, I tried to write down what I know about her because she's incredible and maybe some of Dom would come through.
I was lucky to work with her during my time at the University of Illinois press and invited her to do this panel because as an acquiring editor, she serves disciplines in many ways that in ways that many in STEM publishing do not understand. As an acquiring editor, Dom is the first line of curatorial and editorial discretion similar to peer review for academic monographs. She reviews manuscripts and proposals on their merit and works collaboratively with the acquisitions department to validate and move forward proposals with promise.
Her expertise is incredibly valuable to book publishing in the humanities and the humanities is only recently represented or represented set of disciplines here at SSP. Having long been an organization that represented STEM journals and interests, having strong perspective was something that was important to me as the moderator of this panel. If you have spent 30s with me, this. A lot of you are probably laughing and rolling your eyes right now because this like oozes out of my skin.
And I most frequently see Labor of humanists, particularly humanist publishers, marginalized when we discuss the role of publishers in our ecosystem. To be clear, the role of acquiring editors, editorial assistants and editorial boards and humanities publishing, particularly monographs, is critical to the sustainability and quality of books coming out of the humanities. And I think knowing Dom, she would have remarked on pay inequity and she did in her bioRxiv.
So that was redundant. Um, having recently been an editorial assistant, she would have worked 50 hour weeks doing much of the labor that allows acquiring editors to do the intellectual labor required to assess manuscripts. They work on permissions and other tasks that must be done to publish a book. It is hard work by virtue of the fact that University presses are not well funded and do not often operate in the Black.
It is also extremely underpaid. I have heard her argue for better wages for the people that assist her pulling people up as she rises. I have heard her only recently an editorial assistant herself bravely addressed the presses professional organization to advocate for pay, equity and living wages. I wish she was here to deliver her this deliver this herself, because all I can speak is what I have seen and am positive that she could better describe her.
Why she also doesn't mince words. So we're going to get some of hers at the end here and it's going to be really fun. Um, fortunately, as I was wrapping up this little love note to Dom, she texted me at 458 some bullet points and am happy to say that I got a few things right, but I wanted to share her thoughts in her own words. She wanted to say in this industry, the people who make this work happen are often undervalued and the most underutilized resource in particularly, we need to create collaborative spaces for those who are least visible in the process.
This includes our peers and less public facing departments and administrative roles. They are the least likely to be at the table where decisions are made, but most likely to be in critical, to be critical in implementing those initiatives and are often poorly compensated. What would it mean to imagine a brainstorming process that centered those who engage in the most essential labor of our organizations?
We must also build processes that preserve institutional knowledge, not just what or the how, but the why, not having legible and easily accessible roadmaps regarding our processes, I believe greatly Hinders our ability to maintain accessibility, transparency and usage. I hope our conversations can create redress by pushing back against the impulse to make this labor invisible through our silence about it, or worse, our nod I. Typos this is why I can't get through this.
Or worse, nod our heads at the fact that we know we must do more, while usually in very conveniently, very rarely doing very much at all, which thus tacitly justifies how poorly compensated that labor is. So that's from Dom. And it was brilliant. Wants to go first.
Following on from what Dom said, there's also a perception that the people who do this kind of work, academic work, whether in libraries, in publishing houses, et cetera. Do it for the love or it's a calling, or that they're serving a higher noble purpose and that that is part of the compensation. However, you really can't take that to the grocery store is what I said to the group.
This morning. The fact is it's a means of justifying lower wages. And a lot of the times institutions operate on what is the lowest figure that I can get this person in for, rather than asking, um, do our workers remuneration provide a standard of living that affords them dignity? And that should really be the question with labor. There's also the issue of diversity and inclusion.
But if you have an environment that's already fundamentally inequitable. You're going to get a lot of pushback. When you want to do. Redress, the lack of diversity or the lack of inclusion in your system. And that's something I've seen firsthand. We do have to ask those questions about diversity in the labor force and inclusion.
We have to ask about what barriers discourage or prevent the participation, the participation of persons from particular backgrounds or cultures. Um, our work environments, balanced and flexible. Are they safe. And inclusive? Do people feel free to speak up if there's an issue? Do they have a sense of dignity and belonging? Can people be confident that any disputes or problems will be handled in a procedurally and essentially just manner?
We also have to talk about opportunity hoarding. Um, a lot of the times when we talk about not expanding opportunities for indigenous people, Black people, people of color, women. We hear they're not that many in this or that field. And many times the reason we see that is that when you're looking at a certain circle, people have been historically excluded from those circles.
We have to be willing to say, here's somebody who might not have what I have in my head as the best qualifications or the best fit. What training can I provide to that person? Um, what opportunities can I give that person to allow them to advance so that we strengthen the pipeline? Otherwise we just keep replicating a system where opportunities are given to the same set of people because they fit our concept of the best candidate.
Even though the research has shown over and over again that the strongest teams who present the best work, who come up with the who produce the best work, are diverse and inclusive teams. So the next point that we want to discuss is maximizing usage and have to say to the audience that when we were listing the points originally, what we had here was open access and we had a lot of discussions about is the shared value, open access?
Is that what the shared value is? Because there's a lot of different viewpoints about that. So having provoked that discussion, what we came up with a value, what we came up with as a value that's unequivocally shared by researchers, librarians, publishers, vendors and so on, is that you want to maximize usage of the content. Researchers definitely want to show that their work is being used and shared because that indicates it's valuable.
It has made a contribution to the field. Libraries want to make sure that the collections that they spend millions on are being used. Um, journals want to show that what they're publishing is valuable and they show that because it's being used and cited. And of course readers want access to information so that they can use it in a variety of ways. So how each sector goes about pursuing that goal of maximizing usage is going to be different, and even the same person will have different strategies depending on their needs at different points in time.
So so vendors and publishers and open source developers and libraries help maximize usage by investment in and curation of content on electronic databases, on the indexing, on the search engines, bibliometric platforms and researcher information management systems. Of course, open access can play a role in maximizing usage. Um, even just from the authors rights perspective of allowing the author to use their work in ways that would be prohibited by traditional copyright transfer.
And that's actually one of the core features of open access that tends to get overlooked in the discussion, um, or get conflated with free to read, which is understandable. But one, one of the core features is that open licensing, which gives the author more control over how their work is used so they can reuse it and they can share it in ways that traditionally they would have had to get the permission of the publisher for.
these days with self-archiving or green open access. A lot of those permissions are set out in the publisher self-archiving policy. But these permissions only go to prior versions, not the version of record. But that green open access is also a way. Preprints, of course, are vastly popular of maximizing usage.
Um, so open access certainly had great promise conceptually, especially as an entry point for those operating outside of closed networks of knowledge production in the global North or even those in less well funded institutions in, in what we think of as the global North in terms of being able to access more scholarly work, if that work is open access, and especially so for researchers seeking access outside of the global North.
So we're thinking about Latin America, Africa, Asia, and they looked at open access as a means for inclusion in access. But there's also the issue of inclusion in knowledge production. And there's scholars are really pointing out now that the model, the models that have dominated open access gold, open access, where the author pays a fee or transformative agreements, where your institution covers the cost of open access publishing, um, that it really has turned out to exclude those same people in the global South from the Centers of knowledge production because they, they and their institutions are not able to have their work published.
Open access under the types of models that have now prevailed. And so in a lot of those societies, they've taken a different approach to open access. I'd recommend the work of scholars like Reggie rajoo, um, Dennis albornoz, Leslie Chan. Um, they're pointing out that researchers outside of these elite knowledge production centers, they are just as marginalized in open access publishing.
They are not getting their work into, Into the open. The primarily are the dominant open access venues because of the barriers. so the process of open divorced from sort of the values of open why we wanted open in the first place can divide and exclude rather than building community around researchers globally.
So we need to explore a lot of different models because just in the same way that, um, big deals ate up library budgets, transformative agreements, also eating up library budgets in much of the same way. And excluding folks who can't afford those type of agreements. So what I would say is that I support the movement toward a values based publication ecosystem where our academic libraries support vendors and publishers.
Um, where there's an alignment of values. And this is likely to increase connections between the different parts of the scholarly ecosystem. And we won't always get it right, but if we're willing to try and support different models. Um, and, and publishing that is mission based, we can work towards, Uh, a system where we get maximum usage both at the point of knowledge production and knowledge consumption.
And, and Rachel Caldwell of the University of Tennessee has proposed an interesting approach to this towards a value system and is actually putting together an advisory council to do further work on this. So I would, if you haven't seen her work, I'd recommend taking a look at it. Um, at IU Bloomington, we recently expanded our agreement with plos because they were offering this global equity model.
Um, so there are a package of journals under the global equity model which ensures that institutional pricing reflects the regional economy of where the institution or the researcher is, as well as offering an additional equity equity seat where we pay extra money into the system to help us further reduce costs for authors in low and low to middle income countries.
And if it wasn't for that program, we probably would not have expanded our publishing agreements with plus. So I think, um, talking more about the shared values. And what we want to see from publishers and, and vendors is definitely the way to go. so we only have 13 minutes left.
And are there questions coming in? Neil? yes. Um, there is one question from Gabe, but he's sitting right next to me, so maybe he should just ask it. Thank you all so much. I don't know if I should read my question or try to remember it.
This has been great. Can you maybe share what you think organizations sometimes get wrong in establishing core values? Not right this second. Go wild. Well, I think I would say mindset. Right so we from the start very helpfully had this. What was the word?
Lodestar that's too fancy. We had this guiding. Yeah guiding. Guiding point of like, it takes a village. Right? and I think that. Let's be honest, we all have. We all have jobs. We all work at organizations that have specific needs. They need to.
They need to grow. They need to be sustainable. But the core values that you identify internally are going to miss out on a lot of the conversation that we just had. Right and so I think even if you have to understand, there will need to be things to keep a business running. But maybe there's a second stage where you can say, well, what are those other everyone else that's involved, everyone else that participates?
You know, none of us have a job that is solely ours, right? Like everything, it relies on someone to give us content, someone to read the content. Right? so take a step back and think about everyone there and then say maybe how do we align our core values? That might be what I'm thinking. there's this.
Approach of, you know, mission, vision, values. And I think I don't think I've worked in enough institutions to say, here's where you go wrong. But I think that if you start at the point of considering your mission, what you're there to do, your vision, where do you want to be at x point from now, that really helps you calibrate your values.
And I think also, um, being honest. A lot of the times its do find that in discussions or conversations, there is work to be done on really acknowledging, listen, we've been doing this badly. Um, is looking at in the face and saying. The way we've been doing it is not working.
We need to rethink and also not being able to marry the ideal with the practical. So I think it's really I think that part is really important because, A lot of the times the. As I was quoting from the process, it goes wrong in the process. So we have to think about how we are going to implement things while we are thinking about what that vision is.
Otherwise, it won't. It has the potential to go really off, off course or off kilter. So being willing to. Being willing to know that even if we try something, it might not always work out. But having that sort of roadmap, OK, we have this vision of what is ideal, but how will we practically do it is really important.
And I think that when you then if you have all those things in mind, um, it will become easier to, to set out your values. I'm going to riff off of you a little bit because the honesty piece, what I think of immediately is just avoiding platitudes, because I think that has to be I'm not speaking for my organization at all because our core values are perfect and we live we live them every day.
Right but avoiding platitudes, making sure you're actually being honest about what you're capable of as an organization. And that also means being adaptable and able to pivot on them and think, you know, this is something we should think about, too, in our organization like it was. It's not the same place that it was 10 years ago.
And maybe our core values need to change with that. It's not you know, companies grow and what it was when it was 50, a little baby, 50 people and didn't have a preprint platform or whatever, might be something different from what it is now. So I think adaptability and willingness to reconsider them is important to. Actually I'm sorry. Gabe was a little rude.
I actually think one of the things organizations get wrong is that when they adopt a core value, they think of it as like an abusable or uncritically. That once you adopt it, that's what you are. And in order to call yourself something, you have to align your behavior with what you call yourself, which may be integrity. Um, and so I think, I think one of the things when organizations do this wrong is that they say we are innovative, we say we are this thing and their behavior doesn't reflect it.
And I think that that is a really big pitfall. So when we identify core values in our organizations, when we want to live by them, I think it's something that we need to center before we make tactical decisions. When we make the tactical decision, we have to say, does this serve this core value? And if it doesn't, then that is an uncritical, positive, hopeful thing that we've put out into the world.
That is not actually true. It is not a core value. Um, I want to say one really quick thing about equity, because that was something we missed. It's going to 30s. We want to talk about equity today. And the reason is because it's at the end is because I hope what you saw from our brilliant panelists is that it kind of nutshells everything that we talked about.
It's almost like a filter core value. It has to go along with everything that we talked about. It's a concept that's infused in the core values we identified. Accessibility enables equity, transparency helps build it. Labor goes hand in hand with it. And maximizing usage means that we are trying to measure it. I'm going to be brief because you don't need to hear any more from me in this session is kind of heavy.
So now that I've said that thing, the thing where we recognize that the common thread in all of what we do points back to equity, and I'm going to let our panelists talk about what that means in their work unless we don't have time, because I don't think we do. Yeah. Do we have any questions from this audience?
Um, yeah, I tried to put it in whova, but it was too long. So now I have to speak publicly. It's so fun, isn't it? Right Megan McDevitt I'm a managing editor with origin editorial, so I'd like to just go back to the points about looking outside the typical circle. Even if the candidate has less experience.
You see this a lot with the editorial boards where it's like, oh, well, I want to residency with him, so that's fine. Or even worse, which I've seen is I want to residency with his father. So that's, you know, he's fine. So just and I fully support like there has to be training, mentorship, support. Otherwise you're setting up that person you bring in to fail and that's terrible as well.
So I guess just my question is like, how can journals make sure or other organizations and startups make sure that those potential new editor candidates or other candidates are receiving the proper support? And who's that? Who's responsible for that? Is that the journal level, the publisher level, the institution? You know, how what's the infrastructure like of that?
Yeah no, I think that in terms of who eventually does it, that's always going to be dependent a little on how much. How much is the publisher typically handle operations at a journal. What's the relationship between the editors and others? But but I think it I feel like a broken record proverbially goes back to incentives. And this is something that I can't I cannot speak to specifics at our organization.
But but we have recently thought long and hard about how do you measure the behavior you want to see in a journal? Do you the diversity of the people involved in that journal and changing and saying, look, when an editor in chief comes in. We expect this and this is how we're going to measure it. And this is how we know when people are going to review how the health of the journal.
It's not simply going to be a number, you know, the impact factor that it's going to involve this as well. And when you can take a step like that and say, here's what we're asking of you, here are a lot of resources. So it is important, of course, if you come and you tell someone, I expect you to change the world, see you in a few years.
You know, that's tough. I'm not going to work. But come with, come to them and today we're here to help, but we expect this and we're going to measure you on it. And I think that probably is what the biggest step would be. Yeah so so the setting expectations piece is really good, but also I think industry associations have a role to play in providing some of these resources. Depending on the size of who's publishing the journal.
You may not have all the resources in house, that you can tap into industry organizations like SSP and other disciplinary organizations to help get somebody mentored. Oh, gosh. Thank you. So my name is Ryan Ryan with the strategic management society.
We publish three business and academic journals. So one thing I've been thinking about your question you asked earlier about like the intersection of value and open access. And I've been thinking about accessibility and all that. One phenomena we're observing with our journals is that people are reading more of the open access journals. The article downloads are up. Everything seems to be great on that front, but the revenue for our journals is flat or slightly decreasing, which is OK for now.
But if I'm having this conversation three, five, 10 years down the road, the journal won't be sustainable and everything will fail. So I guess I'm just curious what your thoughts are in terms of the business of open access and accessibility because. Right, like if everything folds, then the research that our academics are putting out is not sustainable and it will cease to be accessible.
So just curious what your thoughts were on that. So the sustainability piece is a big piece. Well, um, can I ask if the open access journals, if they're charging an APC to publish or if it's, if APC is APC based? Well, one, one thing is calibrating your APC. Of course. The other thing is looking at, um, other lines of support.
So there's, there are some other models that we've seen out there, whether it's institution supported, donor supported. Um, we've seen Subscribe to open. So I think that the, the issue of sustainability is one that can be solved in a number of ways. But I'm really glad that you raised that point because people often think that open access is free, but there's costs involved served to, um, to publishing.
Like you're not just putting, um, an electronic file on the internet. Um, so there has to be, there has to be a way of covering those costs. No, I was just going to say, I think I'll personally open access is great and I think it's great that more research is getting out there in all the fields.
But professionally, it's kind of challenging because there has to be a revenue model to sustain it. All right. Because it won't serve anybody. It won't serve anybody if eventually the journal goes under because then there's no access. There's no usage. Think a little of this stems from also having to transition from something that exists to something that, you know.
So you're thinking not you. Many of us, all of us think very like, I need to recreate what I'm doing now, but the author needs to pay for it. And I think sometimes that as a group, there's and there's some of this that's, I think, popping up. These new models, new ideas that can help mitigate it. But that can definitely be a challenge. Just just it puts you in a real tough place.
So time for one more. I am happy to stay here as long as people are asking questions that seems like an easy decision. I see. I see no objections. Let's do it. OK this isn't a question. This is a challenge. You and you suggested that the journal dies.
Then the authors have no channel to publish. They do. It's called the internet. They can put their stuff on a website. I'm currently building a platform that harvests, would you believe, 100,000 reports a month? That have been put on the internet. Informally, it's research. It just isn't in a journal.
There's an awful lot of research that does not appear in journals today. If journals die, it doesn't mean to say that this research can't still find an audience. It can. It's just that the Avenue to get there will be different. That's all. OK so journals don't have to exist. And that's something that I think a lot of journal publishers and a lot of journal owners are going to have to wrestle with because I think as I see the future, I don't see journals, a lot of journals surviving because the money isn't there to keep them going because they're too expensive.
That's the fundamental problem. So there are. Someone has to maintain that platform as well. But you're right, that is another possibility. That is another model. There is a colleague of mine runs a platform called C3 in Sweden, and one of the things that they're exploring with one of the Swedish universities is for the University to have its faculty publish their research directly on a platform, on a platform that's, say, will provide, it will be branded with the University branding.
And so the, um, I guess the prestige factor will come from that rather from being enclosed in the container that is a journal. So that is, that may be another route. So we agree with you. I think, though, it illustrates that, you know, we can be serving the same core value and have drastically different results based on how we apply it, which I think makes this panel very interesting and the work that we do.
Um, so since there are no more questions, I do want people to fill out the exit poll because I'm curious to know if you have any takeaways and what you're going to do to apply a core values in your work and center them. I think that's all from us. I can speak for all the panelists when I say we want to Thank you for coming, for being part of this community and for contributing to our panel.
We hope that you are inspired by our panelists and the responses from your colleagues. And we can't see can't wait to see what you do with what you took from today. So thank you so much.
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