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Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value
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Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value
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Segment:1 Tracy Gardner: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
TRACY GARDNER: Thanks for having me here today. So I'm talking about what societies are doing in capturing more of the research lifecycle. When we first started talking about this and putting this program together, I think I was raising the question with Will on the panel-- why? Why would you want to capture more of the research, right? This life cycle?
TRACY GARDNER: It's something that we're talking about a lot in this industry. But the first part of this presentation is just about taking a bit of a step back. So firstly, just a few words about us. We're a UK-based consultancy. There's four of us in the organization. We have worked in various departments. We've got many, many years combined experience-- I didn't like to add them all up-- within publishing.
TRACY GARDNER: And our core client base are societies. We work with vendors as well. And we work with commercial publishers, independent publishers. But at the moment, I would say that about 80% of our client base is societies. We're really busy at the minute. I say we're probably doing quite well from what we like to call the Plan S Panic.
TRACY GARDNER: So we're doing OK out of that at the moment. So why do we want to capture more of the lifecycle? And I do apologize to John Shaw if he's in the room because I noticed he asked this question a number of times in his presentation yesterday. He said, what problem is it are we trying to solve? I didn't pinch that from him. I'd written these slides before he spoke. But I think it's a really, really important point that we need to keep getting back to.
TRACY GARDNER: We need to keep asking ourselves the question, what is it we're trying to do? What are we tried to solve? And where is the value? So one of the first questions we ask when clients come to us-- when societies come to us with a problem, essentially, because that's why they come to consultants-- is what are you all about?
TRACY GARDNER: Is it about mission or money? And I can guarantee the first answer will be, oh, it's all about the mission. We're all about the mission. But of course, it can't be all about the mission because your mission needs financial services to be able to support it. So it has to be about the money as well. So it's about balancing out where the mission is and where the money's coming from to achieve that mission.
TRACY GARDNER: So if we just take a step back in time, the purpose of journals were originally to disseminate research. So they were very mission-based in the good old days. That's what they were for. They've become about financial stability for societies. And predominately my experience is with societies. And that's what I'm calling on, here. So the journals program has become about financial stability for societies.
TRACY GARDNER: They are providing the finances for the rest of the society to do what it is they need to do. So whilst the society's aims are generally all about mission-- they are about mission. We can talk about some of the missions that they've got in a moment. The journal aims are normally about the money. And this creates a problem in an open-access world. I can't see those slides, so I'm going to have to look up there.
TRACY GARDNER: So how to solve that problem will be different for everybody. So we're in an OA world. We've got mission on one side. We've got money on the other side. We've got pressure on us to make everything open access. So what are we going to do to solve that problem? So one thing that it comes back to quite often is new products and new innovations.
TRACY GARDNER: But we need to, again, take a step back and try to figure out what it is we're trying to do. So that's what we ask of societies. And that's just taking you through a bit of a process of when people come to us, they come with what they think there was an initial project. And we like to take a step back and go through that process. So mapping some society goals is really important to understanding what it is they're trying to achieve for their user base, for their membership base, because there's no point in creating a whole load of products that don't actually meet those missions and those goals for an organization.
TRACY GARDNER: So there was just a number here. There's probably more. Some of those are more relevant in some subject areas. So, you know, CME-- obviously really, really crucial in the medical space. But increasingly in the engineering space and other professional societies as well are trying to professionalize and create content that supports the education of their members as well.
TRACY GARDNER: Some societies will have very much a global aim, that they want to support their global community. They may want to support the public. They might want to further the public's understanding of that science. So it very much differs depending on the society we're talking to, depending on the subject area, whether we're talking social sciences or STM or the medical sector.
TRACY GARDNER: So getting back to basics and understanding what the society is trying to do. Can everyone see that? They're messed up. Sorry about that. So I'll read them out. So clearly, a society needs money to be able to fulfill its mission.
TRACY GARDNER: So you need money. So that's what you need to work out-- how you're going to get that money. And it's all about, for them, and I know in future, responsibility is going to have to be shared between the community. So within a society, when we start talking to them about what they're going to do, about Plan S, et cetera.
TRACY GARDNER: We think about, we ask questions about, how do you interact with the rest of the society? And quite often, the answer that we get is that we don't. We don't answer. We don't really react. We don't really connect particularly well with the rest of the society. So one thing that we're very keen on doing is encouraging them to start embracing the mission from a society point of view.
TRACY GARDNER: So we've been in situations where we're talking to the publications team within a society. And they don't even really know the conference team. They don't know the events team. They don't really have any communication with memberships. Now, there may be some societies in this room. And you say that's not true of our society. Were very un-siloed.
TRACY GARDNER: We work very collegially. But I know there are some societies that don't work like that. And they say, actually, yeah, that's a problem-- being very, very siloed. Publications team generally seen as being supporting the organization, the society's missions, financially. And the rest of the society is seen as doing all the community stuff.
TRACY GARDNER: That's going to have to change. The whole society is going to have to embrace the mission. So I have got a bit of a plug here for a conference that we have founded. It's been running for two years in the UK. It's running next year in DC and in London. And it's all about embracing the mission. And what we're trying to do is attract not just publishing people to this conference.
TRACY GARDNER: We're trying to attract society leaders. Because we think that in order to survive, the whole society is going to have to embrace the mission. So essentially, societies need to see the current disruption as an opportunity, really, to take a step back and think about what you're doing. So when we talk about the Plan S panic-- when people come to us, and they are worrying about the future-- we're not saying there's nothing to worry about.
TRACY GARDNER: There clearly is. But you've got time to take a step back and think about what it is you're trying to do. So essentially, that's just kind of how we work with people. And it's trying to be encouraging, actually, to say there are new opportunities out there. So, just a few slides here on what's new. I can't really give case studies because some of these ideas are ideas that we are discussing with current clients.
TRACY GARDNER: Some of them are not our clients' ideas. They're just out there in the community that we know about. So they're not at case-study stage yet. They are just some ideas of how people have started to think about capturing more of that research lifecycle in order to meet the society's overall aims and missions. So if the world is all OA, you obviously can't sell the content.
TRACY GARDNER: And no matter how many times you look at a spreadsheet to work about how you're going to flip a journal from a subscription model to an OA model, the spreadsheet isn't going to give you those numbers that you want it to do. I mean, we've done it ourselves for clients. We keep looking. And we're like, it's not going to work. We can't make it work.
TRACY GARDNER: So what else can you do? What else can you sell on top of that as a publisher? So what can you layer on top? So a few people that we're talking to at the moment, it's about selling tools on top of that content. This requires, clearly, standards in the industry. It goes back to what Anne was saying yesterday about the fact that there is no identifier that people have to put into their XMLs to say something is open access.
TRACY GARDNER: So clearly, we need standards. We need data. We need infrastructure to be able to support this innovation. But if we had that, you could build tools on top of OA data. So GeoScienceWorld, I know it's a Silverchair client. They do this already with one of their products. How about if you were publishing in plant diseases or medical health problems across the world?
TRACY GARDNER: You could easily map where that research is coming from, where disease outbreaks were coming from, across the world. And you could produce that on top of all the OA literature. You could map pesticides and entomology and see if there's any links between that and sell that tool on top of that content if it was all OA. There's probably so many social science ideas that you could use to do this. So think about sending tools, not content.
TRACY GARDNER: In the future, when all content is free, we have to think of another way of making that money. Again, apologies for the fact that my font's gone wrong on these slides. So the published article is sometimes the combination of years and years of-- we've been hearing just now. It's the combination of years of research. So we need to be more research-focused, not article-focused.
TRACY GARDNER: We're so focused on the final published output-- the article. And as we've been hearing, now, they're fed up with it. At our point, they're done. They want to move on. So we need to move on from an article focus to a research focus. And that is about capturing more of that lifecycle of that research.
TRACY GARDNER: So capture conference papers-- the gray literature. I'm not going to talk about pre-prints because I know John is going to talk about pre-prints after me. But data, impact statements, reports, links with the original article-- it's all out there. We know it's all being produced and have publishers. And society's got a role in packaging that up and producing that to further the aims of their society, further their aims of research.
TRACY GARDNER: Additionally, you can include editorially generated content. So we're talking about blogs and podcasts and video content that actually makes all of that research much more accessible. So if you have a mission to educate the general public about what it is you're doing, then why not package that all up and layer it over with some blog posts or some video statements about impact? So, making that content more accessible. Becoming less about the published article, but more about the whole research.
TRACY GARDNER: Support your members' careers. Again, CME, this is a really important service that they provide. Many societies provide CME programs to their users. But there's applications for CPD and continuing professional development in other sectors as well. So we're talking to an engineering client right now about how to do this.
TRACY GARDNER: How to use content that's already out there. How to use OA content, how to repurpose it, and how to professionalize their members' careers through some kind of accreditation within the societies. So you're supporting the society's mission. You're supporting the aims. You're also capturing more of that research and using it in a very effective way.
TRACY GARDNER: So we're talking to quite a few people about how they can do that and how they can package all that up to provide education, so it meets that mission. Conferences-- I could probably talk a whole paper on conferences and the power of conferences and the value that they have. So a researcher, before they publish their article, they will be at a conference.
TRACY GARDNER: There will be poster sessions. There will be conference sessions. So packaging that up with the final published article is important. But additionally, conferences and events can provide a really significant additional revenue stream. They already do. And that's a really important revenue stream. But then working together with the publications team and packaging that up, I think, is going to be really important.
TRACY GARDNER: You need a really, really sound video streaming functionality. You need good e-commerce. But most of all, you need to be working collegially within your organization, within your society, to be able to do that. So the publishing team and the events team were working very, very closely together to think about maybe putting thematic packages of content together, maybe based around a particular author.
TRACY GARDNER: Once you've got your data and once you've got your content properly tagged and once you've got a platform that can offer you a way of packaging up these different types of format of content, then you can see how you can start providing access and supporting your society's mission by producing all of this for your members. So I think conferences are really, really going to be important.
TRACY GARDNER: And working with the conference team within your publications team is going to be key. This might be quite provocative. It probably is. But if content is OA, why not use other people's OA content? So this is something that we're talking about with some of our societies. And one of them is actually looking at doing this right now.
TRACY GARDNER: So they are in the life-sciences space. They're very, very niche. A lot of the content in that space is already open-access. So if you've got standards in place, if there's an identify, if there's somewhere that we know that there's a TCBY license in the XML header, then it's very easy to mine something like Crossref to actually pull in all of the OA content. So why not become the discovery layer?
TRACY GARDNER: So it's impossible to become a discovery layer in the subscription world because you, as a publisher, don't own access to all of that content. You can't provide a discovery layer on top of that content because it's all behind access control. But when access control goes away, there are endless possibilities of how you do that. So using all the OA content that's out there and providing a discovery layer actually then becomes something that's worth talking about again.
TRACY GARDNER: So a few years ago, we were talking to our clients about there's no point trying to be the discovery layer. You can't own. You don't have critical mass in that area. There are other discovery layers that are big. I mean, you're not going to beat Google and PubMed and the library. But you could provide that service for your members. So OA, see it as an opportunity.
TRACY GARDNER: You can then add the tools that we were talking about earlier on top of that. And then that becomes a really powerful proposition. Clearly this doesn't come without investment. So I'll get to that in a moment. You may wish to collaborate with others. And I know Lauren talked about this, again yesterday, about collaboration. I think collaboration is really difficult in this space.
TRACY GARDNER: I think it's hard enough to get a society to collaborate with other members of the team within a society. So to try and get some societies to convince their governance and to convince their treasurer and to convince the people who hold some of the power within society to try and break down those silos and that years and years of this is the way we've done things, it's really hard to collaborate within a society.
TRACY GARDNER: There's real challenges to try and get more than one society to do that together. But there is opportunity. If you can overcome that, perhaps there are other societies in your space that you can buddy up with and provide that service. Or you may just wish you don't want to do it. Actually, you've got the power. And you're going to do that.
TRACY GARDNER: You're going to go alone in that. We did a really, really bad job of marketing and promoting this white paper that we did last year. We wrote it. We spent ages on it. We wrote it. We put it out there. And then we didn't take any of our own advice.
TRACY GARDNER: And then we didn't market it. So it's here. So we did this last year. It was a landscape review. It's packed full of ideas and case studies about how people are using videos and podcasts, which really lends itself really well to this presentation because all of it is about capturing more of that lifecycle.
TRACY GARDNER: So this is about embracing new channels. But it's also about harnessing the power of the personality. You know, we live in a personality-driven world. There will be authors, there will be researchers in your space that are happy to be on camera, happy to do podcasts. We know podcasts are a really underused medium, I think. I think ASM reported something like 10 million downloads of their podcasts.
TRACY GARDNER: We know that they're a really popular channel for education. Next to comedy, education is the next important genre for podcasts. So people listen to them in the car. They listen to them when they're waiting for their kids, when they've dropped them at gym. If done well-- and they need to be done well. You need a really engaging speaker. They're a really powerful way of engaging with your community and getting that information out there.
TRACY GARDNER: So I would say I'm not going to go into too much of it now. There are a huge amount of examples in that report. It's free. I'm not selling it. But please just go and have a look at it. So embrace the mission, I think, is the whole take-home message of this. Really, don't panic.
TRACY GARDNER: There's no point panicking. The future is going to be what the future is, and we need to think really, really innovatively and creatively about how we can address some of those issues that are facing us. You need to identify your goals. And you may need to be brave. I mean, I think there needs to be an honest discussion within societies that the publications are not going to be the cash cow any longer, and this is a problem.
TRACY GARDNER: This is not just a problem for the publications department to solve. This is a problem for the society to solve as a whole. So you're going to need to tackle some internal barriers. We're working really hard with some societies on helping them tackle those internal barriers. Because they've been there for sometimes hundreds of years, it's very difficult to overcome them. But if you don't, you're not going to succeed.
TRACY GARDNER: That's the take-home message for that. You're going to need to take some risks. And I know we're a very risk-averse community. We're very conservative. We don't like taking risks. But we are facing real challenges and disruption. And disruption requires some risk-taking. So I didn't have any more of these mugs. They were really popular at London, but fair.
TRACY GARDNER: Everyone just wanted them. We were really delighted with them. But if I had, I'd have brought them here. So yeah, keep calm. Come to our Society Street Conference if you are a society. I've left some postcards on the desk. I did ask Jake if that was OK if I could do that. Have a look at our streaming video.
TRACY GARDNER: And please feel free to email me with any questions.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much, Tracy. [APPLAUSE] I'm very sorry about the slide formatting.
TRACY GARDNER: Oh, it's OK.
SPEAKER 1: It's one of those things. You never know how it works. Next up is John Inglis from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. I was going to try to get that out.
Segment:2 John Inglis: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
JOHN INGLIS: Thank you. So can I read my slides? Just about. Well, good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much to Silverchair for the invitation to address this formidable audience. I come from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is about 30 miles from here-- 100-year-old institution with a long commitment to both doing research and educating in science and communicating science in a whole variety of ways.
JOHN INGLIS: I do several things at this particular institution, which I've listed here. But in particular, I'm here because of my role as a founder with my colleague Richard Sever of two pre-print services, which I'm going to say a little bit more about. And I have various other involvements in other organizations. A pre-print, as I'm sure you know, is a research manuscript that has not yet been published or, in fact, to be accurate, has not yet been accepted by a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: And a pre-print server, when I use that term, I mean a website essentially devoted exclusively to the distribution of pre-prints. Pre-prints have been around for a long time-- for about 30 years-- initiated by the physics, mathematics, and computer science community and followed then by social science. That's the archive, the famous archive.
JOHN INGLIS: Followed by the social science research network around the same sort of time and the French repository, HAL. But in the last six years, there's been a proliferation of servers serving different parts of the scholarly landscape, sometimes with a country-specific focus, sometimes with a discipline or sub-discipline focus. This is an out-of-date slide. There are now approaching 50 of these things.
JOHN INGLIS: And their volume is increasing. This, too, is slightly out of date. But I was grateful to Crossref for this provision of these data. This is just an example of what's happening at one locus of pre-print servers, the Center for Open Science, where they have 26 pre-print servers. And you can see an increase in volume. On a monthly basis, their acquisition of new content has trebled in the past year across all of the COS servers.
JOHN INGLIS: ChemRxiv, which has about 2,500 manuscripts at this point-- and this shows growth in usage. And bioRxiv is growing at the rate of about 2,500 manuscripts a month at this point. We have about 60,000 manuscripts and a lot of authors from many institutions in a large number of countries, very gratifyingly. Usage of bioRxiv is also going up.
JOHN INGLIS: We recently brought in full text HTML of all pre-prints. And the usage of that component of the server is going up to roughly 6 million page views and downloads a month. A couple of years into the life of bioRxiv, Harlan Krumholz and Eric Topol, prominent members of the medical community, published an op-ed in The New York Times, basically saying that medicine needs a bio archive.
JOHN INGLIS: So we embarked on a pilot, introducing two subject categories from medicine-- clinical trials and epidemiology. We ran that for a number of years and convinced ourselves that medicine, too, could support a pre-print server. And so just in June of this year, we launched medRxiv. It's owned and operated by the laboratory. But it is managed in partnership with Yale and BMJ.
JOHN INGLIS: So we have a six-person management team-- two people deeply embedded in medical publishing and two professors of medicine and Richard and myself. And those conversations about individual manuscripts are terribly interesting. So we have posted about 320 manuscripts to date. I don't really have time to go into the nuts and bolts of how these pre-print servers work. But I do want to make the point that not all pre-print servers work the same way.
JOHN INGLIS: And there are variations of all kinds-- for-profit or not-for-profit, the degree of financial support that an individual server may or may not have. Whether it's publisher-centric, which means that essentially the publisher is posting a pre-print version of a manuscript. Or if it's publisher-neutral, which is the term we use to describe bioRxiv and medRxiv. Submission requirements vary.
JOHN INGLIS: Permitted article types vary. We, for example, do not post review articles, but other servers do. And also a very important issue is whether one can post to a pre-print server an actually published journal article. bioRxiv and medRxiv and ChemRxiv do not permit that. But many of the other servers do. There are differences in licensing choices, screening procedures, withdrawal, removal-- all of these are the nuts and bolts of how servers operate, which we could talk about later if you'd like to.
JOHN INGLIS: I'm going to focus on the extent of the integration of pre-print servers with the rest of the scholarly ecosystem. And after I made that slide, this wonderful document was posted yesterday morning. So I recommend this if you have an interest in this subject. It's a very deep dive into the current state of pre-prints and pre-print servers. A very fair account, I think.
JOHN INGLIS: And these are the take-home messages. Essentially, that there are benefits to pre-prints. There are concerns of a variety of sorts about pre-prints themselves, and also about the severs that distribute them. The role of Twitter is important. And in the long term, there are a number of questions about where prepayment servers are going to go. So I recommend that.
JOHN INGLIS: My focus for this part of the presentation is really on what publishers are doing in response to the advent of pre-prints in new disciplines of science or scholarship. And I would group those responses into these three categories-- facilitation, integration, and experimentation. So facilitation basically takes on a whole variety of forms.
JOHN INGLIS: One very important one is the fact that journals, particularly over the last six years, have been willing to make much more explicit their policies when it comes to the consideration of manuscripts that have been placed on a pre-print server. That was not the case when bioRxiv began. We did a good deal of advocacy one-on-one with societies, with journal editors. And that was extremely helpful.
JOHN INGLIS: And now I think it's actually quite hard to find journals in the biomedical space that have a policy that says we won't consider a pre-printed manuscript. And this week the brand-new editor of the New England Journal of Medicine gave an interview to STAT News in which he indicated that, as a scientist, he had put material on bioRxiv.
JOHN INGLIS: So we have some hopes that this may presage a change in the policy of The New England Journal when it comes to this kind of decision. And if that happens at NEJM, then perhaps there will be a knock-on effect throughout the world of medical journals, too. Scooping protection is something that a few journals have, which essentially says if we are considering your manuscript, and another paper is published while we are considering your manuscript, then we won't care about that.
JOHN INGLIS: We'll continue to review the paper. And it will end up however it ends up. EMBO Press have decided to extend this scooping protection to pre-prints. And there are other publishers that are considering the same thing. I should say just in passing that if I call out particular examples, it's because they are on the top of my mind.
JOHN INGLIS: This is not a comprehensive attempt to identify all the actors in this space. So forgive me if I miss out your organization or your favorite project. Another form of facilitation comes from journals that encourage their office to deposit a manuscript on a pre-print server while submitting that manuscript to the journal. At bioRxiv we have now-- I think it's about 40 journals that are doing this-- about 15 to 20 publishers.
JOHN INGLIS: And at the moment, that contribution amounts to about 15% of all the manuscripts that are posted on bioRxiv each month. And that proportion is rising. Another part of this integration is that if a journal publishes a paper that has had a pre-print version, then a certain number of journals will link back to that paper-- back to the pre-print to indicate something of the journey that that manuscript has undertaken.
JOHN INGLIS: And then, of course, there are societies that group together to start pre-print servers. I'm thinking of ChemRxiv. I'm also thinking of the earth and space science open archive, open research archive. And those are serious contributions to the growth of pre-prints in those particular disciplines. And then finally, there is at least one example, namely Cambridge University Press, that has used its own journal publishing platform-- adapted it for the purpose of a pre-print server on behalf of the American Political Science Association.
JOHN INGLIS: So that's what I would call facilitation. Integration is a little bit different. It starts from-- and this has happened from the absolute beginning of bioRxiv. That entrepreneurial editors troll through the manuscripts that they find on a pre-print server and approach authors about the possibility of submission. This has been formalized by at least two journals. PLOS Genetics is one.
JOHN INGLIS: And one of The Royal Society journals, who actually have pre-print editors whose jobs it is to scout for those kinds of promising manuscripts. But we know this is happening informally a great deal. We have made it possible for the author of a pre-print to transfer it directly into the submission system of a journal. And we have about 150 journals that are set up to receive those submissions.
JOHN INGLIS: We are transferring, at this point, somewhere around 300 manuscripts a month. And that is growing. We work with the manuscript handling systems. And I am very delighted to say that ScholarOne has recently come on board. And there will be, I think, a growth in the number of journals that we can offer to the bioRxiv office in that sense.
JOHN INGLIS: There are numerous conversations about enhancing the process of peer review by trying to capture the conversations that go on around the pre-print versions of a submitted manuscript. At the moment, we don't have the technology. It's an informal process. It basically means that the handling editors are looking on Twitter or looking on the comments section of bioRxiv to see if they can get some sense of what the community thinks about this manuscript.
JOHN INGLIS: And we're trying to figure out ways in which we could make this more efficient. We have one instance on bioRxiv of a badge which comes from a collaboration with The American Society for Microbiology, who tell us when they have decided to accept for publication a manuscript that's on bioRxiv. So there is a badge that says, essentially, "accepted." And then we also make links from the pre-print version of a manuscript to the published version.
JOHN INGLIS: And that's the product of a script that we run on Crossref and PubMed that makes those links automatically. And about 70% of what appears on bioRxiv finds its way into the journal literature within a couple of years. And then finally, a somewhat vexing question is that of how do you cite pre-prints? And really, there are no agreed conventions about this.
JOHN INGLIS: I think we probably are seeing the end of the days when a pre-print citation was changed by copy editors into "personal communication." We would love to have someone seed a discussion about how pre-prints should be cited in a more standard sort of way. And if anybody would like to have that conversation, we'd be delighted to be part of it. Finally, this question of experiments.
JOHN INGLIS: There are a number of things that publishers are doing in a tentative or early-stage way that I wanted to call out in this section. The first author-independent pre-print assessment-- what I'm thinking of there is something called preLights, which is a project of a company of biologists in Cambridge. They have recruited a large number of early-career researchers, who window into bioRxiv and say, I would like to write a commentary on this particular paper.
JOHN INGLIS: It's something that happens independently of authors. But the authors have a chance to respond. So there's a growing number of these commentaries. And there's a good deal of back-and-forth between the commentator and the authors concerned. This seems like a win-win project for all concerned. The early-career researchers get a chance to demonstrate their critical abilities. They get the chance to practice doing peer reviews.
JOHN INGLIS: And the authors benefit from the community response. And there are one or two other projects of a similar sort being run, not by publishers, but by independent groups. Journal-independent Portable Pre-print Peer Review-- there must be an acronym in there somewhere. This is something which has not formally been announced yet. But I know that a number of publishers in the room are aware of this.
JOHN INGLIS: It's a project that has been initiated by EMBO in collaboration with ASAPbio. And essentially, that's what it is. It's journal-independent peer review. They propose to take pre-prints, solicit reviews, which are then given to the authors, who can then take those reviews with their manuscript when they submit it to a journal. And there are, I think, around a dozen journals-- as I say, several represented in the room, here-- who have declared a willingness to accept those kinds of submissions.
JOHN INGLIS: So that will be formally announced, I think, in the next few days. This week, PNAS published a paper by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Marcia McNutt, Veronique Kiermer, and my colleague Richard Sever that came out of a meeting that we ran at Cold Spring Harbor last year about signals of trust-- going back to the previous research panel-- signals of trust in science.
JOHN INGLIS: But particularly in pre-prints, a group of us are considering how to incorporate badges to show that statistics have been checked, for example, or images have been analyzed for manipulation. The Center for Open Science already-- they have been a bit of a pioneer in badging. They are doing this with some of their outputs. And we are thinking about ways in which we might adapt and approach that.
JOHN INGLIS: Another thing that is going to be announced in the next few days is an enhancement of so-called transparent peer review. It will be adapted and applied to pre-print versions of manuscripts. I don't want to say too much about it here because there will be an announcement. This involves collaboration with about six or seven other organizations.
JOHN INGLIS: And you'll be hearing more about that in the next week or so. And then there is this question of overlay journals, which do not exist yet, around bioRxiv. But the archive and HAL have had such entities for a long time. Essentially, the pre-print lives on the pre-print server. The commentary, the peer review, lives on a separate project server.
JOHN INGLIS: That process of evaluation has the weight and authority of a journal. So this is deemed to be a publication. And we've seen this in math. We've seen it in physics. We have not seen this in biomedicine yet. But I know there are plenty of people who are thinking about it. So just finally, a few developments that might enhance how publishers feel about pre-prints.
JOHN INGLIS: One is in rich content. We are planning to incorporate streaming video into bioRxiv. We're also trying to figure out how to bring in things like output from Jupyter Notebooks and runable software of that kind. New content input-- by that, I mean essentially we have a group of people who are really itching to get away from a reliance on Word and PDFs and send us XML.
JOHN INGLIS: So we'll see how that goes. We're talking with a number of indexing organizations, who are looking to incorporate pre-prints into what they're already doing for the journal literature. Semantic Scholar is one. And others, who are still sort of under wraps at this point. And we are planning to release on a routine basis the XML for each pre-print plus the corpus of all the 60,000 that we have already, so that that will be available for text and data mining and other kinds of experiments that publishers might want to run.
JOHN INGLIS: And that will be aided in part by the development of better APIs than we currently have. So basically, I think Paul Ginsparg, the founder of arXiv, observed once-- because arXiv started with particle physics. And it spread gradually through the other sub-disciplines of physics. And Paul observed a number of years ago that no community that has embarked on the embrace of pre-prints has ever gone back.
JOHN INGLIS: So if we are to believe that, I think pre-prints are here to stay. There are many questions about the future, which are indicated in that report. However, what is clear is that both authors and readers see benefits to this early release of research results. And they see it as a contribution to accelerating science. So it's a good thing.
JOHN INGLIS: However, peer review is still, by every survey of academics that's ever been done, a pillar of the scholarly publishing process. And at least as far as we're concerned, a pre-print survey is not an attempt to overturn the system of journal publishing and the paramount importance of peer review. So we are looking to our activities as complementary to what journals are interested in doing when they want to improve, enhance, make more efficient their peer-review process.
JOHN INGLIS: And people in this room are tremendously well-placed to do those experiments and share with the rest of us what comes out of it, particularly how the research community feels about such experiments. And in addition to trying to accelerate the march of science, we see our pre-print servers as aides to this process of improving the way that the scholarly communication process works.
JOHN INGLIS: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, John. We're going to switch slides. But I'd like to welcome to the stage Sami Benchekroun from Morressier.
Segment:3 Sami Benchekroun: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Thank you very much. So I would like to talk about the pre-prints, basically. So I would like to basically go even earlier than the pre-print. And I would like to start with just a quick question that helped me to understand how basically researchers find very early results, right? So first signals, first ideas. And the question is, how do we look for the latest information these days?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I tend to Google everything. So we type everything into Google, whether the results from the opera yesterday or the soccer results. Everything that happens is being found on Google. So you have all the results there. And such an easy tool to use for us, to really be always, always, always up to date. But it seems like in research, the Google results-- at least if you filter it by novelty or by news-- it looks a little bit like that.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So everything that happens in that time frame of 0 to three years-- before pre-print or before a published article-- we cannot really find it. It's not really made accessible on a common platform or in a way that I can actually easily access it. So accessing that scholarly content more upstream is extremely difficult for researchers. And we have talked with a lot of researchers.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I would love to take you on a journey, on a short journey, with that researcher, here, to see how she's doing research. So the two elements-- and we've heard it earlier. There's a lot of discussion in the local communities or with other researchers. That's one of the most important parts in the research process. And one second element, obviously, as you all know, is the literature review. So what we see is all of these elements somewhat happen on the right side.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So I like to see that as kind of a process of research. It's going up and down. You're throwing away things during your research. But the vast majority of the process is absolutely hidden, or at least hard to access. So the part that is accessible is on the right side when it comes to publications and pre-prints. But we actually know by this wonderful study that keeping up to date and getting novel results is being made on scientific and academic conferences around the world.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So you go on conferences. You consume posters, presentations. You discuss. So conferences seem to be a very, very important way on getting access to the very earliest bits of the research process. But quite frankly, for most of the researchers around the world, the time is very, very much limited, and funds as well.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So it's tough to go really on conferences. Or at least on all of the conferences that I would like to be at, which is a challenge. But if you go on one of these conferences, conferences still look very much like that, right? You have a poster. It has a beautiful format. It gives you a wonderful idea. But it's still analog and offline.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: You cannot really search through these halls of posters and presentations. It's just absolutely overwhelming how many content pieces that are presented. And I would love to do the math together with you. So a researcher, on average, goes on three to four conferences. Now, going on one of these conferences, you end up being on a three to five-day conference.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And you want to consume 2000 posters. And there's more than 200 keynotes. And there's workshops and symposia. And it's just absolutely overwhelming. So there is no way in actually preparing for the conference because the content is, as you see, analog and offline. So what we did at Morressier is we looked exactly at that problem. And we are doing two things.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: The first thing that we are actually doing is we bring all the documents that are presented on a conference-- posters, presentations, abstracts-- online and make them accessible, not only after and during the conference, but also already before the conference. So a researcher can actually prepare for conference, get more out of it, and get actually through a very easy platform access to all the wonderful documents and content that is shared.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And so the platform that we have created looks a little bit like that. So you have a search interface. You have the classical filtering. It doesn't look good on the screen, but it looks good in reality. So what you see here-- so I'm just going to describe it really, really quickly. You have the overview of the poster, the presentation, and the abstract.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And what we add to that-- so not only that we put the poster and presentation online, and we make it digital in a sense. We also attribute digital object identifiers to it. So it gets part of the scholarly ecosystem. What we also do is we track interactions. And again, we don't only track interactions on the platform itself, but also on the conference. So that we see quite live, in a sense, what posters or presentations had been consumed the most, what had been shared the most.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So some sort of alternative metrics that we add to it. Now, I would love to come back to our researcher and flip the side. Because the question is, how do we get all these content pieces on that platform? So what we also do on the other side is we offer conferences and researchers a workflow tool to better manage the conference. So for the conference organizer, we give them an abstract management tool to do the peer-reviewing part.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: We offer a poster submission tool. We offer a presentation submission tool. And also for the researcher, we offer a very simple tool to upload the research poster or the presentation, which looks a little bit like that. So it's a piece of software that you can access to. You get all sorts of great information on how people are actually interacting with your documents for your dedicated conference.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And what we also offer is on the conference itself, we have that beautiful iPad app if conferences want to use it. So conference posters actually get digital on the conference itself-- not only the paper posters, but also in a digital format. So just to look into where we are with our development at Morressier, we are roughly three to four years old. And we grew quite nicely during the last years.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we keep on growing, so the platform of posters and presentations actually increases. And the most interesting part and the most exciting part, actually, is now we started to connect posters and presentations to the published version. And we actually managed to do it-- right now, it's still a small amount of posters-- in a very automated way. So we are scanning through the paper and trying to find the right-- the poster or the presentation on our platform, so that we can quite nicely go step-by-step.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: That poster has been presented at that conference. Then there was a next iteration. Then there was a presentation. Then there was maybe a pre-print. And there was a published article. So this is one of the examples that is quite exciting. So the idea of all of that-- and this is how we see, basically, the process-- is we work towards a world where that hidden part is not really hidden anymore, but really accessible.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So that throughout the research process, from the first idea of the research over to the first poster, the second poster presentation, towards the published article, you can really see the creation process. So that also other researchers all around the world can get access to every single step in the process. So right now, we are covering a great amount of conferences in health and medical sciences.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: But it shouldn't stop there. So we already started working with other conferences. So the structure of conferences throughout the world looks quite similar. And we're actually quite happy about that. And our mission and what we strongly believe is that if the access tools-- these first bits in the research process-- is given to all the researchers, we can actually accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we are working towards a world where the researcher do not see the blank pages in Google anymore, but actually filling it up with very, very novel things that are being shared on conferences around the world. So thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions and discussions. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:4 Q&A: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Sami. John and Tracy, want to come back up to the stage? I'm happy to take questions from folks in the room. In the back, first.
AUDIENCE: John, this question is for you. This is Glenn Landis from the American Society of Hematology. Thank you for presenting. Congratulations on all your work. Especially the eight million downloads a month is incredible.
JOHN INGLIS: I think six, actually.
AUDIENCE: Six million? I can't read from this far. As you know, I've seen you and Richard present that over the years, many different meetings. If I took a step back and didn't see this presentation and only heard about bioRxiv today, I guess I would not call you a pre-print place or a pre-print server. I would just call you a mega publisher. With the experiments you're doing, with the partnership with ASAPbio, with the peer review, with the comments and the technology that you're presenting.
AUDIENCE: Is that what you consider yourself now?
JOHN INGLIS: No, absolutely not. I mean, we've made it something of a fetish of saying-- semantics matter, right? So when we talk about the appearance of a manuscript on bioRxiv, we talk about posting. We never talk about publishing. Because as far as we're concerned, publishing is what journals do. And that incorporates the process of peer review. Now, I didn't want to-- I perhaps confused matters by alluding enigmatically to this transparent peer review experiment.
JOHN INGLIS: But it's like I said, it's a joint venture. And I don't want to talk about it until we've all decided when we're going to mention it publicly. But I want to emphasize that the experiments are being done by journals on the bioRxiv platform. They're not experiments that are being done by bioRxiv. But these are journals that are interested in connecting the review process to an early-- to this stage of a manuscript that it was at when it was submitted to a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: So it's their experiment. And the six or so organizations involved are going to actually implement this in slightly different ways. But I want to emphasize that all that bioRxiv is doing is providing a platform for those experiments. We are very, very eager to make the point that bioRxiv is a pre-print platform. It is not a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: And it is not a publication process.
AUDIENCE: Hi, John. David Crotty, Oxford University Press. I think I ask you this question--
JOHN INGLIS: You do.
AUDIENCE: --that same thing every time you give a talk.
JOHN INGLIS: I know. You do.
AUDIENCE: --is that--
JOHN INGLIS: And I always say the same thing.
AUDIENCE: But you keep doing new things. And I think there's a continuously blurring line between posting and publishing. And traditionally, as you say, the idea of a pre-print is it hasn't gone through this formal peer review, editorial review process. But with this paper that Richard and several others wrote, if you're adding badges to a pre-print that says, "The statistical analysis done in this paper has been reviewed and is valid." And a badge that says, "We have reviewed all of the figures in this paper.
AUDIENCE: And they are not manipulated. They are valid, accurate figures." How is that any different from a paper that's published in a mega-journal-- in a PLOS One, Scientific Reports-- where the paper has been reviewed strictly for accuracy? And the analysis is accurate. The figures are accurate. Is that now a published paper?
AUDIENCE: And why would I want to put that in my journal, if it's already been previously through that formal review process and publicly declared to have been reviewed in that manner?
JOHN INGLIS: I was very tempted when showing my disclosure slide to say that I gave the head chef of the Scholarly Kitchen his first job in publishing. And then you could tell me afterwards whether that was a good thing or not. And he's just proved why it was a very bad thing. So to answer your question, David, first of all, I think we could agree that journals struggle with certain aspects of validation, image manipulation being one of them, statistical checking being another.
JOHN INGLIS: And there are attempts to improve this. But I think we could agree that journals don't always do a very good job. So I see the idea-- and we haven't done it, yet. This is all just a discussion. But I think that a pre-print server, by offering the opportunity for a very broad community to weigh in on statistics or image manipulation or whatever it happens to be, that's a good thing.
JOHN INGLIS: I think that's a good thing for the community. I think it's a good thing for authors. And I think it's a good thing for journals, too, because it adds reassurance. And it slightly takes the pressure off them to do it themselves. So that's the kind of thinking that we are using in relation to the badging thing. It is not an attempt to supplant what a journal does.
JOHN INGLIS: A journal might want to go much further, for example, in doing all of these things. And then those things like disclosures, conflict of interest statements, data availability, et cetera, et cetera-- things that journals do, that pre-print servers do not. Although I should say that medRxiv has taken a few steps in that direction, which we felt was a responsible thing to do because it's medical information.
JOHN INGLIS: So I mean, I get your point. I get your anxiety. Obviously, things are shifting to some extent. But I think we are very, very conscious in all of the decisions that we try to make about where bioRxiv goes of maintaining that critical distinction, it seems to me, between what a pre-print server does and what a journal does.
AUDIENCE: Thanks, everyone. Rod Cookson from IWA Publishing. Three very interesting talks. I had-- sorry-- two questions for you, John. The first of those is, did you know who's reading bioRxiv? And is it very different from the people that read the CHSL press journals? Are you reaching a sort of broader community?
JOHN INGLIS: That's a great question, Rod. I wish I knew the answer to that. I mean, all we know are data from downloads and page views and so on. We collect no information at all on readers. So we have no idea.
AUDIENCE: But usage is high, which is good. And second question-- we've been thinking about a pre-print in our area-- pre-print server. Now that bioRxiv's maturing, do you have any kind of ballpark idea of what a sort of unit cost for running a pre-print server is when you get to scale? Because that's one of the many questions at the back of our mind. Were we to be successful, how big does the this is the price ticket get in the end?
JOHN INGLIS: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair question, Rod, and one you obviously do have to answer. But you know, if you talk to any of the journal publishers here and-- well, you are a journal publisher, too. And you say, well, how much does a paper cost you to publish? And the answer is it depends, right? It depends what you put in there. And I would say the same thing. I mean, I'm very reluctant to put numbers around costs because we are very fortunate to have very generous support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which we spend every dime.
JOHN INGLIS: But then the laboratory also supports the server as well. I mean, CZI doesn't pay my salary, for example. So there are many ways of looking at that. And I think it's exactly the same argument that goes into this question of do journal publishers make outrageous profits? Because look, it only costs x to publish a paper. Well, when there is public discussion of those costs, it becomes apparent it's not as simple as that.
JOHN INGLIS: So sorry not to answer your question. But I used a lot of words.
AUDIENCE: Thanks. I have a question for Sami. You do a great job of talking about the importance of-- the enduring value of research in abstracts and posters and so forth. But I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about how Morressier is different from a lot of the other services that have existed doing the same thing for a long time?
AUDIENCE: Things like Confacts and Oasis and SCAR1 and MiraSMART and all the other tools in this space. What makes yours different?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Thank you for the question. So essentially, we looked at the market. And how we saw things were moving is that there were two separate worlds. So you had the world of scientific conferences, and you had the world of conference organization. And you had the world of publication. And I don't know. Someone said it earlier. But in a sense, the publishing part of a society-- I think you said it-- and the conference part, the communication somehow is not there.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we saw that as well in that area. So what I believe makes us different is actually the attempt to bring these worlds together. To support scientific conferences on the one hand side and give them also the tools that are used on the other side and on the publication side. For example, DOIs-- a very simple example. But until now, there was not a service that gave to posters and presentations DOIs at scale.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: That hasn't been done because the conference world didn't know what the value of a DOI is, et cetera. So I believe that is the main point, here. That we are bridging the gaps between these two worlds that were long kind of separate from one another. And we make beautiful software as well.
SPEAKER 1: We have time for one last question.
AUDIENCE: Just also feel like I have to be fair and ask Tracy a question. I might have missed it. Did you touch on expert networks as part of things that societies are thinking about?
TRACY GARDNER: No, I didn't, actually. But that was an oversight because that is something that we are talking to quite a lot of societies about. So I think that is where, certainly, they are really wanting to add value. And I think that's where a society can bring their expertise, their knowledge, their communities. And that's where they can add value. So it was an oversight, actually. And after I'd handed my slides in, I thought, oh, I missed an opportunity to cover that.
TRACY GARDNER: But, no. It's something that's coming out quite strongly. And we're talking to a lot of societies about it. Because I think absolutely, that's just totally in their space. It's about building community. And that's a perfect way of doing so.
SPEAKER 1: Well, Tracy, John, Sami, thank you very much. That was an excellent session. So, folks, [APPLAUSE] --round of applause.
Segment:1 Tracy Gardner: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
TRACY GARDNER: Thanks for having me here today. So I'm talking about what societies are doing in capturing more of the research lifecycle. When we first started talking about this and putting this program together, I think I was raising the question with Will on the panel-- why? Why would you want to capture more of the research, right? This life cycle?
TRACY GARDNER: It's something that we're talking about a lot in this industry. But the first part of this presentation is just about taking a bit of a step back. So firstly, just a few words about us. We're a UK-based consultancy. There's four of us in the organization. We have worked in various departments. We've got many, many years combined experience-- I didn't like to add them all up-- within publishing.
TRACY GARDNER: And our core client base are societies. We work with vendors as well. And we work with commercial publishers, independent publishers. But at the moment, I would say that about 80% of our client base is societies. We're really busy at the minute. I say we're probably doing quite well from what we like to call the Plan S Panic.
TRACY GARDNER: So we're doing OK out of that at the moment. So why do we want to capture more of the lifecycle? And I do apologize to John Shaw if he's in the room because I noticed he asked this question a number of times in his presentation yesterday. He said, what problem is it are we trying to solve? I didn't pinch that from him. I'd written these slides before he spoke. But I think it's a really, really important point that we need to keep getting back to.
TRACY GARDNER: We need to keep asking ourselves the question, what is it we're trying to do? What are we tried to solve? And where is the value? So one of the first questions we ask when clients come to us-- when societies come to us with a problem, essentially, because that's why they come to consultants-- is what are you all about?
TRACY GARDNER: Is it about mission or money? And I can guarantee the first answer will be, oh, it's all about the mission. We're all about the mission. But of course, it can't be all about the mission because your mission needs financial services to be able to support it. So it has to be about the money as well. So it's about balancing out where the mission is and where the money's coming from to achieve that mission.
TRACY GARDNER: So if we just take a step back in time, the purpose of journals were originally to disseminate research. So they were very mission-based in the good old days. That's what they were for. They've become about financial stability for societies. And predominately my experience is with societies. And that's what I'm calling on, here. So the journals program has become about financial stability for societies.
TRACY GARDNER: They are providing the finances for the rest of the society to do what it is they need to do. So whilst the society's aims are generally all about mission-- they are about mission. We can talk about some of the missions that they've got in a moment. The journal aims are normally about the money. And this creates a problem in an open-access world. I can't see those slides, so I'm going to have to look up there.
TRACY GARDNER: So how to solve that problem will be different for everybody. So we're in an OA world. We've got mission on one side. We've got money on the other side. We've got pressure on us to make everything open access. So what are we going to do to solve that problem? So one thing that it comes back to quite often is new products and new innovations.
TRACY GARDNER: But we need to, again, take a step back and try to figure out what it is we're trying to do. So that's what we ask of societies. And that's just taking you through a bit of a process of when people come to us, they come with what they think there was an initial project. And we like to take a step back and go through that process. So mapping some society goals is really important to understanding what it is they're trying to achieve for their user base, for their membership base, because there's no point in creating a whole load of products that don't actually meet those missions and those goals for an organization.
TRACY GARDNER: So there was just a number here. There's probably more. Some of those are more relevant in some subject areas. So, you know, CME-- obviously really, really crucial in the medical space. But increasingly in the engineering space and other professional societies as well are trying to professionalize and create content that supports the education of their members as well.
TRACY GARDNER: Some societies will have very much a global aim, that they want to support their global community. They may want to support the public. They might want to further the public's understanding of that science. So it very much differs depending on the society we're talking to, depending on the subject area, whether we're talking social sciences or STM or the medical sector.
TRACY GARDNER: So getting back to basics and understanding what the society is trying to do. Can everyone see that? They're messed up. Sorry about that. So I'll read them out. So clearly, a society needs money to be able to fulfill its mission.
TRACY GARDNER: So you need money. So that's what you need to work out-- how you're going to get that money. And it's all about, for them, and I know in future, responsibility is going to have to be shared between the community. So within a society, when we start talking to them about what they're going to do, about Plan S, et cetera.
TRACY GARDNER: We think about, we ask questions about, how do you interact with the rest of the society? And quite often, the answer that we get is that we don't. We don't answer. We don't really react. We don't really connect particularly well with the rest of the society. So one thing that we're very keen on doing is encouraging them to start embracing the mission from a society point of view.
TRACY GARDNER: So we've been in situations where we're talking to the publications team within a society. And they don't even really know the conference team. They don't know the events team. They don't really have any communication with memberships. Now, there may be some societies in this room. And you say that's not true of our society. Were very un-siloed.
TRACY GARDNER: We work very collegially. But I know there are some societies that don't work like that. And they say, actually, yeah, that's a problem-- being very, very siloed. Publications team generally seen as being supporting the organization, the society's missions, financially. And the rest of the society is seen as doing all the community stuff.
TRACY GARDNER: That's going to have to change. The whole society is going to have to embrace the mission. So I have got a bit of a plug here for a conference that we have founded. It's been running for two years in the UK. It's running next year in DC and in London. And it's all about embracing the mission. And what we're trying to do is attract not just publishing people to this conference.
TRACY GARDNER: We're trying to attract society leaders. Because we think that in order to survive, the whole society is going to have to embrace the mission. So essentially, societies need to see the current disruption as an opportunity, really, to take a step back and think about what you're doing. So when we talk about the Plan S panic-- when people come to us, and they are worrying about the future-- we're not saying there's nothing to worry about.
TRACY GARDNER: There clearly is. But you've got time to take a step back and think about what it is you're trying to do. So essentially, that's just kind of how we work with people. And it's trying to be encouraging, actually, to say there are new opportunities out there. So, just a few slides here on what's new. I can't really give case studies because some of these ideas are ideas that we are discussing with current clients.
TRACY GARDNER: Some of them are not our clients' ideas. They're just out there in the community that we know about. So they're not at case-study stage yet. They are just some ideas of how people have started to think about capturing more of that research lifecycle in order to meet the society's overall aims and missions. So if the world is all OA, you obviously can't sell the content.
TRACY GARDNER: And no matter how many times you look at a spreadsheet to work about how you're going to flip a journal from a subscription model to an OA model, the spreadsheet isn't going to give you those numbers that you want it to do. I mean, we've done it ourselves for clients. We keep looking. And we're like, it's not going to work. We can't make it work.
TRACY GARDNER: So what else can you do? What else can you sell on top of that as a publisher? So what can you layer on top? So a few people that we're talking to at the moment, it's about selling tools on top of that content. This requires, clearly, standards in the industry. It goes back to what Anne was saying yesterday about the fact that there is no identifier that people have to put into their XMLs to say something is open access.
TRACY GARDNER: So clearly, we need standards. We need data. We need infrastructure to be able to support this innovation. But if we had that, you could build tools on top of OA data. So GeoScienceWorld, I know it's a Silverchair client. They do this already with one of their products. How about if you were publishing in plant diseases or medical health problems across the world?
TRACY GARDNER: You could easily map where that research is coming from, where disease outbreaks were coming from, across the world. And you could produce that on top of all the OA literature. You could map pesticides and entomology and see if there's any links between that and sell that tool on top of that content if it was all OA. There's probably so many social science ideas that you could use to do this. So think about sending tools, not content.
TRACY GARDNER: In the future, when all content is free, we have to think of another way of making that money. Again, apologies for the fact that my font's gone wrong on these slides. So the published article is sometimes the combination of years and years of-- we've been hearing just now. It's the combination of years of research. So we need to be more research-focused, not article-focused.
TRACY GARDNER: We're so focused on the final published output-- the article. And as we've been hearing, now, they're fed up with it. At our point, they're done. They want to move on. So we need to move on from an article focus to a research focus. And that is about capturing more of that lifecycle of that research.
TRACY GARDNER: So capture conference papers-- the gray literature. I'm not going to talk about pre-prints because I know John is going to talk about pre-prints after me. But data, impact statements, reports, links with the original article-- it's all out there. We know it's all being produced and have publishers. And society's got a role in packaging that up and producing that to further the aims of their society, further their aims of research.
TRACY GARDNER: Additionally, you can include editorially generated content. So we're talking about blogs and podcasts and video content that actually makes all of that research much more accessible. So if you have a mission to educate the general public about what it is you're doing, then why not package that all up and layer it over with some blog posts or some video statements about impact? So, making that content more accessible. Becoming less about the published article, but more about the whole research.
TRACY GARDNER: Support your members' careers. Again, CME, this is a really important service that they provide. Many societies provide CME programs to their users. But there's applications for CPD and continuing professional development in other sectors as well. So we're talking to an engineering client right now about how to do this.
TRACY GARDNER: How to use content that's already out there. How to use OA content, how to repurpose it, and how to professionalize their members' careers through some kind of accreditation within the societies. So you're supporting the society's mission. You're supporting the aims. You're also capturing more of that research and using it in a very effective way.
TRACY GARDNER: So we're talking to quite a few people about how they can do that and how they can package all that up to provide education, so it meets that mission. Conferences-- I could probably talk a whole paper on conferences and the power of conferences and the value that they have. So a researcher, before they publish their article, they will be at a conference.
TRACY GARDNER: There will be poster sessions. There will be conference sessions. So packaging that up with the final published article is important. But additionally, conferences and events can provide a really significant additional revenue stream. They already do. And that's a really important revenue stream. But then working together with the publications team and packaging that up, I think, is going to be really important.
TRACY GARDNER: You need a really, really sound video streaming functionality. You need good e-commerce. But most of all, you need to be working collegially within your organization, within your society, to be able to do that. So the publishing team and the events team were working very, very closely together to think about maybe putting thematic packages of content together, maybe based around a particular author.
TRACY GARDNER: Once you've got your data and once you've got your content properly tagged and once you've got a platform that can offer you a way of packaging up these different types of format of content, then you can see how you can start providing access and supporting your society's mission by producing all of this for your members. So I think conferences are really, really going to be important.
TRACY GARDNER: And working with the conference team within your publications team is going to be key. This might be quite provocative. It probably is. But if content is OA, why not use other people's OA content? So this is something that we're talking about with some of our societies. And one of them is actually looking at doing this right now.
TRACY GARDNER: So they are in the life-sciences space. They're very, very niche. A lot of the content in that space is already open-access. So if you've got standards in place, if there's an identify, if there's somewhere that we know that there's a TCBY license in the XML header, then it's very easy to mine something like Crossref to actually pull in all of the OA content. So why not become the discovery layer?
TRACY GARDNER: So it's impossible to become a discovery layer in the subscription world because you, as a publisher, don't own access to all of that content. You can't provide a discovery layer on top of that content because it's all behind access control. But when access control goes away, there are endless possibilities of how you do that. So using all the OA content that's out there and providing a discovery layer actually then becomes something that's worth talking about again.
TRACY GARDNER: So a few years ago, we were talking to our clients about there's no point trying to be the discovery layer. You can't own. You don't have critical mass in that area. There are other discovery layers that are big. I mean, you're not going to beat Google and PubMed and the library. But you could provide that service for your members. So OA, see it as an opportunity.
TRACY GARDNER: You can then add the tools that we were talking about earlier on top of that. And then that becomes a really powerful proposition. Clearly this doesn't come without investment. So I'll get to that in a moment. You may wish to collaborate with others. And I know Lauren talked about this, again yesterday, about collaboration. I think collaboration is really difficult in this space.
TRACY GARDNER: I think it's hard enough to get a society to collaborate with other members of the team within a society. So to try and get some societies to convince their governance and to convince their treasurer and to convince the people who hold some of the power within society to try and break down those silos and that years and years of this is the way we've done things, it's really hard to collaborate within a society.
TRACY GARDNER: There's real challenges to try and get more than one society to do that together. But there is opportunity. If you can overcome that, perhaps there are other societies in your space that you can buddy up with and provide that service. Or you may just wish you don't want to do it. Actually, you've got the power. And you're going to do that.
TRACY GARDNER: You're going to go alone in that. We did a really, really bad job of marketing and promoting this white paper that we did last year. We wrote it. We spent ages on it. We wrote it. We put it out there. And then we didn't take any of our own advice.
TRACY GARDNER: And then we didn't market it. So it's here. So we did this last year. It was a landscape review. It's packed full of ideas and case studies about how people are using videos and podcasts, which really lends itself really well to this presentation because all of it is about capturing more of that lifecycle.
TRACY GARDNER: So this is about embracing new channels. But it's also about harnessing the power of the personality. You know, we live in a personality-driven world. There will be authors, there will be researchers in your space that are happy to be on camera, happy to do podcasts. We know podcasts are a really underused medium, I think. I think ASM reported something like 10 million downloads of their podcasts.
TRACY GARDNER: We know that they're a really popular channel for education. Next to comedy, education is the next important genre for podcasts. So people listen to them in the car. They listen to them when they're waiting for their kids, when they've dropped them at gym. If done well-- and they need to be done well. You need a really engaging speaker. They're a really powerful way of engaging with your community and getting that information out there.
TRACY GARDNER: So I would say I'm not going to go into too much of it now. There are a huge amount of examples in that report. It's free. I'm not selling it. But please just go and have a look at it. So embrace the mission, I think, is the whole take-home message of this. Really, don't panic.
TRACY GARDNER: There's no point panicking. The future is going to be what the future is, and we need to think really, really innovatively and creatively about how we can address some of those issues that are facing us. You need to identify your goals. And you may need to be brave. I mean, I think there needs to be an honest discussion within societies that the publications are not going to be the cash cow any longer, and this is a problem.
TRACY GARDNER: This is not just a problem for the publications department to solve. This is a problem for the society to solve as a whole. So you're going to need to tackle some internal barriers. We're working really hard with some societies on helping them tackle those internal barriers. Because they've been there for sometimes hundreds of years, it's very difficult to overcome them. But if you don't, you're not going to succeed.
TRACY GARDNER: That's the take-home message for that. You're going to need to take some risks. And I know we're a very risk-averse community. We're very conservative. We don't like taking risks. But we are facing real challenges and disruption. And disruption requires some risk-taking. So I didn't have any more of these mugs. They were really popular at London, but fair.
TRACY GARDNER: Everyone just wanted them. We were really delighted with them. But if I had, I'd have brought them here. So yeah, keep calm. Come to our Society Street Conference if you are a society. I've left some postcards on the desk. I did ask Jake if that was OK if I could do that. Have a look at our streaming video.
TRACY GARDNER: And please feel free to email me with any questions.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much, Tracy. [APPLAUSE] I'm very sorry about the slide formatting.
TRACY GARDNER: Oh, it's OK.
SPEAKER 1: It's one of those things. You never know how it works. Next up is John Inglis from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. I was going to try to get that out.
Segment:2 John Inglis: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
JOHN INGLIS: Thank you. So can I read my slides? Just about. Well, good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much to Silverchair for the invitation to address this formidable audience. I come from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is about 30 miles from here-- 100-year-old institution with a long commitment to both doing research and educating in science and communicating science in a whole variety of ways.
JOHN INGLIS: I do several things at this particular institution, which I've listed here. But in particular, I'm here because of my role as a founder with my colleague Richard Sever of two pre-print services, which I'm going to say a little bit more about. And I have various other involvements in other organizations. A pre-print, as I'm sure you know, is a research manuscript that has not yet been published or, in fact, to be accurate, has not yet been accepted by a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: And a pre-print server, when I use that term, I mean a website essentially devoted exclusively to the distribution of pre-prints. Pre-prints have been around for a long time-- for about 30 years-- initiated by the physics, mathematics, and computer science community and followed then by social science. That's the archive, the famous archive.
JOHN INGLIS: Followed by the social science research network around the same sort of time and the French repository, HAL. But in the last six years, there's been a proliferation of servers serving different parts of the scholarly landscape, sometimes with a country-specific focus, sometimes with a discipline or sub-discipline focus. This is an out-of-date slide. There are now approaching 50 of these things.
JOHN INGLIS: And their volume is increasing. This, too, is slightly out of date. But I was grateful to Crossref for this provision of these data. This is just an example of what's happening at one locus of pre-print servers, the Center for Open Science, where they have 26 pre-print servers. And you can see an increase in volume. On a monthly basis, their acquisition of new content has trebled in the past year across all of the COS servers.
JOHN INGLIS: ChemRxiv, which has about 2,500 manuscripts at this point-- and this shows growth in usage. And bioRxiv is growing at the rate of about 2,500 manuscripts a month at this point. We have about 60,000 manuscripts and a lot of authors from many institutions in a large number of countries, very gratifyingly. Usage of bioRxiv is also going up.
JOHN INGLIS: We recently brought in full text HTML of all pre-prints. And the usage of that component of the server is going up to roughly 6 million page views and downloads a month. A couple of years into the life of bioRxiv, Harlan Krumholz and Eric Topol, prominent members of the medical community, published an op-ed in The New York Times, basically saying that medicine needs a bio archive.
JOHN INGLIS: So we embarked on a pilot, introducing two subject categories from medicine-- clinical trials and epidemiology. We ran that for a number of years and convinced ourselves that medicine, too, could support a pre-print server. And so just in June of this year, we launched medRxiv. It's owned and operated by the laboratory. But it is managed in partnership with Yale and BMJ.
JOHN INGLIS: So we have a six-person management team-- two people deeply embedded in medical publishing and two professors of medicine and Richard and myself. And those conversations about individual manuscripts are terribly interesting. So we have posted about 320 manuscripts to date. I don't really have time to go into the nuts and bolts of how these pre-print servers work. But I do want to make the point that not all pre-print servers work the same way.
JOHN INGLIS: And there are variations of all kinds-- for-profit or not-for-profit, the degree of financial support that an individual server may or may not have. Whether it's publisher-centric, which means that essentially the publisher is posting a pre-print version of a manuscript. Or if it's publisher-neutral, which is the term we use to describe bioRxiv and medRxiv. Submission requirements vary.
JOHN INGLIS: Permitted article types vary. We, for example, do not post review articles, but other servers do. And also a very important issue is whether one can post to a pre-print server an actually published journal article. bioRxiv and medRxiv and ChemRxiv do not permit that. But many of the other servers do. There are differences in licensing choices, screening procedures, withdrawal, removal-- all of these are the nuts and bolts of how servers operate, which we could talk about later if you'd like to.
JOHN INGLIS: I'm going to focus on the extent of the integration of pre-print servers with the rest of the scholarly ecosystem. And after I made that slide, this wonderful document was posted yesterday morning. So I recommend this if you have an interest in this subject. It's a very deep dive into the current state of pre-prints and pre-print servers. A very fair account, I think.
JOHN INGLIS: And these are the take-home messages. Essentially, that there are benefits to pre-prints. There are concerns of a variety of sorts about pre-prints themselves, and also about the severs that distribute them. The role of Twitter is important. And in the long term, there are a number of questions about where prepayment servers are going to go. So I recommend that.
JOHN INGLIS: My focus for this part of the presentation is really on what publishers are doing in response to the advent of pre-prints in new disciplines of science or scholarship. And I would group those responses into these three categories-- facilitation, integration, and experimentation. So facilitation basically takes on a whole variety of forms.
JOHN INGLIS: One very important one is the fact that journals, particularly over the last six years, have been willing to make much more explicit their policies when it comes to the consideration of manuscripts that have been placed on a pre-print server. That was not the case when bioRxiv began. We did a good deal of advocacy one-on-one with societies, with journal editors. And that was extremely helpful.
JOHN INGLIS: And now I think it's actually quite hard to find journals in the biomedical space that have a policy that says we won't consider a pre-printed manuscript. And this week the brand-new editor of the New England Journal of Medicine gave an interview to STAT News in which he indicated that, as a scientist, he had put material on bioRxiv.
JOHN INGLIS: So we have some hopes that this may presage a change in the policy of The New England Journal when it comes to this kind of decision. And if that happens at NEJM, then perhaps there will be a knock-on effect throughout the world of medical journals, too. Scooping protection is something that a few journals have, which essentially says if we are considering your manuscript, and another paper is published while we are considering your manuscript, then we won't care about that.
JOHN INGLIS: We'll continue to review the paper. And it will end up however it ends up. EMBO Press have decided to extend this scooping protection to pre-prints. And there are other publishers that are considering the same thing. I should say just in passing that if I call out particular examples, it's because they are on the top of my mind.
JOHN INGLIS: This is not a comprehensive attempt to identify all the actors in this space. So forgive me if I miss out your organization or your favorite project. Another form of facilitation comes from journals that encourage their office to deposit a manuscript on a pre-print server while submitting that manuscript to the journal. At bioRxiv we have now-- I think it's about 40 journals that are doing this-- about 15 to 20 publishers.
JOHN INGLIS: And at the moment, that contribution amounts to about 15% of all the manuscripts that are posted on bioRxiv each month. And that proportion is rising. Another part of this integration is that if a journal publishes a paper that has had a pre-print version, then a certain number of journals will link back to that paper-- back to the pre-print to indicate something of the journey that that manuscript has undertaken.
JOHN INGLIS: And then, of course, there are societies that group together to start pre-print servers. I'm thinking of ChemRxiv. I'm also thinking of the earth and space science open archive, open research archive. And those are serious contributions to the growth of pre-prints in those particular disciplines. And then finally, there is at least one example, namely Cambridge University Press, that has used its own journal publishing platform-- adapted it for the purpose of a pre-print server on behalf of the American Political Science Association.
JOHN INGLIS: So that's what I would call facilitation. Integration is a little bit different. It starts from-- and this has happened from the absolute beginning of bioRxiv. That entrepreneurial editors troll through the manuscripts that they find on a pre-print server and approach authors about the possibility of submission. This has been formalized by at least two journals. PLOS Genetics is one.
JOHN INGLIS: And one of The Royal Society journals, who actually have pre-print editors whose jobs it is to scout for those kinds of promising manuscripts. But we know this is happening informally a great deal. We have made it possible for the author of a pre-print to transfer it directly into the submission system of a journal. And we have about 150 journals that are set up to receive those submissions.
JOHN INGLIS: We are transferring, at this point, somewhere around 300 manuscripts a month. And that is growing. We work with the manuscript handling systems. And I am very delighted to say that ScholarOne has recently come on board. And there will be, I think, a growth in the number of journals that we can offer to the bioRxiv office in that sense.
JOHN INGLIS: There are numerous conversations about enhancing the process of peer review by trying to capture the conversations that go on around the pre-print versions of a submitted manuscript. At the moment, we don't have the technology. It's an informal process. It basically means that the handling editors are looking on Twitter or looking on the comments section of bioRxiv to see if they can get some sense of what the community thinks about this manuscript.
JOHN INGLIS: And we're trying to figure out ways in which we could make this more efficient. We have one instance on bioRxiv of a badge which comes from a collaboration with The American Society for Microbiology, who tell us when they have decided to accept for publication a manuscript that's on bioRxiv. So there is a badge that says, essentially, "accepted." And then we also make links from the pre-print version of a manuscript to the published version.
JOHN INGLIS: And that's the product of a script that we run on Crossref and PubMed that makes those links automatically. And about 70% of what appears on bioRxiv finds its way into the journal literature within a couple of years. And then finally, a somewhat vexing question is that of how do you cite pre-prints? And really, there are no agreed conventions about this.
JOHN INGLIS: I think we probably are seeing the end of the days when a pre-print citation was changed by copy editors into "personal communication." We would love to have someone seed a discussion about how pre-prints should be cited in a more standard sort of way. And if anybody would like to have that conversation, we'd be delighted to be part of it. Finally, this question of experiments.
JOHN INGLIS: There are a number of things that publishers are doing in a tentative or early-stage way that I wanted to call out in this section. The first author-independent pre-print assessment-- what I'm thinking of there is something called preLights, which is a project of a company of biologists in Cambridge. They have recruited a large number of early-career researchers, who window into bioRxiv and say, I would like to write a commentary on this particular paper.
JOHN INGLIS: It's something that happens independently of authors. But the authors have a chance to respond. So there's a growing number of these commentaries. And there's a good deal of back-and-forth between the commentator and the authors concerned. This seems like a win-win project for all concerned. The early-career researchers get a chance to demonstrate their critical abilities. They get the chance to practice doing peer reviews.
JOHN INGLIS: And the authors benefit from the community response. And there are one or two other projects of a similar sort being run, not by publishers, but by independent groups. Journal-independent Portable Pre-print Peer Review-- there must be an acronym in there somewhere. This is something which has not formally been announced yet. But I know that a number of publishers in the room are aware of this.
JOHN INGLIS: It's a project that has been initiated by EMBO in collaboration with ASAPbio. And essentially, that's what it is. It's journal-independent peer review. They propose to take pre-prints, solicit reviews, which are then given to the authors, who can then take those reviews with their manuscript when they submit it to a journal. And there are, I think, around a dozen journals-- as I say, several represented in the room, here-- who have declared a willingness to accept those kinds of submissions.
JOHN INGLIS: So that will be formally announced, I think, in the next few days. This week, PNAS published a paper by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Marcia McNutt, Veronique Kiermer, and my colleague Richard Sever that came out of a meeting that we ran at Cold Spring Harbor last year about signals of trust-- going back to the previous research panel-- signals of trust in science.
JOHN INGLIS: But particularly in pre-prints, a group of us are considering how to incorporate badges to show that statistics have been checked, for example, or images have been analyzed for manipulation. The Center for Open Science already-- they have been a bit of a pioneer in badging. They are doing this with some of their outputs. And we are thinking about ways in which we might adapt and approach that.
JOHN INGLIS: Another thing that is going to be announced in the next few days is an enhancement of so-called transparent peer review. It will be adapted and applied to pre-print versions of manuscripts. I don't want to say too much about it here because there will be an announcement. This involves collaboration with about six or seven other organizations.
JOHN INGLIS: And you'll be hearing more about that in the next week or so. And then there is this question of overlay journals, which do not exist yet, around bioRxiv. But the archive and HAL have had such entities for a long time. Essentially, the pre-print lives on the pre-print server. The commentary, the peer review, lives on a separate project server.
JOHN INGLIS: That process of evaluation has the weight and authority of a journal. So this is deemed to be a publication. And we've seen this in math. We've seen it in physics. We have not seen this in biomedicine yet. But I know there are plenty of people who are thinking about it. So just finally, a few developments that might enhance how publishers feel about pre-prints.
JOHN INGLIS: One is in rich content. We are planning to incorporate streaming video into bioRxiv. We're also trying to figure out how to bring in things like output from Jupyter Notebooks and runable software of that kind. New content input-- by that, I mean essentially we have a group of people who are really itching to get away from a reliance on Word and PDFs and send us XML.
JOHN INGLIS: So we'll see how that goes. We're talking with a number of indexing organizations, who are looking to incorporate pre-prints into what they're already doing for the journal literature. Semantic Scholar is one. And others, who are still sort of under wraps at this point. And we are planning to release on a routine basis the XML for each pre-print plus the corpus of all the 60,000 that we have already, so that that will be available for text and data mining and other kinds of experiments that publishers might want to run.
JOHN INGLIS: And that will be aided in part by the development of better APIs than we currently have. So basically, I think Paul Ginsparg, the founder of arXiv, observed once-- because arXiv started with particle physics. And it spread gradually through the other sub-disciplines of physics. And Paul observed a number of years ago that no community that has embarked on the embrace of pre-prints has ever gone back.
JOHN INGLIS: So if we are to believe that, I think pre-prints are here to stay. There are many questions about the future, which are indicated in that report. However, what is clear is that both authors and readers see benefits to this early release of research results. And they see it as a contribution to accelerating science. So it's a good thing.
JOHN INGLIS: However, peer review is still, by every survey of academics that's ever been done, a pillar of the scholarly publishing process. And at least as far as we're concerned, a pre-print survey is not an attempt to overturn the system of journal publishing and the paramount importance of peer review. So we are looking to our activities as complementary to what journals are interested in doing when they want to improve, enhance, make more efficient their peer-review process.
JOHN INGLIS: And people in this room are tremendously well-placed to do those experiments and share with the rest of us what comes out of it, particularly how the research community feels about such experiments. And in addition to trying to accelerate the march of science, we see our pre-print servers as aides to this process of improving the way that the scholarly communication process works.
JOHN INGLIS: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, John. We're going to switch slides. But I'd like to welcome to the stage Sami Benchekroun from Morressier.
Segment:3 Sami Benchekroun: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Thank you very much. So I would like to talk about the pre-prints, basically. So I would like to basically go even earlier than the pre-print. And I would like to start with just a quick question that helped me to understand how basically researchers find very early results, right? So first signals, first ideas. And the question is, how do we look for the latest information these days?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I tend to Google everything. So we type everything into Google, whether the results from the opera yesterday or the soccer results. Everything that happens is being found on Google. So you have all the results there. And such an easy tool to use for us, to really be always, always, always up to date. But it seems like in research, the Google results-- at least if you filter it by novelty or by news-- it looks a little bit like that.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So everything that happens in that time frame of 0 to three years-- before pre-print or before a published article-- we cannot really find it. It's not really made accessible on a common platform or in a way that I can actually easily access it. So accessing that scholarly content more upstream is extremely difficult for researchers. And we have talked with a lot of researchers.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And I would love to take you on a journey, on a short journey, with that researcher, here, to see how she's doing research. So the two elements-- and we've heard it earlier. There's a lot of discussion in the local communities or with other researchers. That's one of the most important parts in the research process. And one second element, obviously, as you all know, is the literature review. So what we see is all of these elements somewhat happen on the right side.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So I like to see that as kind of a process of research. It's going up and down. You're throwing away things during your research. But the vast majority of the process is absolutely hidden, or at least hard to access. So the part that is accessible is on the right side when it comes to publications and pre-prints. But we actually know by this wonderful study that keeping up to date and getting novel results is being made on scientific and academic conferences around the world.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So you go on conferences. You consume posters, presentations. You discuss. So conferences seem to be a very, very important way on getting access to the very earliest bits of the research process. But quite frankly, for most of the researchers around the world, the time is very, very much limited, and funds as well.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So it's tough to go really on conferences. Or at least on all of the conferences that I would like to be at, which is a challenge. But if you go on one of these conferences, conferences still look very much like that, right? You have a poster. It has a beautiful format. It gives you a wonderful idea. But it's still analog and offline.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: You cannot really search through these halls of posters and presentations. It's just absolutely overwhelming how many content pieces that are presented. And I would love to do the math together with you. So a researcher, on average, goes on three to four conferences. Now, going on one of these conferences, you end up being on a three to five-day conference.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And you want to consume 2000 posters. And there's more than 200 keynotes. And there's workshops and symposia. And it's just absolutely overwhelming. So there is no way in actually preparing for the conference because the content is, as you see, analog and offline. So what we did at Morressier is we looked exactly at that problem. And we are doing two things.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: The first thing that we are actually doing is we bring all the documents that are presented on a conference-- posters, presentations, abstracts-- online and make them accessible, not only after and during the conference, but also already before the conference. So a researcher can actually prepare for conference, get more out of it, and get actually through a very easy platform access to all the wonderful documents and content that is shared.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And so the platform that we have created looks a little bit like that. So you have a search interface. You have the classical filtering. It doesn't look good on the screen, but it looks good in reality. So what you see here-- so I'm just going to describe it really, really quickly. You have the overview of the poster, the presentation, and the abstract.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And what we add to that-- so not only that we put the poster and presentation online, and we make it digital in a sense. We also attribute digital object identifiers to it. So it gets part of the scholarly ecosystem. What we also do is we track interactions. And again, we don't only track interactions on the platform itself, but also on the conference. So that we see quite live, in a sense, what posters or presentations had been consumed the most, what had been shared the most.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So some sort of alternative metrics that we add to it. Now, I would love to come back to our researcher and flip the side. Because the question is, how do we get all these content pieces on that platform? So what we also do on the other side is we offer conferences and researchers a workflow tool to better manage the conference. So for the conference organizer, we give them an abstract management tool to do the peer-reviewing part.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: We offer a poster submission tool. We offer a presentation submission tool. And also for the researcher, we offer a very simple tool to upload the research poster or the presentation, which looks a little bit like that. So it's a piece of software that you can access to. You get all sorts of great information on how people are actually interacting with your documents for your dedicated conference.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And what we also offer is on the conference itself, we have that beautiful iPad app if conferences want to use it. So conference posters actually get digital on the conference itself-- not only the paper posters, but also in a digital format. So just to look into where we are with our development at Morressier, we are roughly three to four years old. And we grew quite nicely during the last years.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we keep on growing, so the platform of posters and presentations actually increases. And the most interesting part and the most exciting part, actually, is now we started to connect posters and presentations to the published version. And we actually managed to do it-- right now, it's still a small amount of posters-- in a very automated way. So we are scanning through the paper and trying to find the right-- the poster or the presentation on our platform, so that we can quite nicely go step-by-step.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: That poster has been presented at that conference. Then there was a next iteration. Then there was a presentation. Then there was maybe a pre-print. And there was a published article. So this is one of the examples that is quite exciting. So the idea of all of that-- and this is how we see, basically, the process-- is we work towards a world where that hidden part is not really hidden anymore, but really accessible.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: So that throughout the research process, from the first idea of the research over to the first poster, the second poster presentation, towards the published article, you can really see the creation process. So that also other researchers all around the world can get access to every single step in the process. So right now, we are covering a great amount of conferences in health and medical sciences.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: But it shouldn't stop there. So we already started working with other conferences. So the structure of conferences throughout the world looks quite similar. And we're actually quite happy about that. And our mission and what we strongly believe is that if the access tools-- these first bits in the research process-- is given to all the researchers, we can actually accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we are working towards a world where the researcher do not see the blank pages in Google anymore, but actually filling it up with very, very novel things that are being shared on conferences around the world. So thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions and discussions. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:4 Q&A: Capturing More of the Scholarly Lifecycle to Add Value.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Sami. John and Tracy, want to come back up to the stage? I'm happy to take questions from folks in the room. In the back, first.
AUDIENCE: John, this question is for you. This is Glenn Landis from the American Society of Hematology. Thank you for presenting. Congratulations on all your work. Especially the eight million downloads a month is incredible.
JOHN INGLIS: I think six, actually.
AUDIENCE: Six million? I can't read from this far. As you know, I've seen you and Richard present that over the years, many different meetings. If I took a step back and didn't see this presentation and only heard about bioRxiv today, I guess I would not call you a pre-print place or a pre-print server. I would just call you a mega publisher. With the experiments you're doing, with the partnership with ASAPbio, with the peer review, with the comments and the technology that you're presenting.
AUDIENCE: Is that what you consider yourself now?
JOHN INGLIS: No, absolutely not. I mean, we've made it something of a fetish of saying-- semantics matter, right? So when we talk about the appearance of a manuscript on bioRxiv, we talk about posting. We never talk about publishing. Because as far as we're concerned, publishing is what journals do. And that incorporates the process of peer review. Now, I didn't want to-- I perhaps confused matters by alluding enigmatically to this transparent peer review experiment.
JOHN INGLIS: But it's like I said, it's a joint venture. And I don't want to talk about it until we've all decided when we're going to mention it publicly. But I want to emphasize that the experiments are being done by journals on the bioRxiv platform. They're not experiments that are being done by bioRxiv. But these are journals that are interested in connecting the review process to an early-- to this stage of a manuscript that it was at when it was submitted to a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: So it's their experiment. And the six or so organizations involved are going to actually implement this in slightly different ways. But I want to emphasize that all that bioRxiv is doing is providing a platform for those experiments. We are very, very eager to make the point that bioRxiv is a pre-print platform. It is not a journal.
JOHN INGLIS: And it is not a publication process.
AUDIENCE: Hi, John. David Crotty, Oxford University Press. I think I ask you this question--
JOHN INGLIS: You do.
AUDIENCE: --that same thing every time you give a talk.
JOHN INGLIS: I know. You do.
AUDIENCE: --is that--
JOHN INGLIS: And I always say the same thing.
AUDIENCE: But you keep doing new things. And I think there's a continuously blurring line between posting and publishing. And traditionally, as you say, the idea of a pre-print is it hasn't gone through this formal peer review, editorial review process. But with this paper that Richard and several others wrote, if you're adding badges to a pre-print that says, "The statistical analysis done in this paper has been reviewed and is valid." And a badge that says, "We have reviewed all of the figures in this paper.
AUDIENCE: And they are not manipulated. They are valid, accurate figures." How is that any different from a paper that's published in a mega-journal-- in a PLOS One, Scientific Reports-- where the paper has been reviewed strictly for accuracy? And the analysis is accurate. The figures are accurate. Is that now a published paper?
AUDIENCE: And why would I want to put that in my journal, if it's already been previously through that formal review process and publicly declared to have been reviewed in that manner?
JOHN INGLIS: I was very tempted when showing my disclosure slide to say that I gave the head chef of the Scholarly Kitchen his first job in publishing. And then you could tell me afterwards whether that was a good thing or not. And he's just proved why it was a very bad thing. So to answer your question, David, first of all, I think we could agree that journals struggle with certain aspects of validation, image manipulation being one of them, statistical checking being another.
JOHN INGLIS: And there are attempts to improve this. But I think we could agree that journals don't always do a very good job. So I see the idea-- and we haven't done it, yet. This is all just a discussion. But I think that a pre-print server, by offering the opportunity for a very broad community to weigh in on statistics or image manipulation or whatever it happens to be, that's a good thing.
JOHN INGLIS: I think that's a good thing for the community. I think it's a good thing for authors. And I think it's a good thing for journals, too, because it adds reassurance. And it slightly takes the pressure off them to do it themselves. So that's the kind of thinking that we are using in relation to the badging thing. It is not an attempt to supplant what a journal does.
JOHN INGLIS: A journal might want to go much further, for example, in doing all of these things. And then those things like disclosures, conflict of interest statements, data availability, et cetera, et cetera-- things that journals do, that pre-print servers do not. Although I should say that medRxiv has taken a few steps in that direction, which we felt was a responsible thing to do because it's medical information.
JOHN INGLIS: So I mean, I get your point. I get your anxiety. Obviously, things are shifting to some extent. But I think we are very, very conscious in all of the decisions that we try to make about where bioRxiv goes of maintaining that critical distinction, it seems to me, between what a pre-print server does and what a journal does.
AUDIENCE: Thanks, everyone. Rod Cookson from IWA Publishing. Three very interesting talks. I had-- sorry-- two questions for you, John. The first of those is, did you know who's reading bioRxiv? And is it very different from the people that read the CHSL press journals? Are you reaching a sort of broader community?
JOHN INGLIS: That's a great question, Rod. I wish I knew the answer to that. I mean, all we know are data from downloads and page views and so on. We collect no information at all on readers. So we have no idea.
AUDIENCE: But usage is high, which is good. And second question-- we've been thinking about a pre-print in our area-- pre-print server. Now that bioRxiv's maturing, do you have any kind of ballpark idea of what a sort of unit cost for running a pre-print server is when you get to scale? Because that's one of the many questions at the back of our mind. Were we to be successful, how big does the this is the price ticket get in the end?
JOHN INGLIS: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair question, Rod, and one you obviously do have to answer. But you know, if you talk to any of the journal publishers here and-- well, you are a journal publisher, too. And you say, well, how much does a paper cost you to publish? And the answer is it depends, right? It depends what you put in there. And I would say the same thing. I mean, I'm very reluctant to put numbers around costs because we are very fortunate to have very generous support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which we spend every dime.
JOHN INGLIS: But then the laboratory also supports the server as well. I mean, CZI doesn't pay my salary, for example. So there are many ways of looking at that. And I think it's exactly the same argument that goes into this question of do journal publishers make outrageous profits? Because look, it only costs x to publish a paper. Well, when there is public discussion of those costs, it becomes apparent it's not as simple as that.
JOHN INGLIS: So sorry not to answer your question. But I used a lot of words.
AUDIENCE: Thanks. I have a question for Sami. You do a great job of talking about the importance of-- the enduring value of research in abstracts and posters and so forth. But I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about how Morressier is different from a lot of the other services that have existed doing the same thing for a long time?
AUDIENCE: Things like Confacts and Oasis and SCAR1 and MiraSMART and all the other tools in this space. What makes yours different?
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: Thank you for the question. So essentially, we looked at the market. And how we saw things were moving is that there were two separate worlds. So you had the world of scientific conferences, and you had the world of conference organization. And you had the world of publication. And I don't know. Someone said it earlier. But in a sense, the publishing part of a society-- I think you said it-- and the conference part, the communication somehow is not there.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: And we saw that as well in that area. So what I believe makes us different is actually the attempt to bring these worlds together. To support scientific conferences on the one hand side and give them also the tools that are used on the other side and on the publication side. For example, DOIs-- a very simple example. But until now, there was not a service that gave to posters and presentations DOIs at scale.
SAMI BENCHEKROUN: That hasn't been done because the conference world didn't know what the value of a DOI is, et cetera. So I believe that is the main point, here. That we are bridging the gaps between these two worlds that were long kind of separate from one another. And we make beautiful software as well.
SPEAKER 1: We have time for one last question.
AUDIENCE: Just also feel like I have to be fair and ask Tracy a question. I might have missed it. Did you touch on expert networks as part of things that societies are thinking about?
TRACY GARDNER: No, I didn't, actually. But that was an oversight because that is something that we are talking to quite a lot of societies about. So I think that is where, certainly, they are really wanting to add value. And I think that's where a society can bring their expertise, their knowledge, their communities. And that's where they can add value. So it was an oversight, actually. And after I'd handed my slides in, I thought, oh, I missed an opportunity to cover that.
TRACY GARDNER: But, no. It's something that's coming out quite strongly. And we're talking to a lot of societies about it. Because I think absolutely, that's just totally in their space. It's about building community. And that's a perfect way of doing so.
SPEAKER 1: Well, Tracy, John, Sami, thank you very much. That was an excellent session. So, folks, [APPLAUSE] --round of applause.
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