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PS24 What's your strategy if there is no platform?
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PS24 What's your strategy if there is no platform?
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: It's really great to see everyone this morning. Thank you so much for coming in from near and far. I'm Hannah Heckner Swain, the VP of Strategic Partnerships at Silverchair. And I'm joined by a really fantastic panel. And I'm excited to get started. As Will mentioned, at Silverchair, we don't like to shy away from tough questions. So we figured, what better time to question the entire value proposition of your business than in a room full of thought leaders in your industry?
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: So yeah, here we go. In this age of LLMs, disintermediation, content syndication, the TikTok generation, funder mandates, where does the publishing platform stand? What is the future? So that's going to be what we discuss today. So we're going to kick things off with a poll. I believe that this is in the app.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: If you guys can just open the app. The poll is, what do you think will have the most influence on the future of hosting platforms? And your options are syndication, AI driven, disintermediation, open access, funder mandates, and shifting user expectations. So if you guys could put your answers in. While you're doing that, we're going to have the panel introduce themselves.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I'll just go down the row here. So as you introduce yourself, let's hear from you, what do you-- oops, what do you think is the most pressing trend you have seen shifting users away from publishing platforms? Lori. Oh, you have--
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. And I get to go first. [LAUGHS] I only say that because I was recruited 24 hours ago for this.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Big thank you to Lori. I was going to give you props--
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. So I'm Lori Carlin, Chief Commercial Officer At Delta Think. And when I looked at that list, I really wanted to punt and say all of them, because they really all are impacting how our users and how our communities are coming to platforms, the need for platforms. AI is certainly top of mind now.
LORI CARLIN: If you can go in and ask a question and get your answer, what need do you have for a platform? Open access, a little bit less. There's still that need to bring the information together to have it housed in a uniform way, funder mandates. So it is all of it, but I guess the topic of today would be AI.
ROY KAUFMAN: Hi. I'm Roy Kaufman. I'm Managing Director of business development and also managing director of government relations for CCC. As such, AI is certainly top of mind for me these days, both from business development and government relations perspective. I think sort of stepping back, I really like what Will said early about distinguishing between disintermediation and syndication, because in some ways, they're the same.
ROY KAUFMAN: But one has control in a business model and one is attacking you. And to really understand the difference and to recognize-- I've been thinking about this. I used to work for a publisher. Everyone wants, I want the user on my platform so I can watch what they're doing, blah, blah, blah. OK. I'm going to guess more of you subscribe to Netflix than to Peacock.
ROY KAUFMAN: The idea here is, when I-- or go to music. I don't go to Universal Music Group when I want to listen to a band. I go to Spotify. And we need to recognize that-- and those are syndication models. Maybe there's some disintermediation and that you lose a little bit of touch, but those are the models that the users want and that we all know we want as a user.
ROY KAUFMAN: We can't keep pretending that, yes, we know when we're users, we want this. But as a publisher, we're going to demand on something else. It's just not realistic. And by the way, I'm way too old to talk about the TikTok generation. [LAUGHTER]
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I bet you have some good dance moves if you could.
ROY KAUFMAN: That's another discussion.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Hi. I'm Roger Schonfeld. I'm the Vice President at Ithaca where I have responsibility for our organizational strategy overall, as well as some of our SNR programs in the research enterprise, scholarly publishing, and academic libraries. I want to plus 1 a lot of what Roy said, but I want to answer the question directly myself also, which is that the most pressing factor is not a new one.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It's that users just want your stuff. Having dozens or hundreds of platforms to navigate adds very little, if any value, and really just gets in their way. And saying that, I'm here to be the provocateur. [LAUGHS] But what I want to emphasize is that that doesn't necessarily mean they want a single platform either any more than they just want we just want Netflix.
ROGER SCHONFELD: You could imagine a biologist who wants a biological platform, or a literary scholar who wants a literary platform. Lots and lots of different ways to slice and dice content beyond either everything or a publisher-specific model. The point that I want to make is that the publisher specific models are getting in the way of user behavior and preferences.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Well, as the publisher on the panel. [LAUGHTER] Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Hardesty. I work as a digital products and platform manager at the National Academy of Sciences. National Academy of Sciences has two journals in our portfolio. We have PNAS, which we've been publishing for over 100 years. It's a hybrid journal. It publishes a mix of research and nonresearch.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And we also have PNAS Nexus, which we publish in partnership with Oxford University Press. And it's just the slightly younger sibling we launched that about 2 and 1/2 years ago. And to answer the question about the most pressing trend, I took a wider lens, I think, and thought about this over the last, say, 10 years and getting to this point. And so I think any of those options that are in the poll, I would pick, I mean, all the above, I guess.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: But I think open access has kind of-- had the most significant influence on how researchers are discovering and engaging with content today. And we've done analysis and looked into what the impact's on platform usage has if an article has a version on some alternative location, if it's a preprint or institutional repository. And there is an impact.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's something that we at PNAS, we think a lot about, we talk a lot about, we're measuring, especially as the funder mandates come into play, and we see the impacts of those over the next couple of years. So yeah.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. And yes, thanks again to Lori. Susan King was on our panel. But unfortunately, she had a positive COVID test this weekend. So we wish her the best. And thank you so much to Lori for your quick prep. OH, let's get the poll results. I do not have my phone, so I won't be able to read them out. But I imagine there's another mic I'm looking to staff.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN:
SPEAKER 1: OK. So it looks like almost an even tie between AI driven disintermediation with 45% of the votes and shifting user expectations with 40% of the votes.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. Perfect lead in to our first question. So Michael, I'll start with you on this. Do you think that user behavior will dictate future modalities of content publishing, or will the publishers or their technology direct those changes?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I'm going to go with the masses on this one. Yeah, I definitely think this will be user-led, customer-led. And so to overstate the obvious, when we're talking about discovery, the primary pathway for discovering and engaging with our content doesn't involve going to org, using the site search functionality, going to a landing page, going to the table of contents. Like, that browsing sense is just not how-- there are some members of our audience that do engage that way, but it's a small percentage.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So I think we all know this. So if I were to simplify the discovery process, I would say it starts with searching-- a keyword search happening somewhere on a search engine or discovery platform, investigating the results that you get back, and then eventually requesting the resource. And that's happening on our platform. And this is where generative AI comes into the picture, because I think we're evolving from that search model to more of an ask and conversant model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And so you're asking a question, you're getting a response back. You're asking a follow up question. And maybe that leads to that click through, and maybe that leads to the requesting the resource. But this evolution from a search to an ask model in my mind raises two questions. It's about adoption and the evolution from the current state of affairs-- so there's generative AI, LLM forward centric model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And then also, what does that mean for clickthroughs and referrals? So on the first question, I think as existing platforms in our space incorporate generative AI, as new products launch and find product market fit that are geared and centric towards generative AI and leveraging that technology, and just as the technology itself improves over time, whether that's access to data or Moore's law or whatever, it becomes cheaper to maintain over time, I do think that there will be some kind of critical mass that moves over.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I saw something yesterday that it was like, adoption in the first two years of generative AI outpaced that of the internet and the personal computer. So I think that's-- I think it's here to stay, I guess, is my point. On the second question, referral traffic-- and this is something that Will mentioned at the-- earlier. We have some early signal around this. So when we're analyzing our web traffic, as I'm sure most folks do, we create groups and categories of our audience around how they're reaching our content, how they're discovering our content.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: What platforms are they using. And how can we optimize for those? And so on one side, we have a general segment where it's search engines, general information, Google search like Bing, Yahoo, those-- you can even throw social media in this. And over the last 6 to 12 months, we've definitely seen some volatility as well I was alluding to.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And that lines up very closely with changes that Google in particular is making to their product, featured snippets, search, generative experience, AI overviews, all those types of things. On the other side, we have scholarly sources. So this is other journal websites, Google Scholar, Clarivate, PubMed, those geared towards the researcher. And we are not seeing the same fluctuations. It's very steady if not growing.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: This segment of our audience is significantly more likely to be coming from an institutional subscriber. They're more likely to be an author. They're more likely to download the citation information. So I think the story of those two segments is what we're seeing on the general side and the volatility could be a potential data point that we map to the scholarly segment if generative AI kind of permeates through, as I expect it will, the discovery platforms.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: That's assuming the behavior and the motivations are the same with those two segments, because I think they are generally different folks. And I don't know if that assumption holds up, so it's not going to be like a one for one mapping. But that is something that we're paying attention to. So just to wrap on that point, I think it's definitely user-driven. I think as a publisher speaking for us, what we think about is, we're following the data.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: We're not trying to get ahead of that. We're not trying to be first movers in every instance. So ultimately, we're going to be we're going to be led by what our customers and our users expect.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Got it. Thoughts from other folks on the panel.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Well, maybe I'll jump in. So I'm really interested in this question about user expectations and disintermediation, and I think it forces us to really press a little harder on this term disintermediation. Roy, you were making reference to that earlier. To me, it's that publishers-- a big part of what you do is you apply a signal that indicates trust and authority in the content.
ROGER SCHONFELD: I think the fact that that is fundamentally what the application of a brand is doing is something that we sometimes lose sight of. So I might even say that again, you apply a signal that indicates trust and authority. And anything that removes that signal through the discovery process, through that workflow, if you like, that's disintermediation of the core value that you're adding. And so another way to say that is making sure that provenance and a link backwards and all of those things still exist.
ROGER SCHONFELD: That really, really matters. So we're seeing some kinds of risks emerge that the user expectations, which I'll come back to again and say, it's for ease of access, ease of use. That user expectations might end up with models that strip out that signal. So I think that, for me, is the fundamental risk in all of this. Looking at some of these AI models that we're thinking about, is that provenance present?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Is there a way to link back to the underlying source that you have certified that you have signaled has trust and authority around it? To the extent that that can happen, for example, typically in a syndication model, that's still there, then I don't see that as really as disintermediation. It might be disintermediation from the perspective of a platform provider, I want to acknowledge that, but it may not be disintermediation from the perspective of a publisher.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And I think that-- And then there are other models like some of the AI models that we're not so sure about exactly what the kind of best practices, what the common expectations will come to be, where it's entirely possible that your content ends up in an undifferentiated mess. And in that case, those signals of trust and authority are indeed lost. And I would argue that a lot of the value that you add societally, let alone economically, can be lost.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So that's where-- I may have gone a little further than the question was asking for. But for me, that's how we connect user expectations with disintermediation becomes really, really significant.
LORI CARLIN: I don't want to get too far off of the question. I completely agree with Roger. I think that the trust aspect is paramount, and it's something that we'll likely explore as we continue talking today. When Michael was talking, what came to mind for me was the use cases, which is what Michael was pushing on. And it really depends on, what is that use case?
LORI CARLIN: Are you coming in to just ask a quick question and that quick answer is going to be enough for you, or are you a researcher who needs to understand what the prior research was and how it relates to the research you're doing? Is that something that you're going to reference in your research? Are you going to build on that research? And those are two very different use cases.
LORI CARLIN: And so understanding what that user really wants to do and know and understand matters in terms of what they are looking for and what they're satisfied with or to what degree they're satisfied with the response. In that vein, we have to understand the user's behavior. And it's not-- we talk a lot-- we're in this room. We're talking about what the publisher needs in terms of a platform and what we want to gain from that platform and what it means to us and what it means to our publications and our revenue, our bottom lines.
LORI CARLIN: But the flip side of that is, what does the user want? What is the research showing you? What are their motivations? What's their behavior, and what are their challenges? Because sometimes they don't understand what the answer is, but they know what the problem is that they're having. So speaking with them and understanding, where are their challenges? And then where air can you provide a service or a response that is going to address that challenge?
LORI CARLIN: That's where the value will come in. That's where they'll see value if you can provide that to them.
ROY KAUFMAN: So it's interesting, we keep talking about the user and then sometimes we're talking about the customer. And they're not always the same. So thinking from a-- OK. So CCC, we've got a syndication platform called Right Find, where our customer isn't the researcher. Our user is the researcher. Our customer is the corporate librarian for that who wants to make sure that the researcher is using the lawfully acquired copy that they purchased or is getting a lawfully acquired copy, and that the copy that they're going to has those trust markers.
ROY KAUFMAN: The researcher doesn't care about that. If you ask them, they would. But really, they just want to do the search on PubMed or whatever and get all the articles. So there is particularly-- there is somewhat of a disconnect. And we need to remember at the end of the day, if the researchers are unhappy, they won't use the content. If the customer is unhappy, they're not going to pay you.
ROY KAUFMAN: So let's stay there. And then when you get into open access, which I know since we're not really talking about that because the platform. But then who's your customer? Your customer is the author. And it gets even more attenuated because now we're not even talking about the user. The customer, who is the author, is a user in a different context, but their needs as an author are different from their needs as a user, fundamentally.
ROY KAUFMAN: I really liked this issue-- and by the way, I've enjoyed-- this is the first meeting I've been to probably in 30 years where we began with a sense of optimism. And I'm an optimistic guy, if you know me. And whether it's the cause of our optimism, I mean, fundamentally, we're doing something societally important. So how we do it may change.
ROY KAUFMAN: The business models have changed. But fundamentally, what we do may have to change. But what we do is still going to be relevant. In an AI world, the trust markers become more important. And I'm not just talking about being able to link back to the article. I'm not just talking about the RAG model. The AI companies have anthropomorphized. If you had software that just made errors, you'd call that a bug or an error.
ROY KAUFMAN: You wouldn't come up with some human term, hallucination. What is it? It's a mistake. It's a mistake in the input or a mistake in the programming, most likely a mistake in both. Now, I'm going to say something, a lot of you have heard me say this before. If your content is in a preprint server-- and by your content, I mean the author manuscript, I mean the submitted manuscript, whatever, it's already been used to train these LLMs.
ROY KAUFMAN: So as you're thinking about-- so what's your value? We all know that these LLMs are making mistakes. We all know that the best content is the one-- although I think it needs to be syndicated and federated out. I've obviously made that clear. But you still need one version of truth. You need one place you can go and say, OK, this is the real thing.
ROY KAUFMAN: And I think that real thing is going to be increasingly valuable. But also, you have an absolute duty to get it out there. And I mean an economic duty. I mean, if you're not licensing-- OK, I'm a licensing guy, of course. If we are not actively licensing this, the governments and the courts will take away our ability to actively license this stuff.
ROY KAUFMAN: So we need to get out there, and we need-- and we're serving our community by making sure that great stuff, which may also be in a preprint server, but is mixed in with a lot of who knows what. And we need to be out there and making sure that we're handling that. I have no idea if I answered the question, so I'm going to stop talking.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: No, you started-- you got us to where we wanted to go, so it's great. So--
ROY KAUFMAN: The government relations.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I'm familiar with the type. So you've spoken a lot about the money to be had. Because let's face it, this does become a conversation about business models, and also the ability to invest in innovation. So we've spoken around and about the business models involved with having content off of the platform. But Roy, could you talk about the business models that can open up to folks that are striving to keep folks on the platform?
ROY KAUFMAN: Business models to keep folks on the platform.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. So completely opposite to what you're used to talking about. [LAUGHTER]
ROY KAUFMAN: Well, I don't know. I struggle with this question. I mean, I understand why people want on the platform. No matter who your syndication agent is, the further away you are, the further you are from the data that you really want. You want that usage behavior. But I struggle-- I mean, I remember 28 years ago sitting in library advisory board meetings where we were saying to the librarians at the place I worked, look at all these bells and whistles we're about to add to the content.
ROY KAUFMAN: And they all said, stop with the bells and whistles. Can you just put a Google search bar on this, please? Can you not make me train, not make me learn? I mean, I guess if you're-- what are you getting out of having them on the platform? And look, our-- again, Right Find, we're taking them to the platform. So it is-- there are syndication models which take you to the platform.
ROY KAUFMAN: And we have customers who, because of what they're doing, don't want anyone to know what they're doing and have some legitimate needs for not actually knowing every-- because if they see the IP address of this, then that's telling them, oh, company X is working on this medicine. So there's back and forth there. But there are syndication models that do require at least some contact with the platform.
ROY KAUFMAN: And obviously, those are the ones that we prefer because we feel we work for the publishers in that sense. I don't know what the model is. I mean, I guess providing more services. I mean, from a society basis, and I mean learned society, there's a whole lot of things you can do. And if you're connecting your society membership benefits, your newsletters, your journals, and everything else, I think that's a really good way to try to make the platform a little bit stickier.
ROY KAUFMAN: But again, it's, who is your user and which user can you do this for and which user should you not even try? And really deciding, OK, I'm going to put my money on enhancing society benefits, linkage with the content, really pushing out to my members, hey, here's some groundbreaking research we did. That makes a lot of sense to me. That is a viable strategy.
ROY KAUFMAN: But that's where I would think.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. Michael, without giving away any trade secrets at NAS-- I imagine this is a topic of conversation, any thoughts here on the adapting business models to keep folks on the platform?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Yeah. I mean, the way that I've been thinking about this question is, you fall somewhere on a spectrum. Like, on one end, you have this, for lack of a better word, protection. Protect what-- whether it's protected what you currently have, protect your content, protect your privacy, users, data, whatever. And so there, you're thinking about things like blocking LLMs from accessing your content.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I know there's this idea of preprints you have. It's already out there, whatever. And then to Lori's point about use cases, really investing in technology to help you understand your customers, your users so that you can offer the right message to them, and you can provide an excellent experience, a personalization, all those types of things. And in that sense, you're really-- that's more on platform, I guess.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: It's on that side of things. I think the other thing to think about there is your current state. So do you sell ads? Do you have an advertising revenue stream? Do you have meetings? What are the products that you're selling? Is it just-- do you have-- are you open access already or are you or are you subscription model hybrid like us?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's the other things that we're asking ourselves. And on the other end, you have this kind of partnership. You're entering into AI deals, you're licensing your content, you're revising-- reach is more than ever your priority, really meeting users where they are. Syndication, aggregators, downstream strategy, everything. So I think-- I don't know that anyone's on one end or the other.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Maybe there are. I think the truth is we're probably somewhere in between. But I think we're, again, going back to this idea of, we're following the user, following the customer, and the data we're getting from their behavior. We'll be thinking about, OK, what dials do we need to shift to move up and down that spectrum depending on what the opportunities are and what the risks are to our business model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's the framework, at least, that I've been using to think through that.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. Roger, did you want to say something before I ask the next question?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Can I just jump in and say that-- I think one of the things that I want to just suggest is that in this model where there's a syndicator and a syndicate, if you think about it in those terms, we're missing out on the power of what some of our organizations might actually have in that. And I think-- Mike, I think you started to get into some of that. Which is that if you actually have a community, if you are a society that has actually built a real community in terms of the business models and the engagement and the sense of connectedness and so forth, there's no reason why you couldn't be the place where others content is syndicated.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And in the same vein, be similarly syndicating your content elsewhere. So maybe what we need to do is think a little bit less about of archipelagos and more about where there are opportunities for a certain kind of interconnectedness. So answering the question, I think the business model is, how do we provide-- if you think that you have the stuff to be able to-- the traffic, the engagement, the community, like, go big.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Don't just go out. I think that's the way that I would think about how to bring the business model to bring users to the platform, if you want to put it that way.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah, I love that. And I think we're seeing some great examples of that in the industry as well. Going back to the idea of reach-- we'll get to questions in a bit. Going back to the idea of reach and syndication and opportunities there, Lori, as a consultant, you're working closely with publishers as they explore opportunities and also experience possible threats.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: So how have you-- what sort of conversations have you had about how publishers can really maintain control while pursuing these agreements? Control of data, of the version of record, of access, and of their brand.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. I mentioned trust before, and I think that that's the underpinning of all of those things. Publishers have the knowledge. All of these other services are using your knowledge to provide results or information, but you have the knowledge. And holding on to that knowledge is really important. And building the trust, and ensuring that you are keeping your brand, that you are not giving away all of the content.
LORI CARLIN: You're bringing folks back to you through linking. These services, they don't want to be housing everybody's content. They don't have the time, the energy, the room. They want to ingest information. They want to give back quick answers, but they want to link back to the version-- what should be the version of record. I think it also is a part education process, education and marketing of your community.
LORI CARLIN: Roger talked about how you've got a learned society. You've got a community who trusts you, who are involved with you. You want to make sure that they understand, you are the source and are coming back to you for that information. And it's really important-- it used to be-- I can remember interviewing researchers and asking them, how did you trust this?
LORI CARLIN: How did you find this? And I can remember seeing even residents doing Google searches and coming up with a surgical procedure on YouTube and deciding whether it was valid or not, just based on their own intelligence and their training. And if you ask a researcher to do a search and bring up a list of articles, they'll quickly look through it and they'll decide which ones are the right ones for their search.
LORI CARLIN: Again, if you ask them why, it's oftentimes just based on their intelligence and their training, maybe they look at the institution and the authors, they know them, somebody is a friend. And all of that feeds into it. And they trusted what they found based on their own intuition and their own experience. But that's shifting now, and all of the issues with research integrity is making researchers question whether or not they can trust this information.
LORI CARLIN: The publisher holds the key to that trust. And ensuring that you are transparent about what you're doing to make sure that your content is trustworthy and that you are the authority will bring them to you for that verification. HANNAH HECKNER
SWAIN: That's great.
SWAIN: Roger, you painted a really beautiful picture of publishers coming together back to a platform. But I'd like to think about the opposite. So what conditions do you see happening where and when publishers should be willing to give up their platforms? When is it the better choice?
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I think I've sketched out in my remarks so far to two different models of what a publisher can be. There's the thing that all publishers have in common, which I talked about before, which is the signals of trust and authority, and then there's something that a few publishers, but realistically not very many have, which is that they have a coherent community at scale. So I want to distinguish between those two things. I'm not talking about the folks now who have a coherent community at scale.
ROGER SCHONFELD: There's a few of those. That's a very exceptional consideration, and let's put that to the side. But for the publishers that are in the trust and authority business fundamentally-- and by the way, this is actually the largest publishers are more in the trust and authority business. Like, the big 3, 5, 7 publishers are more in the trust and authority business than they are in the coherent communities at scale business.
ROGER SCHONFELD: I think that's-- it's not a scale issue. It's a [INAUDIBLE]. The ones who are in the trust and authority business, what are the conditions where they could give up-- where they could reasonably foresee a possibility of giving up the platform? Are there ways to apply the brand, to apply those signals of trust and authority into the articles, into the journals in a way that carries through to other platforms?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Are there opportunities to think about not just, what are we giving up in audience, but how do we expand our audience? So I think one of the things that we sometimes focus on when we look at usage data from our own platform is we see the risk of it falling off. We don't necessarily see-- think as much-- and you may have done this and some may have, but we don't always think as much about, what are the opportunities to grow an audience?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Where are their complementary audiences? Where is there an impact? Where is there a reach? Where is there usage that actually can go beyond what an individual platform might have? And then I just want to make sure to emphasize that, of course, we still need an infrastructure from which to distribute content or to anchor on what is the version of record.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Now, that might not be a public site. That might not be a hosting platform. There's other ways to imagine that working. But I think those are some of the factors that I'd want to put on the table at a high level for discussion.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. I know that we want to ask the audience some questions, so I might open it up. Teo was raising his hand 15 minutes ago, so let's get him a microphone.
AUDIENCE: That will guarantee [INAUDIBLE] publications. Part of the question has been already answered. But I'm going back to what Alex said in the first session-- the article of the future, the Journal of the future, and we're still operating in why the platform matters. I hear trustworthy, I hear trademark. But if we have to envision this journal of the future or the article of the future, what is the role of the platform? Is it YouTube the platform for the article of the future?
AUDIENCE: So I'm being a little bit provocative here since the first part of my question has been already answered. Thank you.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. Any takers? Maybe I'll look to the publisher on the panel. [LAUGHS]
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So the question was formats about PD-- yeah. I don't know. I mean, the PDF has lived for whatever, 30 years since we all went online. And I think it's effective vehicle for talking about trust, talking about authority. It's an effective tool for disseminating research, which I think is our role as publishers, disseminating scientific information and communication.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: This idea I've been thinking about is, we have-- increasingly so, I think the conversation around our content is like-- we think of it as data. And it's not just the metadata, but also, there's metadata that's happening upstream of the publisher that's happening in the lab that we haven't-- it never makes it to us.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And so I think thinking about future-- I don't know 10, 5 years, maybe AI can help with this. Is like, creating parallel formats. Like, ones meant for the user. There's that's the one thing that never changes for us, people still love going to the PDF. It just doesn't budge. And so I don't think we should-- I think we should respect that.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: If our readers are interested in the PDF, then let's continue to produce that for them. But also recognizing that content is discoverable on different platforms, whether it's syndication or open access or what have you. And producing that data that machines can then use ingest in their systems and improve the experience for everyone. So that's what I'd be thinking about.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: HANNAH HECKNER
SWAIN: Other thoughts
SWAIN: on platform of the future?
ROY KAUFMAN: Yeah. Who's your user? So PDF has been around a while, and I would say it's a 300-year-old technology or older because it's paper under glass. And while as an industry we've said, we can make this better-- it's a little bit-- I still wonder, is this is my bells and whistles example from 28 years ago? Yeah, you could make it better.
ROY KAUFMAN: Do people care that much? But there is a whole other user out there, whether you call it AI, whether you call it text and data mining, there is a machine user, and it's platform needs are fundamentally different from the human readers platform needs. So there is-- that's an XML, it's API availability, it's all of that. So as we evolve as an industry and have different user categories, the needs of the platform for each user group are fundamentally different.
ROY KAUFMAN: Machine wants something different from a human. So yeah, so I do think-- we're going to have to see how all of this evolves. But fundamentally, today, we've got the machine user and the human user and they have very different needs and different formats.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Perhaps this is another panel entirely. But I think when we're thinking about knowing our users, it's also good to keep in mind third party cookie deprecation, a lot of other headwinds and perhaps an underlining of the importance of that relationship between publishers, platforms, and their users. A thought--
ROY KAUFMAN: I still think-- but just to say, the version of record is still important. To me, whether it's the human going to the version of record the machine, it's still the version of record. It's still that quality marker.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Hi. Justin Spence, PSI. We did a lot of work on sci-hub in the past. And I'm struck by some of the comments that I'm hearing, and I agree with all of them. That brand is-- first and foremost, has to be, because it's really the only way of stopping the world where, I read it on the internet, or I read it on Facebook. And it's like, well, that's not a source.
AUDIENCE: That's a medium. And it doesn't-- brand has to lie in there. But I'm also struck by the fact that-- I agree with Roy's point, that I'm a huge music buff, but I don't go to individual record producers or labels or what have you. I want to go to Spotify or whatever it is to be able to search for the brand, i.e., the bands or the genre that I like.
AUDIENCE: But I also am willing to pay for it, and I want to pay for it. But I think what we found with sci-hub is, if you give researchers what they want, which is a vast amount of content, ala on a Spotify platform, the ability to search it with, ala with a Google overlay over the content, they will use it even if they know that content has been obtained through maybe amoral means.
AUDIENCE: I also believe that the AI groups that are looking to consume content will look at something like sci-hub and see that as a bounty of content. And so I wonder if there aren't things that we can learn from that experience with sci-hub. And I just wondered if anyone would like to comment on some of those thoughts and how it all ties together.
AUDIENCE:
LORI CARLIN: I was thinking about the sci-hub example a few days ago, because it's out there. How easy would that be. I think that-- well, one provocative question that's been going through my mind ever since I started talking about being on this panel was, when did we need platforms to begin with?
LORI CARLIN: Researchers 5, 10 years ago, if you asked them where they got their content from, they went to Google. And then they went directly to get that article, and they were done. If you ask them years ago, who published a journal, they had no idea. There were some things that happened in the industry, and publishers became more front and center. So yes, now if you ask a researcher where they publish, they know the publisher.
LORI CARLIN: But even members of societies sometimes don't know what journals their own society is publishing. So what value has the platform brought to this community from the start? There obviously is a value. So could we just have an aggregated platform where all publishers are brought together and people go there and look for their information?
LORI CARLIN: It sounds a little utopia. It doesn't sound like it could happen, but who knows? There are lots of things going on today that some of us would not have thought would be the case. I come back also to what Roger has said a couple of times about these communities. There are certain communities where those researchers will go directly to that community, and that is a very known practice.
LORI CARLIN: But for most of the bigger publishers, that's not the case. So everybody would-- you almost have to agree to work together in order for something like that to happen. I never say never, but the question is, how could even pockets of that come together and all work together?
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: We've also made allusions to Spotify a lot, not Napster. So is this an issue of the higher fidelity that can be found in a Spotify? I don't think people are just saying, you know what, I need to pay $9.99 a month. I feel bad for these music producers. Or is it the litigiousness of the music industry?
LORI CARLIN: No, but it's the service. What is that point at which-- what is the convenience fee that somebody is willing to pay in order to get what they need.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I know we're getting close to time, but we have other questions. One more or reception?
SPEAKER 1: We don't like to keep people from breaks.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: OK.
SPEAKER 1: But find everybody later--
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Perfect. Round of applause for this fantastic panel. [APPLAUSE] We have a break until 11:00, and this break is brought to you by Touchstone. So thank you very much, Touchstone.
Segment:0 .
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: It's really great to see everyone this morning. Thank you so much for coming in from near and far. I'm Hannah Heckner Swain, the VP of Strategic Partnerships at Silverchair. And I'm joined by a really fantastic panel. And I'm excited to get started. As Will mentioned, at Silverchair, we don't like to shy away from tough questions. So we figured, what better time to question the entire value proposition of your business than in a room full of thought leaders in your industry?
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: So yeah, here we go. In this age of LLMs, disintermediation, content syndication, the TikTok generation, funder mandates, where does the publishing platform stand? What is the future? So that's going to be what we discuss today. So we're going to kick things off with a poll. I believe that this is in the app.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: If you guys can just open the app. The poll is, what do you think will have the most influence on the future of hosting platforms? And your options are syndication, AI driven, disintermediation, open access, funder mandates, and shifting user expectations. So if you guys could put your answers in. While you're doing that, we're going to have the panel introduce themselves.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I'll just go down the row here. So as you introduce yourself, let's hear from you, what do you-- oops, what do you think is the most pressing trend you have seen shifting users away from publishing platforms? Lori. Oh, you have--
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. And I get to go first. [LAUGHS] I only say that because I was recruited 24 hours ago for this.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Big thank you to Lori. I was going to give you props--
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. So I'm Lori Carlin, Chief Commercial Officer At Delta Think. And when I looked at that list, I really wanted to punt and say all of them, because they really all are impacting how our users and how our communities are coming to platforms, the need for platforms. AI is certainly top of mind now.
LORI CARLIN: If you can go in and ask a question and get your answer, what need do you have for a platform? Open access, a little bit less. There's still that need to bring the information together to have it housed in a uniform way, funder mandates. So it is all of it, but I guess the topic of today would be AI.
ROY KAUFMAN: Hi. I'm Roy Kaufman. I'm Managing Director of business development and also managing director of government relations for CCC. As such, AI is certainly top of mind for me these days, both from business development and government relations perspective. I think sort of stepping back, I really like what Will said early about distinguishing between disintermediation and syndication, because in some ways, they're the same.
ROY KAUFMAN: But one has control in a business model and one is attacking you. And to really understand the difference and to recognize-- I've been thinking about this. I used to work for a publisher. Everyone wants, I want the user on my platform so I can watch what they're doing, blah, blah, blah. OK. I'm going to guess more of you subscribe to Netflix than to Peacock.
ROY KAUFMAN: The idea here is, when I-- or go to music. I don't go to Universal Music Group when I want to listen to a band. I go to Spotify. And we need to recognize that-- and those are syndication models. Maybe there's some disintermediation and that you lose a little bit of touch, but those are the models that the users want and that we all know we want as a user.
ROY KAUFMAN: We can't keep pretending that, yes, we know when we're users, we want this. But as a publisher, we're going to demand on something else. It's just not realistic. And by the way, I'm way too old to talk about the TikTok generation. [LAUGHTER]
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I bet you have some good dance moves if you could.
ROY KAUFMAN: That's another discussion.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Hi. I'm Roger Schonfeld. I'm the Vice President at Ithaca where I have responsibility for our organizational strategy overall, as well as some of our SNR programs in the research enterprise, scholarly publishing, and academic libraries. I want to plus 1 a lot of what Roy said, but I want to answer the question directly myself also, which is that the most pressing factor is not a new one.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It's that users just want your stuff. Having dozens or hundreds of platforms to navigate adds very little, if any value, and really just gets in their way. And saying that, I'm here to be the provocateur. [LAUGHS] But what I want to emphasize is that that doesn't necessarily mean they want a single platform either any more than they just want we just want Netflix.
ROGER SCHONFELD: You could imagine a biologist who wants a biological platform, or a literary scholar who wants a literary platform. Lots and lots of different ways to slice and dice content beyond either everything or a publisher-specific model. The point that I want to make is that the publisher specific models are getting in the way of user behavior and preferences.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Well, as the publisher on the panel. [LAUGHTER] Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Hardesty. I work as a digital products and platform manager at the National Academy of Sciences. National Academy of Sciences has two journals in our portfolio. We have PNAS, which we've been publishing for over 100 years. It's a hybrid journal. It publishes a mix of research and nonresearch.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And we also have PNAS Nexus, which we publish in partnership with Oxford University Press. And it's just the slightly younger sibling we launched that about 2 and 1/2 years ago. And to answer the question about the most pressing trend, I took a wider lens, I think, and thought about this over the last, say, 10 years and getting to this point. And so I think any of those options that are in the poll, I would pick, I mean, all the above, I guess.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: But I think open access has kind of-- had the most significant influence on how researchers are discovering and engaging with content today. And we've done analysis and looked into what the impact's on platform usage has if an article has a version on some alternative location, if it's a preprint or institutional repository. And there is an impact.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's something that we at PNAS, we think a lot about, we talk a lot about, we're measuring, especially as the funder mandates come into play, and we see the impacts of those over the next couple of years. So yeah.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. And yes, thanks again to Lori. Susan King was on our panel. But unfortunately, she had a positive COVID test this weekend. So we wish her the best. And thank you so much to Lori for your quick prep. OH, let's get the poll results. I do not have my phone, so I won't be able to read them out. But I imagine there's another mic I'm looking to staff.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN:
SPEAKER 1: OK. So it looks like almost an even tie between AI driven disintermediation with 45% of the votes and shifting user expectations with 40% of the votes.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. Perfect lead in to our first question. So Michael, I'll start with you on this. Do you think that user behavior will dictate future modalities of content publishing, or will the publishers or their technology direct those changes?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I'm going to go with the masses on this one. Yeah, I definitely think this will be user-led, customer-led. And so to overstate the obvious, when we're talking about discovery, the primary pathway for discovering and engaging with our content doesn't involve going to org, using the site search functionality, going to a landing page, going to the table of contents. Like, that browsing sense is just not how-- there are some members of our audience that do engage that way, but it's a small percentage.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So I think we all know this. So if I were to simplify the discovery process, I would say it starts with searching-- a keyword search happening somewhere on a search engine or discovery platform, investigating the results that you get back, and then eventually requesting the resource. And that's happening on our platform. And this is where generative AI comes into the picture, because I think we're evolving from that search model to more of an ask and conversant model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And so you're asking a question, you're getting a response back. You're asking a follow up question. And maybe that leads to that click through, and maybe that leads to the requesting the resource. But this evolution from a search to an ask model in my mind raises two questions. It's about adoption and the evolution from the current state of affairs-- so there's generative AI, LLM forward centric model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And then also, what does that mean for clickthroughs and referrals? So on the first question, I think as existing platforms in our space incorporate generative AI, as new products launch and find product market fit that are geared and centric towards generative AI and leveraging that technology, and just as the technology itself improves over time, whether that's access to data or Moore's law or whatever, it becomes cheaper to maintain over time, I do think that there will be some kind of critical mass that moves over.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I saw something yesterday that it was like, adoption in the first two years of generative AI outpaced that of the internet and the personal computer. So I think that's-- I think it's here to stay, I guess, is my point. On the second question, referral traffic-- and this is something that Will mentioned at the-- earlier. We have some early signal around this. So when we're analyzing our web traffic, as I'm sure most folks do, we create groups and categories of our audience around how they're reaching our content, how they're discovering our content.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: What platforms are they using. And how can we optimize for those? And so on one side, we have a general segment where it's search engines, general information, Google search like Bing, Yahoo, those-- you can even throw social media in this. And over the last 6 to 12 months, we've definitely seen some volatility as well I was alluding to.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And that lines up very closely with changes that Google in particular is making to their product, featured snippets, search, generative experience, AI overviews, all those types of things. On the other side, we have scholarly sources. So this is other journal websites, Google Scholar, Clarivate, PubMed, those geared towards the researcher. And we are not seeing the same fluctuations. It's very steady if not growing.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: This segment of our audience is significantly more likely to be coming from an institutional subscriber. They're more likely to be an author. They're more likely to download the citation information. So I think the story of those two segments is what we're seeing on the general side and the volatility could be a potential data point that we map to the scholarly segment if generative AI kind of permeates through, as I expect it will, the discovery platforms.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: That's assuming the behavior and the motivations are the same with those two segments, because I think they are generally different folks. And I don't know if that assumption holds up, so it's not going to be like a one for one mapping. But that is something that we're paying attention to. So just to wrap on that point, I think it's definitely user-driven. I think as a publisher speaking for us, what we think about is, we're following the data.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: We're not trying to get ahead of that. We're not trying to be first movers in every instance. So ultimately, we're going to be we're going to be led by what our customers and our users expect.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Got it. Thoughts from other folks on the panel.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Well, maybe I'll jump in. So I'm really interested in this question about user expectations and disintermediation, and I think it forces us to really press a little harder on this term disintermediation. Roy, you were making reference to that earlier. To me, it's that publishers-- a big part of what you do is you apply a signal that indicates trust and authority in the content.
ROGER SCHONFELD: I think the fact that that is fundamentally what the application of a brand is doing is something that we sometimes lose sight of. So I might even say that again, you apply a signal that indicates trust and authority. And anything that removes that signal through the discovery process, through that workflow, if you like, that's disintermediation of the core value that you're adding. And so another way to say that is making sure that provenance and a link backwards and all of those things still exist.
ROGER SCHONFELD: That really, really matters. So we're seeing some kinds of risks emerge that the user expectations, which I'll come back to again and say, it's for ease of access, ease of use. That user expectations might end up with models that strip out that signal. So I think that, for me, is the fundamental risk in all of this. Looking at some of these AI models that we're thinking about, is that provenance present?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Is there a way to link back to the underlying source that you have certified that you have signaled has trust and authority around it? To the extent that that can happen, for example, typically in a syndication model, that's still there, then I don't see that as really as disintermediation. It might be disintermediation from the perspective of a platform provider, I want to acknowledge that, but it may not be disintermediation from the perspective of a publisher.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And I think that-- And then there are other models like some of the AI models that we're not so sure about exactly what the kind of best practices, what the common expectations will come to be, where it's entirely possible that your content ends up in an undifferentiated mess. And in that case, those signals of trust and authority are indeed lost. And I would argue that a lot of the value that you add societally, let alone economically, can be lost.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So that's where-- I may have gone a little further than the question was asking for. But for me, that's how we connect user expectations with disintermediation becomes really, really significant.
LORI CARLIN: I don't want to get too far off of the question. I completely agree with Roger. I think that the trust aspect is paramount, and it's something that we'll likely explore as we continue talking today. When Michael was talking, what came to mind for me was the use cases, which is what Michael was pushing on. And it really depends on, what is that use case?
LORI CARLIN: Are you coming in to just ask a quick question and that quick answer is going to be enough for you, or are you a researcher who needs to understand what the prior research was and how it relates to the research you're doing? Is that something that you're going to reference in your research? Are you going to build on that research? And those are two very different use cases.
LORI CARLIN: And so understanding what that user really wants to do and know and understand matters in terms of what they are looking for and what they're satisfied with or to what degree they're satisfied with the response. In that vein, we have to understand the user's behavior. And it's not-- we talk a lot-- we're in this room. We're talking about what the publisher needs in terms of a platform and what we want to gain from that platform and what it means to us and what it means to our publications and our revenue, our bottom lines.
LORI CARLIN: But the flip side of that is, what does the user want? What is the research showing you? What are their motivations? What's their behavior, and what are their challenges? Because sometimes they don't understand what the answer is, but they know what the problem is that they're having. So speaking with them and understanding, where are their challenges? And then where air can you provide a service or a response that is going to address that challenge?
LORI CARLIN: That's where the value will come in. That's where they'll see value if you can provide that to them.
ROY KAUFMAN: So it's interesting, we keep talking about the user and then sometimes we're talking about the customer. And they're not always the same. So thinking from a-- OK. So CCC, we've got a syndication platform called Right Find, where our customer isn't the researcher. Our user is the researcher. Our customer is the corporate librarian for that who wants to make sure that the researcher is using the lawfully acquired copy that they purchased or is getting a lawfully acquired copy, and that the copy that they're going to has those trust markers.
ROY KAUFMAN: The researcher doesn't care about that. If you ask them, they would. But really, they just want to do the search on PubMed or whatever and get all the articles. So there is particularly-- there is somewhat of a disconnect. And we need to remember at the end of the day, if the researchers are unhappy, they won't use the content. If the customer is unhappy, they're not going to pay you.
ROY KAUFMAN: So let's stay there. And then when you get into open access, which I know since we're not really talking about that because the platform. But then who's your customer? Your customer is the author. And it gets even more attenuated because now we're not even talking about the user. The customer, who is the author, is a user in a different context, but their needs as an author are different from their needs as a user, fundamentally.
ROY KAUFMAN: I really liked this issue-- and by the way, I've enjoyed-- this is the first meeting I've been to probably in 30 years where we began with a sense of optimism. And I'm an optimistic guy, if you know me. And whether it's the cause of our optimism, I mean, fundamentally, we're doing something societally important. So how we do it may change.
ROY KAUFMAN: The business models have changed. But fundamentally, what we do may have to change. But what we do is still going to be relevant. In an AI world, the trust markers become more important. And I'm not just talking about being able to link back to the article. I'm not just talking about the RAG model. The AI companies have anthropomorphized. If you had software that just made errors, you'd call that a bug or an error.
ROY KAUFMAN: You wouldn't come up with some human term, hallucination. What is it? It's a mistake. It's a mistake in the input or a mistake in the programming, most likely a mistake in both. Now, I'm going to say something, a lot of you have heard me say this before. If your content is in a preprint server-- and by your content, I mean the author manuscript, I mean the submitted manuscript, whatever, it's already been used to train these LLMs.
ROY KAUFMAN: So as you're thinking about-- so what's your value? We all know that these LLMs are making mistakes. We all know that the best content is the one-- although I think it needs to be syndicated and federated out. I've obviously made that clear. But you still need one version of truth. You need one place you can go and say, OK, this is the real thing.
ROY KAUFMAN: And I think that real thing is going to be increasingly valuable. But also, you have an absolute duty to get it out there. And I mean an economic duty. I mean, if you're not licensing-- OK, I'm a licensing guy, of course. If we are not actively licensing this, the governments and the courts will take away our ability to actively license this stuff.
ROY KAUFMAN: So we need to get out there, and we need-- and we're serving our community by making sure that great stuff, which may also be in a preprint server, but is mixed in with a lot of who knows what. And we need to be out there and making sure that we're handling that. I have no idea if I answered the question, so I'm going to stop talking.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: No, you started-- you got us to where we wanted to go, so it's great. So--
ROY KAUFMAN: The government relations.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I'm familiar with the type. So you've spoken a lot about the money to be had. Because let's face it, this does become a conversation about business models, and also the ability to invest in innovation. So we've spoken around and about the business models involved with having content off of the platform. But Roy, could you talk about the business models that can open up to folks that are striving to keep folks on the platform?
ROY KAUFMAN: Business models to keep folks on the platform.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. So completely opposite to what you're used to talking about. [LAUGHTER]
ROY KAUFMAN: Well, I don't know. I struggle with this question. I mean, I understand why people want on the platform. No matter who your syndication agent is, the further away you are, the further you are from the data that you really want. You want that usage behavior. But I struggle-- I mean, I remember 28 years ago sitting in library advisory board meetings where we were saying to the librarians at the place I worked, look at all these bells and whistles we're about to add to the content.
ROY KAUFMAN: And they all said, stop with the bells and whistles. Can you just put a Google search bar on this, please? Can you not make me train, not make me learn? I mean, I guess if you're-- what are you getting out of having them on the platform? And look, our-- again, Right Find, we're taking them to the platform. So it is-- there are syndication models which take you to the platform.
ROY KAUFMAN: And we have customers who, because of what they're doing, don't want anyone to know what they're doing and have some legitimate needs for not actually knowing every-- because if they see the IP address of this, then that's telling them, oh, company X is working on this medicine. So there's back and forth there. But there are syndication models that do require at least some contact with the platform.
ROY KAUFMAN: And obviously, those are the ones that we prefer because we feel we work for the publishers in that sense. I don't know what the model is. I mean, I guess providing more services. I mean, from a society basis, and I mean learned society, there's a whole lot of things you can do. And if you're connecting your society membership benefits, your newsletters, your journals, and everything else, I think that's a really good way to try to make the platform a little bit stickier.
ROY KAUFMAN: But again, it's, who is your user and which user can you do this for and which user should you not even try? And really deciding, OK, I'm going to put my money on enhancing society benefits, linkage with the content, really pushing out to my members, hey, here's some groundbreaking research we did. That makes a lot of sense to me. That is a viable strategy.
ROY KAUFMAN: But that's where I would think.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. Michael, without giving away any trade secrets at NAS-- I imagine this is a topic of conversation, any thoughts here on the adapting business models to keep folks on the platform?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Yeah. I mean, the way that I've been thinking about this question is, you fall somewhere on a spectrum. Like, on one end, you have this, for lack of a better word, protection. Protect what-- whether it's protected what you currently have, protect your content, protect your privacy, users, data, whatever. And so there, you're thinking about things like blocking LLMs from accessing your content.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: I know there's this idea of preprints you have. It's already out there, whatever. And then to Lori's point about use cases, really investing in technology to help you understand your customers, your users so that you can offer the right message to them, and you can provide an excellent experience, a personalization, all those types of things. And in that sense, you're really-- that's more on platform, I guess.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: It's on that side of things. I think the other thing to think about there is your current state. So do you sell ads? Do you have an advertising revenue stream? Do you have meetings? What are the products that you're selling? Is it just-- do you have-- are you open access already or are you or are you subscription model hybrid like us?
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's the other things that we're asking ourselves. And on the other end, you have this kind of partnership. You're entering into AI deals, you're licensing your content, you're revising-- reach is more than ever your priority, really meeting users where they are. Syndication, aggregators, downstream strategy, everything. So I think-- I don't know that anyone's on one end or the other.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: Maybe there are. I think the truth is we're probably somewhere in between. But I think we're, again, going back to this idea of, we're following the user, following the customer, and the data we're getting from their behavior. We'll be thinking about, OK, what dials do we need to shift to move up and down that spectrum depending on what the opportunities are and what the risks are to our business model.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So that's the framework, at least, that I've been using to think through that.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. Roger, did you want to say something before I ask the next question?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Can I just jump in and say that-- I think one of the things that I want to just suggest is that in this model where there's a syndicator and a syndicate, if you think about it in those terms, we're missing out on the power of what some of our organizations might actually have in that. And I think-- Mike, I think you started to get into some of that. Which is that if you actually have a community, if you are a society that has actually built a real community in terms of the business models and the engagement and the sense of connectedness and so forth, there's no reason why you couldn't be the place where others content is syndicated.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And in the same vein, be similarly syndicating your content elsewhere. So maybe what we need to do is think a little bit less about of archipelagos and more about where there are opportunities for a certain kind of interconnectedness. So answering the question, I think the business model is, how do we provide-- if you think that you have the stuff to be able to-- the traffic, the engagement, the community, like, go big.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Don't just go out. I think that's the way that I would think about how to bring the business model to bring users to the platform, if you want to put it that way.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah, I love that. And I think we're seeing some great examples of that in the industry as well. Going back to the idea of reach-- we'll get to questions in a bit. Going back to the idea of reach and syndication and opportunities there, Lori, as a consultant, you're working closely with publishers as they explore opportunities and also experience possible threats.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: So how have you-- what sort of conversations have you had about how publishers can really maintain control while pursuing these agreements? Control of data, of the version of record, of access, and of their brand.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. I mentioned trust before, and I think that that's the underpinning of all of those things. Publishers have the knowledge. All of these other services are using your knowledge to provide results or information, but you have the knowledge. And holding on to that knowledge is really important. And building the trust, and ensuring that you are keeping your brand, that you are not giving away all of the content.
LORI CARLIN: You're bringing folks back to you through linking. These services, they don't want to be housing everybody's content. They don't have the time, the energy, the room. They want to ingest information. They want to give back quick answers, but they want to link back to the version-- what should be the version of record. I think it also is a part education process, education and marketing of your community.
LORI CARLIN: Roger talked about how you've got a learned society. You've got a community who trusts you, who are involved with you. You want to make sure that they understand, you are the source and are coming back to you for that information. And it's really important-- it used to be-- I can remember interviewing researchers and asking them, how did you trust this?
LORI CARLIN: How did you find this? And I can remember seeing even residents doing Google searches and coming up with a surgical procedure on YouTube and deciding whether it was valid or not, just based on their own intelligence and their training. And if you ask a researcher to do a search and bring up a list of articles, they'll quickly look through it and they'll decide which ones are the right ones for their search.
LORI CARLIN: Again, if you ask them why, it's oftentimes just based on their intelligence and their training, maybe they look at the institution and the authors, they know them, somebody is a friend. And all of that feeds into it. And they trusted what they found based on their own intuition and their own experience. But that's shifting now, and all of the issues with research integrity is making researchers question whether or not they can trust this information.
LORI CARLIN: The publisher holds the key to that trust. And ensuring that you are transparent about what you're doing to make sure that your content is trustworthy and that you are the authority will bring them to you for that verification. HANNAH HECKNER
SWAIN: That's great.
SWAIN: Roger, you painted a really beautiful picture of publishers coming together back to a platform. But I'd like to think about the opposite. So what conditions do you see happening where and when publishers should be willing to give up their platforms? When is it the better choice?
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I think I've sketched out in my remarks so far to two different models of what a publisher can be. There's the thing that all publishers have in common, which I talked about before, which is the signals of trust and authority, and then there's something that a few publishers, but realistically not very many have, which is that they have a coherent community at scale. So I want to distinguish between those two things. I'm not talking about the folks now who have a coherent community at scale.
ROGER SCHONFELD: There's a few of those. That's a very exceptional consideration, and let's put that to the side. But for the publishers that are in the trust and authority business fundamentally-- and by the way, this is actually the largest publishers are more in the trust and authority business. Like, the big 3, 5, 7 publishers are more in the trust and authority business than they are in the coherent communities at scale business.
ROGER SCHONFELD: I think that's-- it's not a scale issue. It's a [INAUDIBLE]. The ones who are in the trust and authority business, what are the conditions where they could give up-- where they could reasonably foresee a possibility of giving up the platform? Are there ways to apply the brand, to apply those signals of trust and authority into the articles, into the journals in a way that carries through to other platforms?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Are there opportunities to think about not just, what are we giving up in audience, but how do we expand our audience? So I think one of the things that we sometimes focus on when we look at usage data from our own platform is we see the risk of it falling off. We don't necessarily see-- think as much-- and you may have done this and some may have, but we don't always think as much about, what are the opportunities to grow an audience?
ROGER SCHONFELD: Where are their complementary audiences? Where is there an impact? Where is there a reach? Where is there usage that actually can go beyond what an individual platform might have? And then I just want to make sure to emphasize that, of course, we still need an infrastructure from which to distribute content or to anchor on what is the version of record.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Now, that might not be a public site. That might not be a hosting platform. There's other ways to imagine that working. But I think those are some of the factors that I'd want to put on the table at a high level for discussion.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Great. I know that we want to ask the audience some questions, so I might open it up. Teo was raising his hand 15 minutes ago, so let's get him a microphone.
AUDIENCE: That will guarantee [INAUDIBLE] publications. Part of the question has been already answered. But I'm going back to what Alex said in the first session-- the article of the future, the Journal of the future, and we're still operating in why the platform matters. I hear trustworthy, I hear trademark. But if we have to envision this journal of the future or the article of the future, what is the role of the platform? Is it YouTube the platform for the article of the future?
AUDIENCE: So I'm being a little bit provocative here since the first part of my question has been already answered. Thank you.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Yeah. Any takers? Maybe I'll look to the publisher on the panel. [LAUGHS]
MICHAEL HARDESTY: So the question was formats about PD-- yeah. I don't know. I mean, the PDF has lived for whatever, 30 years since we all went online. And I think it's effective vehicle for talking about trust, talking about authority. It's an effective tool for disseminating research, which I think is our role as publishers, disseminating scientific information and communication.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: This idea I've been thinking about is, we have-- increasingly so, I think the conversation around our content is like-- we think of it as data. And it's not just the metadata, but also, there's metadata that's happening upstream of the publisher that's happening in the lab that we haven't-- it never makes it to us.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: And so I think thinking about future-- I don't know 10, 5 years, maybe AI can help with this. Is like, creating parallel formats. Like, ones meant for the user. There's that's the one thing that never changes for us, people still love going to the PDF. It just doesn't budge. And so I don't think we should-- I think we should respect that.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: If our readers are interested in the PDF, then let's continue to produce that for them. But also recognizing that content is discoverable on different platforms, whether it's syndication or open access or what have you. And producing that data that machines can then use ingest in their systems and improve the experience for everyone. So that's what I'd be thinking about.
MICHAEL HARDESTY: HANNAH HECKNER
SWAIN: Other thoughts
SWAIN: on platform of the future?
ROY KAUFMAN: Yeah. Who's your user? So PDF has been around a while, and I would say it's a 300-year-old technology or older because it's paper under glass. And while as an industry we've said, we can make this better-- it's a little bit-- I still wonder, is this is my bells and whistles example from 28 years ago? Yeah, you could make it better.
ROY KAUFMAN: Do people care that much? But there is a whole other user out there, whether you call it AI, whether you call it text and data mining, there is a machine user, and it's platform needs are fundamentally different from the human readers platform needs. So there is-- that's an XML, it's API availability, it's all of that. So as we evolve as an industry and have different user categories, the needs of the platform for each user group are fundamentally different.
ROY KAUFMAN: Machine wants something different from a human. So yeah, so I do think-- we're going to have to see how all of this evolves. But fundamentally, today, we've got the machine user and the human user and they have very different needs and different formats.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Perhaps this is another panel entirely. But I think when we're thinking about knowing our users, it's also good to keep in mind third party cookie deprecation, a lot of other headwinds and perhaps an underlining of the importance of that relationship between publishers, platforms, and their users. A thought--
ROY KAUFMAN: I still think-- but just to say, the version of record is still important. To me, whether it's the human going to the version of record the machine, it's still the version of record. It's still that quality marker.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Hi. Justin Spence, PSI. We did a lot of work on sci-hub in the past. And I'm struck by some of the comments that I'm hearing, and I agree with all of them. That brand is-- first and foremost, has to be, because it's really the only way of stopping the world where, I read it on the internet, or I read it on Facebook. And it's like, well, that's not a source.
AUDIENCE: That's a medium. And it doesn't-- brand has to lie in there. But I'm also struck by the fact that-- I agree with Roy's point, that I'm a huge music buff, but I don't go to individual record producers or labels or what have you. I want to go to Spotify or whatever it is to be able to search for the brand, i.e., the bands or the genre that I like.
AUDIENCE: But I also am willing to pay for it, and I want to pay for it. But I think what we found with sci-hub is, if you give researchers what they want, which is a vast amount of content, ala on a Spotify platform, the ability to search it with, ala with a Google overlay over the content, they will use it even if they know that content has been obtained through maybe amoral means.
AUDIENCE: I also believe that the AI groups that are looking to consume content will look at something like sci-hub and see that as a bounty of content. And so I wonder if there aren't things that we can learn from that experience with sci-hub. And I just wondered if anyone would like to comment on some of those thoughts and how it all ties together.
AUDIENCE:
LORI CARLIN: I was thinking about the sci-hub example a few days ago, because it's out there. How easy would that be. I think that-- well, one provocative question that's been going through my mind ever since I started talking about being on this panel was, when did we need platforms to begin with?
LORI CARLIN: Researchers 5, 10 years ago, if you asked them where they got their content from, they went to Google. And then they went directly to get that article, and they were done. If you ask them years ago, who published a journal, they had no idea. There were some things that happened in the industry, and publishers became more front and center. So yes, now if you ask a researcher where they publish, they know the publisher.
LORI CARLIN: But even members of societies sometimes don't know what journals their own society is publishing. So what value has the platform brought to this community from the start? There obviously is a value. So could we just have an aggregated platform where all publishers are brought together and people go there and look for their information?
LORI CARLIN: It sounds a little utopia. It doesn't sound like it could happen, but who knows? There are lots of things going on today that some of us would not have thought would be the case. I come back also to what Roger has said a couple of times about these communities. There are certain communities where those researchers will go directly to that community, and that is a very known practice.
LORI CARLIN: But for most of the bigger publishers, that's not the case. So everybody would-- you almost have to agree to work together in order for something like that to happen. I never say never, but the question is, how could even pockets of that come together and all work together?
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: We've also made allusions to Spotify a lot, not Napster. So is this an issue of the higher fidelity that can be found in a Spotify? I don't think people are just saying, you know what, I need to pay $9.99 a month. I feel bad for these music producers. Or is it the litigiousness of the music industry?
LORI CARLIN: No, but it's the service. What is that point at which-- what is the convenience fee that somebody is willing to pay in order to get what they need.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: I know we're getting close to time, but we have other questions. One more or reception?
SPEAKER 1: We don't like to keep people from breaks.
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: OK.
SPEAKER 1: But find everybody later--
HANNAH HECKNER SWAIN: Perfect. Round of applause for this fantastic panel. [APPLAUSE] We have a break until 11:00, and this break is brought to you by Touchstone. So thank you very much, Touchstone.
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