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2024 Hot and Happening – The latest and greatest you need to know about NOW! (Video)
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2024 Hot and Happening – The latest and greatest you need to know about NOW! (Video)
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Segment:0 .
Welcome, everyone. We'll just give a few seconds to assemble and then we will get underway.
Just a few more seconds and we'll be underway shortly. OK we're going to get started. Thank you and welcome to our SSP webinar today, we'll be focused on 2024 hot and happening the latest and greatest you need to know about.
Now We're very pleased that you can join us today. Before we begin, I'd like to Thank our 2024 education sponsors, access innovations open, Athens and Silverchair. We're very, very grateful for your support. My name is Lori Carlin. I'm chief Commercial Officer at Delta think and the SSP education committee webinar working group chair. Before we get started, I just have some housekeeping items to review.
Attendees microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in the Zoom to enter your questions for the moderator and the panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with other participants and with the organizers. Closed captioning has been enabled and you can view the captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing show captions.
This one hour session will be recorded and it'll be available to the registrants. Following today's events event. Registered attendees will be sent an email with the recording as soon as it's available. And a quick note on SPS code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner at the conclusion of today's discussion. You will receive a post-event evaluation via email and we encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape the future SSP programming. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our moderator today, Dave Myers.
Dave is a serial entrepreneur and a recurring revenue licensing and B2B information expert with over 30 years experience specializing in strategy, sales, legal licensing and business development. He has drafted negotiated and closed over 500 domestic and international licensing agreements with partners, customers and distributors. He has also negotiated and closed countless business alliances, strategic partnering and revenue generation deals.
Prior to starting data licensing alliance and his consulting practice D media associates, he was executive director, global licensing and business development with Wolters kluwer health for seven years. So thank you, Dave, for moderating and over to you. Thank you, Lori. So and Thank you all for joining the first webinar of 2020 for the January SSP webinar 2024 hot and happening the latest and greatest you need to know about.
Now Well, we're not going to be going as far as predicting the future today. What we will do with the help of our esteemed panel is to take some lessons from what transpired in 2023 and what we see in for 2024 to make you prepared for the year to come. We'll talk about some of the latest innovations, disruptors and transformative advances shaping the way we work and interact with our community.
And we hope to provide valuable insights to help you stay current and plan for the year ahead. So here's the plan in general. After introductions, we'll be looking briefly back on 2024. Then we'll be moving on to 20 excuse me, to 2023. Then we'll be moving on to 2024, starting with a report on 2024 trends the SSP community is talking about. And then moving on to four core topics AI publishing models, non-traditional content and publishing workflows.
A discussion on these topics could easily support an entire conference, but we only have an hour, so let's get started. And with that, the panel discussion. Panel introductions. I'll start with vita Damian Elias. Good morning. My name is Vida Dan Unitas. I am the director of worldwide sales for the Jama network.
We are the journal, the journal publishing arm for the American Medical Association. We publish 13 journals, Jama's, our flagship, and it is still a fully subscription based journal. We have 10 specialty journals that are all hybrids, and we also publish two fully gold journals. So we pretty much run the gamut of different publishing models in our organization. Thank you, Darrell.
Yes, good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm Darrell Gunter. I'm the principal of Gunter media group. We've been in business since 2010. Prior to that, I worked on the industry leading initiatives Factiva for Dow Jones, sciencedirect, Scopus for elsevier, and then going on to Lexis with the reviewer finder along with now with my client underlying, we've launched a digital video library, so I specialize in helping to commercialize these businesses with their new technology.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Dora Tim Lloyd Hi, everyone. Yeah, I'm Tim Lloyd. I'm the founder and CEO of lablynx, which is a business specializing in identity access and analytics solutions for online resources. Prior to that was several product development and operational hats at Alexander Street Press.
That's a scholarly publisher in the humanities and social sciences. More generally, my career to date is focused on developing innovative products and services to support online learning and research outside of lablynx. I'm co-chair of fsp's annual meeting program committee and a member of the governance committee on Seamless access.org and co-chair the outreach committee and serve on a variety of industry working groups related to identity and analytics.
And my context for thinking about the future is, as someone that helps maintain some of the digital plumbing that underpins scholarly publishing. So think research and reader identity authentication processes, resources and editorial systems. Analytics on the usage of scholarly resources. So digital plumbing.
Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Next, Avi stamen. Yeah thanks, David. Nice to meet everyone. Good morning. I am the founder and CEO of a company called academic language experts, which is an author services company focusing on books in the humanities and social sciences, and more recently, I founded a new startup called serrator AI, which is an attempt to become the first co-writing pilot tool for researchers and for authors in actually writing up their research.
Great and last but certainly not least, Hannah heckner swing. Hi, I'm really happy to be here. Hannah heckner Swain. I'm the VP of product at silverchair, which is a publishing platform. We've been in business now for 31 years, so our business has changed a lot. But as VP of product, I work with our publishing community as well as the industry at large to develop our platform and future products to solve problems, create new opportunities and help our publishers make money, save money and fulfill their missions.
Before silverchair, my experience was solely on the publisher side. I was most recently at triple A's working in the Office of publishing at science. And I'd say what really activates me is partnerships, working with our publishers and problem solving. So happy to be here, excited to be part of this panel. Thank you, Hannah.
Appreciate it. All right. Now let's get into the meat of our webinar. Again, we're looking back on 2023 for a second, and I'll ask each one of our panelists. From your perspective, what was the most significant or notable scholarly communication trend that shaped 2023 for you? Let's go in the same order. So we'll start with vita.
So actually, in my opinion, for us, it was too I mean, I think we entered the year thinking about open access and particularly kind of waiting to see what the memo was going to how that was going to come out, what that was going to say. But all of a sudden that change and it was all I after that, I think I kind of came, you know, everyone started talking about chatgpt sometime in spring.
And I think that really that was a really big transition in our industry. I don't know that everyone knows what to do with it yet, but I think there is this ship last year. Yeah sounds like a common thread that's we're going to hear about today next, Darryl. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the normal issues in our industry when we're looking at pricing access and technology. Quite frankly, I was very happy about chatgpt because it helped to open up sales to my book that I published two years ago on blockchain and AI.
But I think this industry is slow to move and adopt and understand how this technology can help us. And I think chatgpt and Ava is going to dive into that greatly. It's a good basic way of looking at a basic corpus of data. But I tell you, I wrote a speech for a talk on semantic search. And, and I use chatgpt to just do a general search on stuff. And they had information about Dow Jones wrong. So you got to you got to use chatgpt.
It's worse than Wikipedia in one sense. So but yeah, I appreciate that completely. I feel the same that one of the biggest challenges for me, at least in 2023, was the concept of hallucinations and biases. You got to have diversity in your data sets and a bunch of other things that I still has challenges with. And we're going to be probably looking at those for 2024 as well.
Moving on, Tim Lloyd. So I went in a slightly different direction for this. And my three buzzwords for 2023 were scale, complexity and trust. And they all interrelate. So on scale the impact of increasing volumes. So more submissions running through editorial processes, more content being published, more usage as access increases as a result of open access content or syndication or content ad lib links.
We've seen this most notably in the volume of usage stats. Did an analysis last year of a sample of $500 million open access and paywalled events that had happened over the previous 12 months and found that open access content received 7 and 1/2 times more engagement than paywalled content on average over that data set. That's a significant increase in scale. It's got pretty important implications for the systems we use to manage the scholarly publishing workflow.
So for example, if you're a paywalled publisher who's experimenting with open access publishing, are you ready for an order of magnitude and growth in usage? Second one, complexity. It just continues to get more and more complex. We're all seeing this. A couple of examples I picked out was one was the complexity of meeting open access reporting mandates.
The many to many reporting requirements are leading to infrastructure solutions like the switchboard. These solutions avoid publishers having to replicate functionality individually, but add to the complexity of what we're doing. Another one is aggregating usage analytics. Once usage starts happening outside of your own platform and just a data normalization and mediation between there.
And then the last one on trust. So more data flowing through more parties obviously increases the opportunities for mistakes and fraudulent activity, something we've learned a lot more about as paper Mills have overloaded editorial processes that were really designed for simpler, slower tasks, the scaling complexity isn't going to reduce. So the answer lies in baking trust in more automated ways into our processes.
So those are my three scale complexity and trust. Thank you. That was pretty complete. You know, it's interesting. Clark and Esposito just came out with an email report today talking exactly about some of those issues you just highlighted. Um, Abby, over to you for 2023. Yes I guess I've always become kind of the perennial optimist in these forums and trying to look at the positive side.
And I think that the what's really excited me is what's always been my life mission. But, you know, finally feel like there's an opportunity, an opportunity to fulfill it, which is leveling the playing field for non native English scholars and for global scholars. And I think that the opportunities that are created in terms of information search at our fingertips, in terms of language capabilities, in terms of access to data sets and being able to manipulate data in ways that, you know, researchers who don't necessarily have the infrastructure or the resources to do that all of a sudden have that opportunity.
And I think that as an industry, we still we are still kind of far behind in terms of diverse representation, in terms of the scholarly record. And I see large language models, as you know, potentially one way to become the great equalizer. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its downsides in all sorts of ways. I'm sure we'll get into.
But that's what excites me about diving into 2024. Thank you, Avi. Hannah Yeah. I'm going to keep that wave of optimism going. I really think that 2023 was a year where you can really see evidence of the scholarly communications community getting tired of being painted in that too slow, too staid, too siloed brushstroke. Um, and I mean, if you think about the approaches to publishers, you know, seeing this influx of generative AI possibilities and saying, you know, for this many years I have really cared about people, you know, coming to this website to find this content.
But now I'm going to turn that on its head. How else can I think of new discovery pathways? How do I still capture that engagement? Stay part of this conversation. I mean, you also think about the syndication possibilities that Tim, you spoke about. Publishers are saying, how can I meet researchers where they are? And also those two syndication platforms are going to work together and say, OK, how can we make sure that this usage is normalized.
So that we continue to make these publishers happy? So like I see these walls coming down that have been, you know, so established for so many years, and I think can also see collaboration between different kinds of parties in the scholarly ecosystem. Um, with the Nelson memo coming out, there's been so much activity of publishers working together and saying, OK, how can we have this, you know, United consolidated front that we can really communicate our value proposition to these funders?
How do we keep this communication, this conversation going? Um, rather than just going in the status quo, making small tweaks. So yeah, I see lots of really great trends and I see that continuing. Going into 2024? Absolutely you know, if I had to think about the motto for 2024, I would say it's something along the lines of innovate and evolve.
And we all have to the status quo is not going to cut it anymore. For most of us. So I appreciate those comments. Thank you so much. All right. So that was a little bit about of a recap of 2023. And, you know, our panelists really set up 2024. But before we really get into it, I'm going to ask again SSP annual meeting co-chair Tim Lloyd to talk about the 2024 annual meeting submissions and trends that he's seen with the submissions for talks and panels.
So I spent several years, it feels like of my life. That was actually only about five days between Christmas and New year, going through over 100 proposals for this year's annual meeting, along with my fellow co-chairs. So shout out to Erin Foley and Jesse Slater, who also slogged through this. About half of them were on five topics only, and the rest were a very diverse range of topics. And of those five, the biggest was I. I great surprises there, but from a lot of different contexts.
So there were use cases for AI, the concept of machine versus human intelligence. What's good for what AI and ethics? AI in humanities and social sciences tools. So it was very broad. But you know, there's definitely a hunger for understanding how AI intersects with what we do. The next four categories were pretty similar in terms of amount, so the first one was peer review and research integrity again, came up there to the adoption of AI to assist in peer review publishing ethics.
The second one was open access. So proposals around subscribe to open managing the transition to open access, the implications of mandates and compliance on workflows and researcher outreach. The third one was Dea issues. And to your point, Abby, about accessibility, that was a big one. So using technology to help improve accessibility, ethnicity, surveys, accountability and toolkits.
And the last one was data data in general, metadata, pids, bibliometrics taxonomies. And you know, I'll come back to this when we talk about publisher workflows, but that's got to be big. Once you get outside of those, the sort of other topics that we so we selected session sessions on research impact public policy, professional development, preservation, marketing and publication formats, but almost everything had a thread of AI running through it.
Yeah so those trends really kind of align a little bit with what we're talking about. Certainly be the one that is the outlier that we were maybe not going to talk about too much today, but certainly has come up in conversations is about peer review. And we kind of I specifically left it off a little bit, because we're going to be having a webinar on peer review sometime this year so that that's going to be its own little area of conversation, but kind of falls in line what we're talking about.
So thank you very much for setting that up for us. And of course, as I mentioned when we first got together today, AI is really the thing that everybody is talking about for good and for bad, as Avi had mentioned. AI to look at it in the positive instead of the negative. But I certainly identify I can identify some of the challenges with AI. And so I'm going to ask Avi first, how do you foresee artificial intelligence and specifically Gen AI impacting the information industry in 2024?
And maybe talk a little bit about the role it will play in shaping the future of scholarly publishing community in general? Yeah so when I think about this question, I think about three main categories legal editorial and integrity. So I'll try to break those down one at a time. In terms of the legal and I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but we're asking very basic, fundamental questions about what does it mean to be a creator?
What does it mean to take owner to have ownership over a text or an image or a likeness or an identity? And these are kind of basic, fundamental philosophical questions, which I think is why the lawyers maybe are, you know, struggling a little bit to come out with a clear answer. And they're nuanced and they're complex. And I think that a big part of the reason that many of the publishers are taking a kind of wait and see approach is because we all want to see where the chips fall in terms of, you know, the jurisprudence on this issue.
So that's part one editorial is really a question of, well, what is the significance of a written manuscript or a written grant proposal or any sort of research output in a world where writing no longer has the same, um, I'm not going to say the same meaning, but writing is different than when we all learned writing. You know, in school, if we're starting off with being able to generate a text and then maybe our role is more of a reviser editor, critical thinker, depending on how you want to approach it.
So then all of a sudden it's what is the significance of a written text either within a journal or a book. Right? how do we approach that? Are there alternative formats of writing or of expression, maybe their verbal expression video that actually can have meaning and purpose and impact in different ways?
And then finally is, you know, and then obviously kind of the question of as editors ourselves, right, how do we navigate that? Do we try and police it? Do we try and educate around it? Do we try and turn a blind eye? Right even deciding not to do anything is a decision in and of itself. And then the last category that I want to bring up is research, integrity.
These tools, you know, the common wisdom about these tools is that they will speed up some of the research integrity issues that already have been prevalent. People like to talk about paper Mills the same way people are like to talk about, you know, predatory journals, which I think are important issues. And I think they're kind of the big, you know, the big Frankensteins that we can all see and identify.
I actually would say that the bigger issue is around researchers with good intentions and who want to do the right thing, but may not understand the nuance of what they can take from some of these large language models and what they can't and may unintentionally be committing some sort of fraud or plagiarism, which is a different discussion or, you know, or making mistakes unknowingly. And then the question becomes, well, as peer reviewers, as an editorial process, do we actually have the ability to catch those and/or do we have the ability to educate proactively?
So those are kind of the three ways that I think those are the ball's in the air that were, you know, that have yet to really fall in a kind of, you know, generally accepted way. But I think those are going to be the topics that are going to be kind of at the forefront going into 2024 around generative AI. Dave, I like to, to build on what Ivey said. Ivey really great presentation.
Really, really enjoyed your comments there. Since I've been involved with I technically since 1993 at Dow Jones, we had a service that would look at the, you know, the trading average of a particular stock and then give you an alert. And then, of course, Alexis, which I thought was very phenomenal, where we're able to understand a digital fingerprint of a document and then match it against other documents based upon the content, the context of it.
And I think it comes down to with AI leveraging these algorithms is the recall and precision, right? So you have recall where a search will give you everything related to that search. But the precision is that it's in context. And I always like to talk about content in context, you know, for that. Um, so these, these are tools that have been around for a long time and now the publishing community is starting to understand the benefit of that.
And to Ivy's point about these paper mills, I mean, I think this is such a huge problem for us where we have really bad papers making into our workflow. And I think these AI, large language model systems will allow us to really identify those and not allow them to get into our system. So I'm very bullish, as you can tell, on, on AI. Yeah, I might jump in here too. I think there's so much opportunity right now for scholarly publishers.
When you start a conversation that involves generative AI and the scientific enterprise, it immediately becomes a conversation about garbage in, garbage out. And there is just such an opportunity for publishers to, you know, really have a lot of power in this. I mean, these models are going to be knocking on the doors of these respected publishing institutions to say, you have something that we really need in order for our tool to maintain relevance and trust.
And I think the devil will be in the details of how those interactions win out and also how publishers take this opportunity into their own hands, create those novel engagements with their end users, once again taking the side of the optimist here. But I really think that there's a lot of opportunities. And this also becomes a question about, you know, what I think of as like lowercase a access. If you think of the like, yes, there's opportunities for distrust in the scientific process when you have a model that's rife with, you know, hallucinations.
But imagine the opportunities if, you know, a middle Schooler can ask a GPT to summarize a paper that they would have never been able to really understand in the past and summarize it in the style of a Megan Thee stallion song, you know, like that's going to make someone really excited about science. So I think that there's a lot of opportunities here, but we need to figure out how to keep things safe and thinking about copyright and thinking about use cases and also how to allow publishers to hold on to that value proposition, eke out their own value and create new variable experiences with their end users.
Absolutely you know, I agree with all that you have said. I you know, as a lawyer, Avi, you know, I totally understand the legal implications. I want to add a little bit. Um, regulation is going to be a lot of what drives the adoption and the use of these AI, especially Gen AI tools, because the, you know, the governmental powers are trying to wrap what was, you know, the prior organizational infrastructure around something that is new and never been thought of.
So that's certainly going to be a driver. I also wrote the word trust. Trust we've mentioned it a couple of times already today. But trust is going to be key going forward. And I certainly am an optimist as well. I think that there's massive amounts of opportunity, especially for data owners in rethinking the assets that they have, how they package it and how they expose it to the world.
So thank you very much. Before we move on, anybody else have any quick. Yeah, sure, Tim. Yeah I took a slightly more existential view on this. I mean, I agree with everything that everyone said, but, you know, from an economics perspective. I think is existential for our industry. So there's a quote I like from Warren buffett, who added this addendum on to the rising tide, lifts all boats and said that only when the tide goes out, discover who's been swimming naked.
And I see average production costs in scholarly publishing is being like the tide going out. And here's the link. So if recent history has taught us anything, it's that scaling complexity favors those that can manage their production costs, competition, the desire of society to get everything faster and cheaper. It's going to keep putting Downward pressure. We've seen what happens in the marketplace as a result of this consolidation.
And if you're a small or medium publisher, it's tough. If you can resist it, but most can't. So publishers that make effective use of AI are going to be able to sustain their publishing operations in this environment, they will thrive or they'll keep their clothes on, to use the analogy. Those that don't rethink their processes, are they going to lose their clothes? So, you know, whatever angle you take on AI, if you don't leverage it to manage your costs effectively, then you either need to take some artisanal niche strategy to publishing.
Or you need to have some, you know, a lot of funding coming in from somewhere else, because think is what will drive our ability to sustain fast cost effective publishing. And if you don't adopt it, it's going to be a struggle. Absolutely you know, I created a facilitation course for data owners in licensing their content out. And one of the kind of thoughts that I leave with my clients is really about placing some small bets in different places because that's how you discover where your unique selling proposition can be or should be.
So I totally agree with what you're saying. Hey, I just want to mention next week I'm doing a webinar for on for libraries on ethics and bias and AI. So FYI. Thank you. Well, let's move on to something that's not as flashy and that everybody wants to talk about. It's really about publishing models.
And I'm going to ask vita, since she has yet to speak so much today. You know, with the evolving landscape of publishing models, what shifts have you observed in the adoption of open access, transformative agreements and other models, and how are these changes influencing the accessibility of scholarly content? The open access mean to be perfectly it's here to stay.
It's It's expanding. I think many, many more countries are mandating that research that's being funded by their governments are published open access. I think that Japan just recently announced that. Um, that being said. For for the type of publisher we are. Some of this has been difficult to adopt into really good transformative agreement models.
I think we so much think about the content that we publish publish as research content, which is funded, which does have a path to apcs and things like that. However, and I can only speak for the Jama network, you know, we split our content into three pillars. We have opinion, we have our clinical content and we have research content of that. Only the research content is funded for us to be able to publish the opinion and the clinical content, which is content that a clinician can use today in their practice.
The money has to come from somewhere. And the APC charges don't cover that. That being said, at the same time, when you take a look at institutions around the world, I feel like there has been. A different want from them. I think in Europe, especially northern Europe, it's, um, there are mandates. There is an opinion that everyone should have access to the content.
When I talk to libraries in other parts of the world, it's much more a cost savings measure. They, you know, their institutions want this, but they're not consolidating the funding for it. I feel like in Europe, the funding for open access along with subscription, is getting consolidated within the library to allow them to create, whether it's a read and publish deal or a transformative agreement in the United States.
The departments at University still want to hold on to their money, but expect these deals to be negotiated, which has been quite difficult to do. I also think that individual institutions have different goals and it's not always easy to accommodate those goals. We had very long discussions with a very prominent University in the United states, and after several meetings, what we actually finally were able to understand that their goal for trying to find create open access agreements was to help their young researchers publish open access.
They didn't really care about their established researchers because they knew that they had research funding, but they wanted to find a pathway for their young, less established researchers. The problem is, as a publisher, when we get a submission, we have no way of identifying. Is this a established researcher? Is this a young researcher? And the libraries don't want to manage that either.
So there is who's going to know, even if we could find a model to accommodate something like that, there's no good way to manage the recognition of does this does this author fall into the appropriate bucket? So I think there's challenges and I just don't think everyone everyone is looking at open access for the same reasons, which can make it a challenge for various publishers. Great Thank you, Stephanie.
A wild West out there thought one of the interesting data points from recent times was counties decision to stop trying to categorize models. So gold used to be an event type or an access type. It's just moving to open because there are so many models being tried. And I feel like the era of experimentation continues. Yeah, I think a lot of 100% figure it out. And you know, people I think maybe thought that was a solution.
If everyone every zero concept in was fully funded, you know, there'd be no money for the rest of us. So, you know, I think there's going to be a lot more experimentation on one of the other interesting things I've been seeing in the way the publishing model is developing is about how there's a lack, frankly, of good governance structures for how we share the data that has to support the model.
So for a lot of open access publishing models, you know, how do you demonstrate impact? And a lot of these data sets that are being shared, you know, contain a lot of pretty commercial information. So one of the interesting projects I've been monitoring is the open access book usage data trust, and they have this concept of international data spaces, which is fairly new to me. What's interesting about it is that, you know, it's not the technology that's the challenge here.
We know how to move data around in our community. It's the governance structure. Who owns the data, who's where's the provenance of the data, who's got the right to share it, who's got the right to load it, who's got the right to reuse it? And I think those topics can become more and more important as an industry as we Bookshare and share more data that's being driven by these publishing models.
In regards to business models. I just wanted to add one area that I think our industry is not addressing is the NIH funding. The NIH funding provides $46 billion to the research community every year. If we get an administration in our government that decides, oh, I need to put some money somewhere else, our industry will have a very significant issue and maybe some of the associations are dealing with this, I think, very, very quietly.
But I think we need to educate our congressmen so that they're ready to take on this issue, this fight. It's a very important issue. Now, if I could add from my perspective, coming from the author's point of view, I still don't find that researchers are compelled or driven or have the motivating factors to push them to open access as their default mode of action.
So they appreciate and understand kind of the rationale behind it. But as soon as they see that price tag, unless there's some sort of transformational agreement in, you know, in place, they know, they quickly they oftentimes will quickly move on. And again, you know, it depends on the researcher seniority, as vita said, and it depends on the, you know, country where it's coming from.
But I think as a general rule, when there's free and there's big cost, unless we can make a compelling argument for what that cost is and have, you know, and sometimes the institutions have the funding, but it's just a matter of fighting for the APC and it's just they really need to buy in. So I don't know if the, you know, if we've gotten the researcher push that maybe we would have wanted or expected.
And we have to ask ourselves whether that's a problem of marketing from our perspective or maybe there's something inherent here that we need to be addressing. Yeah, I think sorry, go ahead. OK just I think that creating those relationships between publishers and those individuals, be them authors, potential future authors, is going to be all like increasingly more important.
And it's like it's so great, vita, that you were on this call and can talk to all of the complexities because I think that sometimes these publisher and institutional conversations can be painted like can be overly generalized and can sort of be like, oh, these two antagonistic bodies are, you know, so it is such a complex space. But I think that that B2C interaction is going to become more and more important.
Um, the one thing I did want to mention, it was something as a response to what Avi said, that this hasn't really resonated or maybe reached the researchers. I think a lot of the conversations have happened between publishers and institutions or publishers and funders. And I don't the researchers and authors themselves have been as much of a part of the conversation, you know.
You know, every once in a while you hear, um, you know, the right of the researcher to make the decision of where they choose to publish. You know, they don't. Some of them talk about how they don't want to be forced into publishing in a certain journal because of certain requirements. So, you know, I think a very important piece of this entire puzzle is really not part of the conversation about this.
Absolutely you know, you did a great job and outlining a lot of from the publishing perspective, some of the challenges. I just wanted to chime in. One of my big soapbox issues is with regards to funding funder mandates. And I encourage data owners to think outside the box in and how that will affect them. And my contention is, is that with government funded data, sure, if you are forced to make it open access because the government funded it, that's fine to read.
But with Gen AI and artificial intelligence in general, you still have a different use case. And that different use case can actually be an opportunity. As you know, as Hannah said, there are tons of opportunities. And this is an opportunity to kind of divorce. The different use cases and give it open to readers, but charge for potentially licensing. And that's kind of one of the things that I see out there.
Well, because of time, I do want to move on, but there's a ton more here. One of the things we didn't talk about is altmetrics and how that affects it. But, you know, maybe we'll circle back to that at the end. I want to move on to non-traditional content and maybe, Daryl, you can take a first stab at this, but um, non-traditional content formats such as video, multimedia posters, conference proceedings, preprints and all have been gaining traction.
How have these formats influenced scholarly communication practices and what challenges or opportunities have arisen as a result? You know, Dave, that's a great question. And I think our recent history of COVID preprints actually started back in the late 50s or early 60s, and they kind of fell out of favor. And then, of course, we had the Los Alamos archive, which is now housed at Cornell.
But during COVID preprints came back and they came back in a large way simply because people had more access to information. Now there's a debate about, you know, some of the quality of some of the preprints. But when we look at a researcher's hypothesis or they're trying to respond to their hypothesis, they want content that supports that hypothesis. Where that content comes from.
It doesn't matter whether it's a lecture, it's a traditional paper, it's a video, it's an article. The researcher is the one who pulls it all together. And I think because of covid, a lot of online services started in transparency underlying as a client of mine. They now have amassed over 50,000 lecture videos. And the thing about this alternative content, it's that when you go to a conference, they have concurrent sessions.
Unfortunately, as human beings, we only have our one person. We can't attend everything. So what it allows us, what it allows someone to do is to be able to review that material in the comfort of their home and also be able to pull out from post to post. Can you imagine poster sessions? Traditionally, the poster person would roll up their poster at the conference, never to be seen again.
But now posters, they're digital, they're searchable, they get a Doi along with the videos. So it allows someone to establish their digital record, but also to say, hey, I thought about that way back when and here's my Doi. So I think the marketplace hasn't really accepted all of these alternative forms yet, but I guarantee you you've heard it here first that as soon as someone starts to cite an article and have a video in there or something cited from a poster, people are going to go, oh, why didn't we do that?
We should do that. Keep in mind that this is the same industry that in 2001 at the conference had a session debating whether books were going to be digital or not. So, you know, sometimes we can get a little comfortable in our industry. And I and I and I hope with our colleagues here, we can get folks to start to look beyond their current 9 to 5 and look at, OK, how can we reinvent ourselves?
Because this is what I is going to allow us to do. Absolutely Abby, did you have anything to chime in on that? Yeah listen, I'm all for it. And and I and I've been seeing that there's been more and more expansion of what can be given to which I think is an interesting concept. You know, in terms of, you know, new media. Um, I still think, though, maybe the elephant in the room might be, you know, the slang, the slang, the beast, and that is the impact factor, right?
So long as impact factor drives, you know, academic promotion and tenure, I think that all these other alternatives are going to be seen as nice additional extras, which researchers don't have time for, or if they know, if they do have time for, it's once in it's once in a blue moon. So, you know, the I think the technologies are there. I think the willingness is there.
I think the argument for science communication is there. But I'm not sure the incentives and the incentive structure because, you know, is there because at the end, when you're up for your promotion committee, you know, they're not going to want to see a bunch of videos or at least not yet. Right and maybe they should. But I think, you know, that's something that'll be interesting to keep an eye on.
Yeah, but Abby, wouldn't you say that I and the Gen I and the LMS may change this landscape because now conference machines are another data set, just like a journal, right? Or an article or a video. And so, you know, there's I think that the way that these Alt non-traditional formats are really going to take more center stage, especially because they're earlier on in the, you know, the work process of a researcher.
I mean if you're asking me if I was a policy maker, would I adopt that? The answer would be yes. If you're asking me if I've seen that in practice be adopted and given some sort of metric that's taken seriously, the answer is no. So, you know, I hope that it goes in that direction, but I have yet to see. I mean, altmetrics are nice.
I haven't yet seen them as playing a serious factor in promotion committees. I think there's something to think about here too. Like as these trust markers, integrity indicators gather momentum. You can see how multiple iterations of research become that are further upstream become more and more important.
and, you know, someone could say like, yes, I am Hannah heckner Wayne and I, you know, have like now I am just submitting this article to a journal. But you'll also see the preprint here, and I presented this in a poster here and, you know, yada, yada, so on and so on. I think also if this research integrity, then also, especially in thinking about funder mandates and collaboration between funders and publishers, if there is now more of an like if we go back to increased emphasis on reproducibility, this is also then part of that speaking from more of like the technology standpoint, you know, working at a publishing platform, there is a challenge here in sort of the squishiness of some of this content.
Scholarly publishing has been really good at creating this fantastic structure of XML and we have great Jets and bits specifications to put book chapters and journal articles in. And there has been a lot of momentum towards, you know, getting nice metadata fields for video, which is great. And you know, we've implemented that, but there's still some squishiness here and you want to maintain some of that squishiness because some of this stuff is going to not be as structured, but you still want it to have the same sort of building blocks that keep it as part of this overall research record.
So challenges and opportunities in there. Peter, did you have something? I did. You know, I think so. We had to. We're kind of talking about two things, or preprints and some of the other alternative videos. Podcasts I sometimes think it's a really, you know, videos podcast that might be a very different user base.
You know, researchers are going to find the content they really need to read it, understand it, get into the details of it, really understand the citations. And I'm coming from the perspective of clinical medicine. So your, your general practitioner that you go to for a checkup every year is probably not, you know, they may take a look at some abstracts they tables of contents, but they're the ones that are much more likely to listen to a podcast or look at a video on YouTube to keep up with information that's very different than the actual researcher.
And I think as publishers have a challenge of figuring out what is the right way to communicate with all of our audiences and where is that, you know, videos. I know we have struggled a little bit. You know, we want to drive everybody back to our journal. But the reality is, especially young physicians, they're looking at YouTube, you know, so, you know, a lot of our videos are out there on YouTube, but how do we then get them back to our journal where we can, you know, direct them to other things?
There's opportunities and challenges. I'm happy you said that because when you look at the video, the transcriptions that are done, and then within the underlying platform, they actually have a learn more where we get the metadata from full text from publishers, where we put that in context to the video. So the person, the researcher will click right into the publisher's base to get access to the full text article.
So with the transcriptions that are made of these podcasts and videos, it allows people to search it and find it, discover it very quickly. So I think we're close to, as an industry, solving, solving that issue that you raise. Well, that challenge, it's adding it's adding expense to the entire process, which hopefully I will help us deal with in the long term. So, you know, yeah, with regards to expense, I completely agree.
But what scares me a little bit is, you know, the statistic that most of the younger generation, my son, 13 years old, they're all getting most of their information from tiktok, which is the scariest thing to me of all time. But that's a different subject. Well, in the spirit of time, let's move on to a last subject, which is publishing workflows.
Hannah, maybe I'll start with you on this one. How do you envision publishing workflows evolving in 2024, and what technological advancements are likely to play a crucial role in streamlining these workflows? Yeah in thinking about this question, I've just been thinking a lot about the increasing need for the granular of content. You know, making, you know, leaning into that sort of structure that I was mentioning a few moments ago.
I think those these data points that are part of an overall article, overall research output are going to become more and more important as we want to connect pieces of content, connect content to institutions, connect content to institutions, to funders, and then also to, you know, semantic categorization. So, um, I think really thinking about what those building blocks are of your content, what you need to be collecting upstream, how to make that as easy as possible.
Um, so pretty much thinking of what you want to be doing, Uh, a year after an article is published at the time you're getting submissions in. So it, but I really think just atomizing content, um, putting things into as many little boxes as possible will be increasingly important. A boring answer, but I think an important one to think about. Super important Tim do you have anything to add on that before I got another boring answer, which is automation.
So the scaling complexity, we can only cope with it if we automate things. More logic written for simple interactions is going to struggle to cope with more nuanced, complex ones. Workflows are designed around manual review of edge cases. They're going to get overwhelmed as the volume and diversity of those edge cases increases. So I see.
So I was thinking about what are some practical examples of this, and I came up with three at least in the areas that I interact with. So one is trust, trust schools. So a key component of research integrity is trusting the identity and credibility of the person, submitting the content or reviewing the content. There's lots of different ways to assess trust. There is no one size fits all.
If you're a researcher in a well funded Western institution, you might have a Shibboleth login, which means that we know exactly which institution you work for with a high degree of certainty. If a researcher in a less well developed institution with poorer funding. There are other techniques that need to be used, but the volume at which we're processing the materials, no one can do a manual review on this, but artificial intelligence or machine learning can start assigning trust scores as people interact with you, maybe build on patterns of their interaction, which could help us deal with research integrity in real time.
Another example is data normalization. So there was a really good example actually in the Scholarly Kitchen just this week. So Maria Gould, who's the director of the research organization registry, or roroa, was interviewed and talked about a machine learning project where openai, which is an Open Database of global research, was using machine learning to match text strings to raw identifiers so that you can automate the generation of pids, which is fundamental to making stuff work across all our organizations.
And the third one is data analysis. You know, one of my favorite uses for AI is to summarize complex data. It's really hard and time consuming for us to do this. As humans. It's really effective for AI to do it, and our industry is only going to generate more and more complex data sets. So an example that we encountered at lablynx is to do with irregularities and trends in data usage.
Irregularities can proactively identify breakdowns in access control where usage is falling. You could spot fraudulent access where usage is increasing. Trends can help editors to spot communities that are engaging with content that they didn't expect to be engaging. So there's huge efficiency and productivity benefits as well as just managing the increasing volume and scale. So yeah, automation, huge.
Thank you. Anybody else. Well, before we get into some questions, which I encourage anybody on this webinar to post on the Q&A section, I'd like to circle back with the panelists and say. What is the number one thing you believe is the will be an enduring trend in scholarly publishing that will continue to shape our industry. So in other words, what are you focusing on in you for yourself or your organization that will be important for 2024?
And let's start with the same order we introduced ourselves. So, um, you know, I think we are, you know, approaching. Expanded versions of our publishing. Platforms like I'm not sure if I'm going to be using the right terminology. You know, we're always going to have our books. We're always going to have our journals and databases. But I think AI is a disrupter, and I think we have to take a look at AI.
We have to take a look at everywhere our readers are reading our content. You know, there's researchgate, there's other aggregators, there's there, it's a, you know, we are every one of us is like a small piece of a really big puzzle. And how do we really encompass all of that? I think that's a trend. I think, you know, I could speak for my organization, you know, so long is like, how do we get people to log in directly to jama?
But they don't they're going to do a search somewhere else. They're going to find information and hopefully they're going to get back to us in some way. And I think this is going to be a trend. AI is going to actually hasten that trend even more. So absolutely. Business 101 be where your customers are, right? Daryl yeah, I mean, Gunther media group, we're in stealth mode, but we're looking to be the champion for the micro, small and medium sized publishers to help them with these challenges that they have with expensive databases and platforms and AI and all that technology.
And we're very concerned about the moral and ethics in our publishing as well Tim and everyone has spoken about that. I think we have to be the gardeners and the keepers of good ethics and publishing, otherwise it's going to have a negative effect on humanity. So that's what keeps me up at night and that's what we're working on. Excellent Tim specialization.
There's just too much going on. There's more and more complex processes. We can't do a good job of everything. We're already seeing specialized infrastructures being generated or specialist vendors dedicated to areas. I think publishers need to build interoperability into their systems. Think about microservice architectures, encourage a culture of focusing on flexibility because the only way to survive is not to try and do everything yourself and think that's going to become a bigger issue.
Yeah so collaboration. Avi. Yeah so, you know, I really focused on research and experience and making sure that our journals and our publishers are, you know, truly representing the best of science, regardless of where it comes from. And I think that, you know, the way to do that is really taking a close, hard look, not only at, you know, tools that will help us evaluate manuscripts when they come in, but actually helping researchers through that process, I like to take a page out of the book publishing world where they actually have acquisitions, editors who work with editors, you know, who work with the authors in order to get them up to par.
Whereas in the journal world, we sort of take this binary. Yes, no, you know, accept, reject approach. And I think that obviously for us to do that at scale is challenging, but gives us the opportunity to actually provide tools and resources for researchers so that we're guiding them through a constructive educational process, which will then also make them much more loyal and dedicated long term. So I think that's the researcher experience in a meaningful in a deep and meaningful way.
And helping them through that process allows us to really become champions of, of our research fields and industry. Sounds great. And to wrap it all up, Hanna, what are you looking at? Yes, I really think relationships with institutions is going to be enduringly important. Yes, the membership of scholarly institutions may be aging out. There's opportunities to create those new relationships.
And also those kind of relationships are not something that generative I can do just yet. I know there was something about chat bot helping with, you know, everything, but I think that, you know, cultivating those relationships between institutions and researchers and authors working off of the years of trust that have been really a heavily one will be continuously important. Thank you.
Yeah and you know, for me, I'm really just looking at channels to help others collaborate, especially with AI. I think that, you know, data is going to be a differentiator in all the different ways we talked about. And I think that if you're there where your customers are and you make it as easy to interact with data as possible, that's going to help propel organizations.
Well, unfortunately, we've run out of time. I really want to Thank this awesome panel, vita, Darryl, Tim, Avi and Hannah, Thank you so much for all your great insights. Hopefully you as participants in this webinar felt the same. And let's continue this conversation on all the channels for SSP and all. So really appreciate it. I'll turn it over to Lori for any last comments.
Yeah, just really, really quick closing. Thank you. From me also to all of our panelists and Dave for pulling this together and moderating and our participants for sticking with us for this great conversation. Please don't forget to complete the evaluation. You can scan this QR code to get to that. And I think Susan also put the link in the chat.
Um, and please remember to save the date for the SSP annual meeting may 29th through 31 in Boston. We are back in Boston and I see Tim smiling, so I'm sure it's going to be a great program. Registration will open in February, so Thanks again to our sponsors access innovations, openathens and Silverchair. And today's webinar was recorded and all the registrants will be sent a link to the recording.
The recording and that concludes our session today. Thank you, everyone. Yep Thanks, everyone. It's been a pleasure working with you. This was fun. Bye bye. Bye bye bye.