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Publications and Wrap up
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Publications and Wrap up
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SAM BURRELL: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to our last and final session of this-- what feels like has been an absolute marathon session. For those of you that have been to every one of these sessions, I salute you, because I also have been, and my ability to concentrate for that long has been challenged. It's been really interesting, though. I hope you've all enjoyed it as much as I have.
SAM BURRELL: This last session, I'm going to chair. It's on publications. And as so much of this conference, this particular panel, we changed topics about six times from the moment we first thought about it to where we are today. Because so much has been happening so fast within publications that we kept on going, oh, if we're doing the conference in March, then we need to address the OSTP.
SAM BURRELL: Remember that thing? And we need to talk about Plan S. No, we don't talk about Plan S. Now we need to talk about coronavirus. So it's been an enormous change. A lot's happened in the last few months. We brought a panel of knowledgeable speakers together. The agenda for this session-- the way we're going to run it is I have a couple of questions and we're just going to kick off a discussion.
SAM BURRELL: Please carry on chatting in the chat box. I'm going to be quieter in the chat box, because I'm going to be doing this now, but Tracy is still there. And yeah, we're off. So I'm just going to turn my camera off so we can see Simon. We've got Sim-- should we just get everyone to introduce themselves? If you just say hello.
SAM BURRELL: So we go Simon, Judy, Angela. And then we can kick off with my first question. So I'm vanishing.
SIMON INGER: I think I'm there. Hello. I'm Simon Inger. I've been, obviously, introducing a lot of things today. I work as a consultant-- at Renew Consultants. I've been working as a consultant in the publishing space for about 18 years. OK. Next.
SIMON INGER: [CHUCKLES]
JUDY LUTHER: I'm Judy Luther. I'm heading up Informed Strategies. We're also consultants. We have been in the space, really bridging between the academic sector and the publishing sector and actually, all stakeholders throughout the publication supply chain.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I'm Angela Cochran. I am the Managing Director and Publisher at the American Society of Civil Engineers, and I am also the current president of the Society of Scholarly Publishing.
SAM BURRELL: All right. Thanks, everybody. I'm sure these are familiar faces anyway, but it's nice to see you here. So the question I want to start us off with is around the impact that the coronavirus has had on what we think will happen to the pressure to move towards open access and whether we think that that's going to significantly change funders' policies around what they're mandating for open access.
SAM BURRELL: Simon, go on.
SIMON INGER: OK, I'll go first. I think very simply, it just adds further to the common public pressure. It would be very, very hard to argue right now that open access was not a good thing. It would be a brave person that stood up and said open access weren't a good thing, especially in some subject areas. Clearly, life sciences and medical are going to come under pressure.
SIMON INGER: So I think it just changes, again-- another step change in where we're likely to see more mandates and more movement in that direction. Whether it changes the amount of money available in the system to actually support it is another matter entirely-- less certain about that.
SIMON INGER: And Susan Dentzer in an earlier session pointed out that as we come out of this phase-- the coronavirus phase-- what will funding look like in general? Will governments do what they often do, which is spend their way out of a recession? Or will they batten down the hatches and wait for the economy to grow more slowly? So that, I think, will have an enormous impact on what actually happens at the end.
SAM BURRELL: Angela?
ANGELA COCHRAN: Society publishers, in particular, have been charting their way forward in an open access world, partly because they're mission-driven and partly because their members are asking for a change in business model. I also see the COVID pandemic as another accelerator. So we've been talking about open access forever, and how we get there, and people feeling as though it's slow.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And then we have [INAUDIBLE] which was specifically designed to accelerate the amount of open access. What OSTP with the US government decides to do has certainly spawned at least conversations between stakeholders, publishers, universities with federal government agencies, so that's been a bit of an accelerator.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now we have this. And there's a couple of things going on with publishing. The other part of it is gaining rapid publication-- a rapid purity in the publication of content. So I think in one way, the COVID crisis is a stress test for our preprint culture-- so how quickly can things be posted on preprint servers? And then how quickly can that be validated and embedded as accurate scientific information?
ANGELA COCHRAN: We've seen a stress test on preprint servers hosting biomedical content on how quickly they can react to or take down paper that are deemed within 24 to 48 hours by the scientific community as being unhelpful. And then we have journals that are medical journals that have assembled these sort of quick response, almost like crisis purity teams that are very quickly reviewing the content and getting comments back to authors and going back and forth.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And then the publishers are fast-tracking the production processes. And so we hear things like, well, if you can publish COVID papers that quickly, why can't you publish cancer papers that quickly? And I think that we're going to see a lot of questions around that. If you can make all the COVID papers free, then why can't you make all the other diseases' papers free?
ANGELA COCHRAN: And we need to have some good answers around that. But a lot of it has to do with scalability. For every COVID paper that is being fast-tracked, there's probably four or five other papers that are probably being delayed. So when we're talking about processes that are mostly deemed by-- run by volunteer effort in some way, shape, or form, that is something that needs to be taken into consideration.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I think we'll see the conversation around open access continuing because of this crisis. How much of a impact it will have, I think we're going to have to wait and see.
SAM BURRELL: Can I just do a point of detail to make sure that everybody's muting if they're not speaking, including me? [CHUCKLES] Judy?
JUDY LUTHER: There are a number of publishers, from the largest down to a more modest size, who are making their content, as Angela indicated, open. And that is-- that's a question in my mind about how long they were planning to do that, because as the news continues to change about what the outlook is for COVID-- and now this morning, there was a headline about seasonal, where it might subside and then return. Well, until we have actual solutions for it, if that takes a year, that content will be expected to be available.
JUDY LUTHER: Putting it back behind-- the longer it's out, trying to put it back behind a firewall-- it's going to be a bit challenging. The pressures on all publishers, I think, in this time period-- commercial as well as society and academic and independent and smaller publishers-- is to actually find ways to economize in terms of what they're spending. The amount of debt being occurred right now in the national economic system leads me to believe that the ability to fund other activities is going to be fairly limited.
JUDY LUTHER: And if the expectations are there, and particularly if the requirements for promotion and tenure begin to shift and group peer review emerges around preprints, it will be an interesting set of factors that could very well tip the scales. I don't think it's going to be any one thing. And it may be that we will continue along. We'll pick up threads afterwards.
JUDY LUTHER: But the other side of this to me is, how much of the content that we were talking about in the last session needs to be connected to publishing content? And that's not going to be freely done, but if we're going to afford that-- both the requirements to streamline the process and the requirements to connect the content and make it accessible-- to link the preprints, to link the presentations, to link the posters-- and especially if they have DOI into this broader-- into the existing published and to be published scholarly content-- will require that we become very innovative.
JUDY LUTHER: And there are some interesting things in development. But I don't think you can achieve open access to savings. I'll just say that. We can make publishing cheaper, but it isn't going-- by itself, it's not going to enable us to-- for those institutions who want to and feel they can manage this process, I don't see that that will take them-- push them to avoid--
SAM BURRELL: So to ask the reverse question-- and actually, I'm already seeing some good things in the chat box that I want to get into. But the reverse question is, do you think the reverse might also be true that subscriptions will be-- that the rigor of properly-published, specifically scientific content will increase its value and therefore make subscriptions more solid? Simon?
SAM BURRELL:
SIMON INGER: In some subject-- I think it is all about money. And just picking up partly, then, on what Judy just said. You need a certain amount of money in the system to innovate to save money later as well, because there are all kinds of interesting things going on at the moment-- the use of artificial intelligence in content triage, which would potentially save editors a lot of time.
SIMON INGER: So you need to create some surpluses of the system anyway. So I'm never one for advocating cost cutting to the bone, because I think you stop being able to innovate. You end up relying on grant money to innovate. And then that's then in the hands of too few people, really, because there are many funders who fund innovation. There are a few notable ones. But I worry that if we starve that whole system too much money, we're in trouble.
SIMON INGER: So that's tangential non-answer to your question. So going back to where you were heading about subscriptions, I do also think-- and we've done a lot of work with societies, especially in clinical medicine, where it's hard to see many of the open access models working very well because of the massive difference between where the money comes from subscriptions and where the money would need to come from for open access.
SIMON INGER: And that's both geographically and sectorally across the world. So I know that some subject areas are more ready for open access than others. So I actually do think there is probably quite a lot of room for a dual economy in the future with a lot of content open and a lot of it still behind a paywall. And at the end of the day, people still go-- the authors are still going to go to the place that gives them the highest quality that they can achieve.
SIMON INGER: Now, I don't necessarily mean that as an impact factor, but of reputation in some way. And so I do think that we will still have multiple content models-- business models for content.
SAM BURRELL: Who else? [INAUDIBLE]
ANGELA COCHRAN: I've been thinking about the whole subscription model versus OA model in the context of how much of the rest of our life is moving towards the subscription model, whether it's Netflix or a subscription for your grocery delivery or a subscription for workout videos or whatever. I forget. There was something recently that popped up as a subscription model that I never in a million years would have thought-- some physical object that we get all the time.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And it's kind of ironic, because it feels like in the publishing business, all we've been hearing about is how the subscription model is going to be dying off. To go back to a metaphor this morning of the dinosaur. But subscriptions are more popular than ever and I think what we need to do is think about subscription models that makes sense. And it's very possible that a subscription to a journal or a big deal is not what makes sense.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's possible that subscription to content based on subject area makes more sense, or flexible subscriptions where people can choose what it is that they need. Or universities even could choose what they need. So I'm not convinced that we're-- I agree with Simon that a dual model system will probably continue to move forward. To your original question of the-- with the peer review and the rigor and the trust factor when it comes to subscription versus open access journals, I think that's pretty much falling by the wayside.
ANGELA COCHRAN: There are very good open access journals. There are very substandard subscription journals. So I think what we need to do-- one of the things that I've been thinking about, and I wrote a little bit about this in The Scholarly Kitchen, is the question really about how much money publishers make off of either subscriptions or open access? And more-- I've been thinking a lot about what Judy was talking about-- getting money out of the system as far as fixing up the workflow.
ANGELA COCHRAN: How do we streamline the workflow and get some of the expense out? And one of the ways that I-- one of the things-- the conversations I think we need to have is, what are the expectations now? So if the world moves to expecting only manuscripts on a peer review site, then there is no more value in what the publishers do. But I don't believe that.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I think the peer review part is very valued by other communities. So what is it exactly that people want from a journal article? And do they need it to be pretty? Do they need it to be in multiple file formats? Do they need it to be within 48 hours of acceptance? We need to decide what is worth paying for and how can we facilitate the needs of the end users in multiple different kinds of formats under different models.
ANGELA COCHRAN:
JUDY LUTHER: I'll add that I think the academic sector is under increasing pressures or has been for a long time, particularly since what I call the "Crash of '08." And I expect that unless our economy turns rosy again, that those pressures will continue. So I think the viability of a subscription-based business, even though a portion of what publishers get comes-- depending on their discipline, can come from corporate and government, the majority of it in the space that we usually discuss is from academic.
JUDY LUTHER: And when the academic library budgets get slashed, that then is felt-- reverberates throughout the system. So I think that's a factor. I also think we're going to continue to see innovative models that-- for this next generation and then thinking about the earlier presentations talking about engagement of members of the society and how the next generation prefers to be engaged.
JUDY LUTHER: I could see them feeling more comfortable with a model where they could express their concerns, mention their own research that-- there's a difference in what's there. And I wonder to what extent those models-- and again, I was thinking based on some of the earlier conversations, the extent to which collaboration is a theme. So if the new models of creation of content are collaborative-- and we know they are.
JUDY LUTHER: They just aren't in our workspace in digital form in that way yet. It's very natural that the review process which we now have taking place behind a firewall could be open. So I don't know to what extent some disciplines will survive or thrive in a more open environment. I know that the institutions-- and now I'm going back many, many years to my library days-- value preservation, and that does not come cheap.
JUDY LUTHER: And preservation of published content has been what I have long heard referred to as the "scholarly record." That came about-- that term entered my lexicon when we were talking about the difference between what was available in digital form [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: Which actually leads me really nicely into one of the questions that we've just had from Beth. She says "I've seen news outlets quoting preprints in this pandemic. Those of us in publishing understand that this research isn't peer reviewed." And she goes on say, "What can we do as publishers to educate the public?" But I think that links to your point that you just made there about being more open.
SAM BURRELL: The way we get to the scientific record or the scholarly record is quite convoluted before we go yes, this is an item of record. And of course, preprints changes that dynamic, because-- or does it? And so again, to bring us back to the now a bit, is how do we think the reporting about the current situation that draws on-- I read a story the other day that said something along the lines of more men than women have been hospitalized about-- with COVID.
SAM BURRELL: And it grabbed my attention. I was like, wow. That's really interesting. And then went to read the story and it's like, it's from a preprint that actually only talks about a few-- one hospital in Hong Kong. Now, that's not say it's not interesting. But equally, you just go, that's an observation.
SAM BURRELL: The way it's reported is that you suddenly go, oh, my god. Men are all going to end up in hospital and women are fine. Which clearly isn't what it was saying. But there's something-- I'm being a bit unclear here, but there's something there about preprints and the version of record and actually, the focus on, particularly, science at the minute in the public psyche of world events. I guess that's an invitation to please start speaking freely about preprints.
SAM BURRELL: I'll shut up now. [LAUGHTER]
ANGELA COCHRAN: Well, I don't even know if it's a preprint problem. We've seen some headlines made from peer-reviewed journal articles as well where the news media or politicians, policymakers run off and say, oh, it looks like we can do xyz. And it's based on a paper that was published which included 12 people in the cohort. There is the iterative way-- it's funny, because I was trying to explain this to my kids because they were asking me about vaccines for coronavirus.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so I was explaining what the process is. You have to start testing it with people, but you don't test it with 5,000 people. You test it with a dozen people and you make sure that nothing horrible happens and nobody dies. Then you make some changes and then you move on to a bigger group of people. And then-- And not everybody knows that.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And I think the problem is that the-- you eat too many eggs it's going to kill you and it's really good to have eggs. Or red wine is good for your heart or-- juxtaposed with, if you drink too much red wine, you're going to have this horrible disease-- that there's a scientific illiteracy. And then it's exacerbated by click-bait culture. So I don't even know if it matters so much if it's peer reviewed or not peer reviewed when it comes to how the mainstream media and the general public attach things.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now, what I think a journal has the opportunity to do and that journals do very well is that they put things in context. So very often, they will invite experts to write an editorial that helps put it in context for the general public. And those kinds of what I call these translation services-- how do we take technical content in a crisis like this? And the focus is not on-- the focus is on getting the science published as soon as possible for the scientists that will find it most useful.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But how do we also in that moment think of the long game of, how is this going to show up in the New York Times tomorrow? Or BuzzFeed? What is the difference between the two? And how can we balance that? And I think journals have that opportunity to provide that context, whereas preprint servers don't.
SIMON INGER: Can I just go-- I'm fascinated here. For me it's a matter of reputation. And I'm mindful-- I'm full of anecdotes, as people who know me know well. I'm mindful of a couple of conversations I've had in the past. One was with a Nobel Prize winner. I was talking to him about where he would be published. And he said, it doesn't matter where I get published, because everybody knows me.
SIMON INGER: And wherever I get published, I will be read. So I can publish anywhere I like. Of course, the layperson or actually, most scientists, will use a journal as a proxy for quality-- as a proxy of reputation, if you like. That if it's in a certain journal, it must be good. But as has already been pointed out, there's perfect-- there's highly controversial stuff in those places too. And since it was Beth that raised the question-- and I used to be an electrochemist many, many, many moons ago.
SIMON INGER: I was around at the period when I think it was Fleischmann and Pons declared they discovered cold fusion. And that was published in reputable journals. But of course, the scientists that knew them were always suspicious. And I think it was very, very interesting. So the inner circle of scientists know who they can trust and know what-- then the people-- well, those writers are all about.
SIMON INGER: It's actually the wider audience, isn't it, that we have to worry about and how we give them a filter into that information. So I don't-- it wouldn't matter whether a Nobel Prize winner published in a preprint server or in a journal. That is still going to be respected content. So it's somehow, we have to have a mechanism which is a proxy for that reputation.
SAM BURRELL: Judy, want to add to that?
JUDY LUTHER: I was just thinking as you were talking, Simon, that yes, the journal has served as a proxy for reputation. But when I work with societies, I think of the society as of, if you're a member of society, you're attending meetings, you're part of that network, people may disagree about approaches on a topic, but they're generally considered authorities. And if they publish something at some point that is egregiously wrong or people are suspect that it isn't valid, their colleagues at some point will call them on it.
JUDY LUTHER: And the whole process of retracting articles is there to try to-- the reason societies go through that very painful process is to oftentimes to protect the scholarly record, because they feel it's their duty. It's their commitment. For the more idealistic ones, it's their commitment to the discipline to do that. So to me, the community, if we-- we have been wedded to the journal, and I'm not saying that the journal is going anywhere.
JUDY LUTHER: It has served a useful purpose. But in some fields where-- such as computational biology where the data sets can be more important to fellow researchers, they just want to get their hands on the data to manipulate it. It's-- and the code. I wonder to what extent the society could in time-- membership in a society.
JUDY LUTHER: It's nothing I see being talked about on the horizon. It's just an observation I have about the role of societies in terms of the broader community. And to the extent that they can make that visible, I very much applaud taking research and taking it into the public sector. And with branding all over it from societies, from publishers, from organizations that are perceived to have authority.
SAM BURRELL: That's my next question, which is a kind of very wide open question for the panel, which is, putting on our future gazing glasses-- and we can define that future as six months or two years. I don't think any further than that is realistic. But how do societies today embrace their mission in publications In today's environment? What do you think are the challenges that they should be looking at?
SAM BURRELL: And how can they face those challenges? Because we talked very briefly at the top of the session about a bunch of stuff that's really complicated. That's a nice summary, isn't it? But there's so much going on. If you are a society leader looking at your publications program and thinking about your mission and looking at today's environment, what do you think you should be looking at?
SAM BURRELL: Let's start with Angela.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Looking at the translational qualities-- and that's something that I mentioned earlier. But how do we take highly-technical content and make it applicable to the practitioner audience? Now, at the American Society of Civil Engineers, we have 150,000 members globally, and most of them are practitioners. And our community of academics is actually not that big.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's a small percentage of our membership. But the journals program, which is served by and serving the research and academic markets, makes up the most important product line for our revenue. So we're actually producing and surviving financially on content that doesn't serve the bulk of our membership. It doesn't serve them directly. It serves them, of course, indirectly. We do research and it turns into practice.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Later on, it turns into standards for building codes and public health and safety and so on and so forth. But how do we make that line-- draw that line a little straighter? How do we get in front of the general practitioner? Or if you're in a medical organization, it's the clinicians' hands, when we're looking at the research implications.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And I think that what-- part of our mission should be to accelerate that. So how do we accelerate what's being done in the lab to get into practice instead of it taking its normal several years to move on? Civil engineers are a very cautious group of people. They take their mandate on public health and safety extremely seriously, which is part of why they are not adopters of preprint culture.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And our average peak citation is like around four and a half years. Papers sit around for a long time before they hit their maximum citation point. So how do we do that? And I think what we're looking at is new services are a new kind of book products that we can-- handbooks and guides that are doing some of that work of translating.
ANGELA COCHRAN: The part that's difficult is finding the folks who can do that kind of work-- who can read research and understand research and see exactly where it fits into the practice community. And then putting that in context and writing about it and getting it into the right hands. So we have all the people. And what we hear is from the practitioners. They'll say, oh, the journals are way too theoretical.
ANGELA COCHRAN: That doesn't impact my everyday life. And, I just need to know how I can do this cheaper, faster, make this more sustainable-- meet my contract goals. And so on the research side, though, they're of course thinking-- they are not researching things that they don't think will have a practical application. And in fact, we ask authors explicitly on every paper they submit what their practical application is for their paper.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But then, we're not actually sharing that with the practitioners and say, here is the practical implication that the author thinks this paper has. We're like, eh, stick it in your abstract and we'll hope people find it. So I do think that a society definitely has a role in trying to-- it is our mission to share this research and this information.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And to do it in a way, though, that isn't just publishing journal articles for other researchers, but is thinking about that content and how we can get it into the hands of practitioners.
SAM BURRELL: OK.
JUDY LUTHER: In the disciplines that I've worked with, there are oftentimes policy implications or standards that are tied to the research that is done. But because those standards may or may not cite, the policies don't have DOIs on them. So they're not really part of our published literature world. And there really isn't, I don't think, as easy a way to connect them. So the evidence that would be there to enable us to trace the research to the people who actually have used it for a good impact on society is really challenging to do.
JUDY LUTHER: I know Altmetric had tried to work on that in some areas. But at least two of the societies I've worked with had sessions at their annual meetings comprised of the standards people-- comprised of the policy people. And they admitted that they were open to some of that. They didn't want to necessarily credit it directly, but they referenced it in their documentation. How do we bring that forward, maybe? And I don't know whether we can encourage the press, or there's another service provider that would make those linkages for us.
SIMON INGER: I think I just-- sorry. I was just thinking I'd like to just think of-- a lot of the times we end up working with societies, we look at the overlap or not between where the authorship is, where the membership is, and actually where the conference attendance is, which nicely brings in all the things we've been talking about today. And Angela's got this interesting thing, which is that the membership is a tiny overlap with its authorship because of the practitioner and researcher side of things.
SIMON INGER: But of course, there's also very much a regional element to that. So we find generally that authorship is much more global than membership, which in turn is generally more global than conference attendance as well. So it's a really interesting problem for societies in serving their members. Or is it their members they serve?
SIMON INGER: Or is it a wider community which encompasses people that aren't their members and have no reason to be members, as such? So I think that that's a fascinating angle. And also, on the financial side of things, of course, we also have that with-- especially with the larger, more successful societies, they have large publishing programs which have always created enormous surpluses to fund a lot of what else goes on within society.
SIMON INGER: And as we transition that to open access, obviously there's less money in the system, which leaves us actually with the position of probably having to be more mission-focused, not just for the money, just because that's-- it's the remaining path. You're having to do-- get the information out for less money and making-- getting the money in from some other angles, I suppose.
SIMON INGER: And making membership compelling in its own right. And I think bringing that back to what was said earlier in some of the other talks, as well. Having a cause, in a way. A lot of the societies at the talk today had a real cause to go for and support. And that's also very interesting for those that actually have a real mission and a reason to engage people to become part of it.
SIMON INGER: So again, that's getting a little bit off the central topic, so I'll stop there. But I do think that we can still achieve mission on less money, most likely.
SAM BURRELL: No?
SIMON INGER: Eh.
SAM BURRELL: OK. Well, there that's-- I think the whole organizing theme, the idea that we started off with way back ages ago for this conference, was around the revenue dilemma. It's just been complicated recently by events. But fundamentally, many of the societies that we work with are facing revenue challenges of pretty epic proportions.
SAM BURRELL: And at the time, it was all about publications. Not just about publications, obviously. Membership revenues and conference revenues were under downward pressure as well. But I think it was the possible precipice of losing a vast quantity of-- for some societies, the vast quantity of publications' revenue. And of course, now we've got pressure and distress on events and conferences as well.
SAM BURRELL: So I think there's a lot of societies that are looking at what they do and how they function. And going, what now? And I think, Simon, a point that you just made there about being very mission-driven, and some societies have a very clear sense of what they're trying to achieve, really helps. And I guess where I'm trying to go is-- and Angela, you've answered that about your society.
SAM BURRELL: But it's the kind of, how does that relate to your publications program? Are we too traditional in thinking about publications? Should we be going back and going, what are the core functions of the society? And if we could think more widely about what publication means.
JUDY LUTHER: Mm-hmm.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. There are pressures on membership. That, I think, is a relative constant for organizations. We have younger generations of career-- early career folks and researchers, depending on the flavor of your membership, that have ways of networking, that have ways of communicating, that have ways of sharing that are different than what our older generations of members came up with and expect.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so we are in that time where societies are catering to multiple audiences. So you might say, well, we have a younger generation that wants to pivot to virtual conferences, let's say. They don't want to travel. They're concerned about their carbon footprint. They don't want to be away from their families to go to conferences. What they want is perhaps different than what an older age bracket of members has been always used to and expects from their organization.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Unfortunately, right now, we can't say we're going to do one or the other. You can't say, well, we're going to keep doing what we've always done and the younger folks that are just coming on board with our organization just need to get in line and do what we do. That's not going to happen, so-- But you also can't say, OK. Well then, we're just going to stop doing everything.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We won't do an in-person meeting anymore. We won't do journals anymore. Instead, we're just going to do preprint servers and we're going to be virtual meetings. So we're at that point in time where both need to be maintained, and I think that is a huge financial stressor for organizations. And I do worry that when we do membership surveys or we look at what the usage statistics and the trends are and who's going where-- there's always been differences in what different demographic groups want from an organization, but I think the gap between what they want is probably fairly wide right now.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So it's not just, well, let's throw in a mixer because our younger members like to have a mixer at the conference. It's, our younger members don't even want to go to a conference. So how do we continue to engage with them? So that gap between what our members tell us they need or they want is widening, and that becomes difficult. So I do think that with this current crisis, when it comes to travel and conferences having to pivot to something else, and the pressure that we're seeing on publications and changes to the future revenue streams, it's a wonderful opportunity for organizations that aren't afraid to do so to really seriously take a look at how they might be able to pivot to become the next generation of membership organization.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's super, super hard to do, because you're still trying to serve multiple constituencies that want something very different from each other. But if we're going to do it, it's going to have to be within the next 12 to 18 months where we really start thinking about what that means.
SAM BURRELL: Have you got thoughts on that? And then we'll get to Judy.
SIMON INGER: A great deal to add-- I think it is that. It is for the land of the brave. And it-- yes, it means reassessing what societies can do and what they need to do. A major theme for me has always been about distinguishing between community and membership. I think membership tends to be a package of things people buy, and community means engagement. But they're not necessarily the same thing.
SIMON INGER: And I think they probably need to be one day in the not-too-distant future for societies-- that one is a product of the other.
JUDY LUTHER: --was impressed with-- not just with it as a tool. I've used it for the last few years. But with some of the other software tools I see that are not just focused on a webinar or not just focused on connecting us online, but that would actually also sustain those connections between meetings. And I think to your point, Simon, the whole conversation around engagement being how we create and generate community-- I think that's happening.
JUDY LUTHER: Earlier today, someone said a lot of the changes are due to the internet. And I'm thinking, well, in all the impacts that I see happening in our publications world, I think are further evidence of the internet. But that happened so long ago, and so much has happened since then that has affected our world significantly that I think that sometimes what was enabled by the internet and is now more robustly developed and maybe not even conceived 20 years ago, is actually having an effect on people's expectations in terms of how they work together, how they share information, what is time effective for them, and what they're willing to tolerate.
JUDY LUTHER: The current publication process oftentimes is-- it's still page-based. At the end of the day, all of what we have is page-based. We're not going to get rid of the page, but a process that was born around a print-based model doesn't take advantage of a born-digital object-- a born-digital manuscript. And there are tools out there that will take those manuscripts and flip them into a PDF in a matter of minutes.
JUDY LUTHER: Now, there's a heavy up front investment to get the formatting right. It's not perfect, but I think over time, it will get better. And I also think over time, when people start to see if they can economize with that, suddenly having a particular format or layout of your journal could make it cheaper than the other way of doing things. 10 years ago, I remember somebody who had been associated with production mourning the online version because they used to be able to recognize their journal by the font that was used to print it.
JUDY LUTHER: And I think, are we at this next stage where we let go of some of the things that we have held near and dear because that's how we use the content? And maybe the same detailed level of copy editing? It's not that-- I hesitate to say that, because it always sounds like we're ready to compromise quality. But there are multiple levels at which copy editing can be done, and the expense of that.
JUDY LUTHER: It needs to be accurate content. It needs to look high quality and be high quality. But again, I think there will be opportunities to make some savings there, and I think it will require that we let go of some of the ways in which we are attached to our [INAUDIBLE]. And I think it will be driven by the next generation.
SAM BURRELL: So we've got a couple of minutes left on this session before we wrap up. So I'd like to ask each of you what one piece of concise advice you would give to a leader of a publications team in a society this evening-- today, this afternoon, wherever you are, whatever time it is. [LAUGHS] Sorry.
SAM BURRELL: That was mean. I didn't warn you that I was going to do that. [LAUGHS]
ANGELA COCHRAN: I guess my piece of advice would be, we have content. If you're a publisher, you have content. And I think the name of the game right now is, do you have the right content and do you have it in the right format and are you putting it in the right hands and doing some analysis around that? We've been thinking about our book program and how long it takes for a book to get written.
ANGELA COCHRAN: They're mostly written by committees and made up of volunteers. And that's a very-- that's a high level of engagement when you get this group of people together and they're going to write a book. And then we publish the book, but it's taken now-- it's taken several years for this committee to work on it.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So are we asking the right questions about, is this the right product for the market? Are we taking a strategic approach when we're looking at our programs? And instead of, we're going to publish what our members come up with, are there ways to direct the membership towards what we see as market needs or products that aren't available? Can we be a little bit more strategic with our volunteer efforts, I think is one thing that we've been really talking about a lot in my division.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We don't want to waste people's time. And they might think it's great to write a book about xyz. But if we know it's not going to come out for four years and there's already a dozen books on that, how can we refocus their energies on something else? And that takes a different kind of volunteer management and volunteer leadership than I think you see in a lot of organizations that have been around a long time.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I guess that would be my piece of advice. On a day when I feel like you can't see more than 30 minutes into the future.
SAM BURRELL: Judy.
JUDY LUTHER: I'm thinking that as we think more widely about content-- digital content, regardless of the form or format that it's in, we will potentially begin to see new opportunities to provide services to our members that meet their need for it, depending on how they want to use it-- depending on print, audio, bite-size, full length. I think there will be opportunities to do that.
JUDY LUTHER: And currently, societies can be challenged by the fact that conferences produces content over here, publications produces content over here, and that's where the strategic piece that Angela mentioned, I think, is really key. If you don't understand your users, it's really hard. And even if you do, there's another whole conversation that needs to take place here that right now is distributed in different areas of the organization that don't think generically about content-- publica-- what-- the webinar over here and the journal article over here are two different vehicles for them.
JUDY LUTHER: And I think we need to look at them collectively and say, this is our body of content. And then what can we offer it-- how can we offer it and make it more accessible to the people who need it when and where and how they need it?
SIMON INGER: OK. For my two penn'orth. I'll be very fast. American Civil War quote-- "You win a battle by getting there the fastest with the mostest." In the context of publishing, means to be agile. You have to change fast. Quality is everything-- always is in any product. And you need to do whatever it is that serves your authors' interests the most.
SIMON INGER: That's as far as publishing. That may not totally overlap with what society as a whole needs to do. But for publishing, I think I'd do that.
SAM BURRELL: Let's take a couple of minutes just say thank you to the three of you for coming on this panel and being open to me just throwing questions at you that I haven't prepared you for. So thank you for that. I also want to take a minute to say thank you to all the speakers who've contributed today. It was a big ask of them to totally change what we'd asked them to do and come and do something completely different, and everybody rose to the challenge.
SAM BURRELL: So thank you so much for your time. I also want say thank you to our sponsors for making it possible for us to do this and to make it open to all of you guys. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it was useful. We'd love to be in touch very briefly after this to ask you what you thought of it and possibly to ask you if you'd like to hear about other virtual events, because we thought we might do some.
SAM BURRELL: And I wish I'd thought to do a social, because it feels like we should all go to the bar and have a refreshing drink now. So I'm sorry we can't do that. It's been-- I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening in-- joining along. All of this content will be available on a site that Tracy has been putting the URL in the comments for ages-- all through the session.
SAM BURRELL: And I hope to do this again in some form really soon. Thanks so much, everybody.
SIMON INGER: Thank you.
SAM BURRELL: All right. [LAUGHS] Bye.
SIMON INGER: Goodbye, everybody.
Segment:0 .
SAM BURRELL: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to our last and final session of this-- what feels like has been an absolute marathon session. For those of you that have been to every one of these sessions, I salute you, because I also have been, and my ability to concentrate for that long has been challenged. It's been really interesting, though. I hope you've all enjoyed it as much as I have.
SAM BURRELL: This last session, I'm going to chair. It's on publications. And as so much of this conference, this particular panel, we changed topics about six times from the moment we first thought about it to where we are today. Because so much has been happening so fast within publications that we kept on going, oh, if we're doing the conference in March, then we need to address the OSTP.
SAM BURRELL: Remember that thing? And we need to talk about Plan S. No, we don't talk about Plan S. Now we need to talk about coronavirus. So it's been an enormous change. A lot's happened in the last few months. We brought a panel of knowledgeable speakers together. The agenda for this session-- the way we're going to run it is I have a couple of questions and we're just going to kick off a discussion.
SAM BURRELL: Please carry on chatting in the chat box. I'm going to be quieter in the chat box, because I'm going to be doing this now, but Tracy is still there. And yeah, we're off. So I'm just going to turn my camera off so we can see Simon. We've got Sim-- should we just get everyone to introduce themselves? If you just say hello.
SAM BURRELL: So we go Simon, Judy, Angela. And then we can kick off with my first question. So I'm vanishing.
SIMON INGER: I think I'm there. Hello. I'm Simon Inger. I've been, obviously, introducing a lot of things today. I work as a consultant-- at Renew Consultants. I've been working as a consultant in the publishing space for about 18 years. OK. Next.
SIMON INGER: [CHUCKLES]
JUDY LUTHER: I'm Judy Luther. I'm heading up Informed Strategies. We're also consultants. We have been in the space, really bridging between the academic sector and the publishing sector and actually, all stakeholders throughout the publication supply chain.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I'm Angela Cochran. I am the Managing Director and Publisher at the American Society of Civil Engineers, and I am also the current president of the Society of Scholarly Publishing.
SAM BURRELL: All right. Thanks, everybody. I'm sure these are familiar faces anyway, but it's nice to see you here. So the question I want to start us off with is around the impact that the coronavirus has had on what we think will happen to the pressure to move towards open access and whether we think that that's going to significantly change funders' policies around what they're mandating for open access.
SAM BURRELL: Simon, go on.
SIMON INGER: OK, I'll go first. I think very simply, it just adds further to the common public pressure. It would be very, very hard to argue right now that open access was not a good thing. It would be a brave person that stood up and said open access weren't a good thing, especially in some subject areas. Clearly, life sciences and medical are going to come under pressure.
SIMON INGER: So I think it just changes, again-- another step change in where we're likely to see more mandates and more movement in that direction. Whether it changes the amount of money available in the system to actually support it is another matter entirely-- less certain about that.
SIMON INGER: And Susan Dentzer in an earlier session pointed out that as we come out of this phase-- the coronavirus phase-- what will funding look like in general? Will governments do what they often do, which is spend their way out of a recession? Or will they batten down the hatches and wait for the economy to grow more slowly? So that, I think, will have an enormous impact on what actually happens at the end.
SAM BURRELL: Angela?
ANGELA COCHRAN: Society publishers, in particular, have been charting their way forward in an open access world, partly because they're mission-driven and partly because their members are asking for a change in business model. I also see the COVID pandemic as another accelerator. So we've been talking about open access forever, and how we get there, and people feeling as though it's slow.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And then we have [INAUDIBLE] which was specifically designed to accelerate the amount of open access. What OSTP with the US government decides to do has certainly spawned at least conversations between stakeholders, publishers, universities with federal government agencies, so that's been a bit of an accelerator.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now we have this. And there's a couple of things going on with publishing. The other part of it is gaining rapid publication-- a rapid purity in the publication of content. So I think in one way, the COVID crisis is a stress test for our preprint culture-- so how quickly can things be posted on preprint servers? And then how quickly can that be validated and embedded as accurate scientific information?
ANGELA COCHRAN: We've seen a stress test on preprint servers hosting biomedical content on how quickly they can react to or take down paper that are deemed within 24 to 48 hours by the scientific community as being unhelpful. And then we have journals that are medical journals that have assembled these sort of quick response, almost like crisis purity teams that are very quickly reviewing the content and getting comments back to authors and going back and forth.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And then the publishers are fast-tracking the production processes. And so we hear things like, well, if you can publish COVID papers that quickly, why can't you publish cancer papers that quickly? And I think that we're going to see a lot of questions around that. If you can make all the COVID papers free, then why can't you make all the other diseases' papers free?
ANGELA COCHRAN: And we need to have some good answers around that. But a lot of it has to do with scalability. For every COVID paper that is being fast-tracked, there's probably four or five other papers that are probably being delayed. So when we're talking about processes that are mostly deemed by-- run by volunteer effort in some way, shape, or form, that is something that needs to be taken into consideration.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I think we'll see the conversation around open access continuing because of this crisis. How much of a impact it will have, I think we're going to have to wait and see.
SAM BURRELL: Can I just do a point of detail to make sure that everybody's muting if they're not speaking, including me? [CHUCKLES] Judy?
JUDY LUTHER: There are a number of publishers, from the largest down to a more modest size, who are making their content, as Angela indicated, open. And that is-- that's a question in my mind about how long they were planning to do that, because as the news continues to change about what the outlook is for COVID-- and now this morning, there was a headline about seasonal, where it might subside and then return. Well, until we have actual solutions for it, if that takes a year, that content will be expected to be available.
JUDY LUTHER: Putting it back behind-- the longer it's out, trying to put it back behind a firewall-- it's going to be a bit challenging. The pressures on all publishers, I think, in this time period-- commercial as well as society and academic and independent and smaller publishers-- is to actually find ways to economize in terms of what they're spending. The amount of debt being occurred right now in the national economic system leads me to believe that the ability to fund other activities is going to be fairly limited.
JUDY LUTHER: And if the expectations are there, and particularly if the requirements for promotion and tenure begin to shift and group peer review emerges around preprints, it will be an interesting set of factors that could very well tip the scales. I don't think it's going to be any one thing. And it may be that we will continue along. We'll pick up threads afterwards.
JUDY LUTHER: But the other side of this to me is, how much of the content that we were talking about in the last session needs to be connected to publishing content? And that's not going to be freely done, but if we're going to afford that-- both the requirements to streamline the process and the requirements to connect the content and make it accessible-- to link the preprints, to link the presentations, to link the posters-- and especially if they have DOI into this broader-- into the existing published and to be published scholarly content-- will require that we become very innovative.
JUDY LUTHER: And there are some interesting things in development. But I don't think you can achieve open access to savings. I'll just say that. We can make publishing cheaper, but it isn't going-- by itself, it's not going to enable us to-- for those institutions who want to and feel they can manage this process, I don't see that that will take them-- push them to avoid--
SAM BURRELL: So to ask the reverse question-- and actually, I'm already seeing some good things in the chat box that I want to get into. But the reverse question is, do you think the reverse might also be true that subscriptions will be-- that the rigor of properly-published, specifically scientific content will increase its value and therefore make subscriptions more solid? Simon?
SAM BURRELL:
SIMON INGER: In some subject-- I think it is all about money. And just picking up partly, then, on what Judy just said. You need a certain amount of money in the system to innovate to save money later as well, because there are all kinds of interesting things going on at the moment-- the use of artificial intelligence in content triage, which would potentially save editors a lot of time.
SIMON INGER: So you need to create some surpluses of the system anyway. So I'm never one for advocating cost cutting to the bone, because I think you stop being able to innovate. You end up relying on grant money to innovate. And then that's then in the hands of too few people, really, because there are many funders who fund innovation. There are a few notable ones. But I worry that if we starve that whole system too much money, we're in trouble.
SIMON INGER: So that's tangential non-answer to your question. So going back to where you were heading about subscriptions, I do also think-- and we've done a lot of work with societies, especially in clinical medicine, where it's hard to see many of the open access models working very well because of the massive difference between where the money comes from subscriptions and where the money would need to come from for open access.
SIMON INGER: And that's both geographically and sectorally across the world. So I know that some subject areas are more ready for open access than others. So I actually do think there is probably quite a lot of room for a dual economy in the future with a lot of content open and a lot of it still behind a paywall. And at the end of the day, people still go-- the authors are still going to go to the place that gives them the highest quality that they can achieve.
SIMON INGER: Now, I don't necessarily mean that as an impact factor, but of reputation in some way. And so I do think that we will still have multiple content models-- business models for content.
SAM BURRELL: Who else? [INAUDIBLE]
ANGELA COCHRAN: I've been thinking about the whole subscription model versus OA model in the context of how much of the rest of our life is moving towards the subscription model, whether it's Netflix or a subscription for your grocery delivery or a subscription for workout videos or whatever. I forget. There was something recently that popped up as a subscription model that I never in a million years would have thought-- some physical object that we get all the time.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And it's kind of ironic, because it feels like in the publishing business, all we've been hearing about is how the subscription model is going to be dying off. To go back to a metaphor this morning of the dinosaur. But subscriptions are more popular than ever and I think what we need to do is think about subscription models that makes sense. And it's very possible that a subscription to a journal or a big deal is not what makes sense.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's possible that subscription to content based on subject area makes more sense, or flexible subscriptions where people can choose what it is that they need. Or universities even could choose what they need. So I'm not convinced that we're-- I agree with Simon that a dual model system will probably continue to move forward. To your original question of the-- with the peer review and the rigor and the trust factor when it comes to subscription versus open access journals, I think that's pretty much falling by the wayside.
ANGELA COCHRAN: There are very good open access journals. There are very substandard subscription journals. So I think what we need to do-- one of the things that I've been thinking about, and I wrote a little bit about this in The Scholarly Kitchen, is the question really about how much money publishers make off of either subscriptions or open access? And more-- I've been thinking a lot about what Judy was talking about-- getting money out of the system as far as fixing up the workflow.
ANGELA COCHRAN: How do we streamline the workflow and get some of the expense out? And one of the ways that I-- one of the things-- the conversations I think we need to have is, what are the expectations now? So if the world moves to expecting only manuscripts on a peer review site, then there is no more value in what the publishers do. But I don't believe that.
ANGELA COCHRAN: I think the peer review part is very valued by other communities. So what is it exactly that people want from a journal article? And do they need it to be pretty? Do they need it to be in multiple file formats? Do they need it to be within 48 hours of acceptance? We need to decide what is worth paying for and how can we facilitate the needs of the end users in multiple different kinds of formats under different models.
ANGELA COCHRAN:
JUDY LUTHER: I'll add that I think the academic sector is under increasing pressures or has been for a long time, particularly since what I call the "Crash of '08." And I expect that unless our economy turns rosy again, that those pressures will continue. So I think the viability of a subscription-based business, even though a portion of what publishers get comes-- depending on their discipline, can come from corporate and government, the majority of it in the space that we usually discuss is from academic.
JUDY LUTHER: And when the academic library budgets get slashed, that then is felt-- reverberates throughout the system. So I think that's a factor. I also think we're going to continue to see innovative models that-- for this next generation and then thinking about the earlier presentations talking about engagement of members of the society and how the next generation prefers to be engaged.
JUDY LUTHER: I could see them feeling more comfortable with a model where they could express their concerns, mention their own research that-- there's a difference in what's there. And I wonder to what extent those models-- and again, I was thinking based on some of the earlier conversations, the extent to which collaboration is a theme. So if the new models of creation of content are collaborative-- and we know they are.
JUDY LUTHER: They just aren't in our workspace in digital form in that way yet. It's very natural that the review process which we now have taking place behind a firewall could be open. So I don't know to what extent some disciplines will survive or thrive in a more open environment. I know that the institutions-- and now I'm going back many, many years to my library days-- value preservation, and that does not come cheap.
JUDY LUTHER: And preservation of published content has been what I have long heard referred to as the "scholarly record." That came about-- that term entered my lexicon when we were talking about the difference between what was available in digital form [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: Which actually leads me really nicely into one of the questions that we've just had from Beth. She says "I've seen news outlets quoting preprints in this pandemic. Those of us in publishing understand that this research isn't peer reviewed." And she goes on say, "What can we do as publishers to educate the public?" But I think that links to your point that you just made there about being more open.
SAM BURRELL: The way we get to the scientific record or the scholarly record is quite convoluted before we go yes, this is an item of record. And of course, preprints changes that dynamic, because-- or does it? And so again, to bring us back to the now a bit, is how do we think the reporting about the current situation that draws on-- I read a story the other day that said something along the lines of more men than women have been hospitalized about-- with COVID.
SAM BURRELL: And it grabbed my attention. I was like, wow. That's really interesting. And then went to read the story and it's like, it's from a preprint that actually only talks about a few-- one hospital in Hong Kong. Now, that's not say it's not interesting. But equally, you just go, that's an observation.
SAM BURRELL: The way it's reported is that you suddenly go, oh, my god. Men are all going to end up in hospital and women are fine. Which clearly isn't what it was saying. But there's something-- I'm being a bit unclear here, but there's something there about preprints and the version of record and actually, the focus on, particularly, science at the minute in the public psyche of world events. I guess that's an invitation to please start speaking freely about preprints.
SAM BURRELL: I'll shut up now. [LAUGHTER]
ANGELA COCHRAN: Well, I don't even know if it's a preprint problem. We've seen some headlines made from peer-reviewed journal articles as well where the news media or politicians, policymakers run off and say, oh, it looks like we can do xyz. And it's based on a paper that was published which included 12 people in the cohort. There is the iterative way-- it's funny, because I was trying to explain this to my kids because they were asking me about vaccines for coronavirus.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so I was explaining what the process is. You have to start testing it with people, but you don't test it with 5,000 people. You test it with a dozen people and you make sure that nothing horrible happens and nobody dies. Then you make some changes and then you move on to a bigger group of people. And then-- And not everybody knows that.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And I think the problem is that the-- you eat too many eggs it's going to kill you and it's really good to have eggs. Or red wine is good for your heart or-- juxtaposed with, if you drink too much red wine, you're going to have this horrible disease-- that there's a scientific illiteracy. And then it's exacerbated by click-bait culture. So I don't even know if it matters so much if it's peer reviewed or not peer reviewed when it comes to how the mainstream media and the general public attach things.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Now, what I think a journal has the opportunity to do and that journals do very well is that they put things in context. So very often, they will invite experts to write an editorial that helps put it in context for the general public. And those kinds of what I call these translation services-- how do we take technical content in a crisis like this? And the focus is not on-- the focus is on getting the science published as soon as possible for the scientists that will find it most useful.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But how do we also in that moment think of the long game of, how is this going to show up in the New York Times tomorrow? Or BuzzFeed? What is the difference between the two? And how can we balance that? And I think journals have that opportunity to provide that context, whereas preprint servers don't.
SIMON INGER: Can I just go-- I'm fascinated here. For me it's a matter of reputation. And I'm mindful-- I'm full of anecdotes, as people who know me know well. I'm mindful of a couple of conversations I've had in the past. One was with a Nobel Prize winner. I was talking to him about where he would be published. And he said, it doesn't matter where I get published, because everybody knows me.
SIMON INGER: And wherever I get published, I will be read. So I can publish anywhere I like. Of course, the layperson or actually, most scientists, will use a journal as a proxy for quality-- as a proxy of reputation, if you like. That if it's in a certain journal, it must be good. But as has already been pointed out, there's perfect-- there's highly controversial stuff in those places too. And since it was Beth that raised the question-- and I used to be an electrochemist many, many, many moons ago.
SIMON INGER: I was around at the period when I think it was Fleischmann and Pons declared they discovered cold fusion. And that was published in reputable journals. But of course, the scientists that knew them were always suspicious. And I think it was very, very interesting. So the inner circle of scientists know who they can trust and know what-- then the people-- well, those writers are all about.
SIMON INGER: It's actually the wider audience, isn't it, that we have to worry about and how we give them a filter into that information. So I don't-- it wouldn't matter whether a Nobel Prize winner published in a preprint server or in a journal. That is still going to be respected content. So it's somehow, we have to have a mechanism which is a proxy for that reputation.
SAM BURRELL: Judy, want to add to that?
JUDY LUTHER: I was just thinking as you were talking, Simon, that yes, the journal has served as a proxy for reputation. But when I work with societies, I think of the society as of, if you're a member of society, you're attending meetings, you're part of that network, people may disagree about approaches on a topic, but they're generally considered authorities. And if they publish something at some point that is egregiously wrong or people are suspect that it isn't valid, their colleagues at some point will call them on it.
JUDY LUTHER: And the whole process of retracting articles is there to try to-- the reason societies go through that very painful process is to oftentimes to protect the scholarly record, because they feel it's their duty. It's their commitment. For the more idealistic ones, it's their commitment to the discipline to do that. So to me, the community, if we-- we have been wedded to the journal, and I'm not saying that the journal is going anywhere.
JUDY LUTHER: It has served a useful purpose. But in some fields where-- such as computational biology where the data sets can be more important to fellow researchers, they just want to get their hands on the data to manipulate it. It's-- and the code. I wonder to what extent the society could in time-- membership in a society.
JUDY LUTHER: It's nothing I see being talked about on the horizon. It's just an observation I have about the role of societies in terms of the broader community. And to the extent that they can make that visible, I very much applaud taking research and taking it into the public sector. And with branding all over it from societies, from publishers, from organizations that are perceived to have authority.
SAM BURRELL: That's my next question, which is a kind of very wide open question for the panel, which is, putting on our future gazing glasses-- and we can define that future as six months or two years. I don't think any further than that is realistic. But how do societies today embrace their mission in publications In today's environment? What do you think are the challenges that they should be looking at?
SAM BURRELL: And how can they face those challenges? Because we talked very briefly at the top of the session about a bunch of stuff that's really complicated. That's a nice summary, isn't it? But there's so much going on. If you are a society leader looking at your publications program and thinking about your mission and looking at today's environment, what do you think you should be looking at?
SAM BURRELL: Let's start with Angela.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Looking at the translational qualities-- and that's something that I mentioned earlier. But how do we take highly-technical content and make it applicable to the practitioner audience? Now, at the American Society of Civil Engineers, we have 150,000 members globally, and most of them are practitioners. And our community of academics is actually not that big.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's a small percentage of our membership. But the journals program, which is served by and serving the research and academic markets, makes up the most important product line for our revenue. So we're actually producing and surviving financially on content that doesn't serve the bulk of our membership. It doesn't serve them directly. It serves them, of course, indirectly. We do research and it turns into practice.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Later on, it turns into standards for building codes and public health and safety and so on and so forth. But how do we make that line-- draw that line a little straighter? How do we get in front of the general practitioner? Or if you're in a medical organization, it's the clinicians' hands, when we're looking at the research implications.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And I think that what-- part of our mission should be to accelerate that. So how do we accelerate what's being done in the lab to get into practice instead of it taking its normal several years to move on? Civil engineers are a very cautious group of people. They take their mandate on public health and safety extremely seriously, which is part of why they are not adopters of preprint culture.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And our average peak citation is like around four and a half years. Papers sit around for a long time before they hit their maximum citation point. So how do we do that? And I think what we're looking at is new services are a new kind of book products that we can-- handbooks and guides that are doing some of that work of translating.
ANGELA COCHRAN: The part that's difficult is finding the folks who can do that kind of work-- who can read research and understand research and see exactly where it fits into the practice community. And then putting that in context and writing about it and getting it into the right hands. So we have all the people. And what we hear is from the practitioners. They'll say, oh, the journals are way too theoretical.
ANGELA COCHRAN: That doesn't impact my everyday life. And, I just need to know how I can do this cheaper, faster, make this more sustainable-- meet my contract goals. And so on the research side, though, they're of course thinking-- they are not researching things that they don't think will have a practical application. And in fact, we ask authors explicitly on every paper they submit what their practical application is for their paper.
ANGELA COCHRAN: But then, we're not actually sharing that with the practitioners and say, here is the practical implication that the author thinks this paper has. We're like, eh, stick it in your abstract and we'll hope people find it. So I do think that a society definitely has a role in trying to-- it is our mission to share this research and this information.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And to do it in a way, though, that isn't just publishing journal articles for other researchers, but is thinking about that content and how we can get it into the hands of practitioners.
SAM BURRELL: OK.
JUDY LUTHER: In the disciplines that I've worked with, there are oftentimes policy implications or standards that are tied to the research that is done. But because those standards may or may not cite, the policies don't have DOIs on them. So they're not really part of our published literature world. And there really isn't, I don't think, as easy a way to connect them. So the evidence that would be there to enable us to trace the research to the people who actually have used it for a good impact on society is really challenging to do.
JUDY LUTHER: I know Altmetric had tried to work on that in some areas. But at least two of the societies I've worked with had sessions at their annual meetings comprised of the standards people-- comprised of the policy people. And they admitted that they were open to some of that. They didn't want to necessarily credit it directly, but they referenced it in their documentation. How do we bring that forward, maybe? And I don't know whether we can encourage the press, or there's another service provider that would make those linkages for us.
SIMON INGER: I think I just-- sorry. I was just thinking I'd like to just think of-- a lot of the times we end up working with societies, we look at the overlap or not between where the authorship is, where the membership is, and actually where the conference attendance is, which nicely brings in all the things we've been talking about today. And Angela's got this interesting thing, which is that the membership is a tiny overlap with its authorship because of the practitioner and researcher side of things.
SIMON INGER: But of course, there's also very much a regional element to that. So we find generally that authorship is much more global than membership, which in turn is generally more global than conference attendance as well. So it's a really interesting problem for societies in serving their members. Or is it their members they serve?
SIMON INGER: Or is it a wider community which encompasses people that aren't their members and have no reason to be members, as such? So I think that that's a fascinating angle. And also, on the financial side of things, of course, we also have that with-- especially with the larger, more successful societies, they have large publishing programs which have always created enormous surpluses to fund a lot of what else goes on within society.
SIMON INGER: And as we transition that to open access, obviously there's less money in the system, which leaves us actually with the position of probably having to be more mission-focused, not just for the money, just because that's-- it's the remaining path. You're having to do-- get the information out for less money and making-- getting the money in from some other angles, I suppose.
SIMON INGER: And making membership compelling in its own right. And I think bringing that back to what was said earlier in some of the other talks, as well. Having a cause, in a way. A lot of the societies at the talk today had a real cause to go for and support. And that's also very interesting for those that actually have a real mission and a reason to engage people to become part of it.
SIMON INGER: So again, that's getting a little bit off the central topic, so I'll stop there. But I do think that we can still achieve mission on less money, most likely.
SAM BURRELL: No?
SIMON INGER: Eh.
SAM BURRELL: OK. Well, there that's-- I think the whole organizing theme, the idea that we started off with way back ages ago for this conference, was around the revenue dilemma. It's just been complicated recently by events. But fundamentally, many of the societies that we work with are facing revenue challenges of pretty epic proportions.
SAM BURRELL: And at the time, it was all about publications. Not just about publications, obviously. Membership revenues and conference revenues were under downward pressure as well. But I think it was the possible precipice of losing a vast quantity of-- for some societies, the vast quantity of publications' revenue. And of course, now we've got pressure and distress on events and conferences as well.
SAM BURRELL: So I think there's a lot of societies that are looking at what they do and how they function. And going, what now? And I think, Simon, a point that you just made there about being very mission-driven, and some societies have a very clear sense of what they're trying to achieve, really helps. And I guess where I'm trying to go is-- and Angela, you've answered that about your society.
SAM BURRELL: But it's the kind of, how does that relate to your publications program? Are we too traditional in thinking about publications? Should we be going back and going, what are the core functions of the society? And if we could think more widely about what publication means.
JUDY LUTHER: Mm-hmm.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Yeah. There are pressures on membership. That, I think, is a relative constant for organizations. We have younger generations of career-- early career folks and researchers, depending on the flavor of your membership, that have ways of networking, that have ways of communicating, that have ways of sharing that are different than what our older generations of members came up with and expect.
ANGELA COCHRAN: And so we are in that time where societies are catering to multiple audiences. So you might say, well, we have a younger generation that wants to pivot to virtual conferences, let's say. They don't want to travel. They're concerned about their carbon footprint. They don't want to be away from their families to go to conferences. What they want is perhaps different than what an older age bracket of members has been always used to and expects from their organization.
ANGELA COCHRAN: Unfortunately, right now, we can't say we're going to do one or the other. You can't say, well, we're going to keep doing what we've always done and the younger folks that are just coming on board with our organization just need to get in line and do what we do. That's not going to happen, so-- But you also can't say, OK. Well then, we're just going to stop doing everything.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We won't do an in-person meeting anymore. We won't do journals anymore. Instead, we're just going to do preprint servers and we're going to be virtual meetings. So we're at that point in time where both need to be maintained, and I think that is a huge financial stressor for organizations. And I do worry that when we do membership surveys or we look at what the usage statistics and the trends are and who's going where-- there's always been differences in what different demographic groups want from an organization, but I think the gap between what they want is probably fairly wide right now.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So it's not just, well, let's throw in a mixer because our younger members like to have a mixer at the conference. It's, our younger members don't even want to go to a conference. So how do we continue to engage with them? So that gap between what our members tell us they need or they want is widening, and that becomes difficult. So I do think that with this current crisis, when it comes to travel and conferences having to pivot to something else, and the pressure that we're seeing on publications and changes to the future revenue streams, it's a wonderful opportunity for organizations that aren't afraid to do so to really seriously take a look at how they might be able to pivot to become the next generation of membership organization.
ANGELA COCHRAN: It's super, super hard to do, because you're still trying to serve multiple constituencies that want something very different from each other. But if we're going to do it, it's going to have to be within the next 12 to 18 months where we really start thinking about what that means.
SAM BURRELL: Have you got thoughts on that? And then we'll get to Judy.
SIMON INGER: A great deal to add-- I think it is that. It is for the land of the brave. And it-- yes, it means reassessing what societies can do and what they need to do. A major theme for me has always been about distinguishing between community and membership. I think membership tends to be a package of things people buy, and community means engagement. But they're not necessarily the same thing.
SIMON INGER: And I think they probably need to be one day in the not-too-distant future for societies-- that one is a product of the other.
JUDY LUTHER: --was impressed with-- not just with it as a tool. I've used it for the last few years. But with some of the other software tools I see that are not just focused on a webinar or not just focused on connecting us online, but that would actually also sustain those connections between meetings. And I think to your point, Simon, the whole conversation around engagement being how we create and generate community-- I think that's happening.
JUDY LUTHER: Earlier today, someone said a lot of the changes are due to the internet. And I'm thinking, well, in all the impacts that I see happening in our publications world, I think are further evidence of the internet. But that happened so long ago, and so much has happened since then that has affected our world significantly that I think that sometimes what was enabled by the internet and is now more robustly developed and maybe not even conceived 20 years ago, is actually having an effect on people's expectations in terms of how they work together, how they share information, what is time effective for them, and what they're willing to tolerate.
JUDY LUTHER: The current publication process oftentimes is-- it's still page-based. At the end of the day, all of what we have is page-based. We're not going to get rid of the page, but a process that was born around a print-based model doesn't take advantage of a born-digital object-- a born-digital manuscript. And there are tools out there that will take those manuscripts and flip them into a PDF in a matter of minutes.
JUDY LUTHER: Now, there's a heavy up front investment to get the formatting right. It's not perfect, but I think over time, it will get better. And I also think over time, when people start to see if they can economize with that, suddenly having a particular format or layout of your journal could make it cheaper than the other way of doing things. 10 years ago, I remember somebody who had been associated with production mourning the online version because they used to be able to recognize their journal by the font that was used to print it.
JUDY LUTHER: And I think, are we at this next stage where we let go of some of the things that we have held near and dear because that's how we use the content? And maybe the same detailed level of copy editing? It's not that-- I hesitate to say that, because it always sounds like we're ready to compromise quality. But there are multiple levels at which copy editing can be done, and the expense of that.
JUDY LUTHER: It needs to be accurate content. It needs to look high quality and be high quality. But again, I think there will be opportunities to make some savings there, and I think it will require that we let go of some of the ways in which we are attached to our [INAUDIBLE]. And I think it will be driven by the next generation.
SAM BURRELL: So we've got a couple of minutes left on this session before we wrap up. So I'd like to ask each of you what one piece of concise advice you would give to a leader of a publications team in a society this evening-- today, this afternoon, wherever you are, whatever time it is. [LAUGHS] Sorry.
SAM BURRELL: That was mean. I didn't warn you that I was going to do that. [LAUGHS]
ANGELA COCHRAN: I guess my piece of advice would be, we have content. If you're a publisher, you have content. And I think the name of the game right now is, do you have the right content and do you have it in the right format and are you putting it in the right hands and doing some analysis around that? We've been thinking about our book program and how long it takes for a book to get written.
ANGELA COCHRAN: They're mostly written by committees and made up of volunteers. And that's a very-- that's a high level of engagement when you get this group of people together and they're going to write a book. And then we publish the book, but it's taken now-- it's taken several years for this committee to work on it.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So are we asking the right questions about, is this the right product for the market? Are we taking a strategic approach when we're looking at our programs? And instead of, we're going to publish what our members come up with, are there ways to direct the membership towards what we see as market needs or products that aren't available? Can we be a little bit more strategic with our volunteer efforts, I think is one thing that we've been really talking about a lot in my division.
ANGELA COCHRAN: We don't want to waste people's time. And they might think it's great to write a book about xyz. But if we know it's not going to come out for four years and there's already a dozen books on that, how can we refocus their energies on something else? And that takes a different kind of volunteer management and volunteer leadership than I think you see in a lot of organizations that have been around a long time.
ANGELA COCHRAN: So I guess that would be my piece of advice. On a day when I feel like you can't see more than 30 minutes into the future.
SAM BURRELL: Judy.
JUDY LUTHER: I'm thinking that as we think more widely about content-- digital content, regardless of the form or format that it's in, we will potentially begin to see new opportunities to provide services to our members that meet their need for it, depending on how they want to use it-- depending on print, audio, bite-size, full length. I think there will be opportunities to do that.
JUDY LUTHER: And currently, societies can be challenged by the fact that conferences produces content over here, publications produces content over here, and that's where the strategic piece that Angela mentioned, I think, is really key. If you don't understand your users, it's really hard. And even if you do, there's another whole conversation that needs to take place here that right now is distributed in different areas of the organization that don't think generically about content-- publica-- what-- the webinar over here and the journal article over here are two different vehicles for them.
JUDY LUTHER: And I think we need to look at them collectively and say, this is our body of content. And then what can we offer it-- how can we offer it and make it more accessible to the people who need it when and where and how they need it?
SIMON INGER: OK. For my two penn'orth. I'll be very fast. American Civil War quote-- "You win a battle by getting there the fastest with the mostest." In the context of publishing, means to be agile. You have to change fast. Quality is everything-- always is in any product. And you need to do whatever it is that serves your authors' interests the most.
SIMON INGER: That's as far as publishing. That may not totally overlap with what society as a whole needs to do. But for publishing, I think I'd do that.
SAM BURRELL: Let's take a couple of minutes just say thank you to the three of you for coming on this panel and being open to me just throwing questions at you that I haven't prepared you for. So thank you for that. I also want to take a minute to say thank you to all the speakers who've contributed today. It was a big ask of them to totally change what we'd asked them to do and come and do something completely different, and everybody rose to the challenge.
SAM BURRELL: So thank you so much for your time. I also want say thank you to our sponsors for making it possible for us to do this and to make it open to all of you guys. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it was useful. We'd love to be in touch very briefly after this to ask you what you thought of it and possibly to ask you if you'd like to hear about other virtual events, because we thought we might do some.
SAM BURRELL: And I wish I'd thought to do a social, because it feels like we should all go to the bar and have a refreshing drink now. So I'm sorry we can't do that. It's been-- I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening in-- joining along. All of this content will be available on a site that Tracy has been putting the URL in the comments for ages-- all through the session.
SAM BURRELL: And I hope to do this again in some form really soon. Thanks so much, everybody.
SIMON INGER: Thank you.
SAM BURRELL: All right. [LAUGHS] Bye.
SIMON INGER: Goodbye, everybody.
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