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A Fighting Chance: Funding and Support Strategies for the Current Moment
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A Fighting Chance: Funding and Support Strategies for the Current Moment
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Segment:0 .
Hey, everybody. Good morning. Thank you. Bob good morning. Good morning. Happy Wednesday. So glad the humidity in DC is starting to get a little better. I hope the weather's great where you are virtually.
Kicking off day two of New directions 2025 and this is me signing off as co-lead. It's my third year working in the new directions committee, and I am so pleased to be handing things over to, of course, my co-lead for this year, Jenny Herbert, and our new co-lead, Jamie Devereaux of sage. So yay for Jamie. So to get us started today, I'm going to hand things over.
Jenny, get us started whenever you're ready. All right. Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for coming back on day two. Or if this is your first day in New directions. Welcome to new directions. Next year, you should totally consider joining us for day one. It was great. We have a great half a day of sessions ready for us today and some fun activities in this afternoon.
So let's go ahead and get into it. Go on the next slide. All right. So another big Thank you to our volunteer working group I know I said this yesterday, but everyone on this committee are volunteers. And everything that you saw yesterday and today, whether it's the program or the things that happened around the program, are the result of the hard work of everyone that's on this slide, as well as the folks at SSP.
So thank you, Thank you, Thank you. If you volunteered with us. This has been such a great seminar and it's entirely because of you. And then secondly, Thank you to our sponsors. Again, I said this yesterday, but it's worth repeating. SSP is such a wonderful community, and part of the reason we get to do things like this is because we have sponsors that thankfully want to engage with us.
So thank you. Cadmore media, Thank you Digital Science. Thank you Silverchair and Thank you data conversion laboratory. We are so grateful for your support of new directions, SSP, and the scholarly community more generally. All right. Housekeeping I have a few housekeeping items to review. The Wi-Fi password is on this slide.
I'm not going to read it because I think that probably wouldn't make much sense. The meeting hashtag is SSP n 2025. Please tag new directions post about us. You know, tell people you're here. Please silence your devices at as a courtesy to our speakers and your fellow attendees. Unless you have a really good ringtone. But it has to be really good.
So your phone goes off and your ringtone isn't very good, we're going to be upset. Closed captions will be enabled for all sessions, so if you are in the room and you were asking a question, please be sure that you go to a microphone. The closed captioning for the sessions themselves will appear on slides. Because people are talking into microphones. If you're in the room, we want to make sure everyone can engage with what you're saying.
So make sure you use a microphone, even if you have a big booming voice, because that means that your voice will also go on that closed captioning. Also, if you're asking a question, identify yourself. Tell us your name and affiliation. We should all know who you are. So let everyone know. All right. Event platforms.
So virtual attendees. Welcome Thank you again for joining us today. If you need technical assistance at any time, please post a message in the chat or email SSP. Net the amazing Jackie Lord or Susan Patton will likely be the ones that help you. So if you're in the room or if you're virtual but what they're at is you can feel free to flag them down directly to for additional networking and information, please download the engage app using this QR code here.
Oh I'm sorry, this QR code. Here you can network with your fellow New direction attendees. So if someone says something that you find really interesting, or you have a great conversation at your table and you want to be able to catch up with people, you can do so in the engage app. All right, SSP merch, buy some merch. There's still time to purchase SSP and Scholarly Kitchen merchandise at the registration desk.
Word on the street is that all the cool people have Scholarly Kitchen apron. You could too. So go ahead and buy some cool merch. Tell people that you love SSP. Code of conduct another reminder of SSP, 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. If you have any questions about the code of conduct or how to report anything, you can feel free to use this QR code, which will take you to more information. All right.
If you came today and you thought, wow, this is so interesting, and I actually have a lot that I want to say to, I'd like to be the one presenting. Didn't you talk about this other subject that you should have talked about. First of all, fair. Second of all, you can submit an annual meeting proposal. Annual meeting proposals for SPS 2026 annual meeting are now open.
The deadline to submit is November 3, 2025. It will be in California. So also if you're like, I want an excuse to go to California. This is a great this is a great opportunity for you. So go to SPS website for more information. Submit your ideas today. OK at the conclusion of the program today, you can join us for a few off site lunches.
So we'll have two folks, Kristen and Jamie, who will be corralling people who are interested in lunch. So if you're interested in lunch, hang around and Jamie and Kristen will put their hands up and, big gestures that, you know, to come follow them to a restaurant. Similarly, we have arranged for a tour of the Au building. So if you're thinking, why would of this building. I've been in it for a day and a half.
It actually is very cool. So the Au building is friendly. I'm explaining this terribly, but they do tours because their building is so cool. So if you're interested in learning more about the building that you've been in for a day and a half and about just environmentally friendly building practices, check out the Au tour. It'll be at 1:30 PM, so just go ahead and meet in the lobby and you'll be able to come along.
Take a tour of the building. Thing all right, we're almost done, I promise. Virtual attendees can head to the virtual break rooms for meeting wrap up after the official program ends. So if you are online and you're thinking, wow, I wish I could go to one of those lunches, don't worry, you can come to our virtual lunch or dinner. Whatever time it is where you are, you can just go ahead and use this QR code.
You can also find it if you go to the lobby section of the Zoom room that you got the link to. When you registered, you'll be able to find the break room there. So go ahead and join us. If you are in person and you want to join the virtual break room, you can also do that. But you could also go to lunch. So the choice is yours.
Lastly, the evaluation form. We want your feedback. So scan this QR code and select the link or select the link in the follow up event email to complete your evaluation form. Tell us what you liked, what you didn't like, what subjects you think would be more interesting for us to talk about. What people you'd like to hear more from.
What groups of people you think we should represent, more. We want to hear it. So with that, we can go ahead and kick off today's session. Thank you, Gini. OK well let's see how the clicker works today. So welcome to everybody who's here in the room with us today. Welcome to everybody who's joining online I'm Jennifer Kemp I'm director of consulting services at stratus strategies for open science.
And for the next hour, we're going to talk about money. So you want some money in the form of sustainability. Hopefully what does sustainability mean today in the current funding environment. Are we talking about sustainability on shorter timelines than we used to. Usually when we talk about funding, we think of research funders and funding. But today, we want to look across the research workflow, and we want to look across programs and every form of revenue.
What is a revenue program. Can we afford in this environment. Innovation and experimentation. Other than AI. What's at risk in this environment. Which organizations and initiatives are at risk and how do we know that. Do we. Do we need a community risk register or something along those lines.
And what can we do about it. So I'm going to moderate today's session. I'm going to turn things over to our panelists to introduce themselves. We're going to have a menti a little bit later on. So don't put away those phones just yet. And then we'll have a discussion. So with that, I am turning things over to Christina for her slides.
Yay! yay! It works. I'm here, I guess, to kick us off with a story about what's at risk. I'm Christina Drummond, I'm the executive director of what was known as the open access book usage data trust, and soon will be known as the scholarly communications trusted data space.
And I'm here to tell a little bit about what that is. I figure you can't pass up being an Au, talking about new directions with not letting all of what a data space is, because this is something we'll all be talking about. But with respect to this new technology and raising an open infrastructure, I want to share a bit with you about our sustainability planning and how it is looking risky.
So I got to start by recognizing that this journey any has already involved so many people around the world. So much effort, volunteer effort from five continents. As you see here, over 2.4 million of investment from the Mellon Foundation. We've had smaller contributions from sponsors that have come in over the past year, as well as engagement from a number of leading partners on our research, as well as numerous individuals and organizations that have been engaged in our technical pilots, our focus groups, our conferences, workshops, all to build an open infrastructure.
Now, I did promise letting what a data space is. OK how many people here know what a database B database I like this, we're making you raise your hands. It's early. I know you're waking up. Hopefully everyone here has heard database. Great data lake. Keep it up if what a data lake is. Yay! that is a good number of hands.
Data space 1234. Four five. Yes OK. We're going to change that today. So data spaces are something emerging out of Europe to basically support data sharing and use agreements. You all know how in your institutions, you have to have ample data governance to align, normalize and work with that data in your own enterprises.
But what happens when you need to pull that data together with organizations. Right now, those are bilateral agreements, data sharing and use agreements. You have to manage those flows of data. You might have gateways to that data. You might have something where it's just emailed that can get really messy from a risk and compliance perspective.
We have now to face that because of AI, not just visualization and other services. So what happens when you need to do this at scale in an ecosystem. The costs associated with the one to one relationships get out of hand pretty quickly. In Europe, the answer to that was not looking at data brokers, which is what we do here in the United States.
Give us your data. We will then provide you back this aggregated service. In Europe, they have created this standard called a data space, which is an additional internet level protocol to add a control plane. And that basically is a transaction level way for machines to know, hey, this data can be shared with these specific entities for these specific transactions.
So think about that for a minute. We don't have that right now. It's very innovative. And we're standing on the shoulders of Giants. This is an industry agnostic standard. It's an ISO draft standard right now. And it is being worked through an already piloted in transportation, in logistics, in news media. And we're looking at how can we adapt it for scholarly communications to provide that immediate operational value, save time.
And we started with looking at distributed usage statistics specifically with books. We found that there were a lot of things that came out of that organizations could retain control over their data, that data sovereignty, they could control those data pipelines and start leveraging security by design. The data isn't just pulled in a broker. But I like to think of, you know, this takes effort to coordinate.
There is the technology itself. We often like to think of the costs associated with that middle layer, the interoperable open technology. And for us in the data space, that's what matches those contract terms. So taking your data sharing and use agreements and making them machine actionable, there's the data transaction itself at the bottom layer, which is where the metadata moves from party to party according to those machine actionable rules.
But in a world where we are looking at trust and transparency, the question becomes, how do you manage bad actors. That requires accountability mechanisms and that requires governance, governance that is trusted by the community. And so in this model, you need a Coordinating Office and you need a board of trustees. And as all of, in your organizations that requires effort to maintain.
We've been lucky to pilot this infrastructure. So we now have a data space. It's up, it's ready, it's worked, and we have used it to transfer data. We've used it to pilot our rulebook, our standard contractual clauses. So we know that we can do this at a minimum viable fashion. The problem is sorry, I'm going pretty quickly. We'll share the slides after.
The problem is what's the value proposition. What we're learning is that this value proposition is really a chicken and an egg problem. Having such a data hub requires critical mass. And if you don't have the critical mass, do you have efficiency. It doesn't work for just one org. You need a network of organizations that are trying to accomplish something through the sharing of that data.
So what does that mean for funding. I told you I'd get to money for us. We're we're startup mode. We're incubating. We have had this investment to get us to the point, we are ready to launch. And now we have to make the jump from going from research and development grant to that self-sustaining budget model.
We have to cross the innovation Valley of death, which all of you probably have heard. And to do that, we recognize that this startup cost, if you have a small group of 10 or 12 organizations, that per organization cost is going to be really high. We need to get to critical mass. So how do you fund that gap. We already have strong foundation. We've been doing this over a decade.
We have a lot of partners that have been involved who know about this. We have intentionally scaled small to control costs and partnered with other organizations to simplify the back office. But we went to our community to say, OK, what potential revenue sources can we use. Because, again, we want to retain trust, trust in the governance, trust in the model.
Some of those are one time, but they require a heavy development effort upfront writing the grants, finding the grants, or recruiting the sponsors and donors. After that. Another additional opportunity was, of course, recurring revenue. As all of you are thinking about, in our case, annual membership to that data sharing, data space community. And then there are variable costs that can go up and down based on your usage of the infrastructure or service.
For example, if you need help onboarding time with a consultant to do that. So we went to our community and asked, what is trust. And I'll note that when we did these workshops, 2324 the answers that we got with membership, for example, being the leading way to fund such an infrastructure may not still be feasible. How many people would agree with that. Show of hands.
So this is one of the big challenges we're facing today. I was going to go through all of our outcomes from those workshops. I'll note they're all in zenodo. Everything we do is open so you can go and pull the reports in the data. There's a lot of good material in there about the strengths and weaknesses of these different models.
But at the end of the day, to have trust, we need to have community. And community needs to be able to support this and have a piece in the game. To that end, we also recognize that thinking about scale strategically and scope strategically really helps. We started with O books and usage as the focus, and quickly learned that our stakeholders had lots of different ways they needed to exchange controlled data.
And again, the key here is controlled. So that's part of how we got to this rebranding, thinking about scholarly communications and the operational data that we need to share at scale. So I'm going to note at the end of this, you know, who are we and what's our case study. We're right now on this journey of unlocking milestones. And we're wrapping up our three year grant right now. It was 1.25 million to sustain and build and do this research to get us to this point.
We're ready to launch, but we need an operational reserve before we can turn on membership, before we can turn on a service and say, hey, give us your money and we'll give you a service for a year. We need to be able to guarantee we can cover those costs. We need to have the operational reserve in place to follow the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. And so right now we have our board actively fundraising to seek those sponsors to help us get to this initial goal.
And I'll just end here by noting it is perhaps even worse than the pandemic in terms of timing, because now's a really hard time for a new infrastructure to be making these asks. Thank you. Christina OK, so before I turn things over for introductions to the rest of the panel, I want to ask them, when you introduce yourselves, talk a little bit about the Wi.
So in the introduction I said, how do we know what's at risk. Right who's the Wi. So who are the stakeholders you work with most closely. And are there stakeholders that you'd like to work with more closely. Like that's an easy one. Everybody hear me. OK OK, great. Hi, everyone.
Thanks for having me. Christina did a great job with slides. We don't, but it's OK. Yes yes, exactly. She set us up pretty well. But I'm Stacy Burke. I'm the director of publishing for open access transformacion digital and marketing engagement at the American Physiological Society.
And what that means is that I help lead strategies that connect readers. And so to our audience, right. It's the readers, the stakeholders, our readers, authors, libraries. And that's really about know, my we'll talk about my subscribe to open that we've launched this year. But what aps does is we publish 16 journals, three are partner and the rest are self-published.
But we're a community. You know, Christina talks about community. This is the our whole remit and our mission is to support the community that we advocate for and what we publish on behalf. So we're not just publishing content to make revenue. Yes, that is great. But we're publishing it for our community. So when we talk about sustainability, we have to talk about diversification as well.
And so that's one hat is my hat, which is a pretty big hat. And then I also have a co-chair of the society publishers coalition. And if you don't know about that. And you're a nonprofit, come see me after because there's no membership fee because as what Christina mentioned, but it's really a group of nonprofits getting together to talk about what Christina's mentioned. What Jen's mentioned is like piloting and transitioning to oa in a sustainable manner.
So we all get together and talk about, hey, did you try this. Did you try that. What? did it fail. What did it succeed. And so get involved in that community because it's really fostering great discussion. So I'm going to talk about those two things as the we and who am I missing. That was the other question.
I'd like to talk to funders more. I'd like to talk to them a little bit more about educating, you know, on what publishing does and what we do. And also making sure that all those stakeholders are at the table. And I think that, you know, one of the pieces that, you know, I'll talk about too, is this, you know, this current moment that we're living in.
And I've been to a lot of conferences recently. It's not new. It's just does anybody else think it's going a little bit faster than I wanted. So there's a lot of things that we're all, you know, struggling. And I think it's brought us all to the attention. But it's been something that we've been working on a continual basis. I think it's just the speed of which we're getting there.
So I'll talk about apps a little bit, which is what we've done. So I mentioned subscribe to open. And I would be in trouble if I didn't mention all of that takes with it. So she talked about the infrastructure. So in 2025 we successfully launched subscribe to open for 10 of our journals. And if you don't know what subscribe to open is, I also will encourage you to join the Subscribe to open community that is really, really helpful to educate everybody.
If you're thinking of veering in that direction, because again, we all share experiences. But what I found is, you know, exploring in different business models gets under the hood to realize how much infrastructure we actually really need to reinvest in and build in order to do all these things at scale. And we talk about it with colleagues here is that, we did one transformative agreement, and we realized how much we had to do internally to support that.
So I'm not even joking that we use sticky notes on people's computers. And not just the sticky notes, real sticky notes, you know, from our production department saying, if anybody comes through from an author from this one University, let's make sure that they have they can publish. Oh, that was not fun for any of my colleagues. And I think, you know, one of my IT department says Stacy's just making things up.
And I'm like, I'm not that good. I'm copying what others are doing, and I'm trying to give a model to our librarian community, which is one of my main stakeholders, right? That's who I talk to. I manage subscriptions. But they're also the author community. How can we support them. So subscribe to open made it a very good, diversifying of our portfolio.
We're also going to be again, that's another thing that from a publisher's standpoint different than the governance and the funding is that, you know, we want to give as many options as we can to that librarian community. So what we've got is a subscribe to open. We also have fully open access journals. And we also have hybrid journals. And I mentioned we have three partner journals.
We're taking one of our gold open access journals in-house in January. And if you don't know what that means, I can talk to you about that after. That's also uncovering a lot of efficiencies that we're creating on the fly as we move into this. But it's also just we know it. We're streamlining all these processes. So we're talking about diversifying our portfolio mostly for that revenue that we're trying to sustain.
And that's what's two will help us do, but we also don't want to put every egg in a basket. Even before the chicken. And so we're diversifying our portfolio from a society publishers coalition. Again I talk about how great that is that everybody gets together and we talk about it. But a few years ago we talked about this topic and I said, well, listen, let's invite everybody here and talk about what they're doing to diversify their revenue.
And so we had, you know, smaller publishers. I was one of them in the smaller where we talked about our spotlight cover program, which is just an additional service for authors to promote their work. We gave a poster for them, and they can explore it in a lot of social media to get us a little bit of revenue. And it was it's just I would say it's a success, but it's certainly not recouping the money that we would lose if revenue from our subscriptions went down.
But we also had larger players there, which was like ACEs, which has a little bit more resources. But if you look at their portfolio, they are completely diversified. They have every different type of journal out there to offer. So there, you know, I, I mentioned our big publishers a lot and I don't mean to do that to insult them. I think that there's some great lessons that we should take from them.
And Jen, and we'll talk about this later about the different sector differences and its nonprofit versus profit. We really have to adopt some of those for profit mentalities. So at the SOC PC, we did this survey and we said, OK, how many of you all are all participating. And over 70% said they tried to do something sustainable and diversify their revenue streams. But the sentiment that they all said was like a really low success rate that we're trying them and it's a pilot and we're excited about it, but it's just not seeing what we want to do.
And I think that comes down to once you start to look into a pilot, you realize, I need to do these seven changes before I can even launch this pilot. And that takes time, which is money and resources. So and they're doing things, you know, when you ask them what types of things are you doing. You know, they went from, you know, certifications, webinars, project funding, you know, a lot of different things.
So we're really know, one of the main pieces that I think everybody has to have a mentality now is this cultural shift to be an entrepreneur at your organization. And that's something that's very different and mindset. And because we're limited in resources, limited in funding, that's one of my lessons from that. Thanks, Stacy. Catherine all right.
So I'm Katherine Skinner. I am the director of programs for Invest529 in Open Infrastructure. And that means that I am constantly looking at both the business models and also the governance models that allow infrastructure, things that we can all depend on to be open and available for use. And I look at that primarily in the scholarly communication space.
I've had a nice career of getting to do this kind of work prior to my position as director of programs at ioi, which is what we refer to invest in open as. I was the founding director of the Edutopia Institute, which is a 501(c)(3 nonprofit organization. We founded it on October 6 of 2006. So it just turned 19, which is really, really cool. And a lot of the work that I did there was around community building and trying to what we really did was we became a fiscal host.
And I'm actually going to start my story with Edutopia rather than invest in open. And I'll come back to some of the things that we're doing now as we get deeper into this panel. But with Edutopia. So rewinding back to 2006. I'm a sociologist by training. My interest in libraries, archives, scholarly publishing, University presses and those are a lot of the communities that I was working with emerged from a side project.
So I was getting my degree and I got hired to be the project manager for two Mellon grants that were being run by Emory University libraries. It was a great side gig. It was paying better than anything else could have interesting people. I was working with Southern collections, and that matched some of what I was doing. And about six months into that job, I realized that everything that I was studying about sociology of business and sociology of culture, and how the music industry, which was my dissertation topic, how it was changing in that moment and how it had changed with social movements over time related directly to the problem.
And I mean problem in all caps of knowledge in a digital age, because all of a sudden knowledge was getting commodified on a level and at a scale that it had never been before. And this is before Google had really come onto the scene. So I was looking at Yahoo and Amazon and freaking out that the libraries did not seem to understand that their livelihood was threatened. And so I jumped in with both feet and founded this organization in 2006 to take some of the successful work that we were doing at the time in digital preservation live.
So our work was community based. It was all about it was based on locks, which is still up and running Stanford University. We ran the first private locks network, which basically means we ran a cloud before there were clouds, and we were running it from all of the institutional participants. So this was a community that was deeply embedded, running the infrastructure that they depended on for preserving their digital collections.
There were seven institutions, and Emory had been the hub and the recipient of the grant that allowed us to first get this thing launched. What we decided is, OK, we can't leave this at Emory. This doesn't make sense for any of these other institutions to be paying Emory for program management. That's not going to work. Institutions don't really like to pay other institutions. They'll do it on occasion, but they don't like to.
What are we going to do and how do we approach sustainability for a digital preservation network that's supposed to last for hundreds of years. So we founded meta archive, was the name of the digital preservation network. We hadn't found meta archive as a 501 C3. We found it at jacobia. So this gets to the story or this gets to the Nugget, and then we'll move back to the rest of the panel.
We did that because we were diversifying from the get go. We knew that to just run a digital preservation network, we had seven members at the start. We were going to have more members. We did. We grew to three continents. I mean, it was a fantastic venture. But we knew that the chances of us surviving as a 501 C3 alone like that were really, really slim.
So we founded Edutopia, which was an umbrella, and we didn't have fiscal hosts back then. That wasn't really a term, but we basically built a fiscal host. And so I took in additional projects and additional founded additional networks like library publishing coalition, big curator consortium, the maintainers network, Software Preservation network. And this diversification is what we've been told is the secret sauce to survival.
And sure enough, you know, Edutopia is still around 20 years later. Metaarchive is not. And I have real questions, as I think about fiscal sustainability and about the diversification strategy, because if I had kept all of that attention that I gave to Edio copia on the digital preservation network. That digital preservation network really might have done something fundamentally different than it was able to do with a portion of my time as the director.
And it's, you know, it's not a regret. I love Edutopia I love what they continue to do. But it's an awareness that everything that we do to earn revenue. Costs us as well. It's where our time and attention goes. And so being very careful not to just think, Oh, diversify. Like what? What other revenue streams can I attract.
I'm done with grants now I need to do this. I need to do that. It can go in directions that can actually be counter to the purpose that you start with. And so I just want to mark that at the beginning of this conversation. Great Thank you. It's too bad we can't capture heads nodding in the captions. That would be great.
So, Stacy, Stacey, you might have given your answer to the next question, but we know that funding for research is greatly diminished in this current environment, at least in the US. So looking more broadly than that, to what extent do you think that this current moment that we are talking about is new in either difference or degree, or to what extent do you think that it is amplifying trends that were already in place.
Christina, you want to start. Sure So I'll just from our perspective, I think that there are a couple of things that as infrastructures, we have to think about grants come with. I would, they always come with an administrative burden, but now they come with a lot of uncertainty. And so if we think of the time and investment that goes into that grant development, especially at a time when there is such demand to even keep things afloat.
The calculus is different, quite frankly. And so it has changed how we think about grant development and that wedge of the pie. And especially if we think of grants, you know, those are 12 to 18 month lead times to do it right. Are there other ways to get the resources we need unlocked sooner. And so I think that's definitely something we're thinking about. But of course it hits up against the market forces in our industry and the budgetary impacts those have.
Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of the things that you had said, and it's like it's clicking in like, Oh yes, yes, but it's there. We're talking about different scenarios. I mean, we're completely different up here. And from a publishing standpoint, it's like it's the same problems and that we're all dealing with. So to answer your question, Yeah, and I did mention it a little bit.
It's going a little faster than I think that we wanted. But financial sustainability has always been a challenge and something that everybody's looking at. We're just going a little bit faster. And I think that that's the big challenge in that, you know, I think the nonprofit space, we haven't had to do that. You know, we've been getting the same revenue streams for a long time. We're like, OK, we're a little worried about it.
But then with this recent these recent changes and acceleration in the funding mechanisms of what, how they have to our authors have to comply. We're we have to speed up. And that's why subscribe to open helped us do it at scale. But really I mean they're not they're not new shocks. They're just happening quicker and faster that we have to remedy them quicker. Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with that, but I'm going to caveat that because I think it I think we've always seen the potential for our revenue streams to change as part of the reason why we diversify revenue and try to have I mean, it's a risk calculus, right?
You're you're not wanting to depend on one funder. So you look to several funders or you're not willing to put all your eggs in the basket, because we know that membership eventually will dry up. And we've been telling that story for literally 20 years. And it didn't happen. And y'all, it's happening now. Like it. And so it is faster.
But it's also this interesting I mean it's very chicken little where for a long time this guy has been on the verge of falling. And we've been like, here it comes, here it comes. And then the pandemic hit and surely this is it. It's been really resilient. It's actually been harder to fail than any of us could have possibly imagined. There's no way with no business training, no idea what I was doing, that in 2006, I should have been able to help, found a nonprofit and run it and have it turn into a $3.8 million a year organization.
I mean, it was insane what I was able to do. And it's because there was money. And there has been money. IDC just got removed from the equation. So even if everything else gets added back in, you've got both federal grants and IDC pulled from the equation for higher Ed. That fundamentally changes everything. And it changes it literally overnight.
And all of those institutions that all of us in here depend on for parts of our revenue are hit hard and they don't know what they're going to do. And that leaves us in a precarious situation. And so one of the other things, like diversification was our answer for so long. Like let's think about different revenue streams. Great risk calculus right now I think mergers and consolidation are the way forward, because if we don't pick winners and decide that we are going to support those things wholeheartedly and put our money behind the same spaces, there is not enough money anymore to go around.
And so this space a couple of weeks ago, I was here and gave a talk that one of the things that I was talking about is how hard it's been for things to fail, even though it was really hard to run them as well. It also if you had a pie and they got a grant and they got something started, or if you had a publisher and they got a product off the ground and it really started to move, it was easier to keep that momentum going than to say, Oh Yeah, no, we're not going to provide that service anymore.
It was like, even if you had one or two customers, you made it continue to work. So whether you're talking about like ojs and Janeway and things that are happening at of open infrastructure scale, or whether you're talking about things that are within other spaces, we've kept a lot of things alive. And I had a slide that had gobs of the things that are out there for open infrastructure, and those jobs aren't going to be able to be sustainable anymore.
And so that to me, like this new versus amplifying trends. I think this is new, even as it's also amplifying. I'm just going to. Oh, sorry. I was going to add that the common theme that you have there is that the communities are still there. Yes so you know, everything that maybe the funding is down, but we still have a community to serve and we have some really great, advocates out there that we need to harness.
I'm going to add a slightly more political angle to that, which is that the positioning is strong. So if we think of M&A like mergers and acquisitions, who's aligned and where. I can't tell you. So you all saw how innovative it is. I'll be in a room and we're like we're building a data space. The amount of organizations that say, Oh, we do that too, who have no idea what this protocol is, who haven't been following.
But we're like, Oh, we do something similar. We can transform and pay for our technical debt to do this new thing. So coming back to your idea of know, can we pay for the things that already exist and sustain it, that also, on the flip side can risk innovation. You know, often we find ourselves talking about standards that were built decades ago, back in the time of Yahoo, and we're somehow still iterating those as opposed to starting with something new for the AI age.
And so I often like to say, well, where is that space for us to fund innovation if we're so worried about sustaining what we're depending on. We don't have that VC bank in the same way that the startups, just the commercial side do necessarily established in scholarly communication. So just another thing to think about. So the next question sort of follows on from that.
We are talking about, you know, diversifying revenue and how Stacey mentioned how different the representation is up here. So it would seem that Stacey and Christina have very different use cases. Right? Stacey is at a well-established publisher society publisher that's been around for a long time. Christina doesn't have an organization yet.
She's trying to get something off the ground. Right so these would seem to be very different use cases. So I want to ask you both what's the biggest challenge that you have when you're talking to money people, however you define them in making your case. Yeah I mean, I think and you mentioned it as well, it's that, you know, we have a revenue stream and it's not going away right now. I'm not going to be Chicken Little about it.
So how do we make that revenue stream better and more sustainable. And that's why we did subscribe to open. We also wanted to answer our community right. We wanted to give them the way that they are looking for and that to comply with their funders. So I think, you know, I don't know if that's the challenge, but it's really why we moved into that, you know. But the biggest challenge, I'd say, and I did mention it, I think it's the even though we're long standing, I think it's that innovation internally.
And the change culture is really tough for people, not for me. I'm like, Oh, let's change tomorrow. That's great. But I realized that it's really a hard pull for our team that has been there for a long time. I mean, a lot of nonprofits, they'll have people that have been there for 30 years. It's mind blowing to me. And they like working there.
That's why they're there. And so with these changes, it's really hard. And then the infrastructure and the systems to build it from a nonprofit. We rely heavily on our external vendors. And so, you know, when we talk about partnerships we have to partner with these and, and the other, you know, using those infrastructures, we're looking at investing in companies that can give us a need as well as a return on investment.
And so we're looking and exploring. I'm hearing like all these great products that are here. Jeff and I'm like, how can we help, you know, foster that innovation on these smaller companies and partner with them as well. And reap the benefits. That's a great segue, because I would say the exact same challenge we have is one of Roi, because when you're starting out, I mean, especially right now, those dollars that companies are investing not just in a membership or service fee or, you know, a sponsorship to get something off the ground, those have to come with an Roi.
And when you are starting out, when you're in the Valley of death. And we don't have scale, it's chicken and egg. We don't have the clear Roi yet. We can explain how that will happen when you have a network of such size. And it's not just that systems Roi, but you have to remember, each of these organizations have their own technical debt, and so they have an internal cost as well to innovate.
That has to be overcome. And so it's, I almost sit here and say we're at this perilous moment where if we stop innovating, we're going to get left behind. But we're all under such stress that financial stress, I'll put it that way, that it is tricky to carve out that space to look at how do we move forward and not to lose things, which is what you were saying, right? Like if we shift over here, that's not going to get attention, engine, right?
So, Catherine, can I actually answer that one to you from the standpoint of open, open infrastructure. So invest in Open Infrastructure when we're talking to funders. So again question is like what is it that you wish your funders. How did you put it. Give me your question again. What was the what's the biggest challenge when you're talking to biggest challenge when talking to funders.
Our biggest challenge talking to funders is that we're advocating for open infrastructures, most of which are relatively invisible and most of whom don't have easy to put forward business plans. So I won't pick on locks. I would if you weren't in the room. Maybe, but I'll pick on archive, which is similar to locks in that it's been deeply embedded archive with an ex deeply embedded within one academic institution as a service to the whole field.
And that kind of model has seemed very safe. Knowledge Commons. Humanities Commons is another one that moved from a society space into what looked like a really resilient, wonderful home of Michigan State University. We've been able to lean on academic institutions, to run a lot of the open infrastructures, because they've had IDC coming in that help to pay for the expenses because there were still grants coming, helped to pay for the expenses that were associated with it.
Well, that's not there anymore. So what happens to things like archive, which used to be at Cornell, but due to political situations there, it moved from Cornell to Cornell Tech over the last five years. It's embedded in Cornell Tech. What happens to it if something happens to Cornell Tech or something happens to leadership at Cornell tech? It's not even actually embedded in Cornell anymore, and we don't realize how many vulnerabilities are underneath these infrastructures that we assume are standing on very solid ground because they've been around for 30 years.
It it is a fundamentally, again, a very different moment. And trying to express that to the funders, whether that's the institutions that need to be paying in more membership fees to things like archives. So that archive actually can make enough money to pay its staff, or whether it's to the philanthropic funders who are still out there and who are trying to figure out, OK, out of all of this stuff that is failing, what do what do we work with.
And one of the answers may be some of the oldest and most important infrastructures that still need that stability. But then that comes back to what Christina was saying about them. Where's your innovation. Where are things like the data space in the middle of all of that and the data trust. So Catherine has a view sort of across sectors and different landscapes.
So can you define or describe how you think of a revenue program and what kind of skills are needed for it. How I think about it versus how do you explain that. So and this kind of gets at the commercial versus nonprofit binary lie that we've all been telling ourselves for way too long. The academic and scholarly space has no idea what revenue is.
A lot of the time the idea of building revenue has not been something that's fundamentally taught within, you know, deanships or within departments or, you know, what have you. And so when things blossom out of the academic space, they often blossom out without any revenue program. They've got a few dollars coming in over here, few dollars coming over here. And then what?
The pies don't realize. The principal investigators don't realize is that most of the money that is actually allowing them to do the work they're doing is coming through the IDC, which was like 50% to 60% And I remember being at Emory University and we had somewhere around $6 million that we had pulled in over the course of a couple of years. And I remember being outraged about how well, only 3 million of that actually was able to fund our projects.
And really, it couldn't even fund our projects because then we were giving that money to other institutions, and their institutions were taking 50% off of the top. Well, the institutions did that because that's what made their bottom line work. So revenue program gets really complicated really fast is what I would say. And when at ioi, at invest in Open Infrastructure, what we're trying to do is help groups think through OK.
Like, what is my landscape. How do I think about revenue. And I'll use archive as an example. Again, they were a client of ours for about a year and a half, and Jennifer actually worked on this with me. And one of the first questions that we asked as we came in was, OK, so how do your revenues work. Well, when oil rigger was there years ago at Cornell, there were fairly clear answers.
It was actually a model within the community. By the time it had gone through all of the change that we were kind of inheriting, the end of, there wasn't a clear sense of, Oh, well, this is coming from membership. This is coming from Cornell subsidizing us. This present is coming from federal grants. This is coming from they weren't thinking about it in those kinds of terms.
And so part of what we're doing at investment in infrastructure is trying to educate up folks who are deeply steeped in these academic traditions. And one of the things that we heard over and over again, is, Oh, you just don't understand how academics work. No, I understand how academics work. And I'm telling you, there's another way. And so revenue program has to be understood in a very different way than I think most do.
And I'll just note there is a big irony here. I used to work in a dean's office for arts and Sciences that we have scientific equipment and service centers on the sciences side that are running as service centers, generating revenue for providing that public service. There are models in the Academy for doing this. For some reason, though, it hasn't translated over cleanly to scholarly communications because we haven't had to, I think, I mean, and now that we have to it's like, you know, you talk about Roi, it's like one of the things that we struggle with is like, OK, let's pilot this.
It's really great. When do we stop it. Right? and so it's because we're starting these projects without any kind of measurement goals. And we're just saying, OK, let's just try it. And it's like but you know, know. So that's why for me, I mean subscribe to open was easier, right?
It's like it's a clear measurement that I'm measuring anyway. So it works. But I mean, that's really, you know, back to what I say. And I think you were getting towards this, this like the sector differences, the commercial versus nonprofit. I'll talk about not about the discipline differences in humanities and bioengineering, biomedical but, you know, commercial, and back to your like, OK, what the lie we're telling ourselves will commercials this way.
And nonprofits are this way, and commercials prize scalability and efficiency and societies just do mission and trust. And it's like, no, we have to have all of those. I mean, we know that they have to have ours and we have to have theirs. So we should be really mirroring each other and taking those ideas. I'm so glad you brought up goals. You know, so I mentioned, we have a capital campaign going on right now with our community led by our trustees.
We have metrics we have to hit. So we're going to be checking in the boards, checking in October. And in November. And if we do not hit those KPIs, we will let the grant run out and it will be for the community to pick up. We will lose momentum. We will lose all of this progress. We'll lose community, and it will be for another organization to pick up, to ramp back to where we are.
And it's a very, very real risk, quite frankly. But that's the reality we're at because we can't just keep, you know, Oh, we'll do this with 10% effort. I mean, there are these conversations. One of our scenarios are boards. Considering is what would this look like if we met as a board four times a year just to check in to see what the temperature is. Now, I don't think that's going to get us far.
I don't think we're going to innervate. I don't think that's keeping the lights on, barely. But it won't be innovation and it won't be revenue. It won't be revenue. And that's, you know, again, when I have shown the slide that has all of the open infrastructure names and, you know, logos and identities, it's clutter. At a certain point, we can't pay attention to that many things too.
And so it is this real. Like we have not been forced to choose winners yet. And I think we're in a space now where we're going to have to choose what is it that we really want to work with and how are we going to support it as communities and support it across both commercial and non-commercial players. Because again, that binary lie is I think it has done tremendous damage.
I think it is doing tremendous damage right now, and that the quicker we can learn from each other and learn to apply business logics on the nonprofit side in a different sort of way, and also how to speak to values alignment in a different way from commercial side. It's the language we speak that is really the barrier. And we need a blend of the two approaches in order for anything to get to scale and stay sustainable right now.
And I know, Jen, you're getting ready to ask a question, but I just want to add that and that's what we're talking about from a non publisher. It's like the sky is falling again guys I'm going to warn you. But if we don't sustain then the options are going to be less for our community. And so it's going to be the for profit publishers that are they're just going to win on a lot of different ways.
So we have to think of different ways at the smaller level to be able to compete and remain. OK so last question before we move on. You know, we all talk a lot about how library budgets have decreased, how things have changed. You know, publishing has increased, library budgets have decreased. How how research funding has changed. So what, if any, lessons can we draw from what a lot of us might consider the good old days.
Maybe it's that post World War II boom in research period. I don't know if this is going to answer it well, but I'll try. I think I was at, I think it was the National Academy of Science had a presentation and there was somebody from ars that they had actually referenced yesterday, and he was like, listen, this idea of science not being trusted, this isn't new. It's just new for us.
Right this second in the states. He's like, if you go to Japan, they're arguing on the other way that science isn't trusted and that it should be trusted. And over here it's maybe we don't trust it as much. So I think, you know, the lesson learned and we've talked about this is that we have overcome a lot of these challenges in the past. And, you know, as publishers in the scholarly communication, every one of us.
So I think we just have to do it differently. I think Vannevar Bush, I mean, going back to Scholarly Kitchen and, you know, one of the kind of rooting forces for the roundtable discussions yesterday, I think there is hope looking backwards at some of the things that have come out before. And and there's. There's a recognition and an awareness that we have been a demonstration for the last 80 years of what public and private interests can do when they come together in higher Ed.
How that translates as this changes is up for grabs, and it means that we need good ideas, we need good activism. We need a whole lot of people paying attention. But it's not that the game is over, it's that the rules just changed. And and the Monopoly board just completely transformed. And now we've got to figure out how to map that back to something that continues to build knowledge and build towards the kind of society and world that we want to see.
And I think that's where Bush was. I mean, a brilliant thinker and a brilliant, you know, lay out the landscape kind of presence. And we need that kind of innovation, I think, right now. You want the last word, christina? Sure speaking of innovation, I would. So my last word is just let's be intentional about how we focus because we have been. And I think we do need the long shots.
We need the goals, the big picture goals. That's transformative innovation. AI is transforming our industry. I don't think we have time to keep doing incremental like improvements on what we've been doing for decades. I think we need to identify where the gaps are and where the true transformative innovation opportunities lie, and then coordinate.
Thinking about yesterday, what does that mean for policy. What does that mean for advocacy. What does it mean for awareness raising, education and indeed research and development. And I think we just have to find a way across our societies to have that conversation. So we can start moving forward with collective action. Thank you. Can we move to the next slide.
Sorry. OK. So before we open it up for questions for this fantastic panel, we have some questions for you. So we have a Mentimeter. So we're going to pull up the QR code and then get out your laptops or phones. There we go. Oh we had it briefly.
Thanks clicker problems. OK so if you're not familiar, you don't need the code. You can go to menti.com and use code 17072843. So we're going to give you a few seconds to get that set up. And then we're going to go to the menti and you'll see the results as they come in. But my suggestion is don't be influenced by other people's input.
Look down at. Don't look at the screen. Answer what the question your own way. And then look up to see results.
OK looks like we still have some results coming in, so I'll give it a few more seconds. So I'm really happy to see this slide. This actually is something that we asked in our workshops that we held in 23 and 24. And I'll just note, depending on what the services that you're providing, the source of your revenue really matters. People really commented on, you know, sort of sponsorships and donors, for example, how that can change levels of trust in a service.
But some things like demand based people that, you know, if it's something where you're going to have users and they're using that service that pay for use again, feels trusted. And I think it's interesting here when you think about trust in the source of revenue. What does that mean for your service, your platform, your community. Yeah so that's tagging.
Tagging on to that for two seconds. I mean, it's the difference between saying as open Alex, for example, which is one of the big open infrastructures that's building right now for open. Alex, they could have just dealt with a wonderful set of funds that are coming through from the Arcadia fund right now to fund their work. They didn't. They created an API, and they've got a kind of a commercial offering, and they are pulling in a lot of revenue from large publishers and from Web of Science and Clarivate groups like this that are using their API.
So already they're starting to build their model. Let's go to the next question while we're talking. There's just one more. It's interesting to see that memberships is high on that list. Yeah Yeah. Talking about like, you know, diversifying the revenue a bit. Is that, you know, what we're doing now is looking at those programs that because of the shift in the funding and because of the shift, a lot of academia are moving from academia and into the for profit sector.
And so we're creating a, you know, something for our community to say, what are the skills you need to go into that sector to diversify themselves. Right our community to say, you know, you've got other options besides the academia. And so where else can you do. And? and we interviewed a lot of our members that are in that field to say, what are the skills that you look for and that are missing on people that come in from the research academia space.
Stand by. Let's open it up to questions while we're waiting on the next mentee. Go ahead. Hey, Tim Lloyd from niblings. So we work with a lot of institutional infrastructure.
I think the mic needs to be. Is it. Hello? yes. Yep. OK, great Tim Lloyd from leblancs. So we work with a lot of institutional infrastructure and non-for-profit infrastructure, and a lot of it's in really, really poor shape.
And the analogy that comes to mind for me is like lots of ships, lots of ships, and no one is ever cleaning the hulls of these ships because they don't have the money. So these ships are just getting slower and slower and slower and take more and more effort to try and sail. And all that cost involved in keeping them going is revenue for someone else. Yeah, but it's really hard to tell these institutions who have peoples whose careers have been defined by knowing this legacy tech, that they are the only ones that can keep going, that it's really not a good idea.
So what tips does the panel have for getting people to stop maintaining crappy tech and let that money flow into something more modern and generationally different. That sounds like a title of a good session for next year. I read it, I'll read it. I mean, I think and I touched on it a little bit. I'm just going to say from, you know, internally it's that if I hear one more person say, well, we can do this manually.
I know that we can do it, but that is really time and effort that it takes. So fine, we can do that as a backup, but we really need to think about. And so Tim, you hit on it. It's like all these infrastructures are like, Oh, wait, are these suited for the purpose right now. And so Yeah, I mean, we need to speed up. And so we need those innovators at, in our institutions or in our programs to say, OK, I'm going to look at this differently.
I'm going to go about this differently. And what can I make more efficient. Which means that we need different incentives. Yes so the incentives right now are for that pie or for that technical person who brought together, you know, a System32 years ago to push forward and continue to, you know, get people to just let that ship sail one more day and, and one more day after that and one more day after that.
Sunsetting has been a hidden secret and kind of a dirty like nobody wants to talk about it until very recently. And that's starting to change right now. But we need ways of actually incentivizing groups to merge, to look at ways that they can build together to do things differently. Instead of just defending their turf and their territory. And I think, Tim, that's the biggest thing that I'm looking for right now is how do we make manifest the information that needs to be there so that we can assess who's doing that well and who's not.
Because unless that's visible, there's not any incentive for groups to change the way that they are sustaining, meaning hanging on for dear life and really moving towards something that is building for the future. So we're a few minutes after 10, but but I'm, I'm clocking the hour because we had the intro this morning. So we have I think just if we can take a couple more minutes, if anybody else has any questions or comments on the last slide, can you tell a librarian put that together.
While we're waiting, if I can just respond. So when Tim, I love the ship analogy because you can also talk about abandoning ship. And I think as anyone who has ever sailed or been on a boat, there's always a plan. And I think if we can find a way to get those people on those ships to think about themselves as resources, that knowledge capital, we're putting so much knowledge, time and effort into maintaining a sinking ship.
What if we instead enabled that same talent, time and money to drive us towards the future. And I think that's a mental leap that we got to start exploring because we're building for today. We should be building for 10 years from now. Simon, I think you get the last word. OK Simon Holt from Elsevier. I just want to build on what Tim was saying. And I suppose as someone who works for a larger organization, believe me, the ships that are in need of repair are not restricted to the smaller organizations amongst us.
Right but I want to talk about value. Really right. And I think I found it really interesting earlier on when you talked about that within the Academy, if you like the idea, this idea of revenue generation isn't really taught or isn't really kind of thought about too much. And it strikes me that in our industry, I think we just talked about incentives.
Just they're part of the problem is that no infrastructure, no investment ever goes into infrastructure that doesn't have a direct correlation to earning money. Right so you get your classic example of you get, you know, a system and the customer facing side is kind of works quite well and quite shiny. You then get your internal side that's based on a million workflows with a million emails and a million Excel documents and, and what have you.
And I suppose my question for the panel is how do we redefine value to include some of this infrastructure stuff and really do a better job of educating people within our industry. That value and revenue aren't just, you know, the swan sailing on the top, but actually might also include the legs paddling hard under the surface.
I'm going to give the last word to Kathryn. Do you want to answer that. She has some. Yeah she has. The last word is laughing on the money panel. She's just counting money. Tag team. So what I would say on that is that those, those feet that are paddling have always been doing that underneath.
One of the things that I think is missing is thinking about, I mean, we talk about it as infrastructure. One of the things that I've been having to say lately, even though the title of my company is invest in Open Infrastructure, we don't have open infrastructure. We've got a whole bunch of open tools, and we don't have infrastructure, period, in this digital space that we all genuinely depend on, whether we're talking about the workflows or whether we're talking about the tooling that lays underneath it.
We need we need some roadmaps and some plans, and we can't afford to do those as Elsevier over here and Simon Fraser University over here. And, you know, x, y and z, all of these different entities doing it separately, we've tried that. And it doesn't yield infrastructure. It yields a whole lot of hidden volunteer effort and work even at the big and small. What we need is to come together across sectors and across institutional spaces to actually map out what is it that we're trying to build.
And there I'm going to give the last word to Stacy, who will say publishing. There is a catch line that we could actually publish with purpose. Oh, she's going to get $100 after this. But seriously, that's great. Yeah I mean, well, we talk about, you know, joining together. We have the same mission.
I mean, a different audience, but it's the same mission. And we want to sustain and be financially sustainable. So great. So quick publishing with purpose. So very quick note, I have no promises or plans, but. But there are 26 people who said yes to a working group. So if you're interested, get in touch and we'll see what we can do with this. Thank you so much to this fantastic panel.
Thank you so much for being here this morning and for your questions. Thanks
Segment:0 .
Hey, everybody. Good morning. Thank you. Bob good morning. Good morning. Happy Wednesday. So glad the humidity in DC is starting to get a little better. I hope the weather's great where you are virtually.
Kicking off day two of New directions 2025 and this is me signing off as co-lead. It's my third year working in the new directions committee, and I am so pleased to be handing things over to, of course, my co-lead for this year, Jenny Herbert, and our new co-lead, Jamie Devereaux of sage. So yay for Jamie. So to get us started today, I'm going to hand things over.
Jenny, get us started whenever you're ready. All right. Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for coming back on day two. Or if this is your first day in New directions. Welcome to new directions. Next year, you should totally consider joining us for day one. It was great. We have a great half a day of sessions ready for us today and some fun activities in this afternoon.
So let's go ahead and get into it. Go on the next slide. All right. So another big Thank you to our volunteer working group I know I said this yesterday, but everyone on this committee are volunteers. And everything that you saw yesterday and today, whether it's the program or the things that happened around the program, are the result of the hard work of everyone that's on this slide, as well as the folks at SSP.
So thank you, Thank you, Thank you. If you volunteered with us. This has been such a great seminar and it's entirely because of you. And then secondly, Thank you to our sponsors. Again, I said this yesterday, but it's worth repeating. SSP is such a wonderful community, and part of the reason we get to do things like this is because we have sponsors that thankfully want to engage with us.
So thank you. Cadmore media, Thank you Digital Science. Thank you Silverchair and Thank you data conversion laboratory. We are so grateful for your support of new directions, SSP, and the scholarly community more generally. All right. Housekeeping I have a few housekeeping items to review. The Wi-Fi password is on this slide.
I'm not going to read it because I think that probably wouldn't make much sense. The meeting hashtag is SSP n 2025. Please tag new directions post about us. You know, tell people you're here. Please silence your devices at as a courtesy to our speakers and your fellow attendees. Unless you have a really good ringtone. But it has to be really good.
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If you came today and you thought, wow, this is so interesting, and I actually have a lot that I want to say to, I'd like to be the one presenting. Didn't you talk about this other subject that you should have talked about. First of all, fair. Second of all, you can submit an annual meeting proposal. Annual meeting proposals for SPS 2026 annual meeting are now open.
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Lastly, the evaluation form. We want your feedback. So scan this QR code and select the link or select the link in the follow up event email to complete your evaluation form. Tell us what you liked, what you didn't like, what subjects you think would be more interesting for us to talk about. What people you'd like to hear more from.
What groups of people you think we should represent, more. We want to hear it. So with that, we can go ahead and kick off today's session. Thank you, Gini. OK well let's see how the clicker works today. So welcome to everybody who's here in the room with us today. Welcome to everybody who's joining online I'm Jennifer Kemp I'm director of consulting services at stratus strategies for open science.
And for the next hour, we're going to talk about money. So you want some money in the form of sustainability. Hopefully what does sustainability mean today in the current funding environment. Are we talking about sustainability on shorter timelines than we used to. Usually when we talk about funding, we think of research funders and funding. But today, we want to look across the research workflow, and we want to look across programs and every form of revenue.
What is a revenue program. Can we afford in this environment. Innovation and experimentation. Other than AI. What's at risk in this environment. Which organizations and initiatives are at risk and how do we know that. Do we. Do we need a community risk register or something along those lines.
And what can we do about it. So I'm going to moderate today's session. I'm going to turn things over to our panelists to introduce themselves. We're going to have a menti a little bit later on. So don't put away those phones just yet. And then we'll have a discussion. So with that, I am turning things over to Christina for her slides.
Yay! yay! It works. I'm here, I guess, to kick us off with a story about what's at risk. I'm Christina Drummond, I'm the executive director of what was known as the open access book usage data trust, and soon will be known as the scholarly communications trusted data space.
And I'm here to tell a little bit about what that is. I figure you can't pass up being an Au, talking about new directions with not letting all of what a data space is, because this is something we'll all be talking about. But with respect to this new technology and raising an open infrastructure, I want to share a bit with you about our sustainability planning and how it is looking risky.
So I got to start by recognizing that this journey any has already involved so many people around the world. So much effort, volunteer effort from five continents. As you see here, over 2.4 million of investment from the Mellon Foundation. We've had smaller contributions from sponsors that have come in over the past year, as well as engagement from a number of leading partners on our research, as well as numerous individuals and organizations that have been engaged in our technical pilots, our focus groups, our conferences, workshops, all to build an open infrastructure.
Now, I did promise letting what a data space is. OK how many people here know what a database B database I like this, we're making you raise your hands. It's early. I know you're waking up. Hopefully everyone here has heard database. Great data lake. Keep it up if what a data lake is. Yay! that is a good number of hands.
Data space 1234. Four five. Yes OK. We're going to change that today. So data spaces are something emerging out of Europe to basically support data sharing and use agreements. You all know how in your institutions, you have to have ample data governance to align, normalize and work with that data in your own enterprises.
But what happens when you need to pull that data together with organizations. Right now, those are bilateral agreements, data sharing and use agreements. You have to manage those flows of data. You might have gateways to that data. You might have something where it's just emailed that can get really messy from a risk and compliance perspective.
We have now to face that because of AI, not just visualization and other services. So what happens when you need to do this at scale in an ecosystem. The costs associated with the one to one relationships get out of hand pretty quickly. In Europe, the answer to that was not looking at data brokers, which is what we do here in the United States.
Give us your data. We will then provide you back this aggregated service. In Europe, they have created this standard called a data space, which is an additional internet level protocol to add a control plane. And that basically is a transaction level way for machines to know, hey, this data can be shared with these specific entities for these specific transactions.
So think about that for a minute. We don't have that right now. It's very innovative. And we're standing on the shoulders of Giants. This is an industry agnostic standard. It's an ISO draft standard right now. And it is being worked through an already piloted in transportation, in logistics, in news media. And we're looking at how can we adapt it for scholarly communications to provide that immediate operational value, save time.
And we started with looking at distributed usage statistics specifically with books. We found that there were a lot of things that came out of that organizations could retain control over their data, that data sovereignty, they could control those data pipelines and start leveraging security by design. The data isn't just pulled in a broker. But I like to think of, you know, this takes effort to coordinate.
There is the technology itself. We often like to think of the costs associated with that middle layer, the interoperable open technology. And for us in the data space, that's what matches those contract terms. So taking your data sharing and use agreements and making them machine actionable, there's the data transaction itself at the bottom layer, which is where the metadata moves from party to party according to those machine actionable rules.
But in a world where we are looking at trust and transparency, the question becomes, how do you manage bad actors. That requires accountability mechanisms and that requires governance, governance that is trusted by the community. And so in this model, you need a Coordinating Office and you need a board of trustees. And as all of, in your organizations that requires effort to maintain.
We've been lucky to pilot this infrastructure. So we now have a data space. It's up, it's ready, it's worked, and we have used it to transfer data. We've used it to pilot our rulebook, our standard contractual clauses. So we know that we can do this at a minimum viable fashion. The problem is sorry, I'm going pretty quickly. We'll share the slides after.
The problem is what's the value proposition. What we're learning is that this value proposition is really a chicken and an egg problem. Having such a data hub requires critical mass. And if you don't have the critical mass, do you have efficiency. It doesn't work for just one org. You need a network of organizations that are trying to accomplish something through the sharing of that data.
So what does that mean for funding. I told you I'd get to money for us. We're we're startup mode. We're incubating. We have had this investment to get us to the point, we are ready to launch. And now we have to make the jump from going from research and development grant to that self-sustaining budget model.
We have to cross the innovation Valley of death, which all of you probably have heard. And to do that, we recognize that this startup cost, if you have a small group of 10 or 12 organizations, that per organization cost is going to be really high. We need to get to critical mass. So how do you fund that gap. We already have strong foundation. We've been doing this over a decade.
We have a lot of partners that have been involved who know about this. We have intentionally scaled small to control costs and partnered with other organizations to simplify the back office. But we went to our community to say, OK, what potential revenue sources can we use. Because, again, we want to retain trust, trust in the governance, trust in the model.
Some of those are one time, but they require a heavy development effort upfront writing the grants, finding the grants, or recruiting the sponsors and donors. After that. Another additional opportunity was, of course, recurring revenue. As all of you are thinking about, in our case, annual membership to that data sharing, data space community. And then there are variable costs that can go up and down based on your usage of the infrastructure or service.
For example, if you need help onboarding time with a consultant to do that. So we went to our community and asked, what is trust. And I'll note that when we did these workshops, 2324 the answers that we got with membership, for example, being the leading way to fund such an infrastructure may not still be feasible. How many people would agree with that. Show of hands.
So this is one of the big challenges we're facing today. I was going to go through all of our outcomes from those workshops. I'll note they're all in zenodo. Everything we do is open so you can go and pull the reports in the data. There's a lot of good material in there about the strengths and weaknesses of these different models.
But at the end of the day, to have trust, we need to have community. And community needs to be able to support this and have a piece in the game. To that end, we also recognize that thinking about scale strategically and scope strategically really helps. We started with O books and usage as the focus, and quickly learned that our stakeholders had lots of different ways they needed to exchange controlled data.
And again, the key here is controlled. So that's part of how we got to this rebranding, thinking about scholarly communications and the operational data that we need to share at scale. So I'm going to note at the end of this, you know, who are we and what's our case study. We're right now on this journey of unlocking milestones. And we're wrapping up our three year grant right now. It was 1.25 million to sustain and build and do this research to get us to this point.
We're ready to launch, but we need an operational reserve before we can turn on membership, before we can turn on a service and say, hey, give us your money and we'll give you a service for a year. We need to be able to guarantee we can cover those costs. We need to have the operational reserve in place to follow the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. And so right now we have our board actively fundraising to seek those sponsors to help us get to this initial goal.
And I'll just end here by noting it is perhaps even worse than the pandemic in terms of timing, because now's a really hard time for a new infrastructure to be making these asks. Thank you. Christina OK, so before I turn things over for introductions to the rest of the panel, I want to ask them, when you introduce yourselves, talk a little bit about the Wi.
So in the introduction I said, how do we know what's at risk. Right who's the Wi. So who are the stakeholders you work with most closely. And are there stakeholders that you'd like to work with more closely. Like that's an easy one. Everybody hear me. OK OK, great. Hi, everyone.
Thanks for having me. Christina did a great job with slides. We don't, but it's OK. Yes yes, exactly. She set us up pretty well. But I'm Stacy Burke. I'm the director of publishing for open access transformacion digital and marketing engagement at the American Physiological Society.
And what that means is that I help lead strategies that connect readers. And so to our audience, right. It's the readers, the stakeholders, our readers, authors, libraries. And that's really about know, my we'll talk about my subscribe to open that we've launched this year. But what aps does is we publish 16 journals, three are partner and the rest are self-published.
But we're a community. You know, Christina talks about community. This is the our whole remit and our mission is to support the community that we advocate for and what we publish on behalf. So we're not just publishing content to make revenue. Yes, that is great. But we're publishing it for our community. So when we talk about sustainability, we have to talk about diversification as well.
And so that's one hat is my hat, which is a pretty big hat. And then I also have a co-chair of the society publishers coalition. And if you don't know about that. And you're a nonprofit, come see me after because there's no membership fee because as what Christina mentioned, but it's really a group of nonprofits getting together to talk about what Christina's mentioned. What Jen's mentioned is like piloting and transitioning to oa in a sustainable manner.
So we all get together and talk about, hey, did you try this. Did you try that. What? did it fail. What did it succeed. And so get involved in that community because it's really fostering great discussion. So I'm going to talk about those two things as the we and who am I missing. That was the other question.
I'd like to talk to funders more. I'd like to talk to them a little bit more about educating, you know, on what publishing does and what we do. And also making sure that all those stakeholders are at the table. And I think that, you know, one of the pieces that, you know, I'll talk about too, is this, you know, this current moment that we're living in.
And I've been to a lot of conferences recently. It's not new. It's just does anybody else think it's going a little bit faster than I wanted. So there's a lot of things that we're all, you know, struggling. And I think it's brought us all to the attention. But it's been something that we've been working on a continual basis. I think it's just the speed of which we're getting there.
So I'll talk about apps a little bit, which is what we've done. So I mentioned subscribe to open. And I would be in trouble if I didn't mention all of that takes with it. So she talked about the infrastructure. So in 2025 we successfully launched subscribe to open for 10 of our journals. And if you don't know what subscribe to open is, I also will encourage you to join the Subscribe to open community that is really, really helpful to educate everybody.
If you're thinking of veering in that direction, because again, we all share experiences. But what I found is, you know, exploring in different business models gets under the hood to realize how much infrastructure we actually really need to reinvest in and build in order to do all these things at scale. And we talk about it with colleagues here is that, we did one transformative agreement, and we realized how much we had to do internally to support that.
So I'm not even joking that we use sticky notes on people's computers. And not just the sticky notes, real sticky notes, you know, from our production department saying, if anybody comes through from an author from this one University, let's make sure that they have they can publish. Oh, that was not fun for any of my colleagues. And I think, you know, one of my IT department says Stacy's just making things up.
And I'm like, I'm not that good. I'm copying what others are doing, and I'm trying to give a model to our librarian community, which is one of my main stakeholders, right? That's who I talk to. I manage subscriptions. But they're also the author community. How can we support them. So subscribe to open made it a very good, diversifying of our portfolio.
We're also going to be again, that's another thing that from a publisher's standpoint different than the governance and the funding is that, you know, we want to give as many options as we can to that librarian community. So what we've got is a subscribe to open. We also have fully open access journals. And we also have hybrid journals. And I mentioned we have three partner journals.
We're taking one of our gold open access journals in-house in January. And if you don't know what that means, I can talk to you about that after. That's also uncovering a lot of efficiencies that we're creating on the fly as we move into this. But it's also just we know it. We're streamlining all these processes. So we're talking about diversifying our portfolio mostly for that revenue that we're trying to sustain.
And that's what's two will help us do, but we also don't want to put every egg in a basket. Even before the chicken. And so we're diversifying our portfolio from a society publishers coalition. Again I talk about how great that is that everybody gets together and we talk about it. But a few years ago we talked about this topic and I said, well, listen, let's invite everybody here and talk about what they're doing to diversify their revenue.
And so we had, you know, smaller publishers. I was one of them in the smaller where we talked about our spotlight cover program, which is just an additional service for authors to promote their work. We gave a poster for them, and they can explore it in a lot of social media to get us a little bit of revenue. And it was it's just I would say it's a success, but it's certainly not recouping the money that we would lose if revenue from our subscriptions went down.
But we also had larger players there, which was like ACEs, which has a little bit more resources. But if you look at their portfolio, they are completely diversified. They have every different type of journal out there to offer. So there, you know, I, I mentioned our big publishers a lot and I don't mean to do that to insult them. I think that there's some great lessons that we should take from them.
And Jen, and we'll talk about this later about the different sector differences and its nonprofit versus profit. We really have to adopt some of those for profit mentalities. So at the SOC PC, we did this survey and we said, OK, how many of you all are all participating. And over 70% said they tried to do something sustainable and diversify their revenue streams. But the sentiment that they all said was like a really low success rate that we're trying them and it's a pilot and we're excited about it, but it's just not seeing what we want to do.
And I think that comes down to once you start to look into a pilot, you realize, I need to do these seven changes before I can even launch this pilot. And that takes time, which is money and resources. So and they're doing things, you know, when you ask them what types of things are you doing. You know, they went from, you know, certifications, webinars, project funding, you know, a lot of different things.
So we're really know, one of the main pieces that I think everybody has to have a mentality now is this cultural shift to be an entrepreneur at your organization. And that's something that's very different and mindset. And because we're limited in resources, limited in funding, that's one of my lessons from that. Thanks, Stacy. Catherine all right.
So I'm Katherine Skinner. I am the director of programs for Invest529 in Open Infrastructure. And that means that I am constantly looking at both the business models and also the governance models that allow infrastructure, things that we can all depend on to be open and available for use. And I look at that primarily in the scholarly communication space.
I've had a nice career of getting to do this kind of work prior to my position as director of programs at ioi, which is what we refer to invest in open as. I was the founding director of the Edutopia Institute, which is a 501(c)(3 nonprofit organization. We founded it on October 6 of 2006. So it just turned 19, which is really, really cool. And a lot of the work that I did there was around community building and trying to what we really did was we became a fiscal host.
And I'm actually going to start my story with Edutopia rather than invest in open. And I'll come back to some of the things that we're doing now as we get deeper into this panel. But with Edutopia. So rewinding back to 2006. I'm a sociologist by training. My interest in libraries, archives, scholarly publishing, University presses and those are a lot of the communities that I was working with emerged from a side project.
So I was getting my degree and I got hired to be the project manager for two Mellon grants that were being run by Emory University libraries. It was a great side gig. It was paying better than anything else could have interesting people. I was working with Southern collections, and that matched some of what I was doing. And about six months into that job, I realized that everything that I was studying about sociology of business and sociology of culture, and how the music industry, which was my dissertation topic, how it was changing in that moment and how it had changed with social movements over time related directly to the problem.
And I mean problem in all caps of knowledge in a digital age, because all of a sudden knowledge was getting commodified on a level and at a scale that it had never been before. And this is before Google had really come onto the scene. So I was looking at Yahoo and Amazon and freaking out that the libraries did not seem to understand that their livelihood was threatened. And so I jumped in with both feet and founded this organization in 2006 to take some of the successful work that we were doing at the time in digital preservation live.
So our work was community based. It was all about it was based on locks, which is still up and running Stanford University. We ran the first private locks network, which basically means we ran a cloud before there were clouds, and we were running it from all of the institutional participants. So this was a community that was deeply embedded, running the infrastructure that they depended on for preserving their digital collections.
There were seven institutions, and Emory had been the hub and the recipient of the grant that allowed us to first get this thing launched. What we decided is, OK, we can't leave this at Emory. This doesn't make sense for any of these other institutions to be paying Emory for program management. That's not going to work. Institutions don't really like to pay other institutions. They'll do it on occasion, but they don't like to.
What are we going to do and how do we approach sustainability for a digital preservation network that's supposed to last for hundreds of years. So we founded meta archive, was the name of the digital preservation network. We hadn't found meta archive as a 501 C3. We found it at jacobia. So this gets to the story or this gets to the Nugget, and then we'll move back to the rest of the panel.
We did that because we were diversifying from the get go. We knew that to just run a digital preservation network, we had seven members at the start. We were going to have more members. We did. We grew to three continents. I mean, it was a fantastic venture. But we knew that the chances of us surviving as a 501 C3 alone like that were really, really slim.
So we founded Edutopia, which was an umbrella, and we didn't have fiscal hosts back then. That wasn't really a term, but we basically built a fiscal host. And so I took in additional projects and additional founded additional networks like library publishing coalition, big curator consortium, the maintainers network, Software Preservation network. And this diversification is what we've been told is the secret sauce to survival.
And sure enough, you know, Edutopia is still around 20 years later. Metaarchive is not. And I have real questions, as I think about fiscal sustainability and about the diversification strategy, because if I had kept all of that attention that I gave to Edio copia on the digital preservation network. That digital preservation network really might have done something fundamentally different than it was able to do with a portion of my time as the director.
And it's, you know, it's not a regret. I love Edutopia I love what they continue to do. But it's an awareness that everything that we do to earn revenue. Costs us as well. It's where our time and attention goes. And so being very careful not to just think, Oh, diversify. Like what? What other revenue streams can I attract.
I'm done with grants now I need to do this. I need to do that. It can go in directions that can actually be counter to the purpose that you start with. And so I just want to mark that at the beginning of this conversation. Great Thank you. It's too bad we can't capture heads nodding in the captions. That would be great.
So, Stacy, Stacey, you might have given your answer to the next question, but we know that funding for research is greatly diminished in this current environment, at least in the US. So looking more broadly than that, to what extent do you think that this current moment that we are talking about is new in either difference or degree, or to what extent do you think that it is amplifying trends that were already in place.
Christina, you want to start. Sure So I'll just from our perspective, I think that there are a couple of things that as infrastructures, we have to think about grants come with. I would, they always come with an administrative burden, but now they come with a lot of uncertainty. And so if we think of the time and investment that goes into that grant development, especially at a time when there is such demand to even keep things afloat.
The calculus is different, quite frankly. And so it has changed how we think about grant development and that wedge of the pie. And especially if we think of grants, you know, those are 12 to 18 month lead times to do it right. Are there other ways to get the resources we need unlocked sooner. And so I think that's definitely something we're thinking about. But of course it hits up against the market forces in our industry and the budgetary impacts those have.
Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of the things that you had said, and it's like it's clicking in like, Oh yes, yes, but it's there. We're talking about different scenarios. I mean, we're completely different up here. And from a publishing standpoint, it's like it's the same problems and that we're all dealing with. So to answer your question, Yeah, and I did mention it a little bit.
It's going a little faster than I think that we wanted. But financial sustainability has always been a challenge and something that everybody's looking at. We're just going a little bit faster. And I think that that's the big challenge in that, you know, I think the nonprofit space, we haven't had to do that. You know, we've been getting the same revenue streams for a long time. We're like, OK, we're a little worried about it.
But then with this recent these recent changes and acceleration in the funding mechanisms of what, how they have to our authors have to comply. We're we have to speed up. And that's why subscribe to open helped us do it at scale. But really I mean they're not they're not new shocks. They're just happening quicker and faster that we have to remedy them quicker. Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with that, but I'm going to caveat that because I think it I think we've always seen the potential for our revenue streams to change as part of the reason why we diversify revenue and try to have I mean, it's a risk calculus, right?
You're you're not wanting to depend on one funder. So you look to several funders or you're not willing to put all your eggs in the basket, because we know that membership eventually will dry up. And we've been telling that story for literally 20 years. And it didn't happen. And y'all, it's happening now. Like it. And so it is faster.
But it's also this interesting I mean it's very chicken little where for a long time this guy has been on the verge of falling. And we've been like, here it comes, here it comes. And then the pandemic hit and surely this is it. It's been really resilient. It's actually been harder to fail than any of us could have possibly imagined. There's no way with no business training, no idea what I was doing, that in 2006, I should have been able to help, found a nonprofit and run it and have it turn into a $3.8 million a year organization.
I mean, it was insane what I was able to do. And it's because there was money. And there has been money. IDC just got removed from the equation. So even if everything else gets added back in, you've got both federal grants and IDC pulled from the equation for higher Ed. That fundamentally changes everything. And it changes it literally overnight.
And all of those institutions that all of us in here depend on for parts of our revenue are hit hard and they don't know what they're going to do. And that leaves us in a precarious situation. And so one of the other things, like diversification was our answer for so long. Like let's think about different revenue streams. Great risk calculus right now I think mergers and consolidation are the way forward, because if we don't pick winners and decide that we are going to support those things wholeheartedly and put our money behind the same spaces, there is not enough money anymore to go around.
And so this space a couple of weeks ago, I was here and gave a talk that one of the things that I was talking about is how hard it's been for things to fail, even though it was really hard to run them as well. It also if you had a pie and they got a grant and they got something started, or if you had a publisher and they got a product off the ground and it really started to move, it was easier to keep that momentum going than to say, Oh Yeah, no, we're not going to provide that service anymore.
It was like, even if you had one or two customers, you made it continue to work. So whether you're talking about like ojs and Janeway and things that are happening at of open infrastructure scale, or whether you're talking about things that are within other spaces, we've kept a lot of things alive. And I had a slide that had gobs of the things that are out there for open infrastructure, and those jobs aren't going to be able to be sustainable anymore.
And so that to me, like this new versus amplifying trends. I think this is new, even as it's also amplifying. I'm just going to. Oh, sorry. I was going to add that the common theme that you have there is that the communities are still there. Yes so you know, everything that maybe the funding is down, but we still have a community to serve and we have some really great, advocates out there that we need to harness.
I'm going to add a slightly more political angle to that, which is that the positioning is strong. So if we think of M&A like mergers and acquisitions, who's aligned and where. I can't tell you. So you all saw how innovative it is. I'll be in a room and we're like we're building a data space. The amount of organizations that say, Oh, we do that too, who have no idea what this protocol is, who haven't been following.
But we're like, Oh, we do something similar. We can transform and pay for our technical debt to do this new thing. So coming back to your idea of know, can we pay for the things that already exist and sustain it, that also, on the flip side can risk innovation. You know, often we find ourselves talking about standards that were built decades ago, back in the time of Yahoo, and we're somehow still iterating those as opposed to starting with something new for the AI age.
And so I often like to say, well, where is that space for us to fund innovation if we're so worried about sustaining what we're depending on. We don't have that VC bank in the same way that the startups, just the commercial side do necessarily established in scholarly communication. So just another thing to think about. So the next question sort of follows on from that.
We are talking about, you know, diversifying revenue and how Stacey mentioned how different the representation is up here. So it would seem that Stacey and Christina have very different use cases. Right? Stacey is at a well-established publisher society publisher that's been around for a long time. Christina doesn't have an organization yet.
She's trying to get something off the ground. Right so these would seem to be very different use cases. So I want to ask you both what's the biggest challenge that you have when you're talking to money people, however you define them in making your case. Yeah I mean, I think and you mentioned it as well, it's that, you know, we have a revenue stream and it's not going away right now. I'm not going to be Chicken Little about it.
So how do we make that revenue stream better and more sustainable. And that's why we did subscribe to open. We also wanted to answer our community right. We wanted to give them the way that they are looking for and that to comply with their funders. So I think, you know, I don't know if that's the challenge, but it's really why we moved into that, you know. But the biggest challenge, I'd say, and I did mention it, I think it's the even though we're long standing, I think it's that innovation internally.
And the change culture is really tough for people, not for me. I'm like, Oh, let's change tomorrow. That's great. But I realized that it's really a hard pull for our team that has been there for a long time. I mean, a lot of nonprofits, they'll have people that have been there for 30 years. It's mind blowing to me. And they like working there.
That's why they're there. And so with these changes, it's really hard. And then the infrastructure and the systems to build it from a nonprofit. We rely heavily on our external vendors. And so, you know, when we talk about partnerships we have to partner with these and, and the other, you know, using those infrastructures, we're looking at investing in companies that can give us a need as well as a return on investment.
And so we're looking and exploring. I'm hearing like all these great products that are here. Jeff and I'm like, how can we help, you know, foster that innovation on these smaller companies and partner with them as well. And reap the benefits. That's a great segue, because I would say the exact same challenge we have is one of Roi, because when you're starting out, I mean, especially right now, those dollars that companies are investing not just in a membership or service fee or, you know, a sponsorship to get something off the ground, those have to come with an Roi.
And when you are starting out, when you're in the Valley of death. And we don't have scale, it's chicken and egg. We don't have the clear Roi yet. We can explain how that will happen when you have a network of such size. And it's not just that systems Roi, but you have to remember, each of these organizations have their own technical debt, and so they have an internal cost as well to innovate.
That has to be overcome. And so it's, I almost sit here and say we're at this perilous moment where if we stop innovating, we're going to get left behind. But we're all under such stress that financial stress, I'll put it that way, that it is tricky to carve out that space to look at how do we move forward and not to lose things, which is what you were saying, right? Like if we shift over here, that's not going to get attention, engine, right?
So, Catherine, can I actually answer that one to you from the standpoint of open, open infrastructure. So invest in Open Infrastructure when we're talking to funders. So again question is like what is it that you wish your funders. How did you put it. Give me your question again. What was the what's the biggest challenge when you're talking to biggest challenge when talking to funders.
Our biggest challenge talking to funders is that we're advocating for open infrastructures, most of which are relatively invisible and most of whom don't have easy to put forward business plans. So I won't pick on locks. I would if you weren't in the room. Maybe, but I'll pick on archive, which is similar to locks in that it's been deeply embedded archive with an ex deeply embedded within one academic institution as a service to the whole field.
And that kind of model has seemed very safe. Knowledge Commons. Humanities Commons is another one that moved from a society space into what looked like a really resilient, wonderful home of Michigan State University. We've been able to lean on academic institutions, to run a lot of the open infrastructures, because they've had IDC coming in that help to pay for the expenses because there were still grants coming, helped to pay for the expenses that were associated with it.
Well, that's not there anymore. So what happens to things like archive, which used to be at Cornell, but due to political situations there, it moved from Cornell to Cornell Tech over the last five years. It's embedded in Cornell Tech. What happens to it if something happens to Cornell Tech or something happens to leadership at Cornell tech? It's not even actually embedded in Cornell anymore, and we don't realize how many vulnerabilities are underneath these infrastructures that we assume are standing on very solid ground because they've been around for 30 years.
It it is a fundamentally, again, a very different moment. And trying to express that to the funders, whether that's the institutions that need to be paying in more membership fees to things like archives. So that archive actually can make enough money to pay its staff, or whether it's to the philanthropic funders who are still out there and who are trying to figure out, OK, out of all of this stuff that is failing, what do what do we work with.
And one of the answers may be some of the oldest and most important infrastructures that still need that stability. But then that comes back to what Christina was saying about them. Where's your innovation. Where are things like the data space in the middle of all of that and the data trust. So Catherine has a view sort of across sectors and different landscapes.
So can you define or describe how you think of a revenue program and what kind of skills are needed for it. How I think about it versus how do you explain that. So and this kind of gets at the commercial versus nonprofit binary lie that we've all been telling ourselves for way too long. The academic and scholarly space has no idea what revenue is.
A lot of the time the idea of building revenue has not been something that's fundamentally taught within, you know, deanships or within departments or, you know, what have you. And so when things blossom out of the academic space, they often blossom out without any revenue program. They've got a few dollars coming in over here, few dollars coming over here. And then what?
The pies don't realize. The principal investigators don't realize is that most of the money that is actually allowing them to do the work they're doing is coming through the IDC, which was like 50% to 60% And I remember being at Emory University and we had somewhere around $6 million that we had pulled in over the course of a couple of years. And I remember being outraged about how well, only 3 million of that actually was able to fund our projects.
And really, it couldn't even fund our projects because then we were giving that money to other institutions, and their institutions were taking 50% off of the top. Well, the institutions did that because that's what made their bottom line work. So revenue program gets really complicated really fast is what I would say. And when at ioi, at invest in Open Infrastructure, what we're trying to do is help groups think through OK.
Like, what is my landscape. How do I think about revenue. And I'll use archive as an example. Again, they were a client of ours for about a year and a half, and Jennifer actually worked on this with me. And one of the first questions that we asked as we came in was, OK, so how do your revenues work. Well, when oil rigger was there years ago at Cornell, there were fairly clear answers.
It was actually a model within the community. By the time it had gone through all of the change that we were kind of inheriting, the end of, there wasn't a clear sense of, Oh, well, this is coming from membership. This is coming from Cornell subsidizing us. This present is coming from federal grants. This is coming from they weren't thinking about it in those kinds of terms.
And so part of what we're doing at investment in infrastructure is trying to educate up folks who are deeply steeped in these academic traditions. And one of the things that we heard over and over again, is, Oh, you just don't understand how academics work. No, I understand how academics work. And I'm telling you, there's another way. And so revenue program has to be understood in a very different way than I think most do.
And I'll just note there is a big irony here. I used to work in a dean's office for arts and Sciences that we have scientific equipment and service centers on the sciences side that are running as service centers, generating revenue for providing that public service. There are models in the Academy for doing this. For some reason, though, it hasn't translated over cleanly to scholarly communications because we haven't had to, I think, I mean, and now that we have to it's like, you know, you talk about Roi, it's like one of the things that we struggle with is like, OK, let's pilot this.
It's really great. When do we stop it. Right? and so it's because we're starting these projects without any kind of measurement goals. And we're just saying, OK, let's just try it. And it's like but you know, know. So that's why for me, I mean subscribe to open was easier, right?
It's like it's a clear measurement that I'm measuring anyway. So it works. But I mean, that's really, you know, back to what I say. And I think you were getting towards this, this like the sector differences, the commercial versus nonprofit. I'll talk about not about the discipline differences in humanities and bioengineering, biomedical but, you know, commercial, and back to your like, OK, what the lie we're telling ourselves will commercials this way.
And nonprofits are this way, and commercials prize scalability and efficiency and societies just do mission and trust. And it's like, no, we have to have all of those. I mean, we know that they have to have ours and we have to have theirs. So we should be really mirroring each other and taking those ideas. I'm so glad you brought up goals. You know, so I mentioned, we have a capital campaign going on right now with our community led by our trustees.
We have metrics we have to hit. So we're going to be checking in the boards, checking in October. And in November. And if we do not hit those KPIs, we will let the grant run out and it will be for the community to pick up. We will lose momentum. We will lose all of this progress. We'll lose community, and it will be for another organization to pick up, to ramp back to where we are.
And it's a very, very real risk, quite frankly. But that's the reality we're at because we can't just keep, you know, Oh, we'll do this with 10% effort. I mean, there are these conversations. One of our scenarios are boards. Considering is what would this look like if we met as a board four times a year just to check in to see what the temperature is. Now, I don't think that's going to get us far.
I don't think we're going to innervate. I don't think that's keeping the lights on, barely. But it won't be innovation and it won't be revenue. It won't be revenue. And that's, you know, again, when I have shown the slide that has all of the open infrastructure names and, you know, logos and identities, it's clutter. At a certain point, we can't pay attention to that many things too.
And so it is this real. Like we have not been forced to choose winners yet. And I think we're in a space now where we're going to have to choose what is it that we really want to work with and how are we going to support it as communities and support it across both commercial and non-commercial players. Because again, that binary lie is I think it has done tremendous damage.
I think it is doing tremendous damage right now, and that the quicker we can learn from each other and learn to apply business logics on the nonprofit side in a different sort of way, and also how to speak to values alignment in a different way from commercial side. It's the language we speak that is really the barrier. And we need a blend of the two approaches in order for anything to get to scale and stay sustainable right now.
And I know, Jen, you're getting ready to ask a question, but I just want to add that and that's what we're talking about from a non publisher. It's like the sky is falling again guys I'm going to warn you. But if we don't sustain then the options are going to be less for our community. And so it's going to be the for profit publishers that are they're just going to win on a lot of different ways.
So we have to think of different ways at the smaller level to be able to compete and remain. OK so last question before we move on. You know, we all talk a lot about how library budgets have decreased, how things have changed. You know, publishing has increased, library budgets have decreased. How how research funding has changed. So what, if any, lessons can we draw from what a lot of us might consider the good old days.
Maybe it's that post World War II boom in research period. I don't know if this is going to answer it well, but I'll try. I think I was at, I think it was the National Academy of Science had a presentation and there was somebody from ars that they had actually referenced yesterday, and he was like, listen, this idea of science not being trusted, this isn't new. It's just new for us.
Right this second in the states. He's like, if you go to Japan, they're arguing on the other way that science isn't trusted and that it should be trusted. And over here it's maybe we don't trust it as much. So I think, you know, the lesson learned and we've talked about this is that we have overcome a lot of these challenges in the past. And, you know, as publishers in the scholarly communication, every one of us.
So I think we just have to do it differently. I think Vannevar Bush, I mean, going back to Scholarly Kitchen and, you know, one of the kind of rooting forces for the roundtable discussions yesterday, I think there is hope looking backwards at some of the things that have come out before. And and there's. There's a recognition and an awareness that we have been a demonstration for the last 80 years of what public and private interests can do when they come together in higher Ed.
How that translates as this changes is up for grabs, and it means that we need good ideas, we need good activism. We need a whole lot of people paying attention. But it's not that the game is over, it's that the rules just changed. And and the Monopoly board just completely transformed. And now we've got to figure out how to map that back to something that continues to build knowledge and build towards the kind of society and world that we want to see.
And I think that's where Bush was. I mean, a brilliant thinker and a brilliant, you know, lay out the landscape kind of presence. And we need that kind of innovation, I think, right now. You want the last word, christina? Sure speaking of innovation, I would. So my last word is just let's be intentional about how we focus because we have been. And I think we do need the long shots.
We need the goals, the big picture goals. That's transformative innovation. AI is transforming our industry. I don't think we have time to keep doing incremental like improvements on what we've been doing for decades. I think we need to identify where the gaps are and where the true transformative innovation opportunities lie, and then coordinate.
Thinking about yesterday, what does that mean for policy. What does that mean for advocacy. What does it mean for awareness raising, education and indeed research and development. And I think we just have to find a way across our societies to have that conversation. So we can start moving forward with collective action. Thank you. Can we move to the next slide.
Sorry. OK. So before we open it up for questions for this fantastic panel, we have some questions for you. So we have a Mentimeter. So we're going to pull up the QR code and then get out your laptops or phones. There we go. Oh we had it briefly.
Thanks clicker problems. OK so if you're not familiar, you don't need the code. You can go to menti.com and use code 17072843. So we're going to give you a few seconds to get that set up. And then we're going to go to the menti and you'll see the results as they come in. But my suggestion is don't be influenced by other people's input.
Look down at. Don't look at the screen. Answer what the question your own way. And then look up to see results.
OK looks like we still have some results coming in, so I'll give it a few more seconds. So I'm really happy to see this slide. This actually is something that we asked in our workshops that we held in 23 and 24. And I'll just note, depending on what the services that you're providing, the source of your revenue really matters. People really commented on, you know, sort of sponsorships and donors, for example, how that can change levels of trust in a service.
But some things like demand based people that, you know, if it's something where you're going to have users and they're using that service that pay for use again, feels trusted. And I think it's interesting here when you think about trust in the source of revenue. What does that mean for your service, your platform, your community. Yeah so that's tagging.
Tagging on to that for two seconds. I mean, it's the difference between saying as open Alex, for example, which is one of the big open infrastructures that's building right now for open. Alex, they could have just dealt with a wonderful set of funds that are coming through from the Arcadia fund right now to fund their work. They didn't. They created an API, and they've got a kind of a commercial offering, and they are pulling in a lot of revenue from large publishers and from Web of Science and Clarivate groups like this that are using their API.
So already they're starting to build their model. Let's go to the next question while we're talking. There's just one more. It's interesting to see that memberships is high on that list. Yeah Yeah. Talking about like, you know, diversifying the revenue a bit. Is that, you know, what we're doing now is looking at those programs that because of the shift in the funding and because of the shift, a lot of academia are moving from academia and into the for profit sector.
And so we're creating a, you know, something for our community to say, what are the skills you need to go into that sector to diversify themselves. Right our community to say, you know, you've got other options besides the academia. And so where else can you do. And? and we interviewed a lot of our members that are in that field to say, what are the skills that you look for and that are missing on people that come in from the research academia space.
Stand by. Let's open it up to questions while we're waiting on the next mentee. Go ahead. Hey, Tim Lloyd from niblings. So we work with a lot of institutional infrastructure.
I think the mic needs to be. Is it. Hello? yes. Yep. OK, great Tim Lloyd from leblancs. So we work with a lot of institutional infrastructure and non-for-profit infrastructure, and a lot of it's in really, really poor shape.
And the analogy that comes to mind for me is like lots of ships, lots of ships, and no one is ever cleaning the hulls of these ships because they don't have the money. So these ships are just getting slower and slower and slower and take more and more effort to try and sail. And all that cost involved in keeping them going is revenue for someone else. Yeah, but it's really hard to tell these institutions who have peoples whose careers have been defined by knowing this legacy tech, that they are the only ones that can keep going, that it's really not a good idea.
So what tips does the panel have for getting people to stop maintaining crappy tech and let that money flow into something more modern and generationally different. That sounds like a title of a good session for next year. I read it, I'll read it. I mean, I think and I touched on it a little bit. I'm just going to say from, you know, internally it's that if I hear one more person say, well, we can do this manually.
I know that we can do it, but that is really time and effort that it takes. So fine, we can do that as a backup, but we really need to think about. And so Tim, you hit on it. It's like all these infrastructures are like, Oh, wait, are these suited for the purpose right now. And so Yeah, I mean, we need to speed up. And so we need those innovators at, in our institutions or in our programs to say, OK, I'm going to look at this differently.
I'm going to go about this differently. And what can I make more efficient. Which means that we need different incentives. Yes so the incentives right now are for that pie or for that technical person who brought together, you know, a System32 years ago to push forward and continue to, you know, get people to just let that ship sail one more day and, and one more day after that and one more day after that.
Sunsetting has been a hidden secret and kind of a dirty like nobody wants to talk about it until very recently. And that's starting to change right now. But we need ways of actually incentivizing groups to merge, to look at ways that they can build together to do things differently. Instead of just defending their turf and their territory. And I think, Tim, that's the biggest thing that I'm looking for right now is how do we make manifest the information that needs to be there so that we can assess who's doing that well and who's not.
Because unless that's visible, there's not any incentive for groups to change the way that they are sustaining, meaning hanging on for dear life and really moving towards something that is building for the future. So we're a few minutes after 10, but but I'm, I'm clocking the hour because we had the intro this morning. So we have I think just if we can take a couple more minutes, if anybody else has any questions or comments on the last slide, can you tell a librarian put that together.
While we're waiting, if I can just respond. So when Tim, I love the ship analogy because you can also talk about abandoning ship. And I think as anyone who has ever sailed or been on a boat, there's always a plan. And I think if we can find a way to get those people on those ships to think about themselves as resources, that knowledge capital, we're putting so much knowledge, time and effort into maintaining a sinking ship.
What if we instead enabled that same talent, time and money to drive us towards the future. And I think that's a mental leap that we got to start exploring because we're building for today. We should be building for 10 years from now. Simon, I think you get the last word. OK Simon Holt from Elsevier. I just want to build on what Tim was saying. And I suppose as someone who works for a larger organization, believe me, the ships that are in need of repair are not restricted to the smaller organizations amongst us.
Right but I want to talk about value. Really right. And I think I found it really interesting earlier on when you talked about that within the Academy, if you like the idea, this idea of revenue generation isn't really taught or isn't really kind of thought about too much. And it strikes me that in our industry, I think we just talked about incentives.
Just they're part of the problem is that no infrastructure, no investment ever goes into infrastructure that doesn't have a direct correlation to earning money. Right so you get your classic example of you get, you know, a system and the customer facing side is kind of works quite well and quite shiny. You then get your internal side that's based on a million workflows with a million emails and a million Excel documents and, and what have you.
And I suppose my question for the panel is how do we redefine value to include some of this infrastructure stuff and really do a better job of educating people within our industry. That value and revenue aren't just, you know, the swan sailing on the top, but actually might also include the legs paddling hard under the surface.
I'm going to give the last word to Kathryn. Do you want to answer that. She has some. Yeah she has. The last word is laughing on the money panel. She's just counting money. Tag team. So what I would say on that is that those, those feet that are paddling have always been doing that underneath.
One of the things that I think is missing is thinking about, I mean, we talk about it as infrastructure. One of the things that I've been having to say lately, even though the title of my company is invest in Open Infrastructure, we don't have open infrastructure. We've got a whole bunch of open tools, and we don't have infrastructure, period, in this digital space that we all genuinely depend on, whether we're talking about the workflows or whether we're talking about the tooling that lays underneath it.
We need we need some roadmaps and some plans, and we can't afford to do those as Elsevier over here and Simon Fraser University over here. And, you know, x, y and z, all of these different entities doing it separately, we've tried that. And it doesn't yield infrastructure. It yields a whole lot of hidden volunteer effort and work even at the big and small. What we need is to come together across sectors and across institutional spaces to actually map out what is it that we're trying to build.
And there I'm going to give the last word to Stacy, who will say publishing. There is a catch line that we could actually publish with purpose. Oh, she's going to get $100 after this. But seriously, that's great. Yeah I mean, well, we talk about, you know, joining together. We have the same mission.
I mean, a different audience, but it's the same mission. And we want to sustain and be financially sustainable. So great. So quick publishing with purpose. So very quick note, I have no promises or plans, but. But there are 26 people who said yes to a working group. So if you're interested, get in touch and we'll see what we can do with this. Thank you so much to this fantastic panel.
Thank you so much for being here this morning and for your questions. Thanks
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