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Locally Sourced, Locally Owned: Independent Society Journal Publishing to Seed Trust and Transformation
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Locally Sourced, Locally Owned: Independent Society Journal Publishing to Seed Trust and Transformation
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Segment:0 .
Will might drift in from desert and that's perfectly fine. So welcome everyone, to the session. Locally sourced, locally owned independent society journal publishing to cede trust and transformation. You might notice those last words from the conference theme. My name is Brian Cody. I'm CEO and a co-founder of Scholastica and I'll be moderating today's session.
Thank you for joining us and Thank you to the panel. I'll introduce in a moment. First, a couple reminders. So if you haven't already, please be sure to visit the website to review the code of conduct. SSP is committed to diversity, equity and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment. Of course, that's also our goal for today's session.
You can visit the website to read the full code of conduct. This QR code, which is going to go away in about three seconds, can also direct you there. Three, two, one. Also want to note SSP, core values, community adaptability, inclusivity and integrity, which again fits in today's panel. So I'll do quick introductions of everyone. I'm not going to read everyone's extensive and impressive bios. These slides will be available.
Also you can peruse them on LinkedIn if you want to know more and I will go through this now. So as I mentioned, I'm with Scholastica. We have Maxine Aldridge, director of publications production, the American Society of Civil Engineers. Thank you, Maxine. Boston, scholarly communication librarian from Murray State University.
Welcome Robert Harrington, associate executive director of publishing, American Medical Society. Thank you, Robert. And Adam Hyde, co-founder, the collaborative knowledge foundation, as we all know as Coco. Thanks, Adam. And Jennifer Regala, director of publications, American Urological association, got it right.
And so we're going to go into a few topics. You've probably seen the session description. And talking about independent society publishing within the larger context where that's not potentially the predominant mode of publishing. And so we'll get into this. I'm going to leave these points up as we go. We will have Q&A at the end. So I'll have a timer.
This microphone in the middle will be for questions. But again, we're going to have a panel discussion first, then questions. So on that, I'm going to get going. So to sort of set the stage and get this going. I would like to ask the panel, what's the problem? Why are we talking about this? I think some sessions you can start off being descriptive or have people's theories, but I like to know what's the problem, what's the meat?
What is at risk with this topic? And so I want to go around and I'm going to start from the panelist closest to me and just let everyone essentially do an opening statement to that point. What is the problem? What are we talking about? In the session, it states, the world of journal publishing is grappling with sustainability crisis.
Is that true? Is that the problem or are there more important problems? So you chose the seat. I'm going to have you go first. He says, I chose his seat, but he said, hey, come sit here. So, all right, let me get this mic set up. I need it to be in the right spot so I can drop it when I'm done talking. All right.
And do you give me permission to live tweet as you're talking? Is that OK? Please I'll get out my phone and I'll retweet it. OK all right. Let me get set up so Robert doesn't copy off my notes. OK? so give me a really good profile here. Oh, look at that, you guys. Look at that. OK, OK, go ahead.
That's going to be a mess. All right. OK I'm going to take a deep breath. And we're going to start over. So large scale publishing, which is I think what we're starting off with here is it's a really great thing for authors because authors need a lot of chances to publish so large scale publishing it's really good for publishing at scale.
But in terms of sustainability, it's not great. When you fled the publishing submission systems with all these manuscripts because you may increase the number of manuscripts, but we only have so many peer reviewers to go around. So it's not sustainable from that perspective. And then as you grow more and more journals to cover more and more subdisciplines, that's also a really good thing for authors.
It's giving them more places to publish in journals that cater to their discipline. But again, speaking from a libraries perspective, that's just more titles that we have to try to keep up with. And as we saw with the big deal serials, subscription crisis, that's also not sustainable. So that's my piece. Like, say, I deliberately didn't sit-in the first seat. Um, I'm actually going to reword part of the question, if that's not too rebellious.
Um, and in the sense that I'm not going to suggest that we have a sustainability crisis, and it's something perhaps that Amy brand this morning talked to a little bit. It's more of perhaps we are in the midst of a community crisis and that's where sort of the difference, I think perhaps comes between what societies do that are independent and societies actually that partner to. But also and the big commercials.
The question is why are we here? And for me, that community crisis is sort of embodied in sort of the lack of trust that we see. What you want is a sort of a pool of your peers, peers around you, Uh, people who may mentor you, but people sort of supporting the next emerging careers of, of those in, in publishing, of those in the field that you might be serving. And for me, that needs work and it needs work at a society level.
It's partly publishing. It's partly what the society does, even beyond publishing. And that's sort of I think is really just driven by this the mission that we have. And that's where I'm that's why I'm sitting up here, I think, or at least one of those. In fact, Jennifer is also in that category. Yes, and that's true. So I'm Mia from the American Urological Association.
We are a very smaller medical association, and we are grappling with the whole reality of our community doesn't even understand what open access means. They don't understand all of these implications of what's going on in the scholarly, scholarly publishing world at large, to the point that I am working really hard. I actually have a session tomorrow that we're working on here at SSP talking about, um, you know, what does the world of scholarly publishing mean to the world of urology?
And there's really just so much to think about in that capacity. What does that mean to drill it down to folks who are very, very, very like Micro Focus on what they're doing. So we will get more into that. But I will pass this on down here to you. Yeah Thank you. Um, Kira, my name's Adam Adam Hyde from Coco.
Um, all the way from New Zealand. Howdy and, um, Coco makes. It's a not for profit organization. We make open source tools for publishers in the journal space. Kotahi is the tool we work on, but my point of view is around tooling. Surprise and see, Luis is here. Louis Russell.
I was reading an article of yours actually just yesterday because I was googling around about tools in the space as I do every now and then, and there's a good article about the limited number of tools that are available. And I thought, yeah, this is a good overview, what's happening? And I looked at the date of publication 2013, same tools. And I think that very little has changed there except for.
There's been a consolidation at the top end where a lot of these tools have been bought up by a number of main, very mainstream, large publishers, and we're lacking diversity in that ecosystem. And this is the tooling that supports the operations that you do. And I think this is a real problem. So we have to diversify those layers, I think, and have community involvement on the scholarly level publishing level with the tools that you use and community inverted commas, ownership, in other words, open source, best of breed tools.
Oh, Hello. First, Thanks for this opportunity. This is indeed an interesting topic. And as you see, each panelist addressed something slightly different. But I will go with what Jennifer has to say. And I think there is a potential crisis in publishing, particularly in the smaller societies and smaller publishers.
And I would tend to say it's the grappling, I think is the mandate for open access and what are we going to do with it and how are we looking at it? And so I'm from the American Society of civil engineer, and at the moment, we're looking at many areas, many ways to handle this and how do we inform our members and our authors and how we do it, how do we do a full transformation when this becomes necessary, which is fairly soon?
Yeah Thank you. Wonderful Thank you. And it's quite a list. So again, for the audience, when we talk about what is the problem or I guess based on this, what are the problems? So questions around finding peer reviews, there are more titles, which means more cost, a community crisis, lack of trust, a lack of diversity in the ecosystem, educating people, including what is scholarly publishing and what is open access, really mean?
How do we do the transformation to open access? Um, what about consolidation? So it's sort of all the problems. But I do want to ask the panel the follow up question. Robert, I'm going to start with you. We look at that list, to what degree does as we talk about locally sourced so smaller independent publishers, to what degree does that address those problems?
Because these could be systemic and small publishers independent, not solve that. So I'd like to almost hear the case for this being a solution, right? So I mean, as I was saying in the first sort of brief comment that I'm sort of framing this as a community crisis, perhaps as I was saying, Amy Brown touched on this morning. And the other thing I wanted to say before I even touch on this is that there are many different types of society.
I mean, we're at the American Medical Society. We're fortunate enough to be large enough to be independent, but that's not the case for many societies. It's not like there's a choice. So you have to sort of find a path that actually ends up meaning we, you know, as a smaller society, you have to partner. One of the things that I believe as an independent society at the American Medical Society is that we literally everything we do gets funneled back all the money that we make, 70% of the operating revenue of the American Medical Society actually comes from publishing.
It's actually been getting more and more from donations now, which which is great. So that percentage is dropping slightly, but more all of that gets funneled back to the community and everything that we do. And I might mention later some of the great things that we do, but I'm not going to bore you with that now. But and you know, so what are the examples of those sorts of things that actually are really tailored to the communities that we serve?
And Miriam Louis Burke, who I talked to, she's an advocate from Siam. She put it really well that, you know, in a sense, what we're doing here, sort of with the theme of this talk, what we're doing here is actually looking at sort of local organic farming. You know, when you go to your local market and pick up sort of really high quality produce or produce, depending on where you live, you know, and you love that quality.
It's not on scale, but the quality of what you have is just so much greater. And you appreciate that. And that's sort of where societies are coming from. We're not going to compete on scale and math, for example. Springer is huge compared to us, but we do compete in terms of what we offer to the community. A very particular example of that might be in response to when Maxine brought this up with the open access piece of it, with the memo that came out on 25th of August, the Nelson memorandum, my wonderful colleague Karen Sachs, who's the associate executive director for government relations, she got us into the National Science Foundation right there.
And then we were, I think, the first ones through the door. And we were at pains to talk to the program officers there about how we as a community, a math community would hope that the National Science Foundation may respond to a mandate on for immediate open access with no embargo. And the way we took it was that we had several things we thought were very, very important. We didn't want to see a proliferation of articles. We're very much personally as a society against article processing charges because we see that as an excuse just to publish more and more content and we don't need more content.
My community actually asked us to publish fewer articles if we can ever do it. And then there's the aspect of author equity, and this has come up and we brought this up in the sense that many mathematicians are not actually funded directly or they may receive low levels of funding, which is quite common. Most of the funding, if a mathematician gets one, is from the National Science Foundation.
And so we felt that actually you might end up with the two classes of authors to two levels of citizenship. And the math community want those who can and those who can't publish where they want to, to publish. So we brought these issues to the table. It was something that National Science Foundation wanted to think about very hard. But the third thing we did is we also at great pains to say, well, look, this is just us, what we think about equity.
The opinions that I may express, it doesn't mean that there is one size that fits all and a commercial company that's going to go hell for leather for article processing charges. They have very good reasons to do that because it's a profit making business and they we should have a range of different models. And that's sort of the third line that we pushed, we didn't want to say it was just what we think is right.
But this is an example of how we put our community first and foremost, how a society can do something different to perhaps the situation where you've got a smaller society partnered with a large commercial or a large commercial may say that was really much longer than I intended. Sorry so great. Thank you. And I want to open this up, Maxine, and then we'll open it up to everyone.
Want to see the idea of to what degree do to use Robert's point. And from the description, the sort of small independent farmers, the farmers market, the quality you appreciate, to what degree does that address some of the problems we were talking about? So that makes perfect sense if you equate it to the farming industry and much like the publishing industry. So yes, you do go to your intimate farmer's market and you get quality products and that's what we like and want.
With the society publishers, it's much the same. You are accustomed to creating your content to please your membership, your authors and so on and so on. And so it aligns perfectly. However, when you look at the larger scale and you look at partnership, it may not be that way because partnering with a commercial publisher, there's a set way of doing things. I hate to use the term, but it's more like a factory operation.
So you're no longer going to get that sentiment from the smaller society publisher or how you're accustomed to doing things, but it's more like you're in this mold and you put in and you get out and it's faster and it's more, but it's not necessarily the quality that you are accustomed to doing for your authors and membership. Um, it works and it doesn't work. So it's, there's pros and cons in how you look at this.
And again, it depends on the society. We, we, we're all different. We have our different ways of doing things. And For example, as we talk about the mandate of open access, you think one might say we don't want to impose open access fees because not everyone can. Not all our authors are able to do that. And not everyone has funding.
But in societies that largely depend on a subscription model, when we change to an open access model, then what do you do? Definitely funding is required. So an APC charge is necessary to continue with operations. It cost a lot of money to publish an article. We know that. Where is the funding going to be coming from if we no longer have a subscription model? Those are the things to think about.
OK and I'll open this up and Jennifer Adam. So I was just going to jump on to that and say it's like it's a huge it's a huge struggle. So you said that. And I'm like, oh, my goodness. Because so at the aoa, we do have a commercial partnership and we do appreciate our partnership. We work with Wolters kluwer. But the concern is, though, how do we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market?
How do we have that warm author touch? How do we also differentiate ourselves from our biggest competitors in the urology field? How do we actually be human in all of this? How do we educate our researchers on what open access means versus subscription? We've introduced in the AOA family of publications a new open access journal, like how do like, how do we make all of that make sense to everybody?
And it's a lot and it's a struggle. And it's actually really, um, it's a big thing that we think about constantly. Lee and, and, and really it's a huge focus of what we do at the AOA. So I agree. It's, it's a problem. Thank you. So, Jennifer, you were talking about your faculty, your researchers and urology, not quite knowing what open access is.
And I'll just offer that information like urine. It just needs to flow. It works best that way. Yes so in our panel discussion, our planning meetings, we kind of talked about this food and agriculture sort of metaphor along with publishing and how Robert and Maxine, you're kind of talking about society publishing as kind of being like this small batch, handcrafted, artisanal sort of publishing.
And there are certain things that society publishing can bring that you don't want at a mass scale. So we have I live in a small town in Murray, Kentucky. There's this one guy, this one farmer who serves raw Milka like that's not pasteurized, but everyone knows this guy and he's like trusted. And so it's like it seems safe to get your raw Milka from this guy, but it wouldn't scale to have raw Milka on shelves across America, not from like a big publisher or Milka producer.
I'm losing my bread. You know, like we pasteurize Milka for a reason, right? But like in certain contexts, it makes sense because you trust the community that you're in. You know, and that's what we're trying to build. Like that whole that whole vibe and that whole like, come and work with us. You can trust us. It's like, so what we even equate it to and we tell this to some of our authors, it's like leaving your kid off at daycare.
You can trust us to take care of your kid. Like we will make sure the good thing happens, um, within our family of publications, but also how do you make that known to the research community? And then also how does that realistically happen when you have a commercial partner? Um, so there's a lot involved in all of that. And we really mean it though.
We really want you to trust your research with us, but there's a lot to that. So Adams And I'm going to I know we don't quite have enough mix for everyone, but because we're also going to have a recording for people want to make sure we're using the mix judiciously. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just going to float it up to the tooling again and one of the problems is that your workflows and your data, if you are working with somebody else's technology, is in the hands of somebody else.
And that's automatically a question of trust right there. You want to ask yourself, you know how much you're paying for these systems and whether they enable you to work the way that you need to work to meet your community's needs. I think that's a question mark. And in my opinion, the know, the cost of technology should be if you look at Wordpress and this doesn't quite translate, but it almost translates Wordpress runs 30% of the internet today, right?
You can get a Wordpress site for how much a month? $2 more or less. $5? $10. This is the cost of what technology should be in the publishing sector. You should be paying something around that Figure Four your technology on a monthly basis. Ask yourself how much you're actually paying.
Technology is not expensive. It's expensive to build. It's not expensive to rent or operate. And so if you are not paying $510 in, what are you paying? And you know, where does that put you? Where does that put your apks? And I just wanted to add a couple more brief things. One, just going back again to the plenary this morning, the whole notion of trust and research integrity, I think is related to how a society works.
And and so if we can build the community and you have a community of peers that really understand how to work in an academic environment and then publish in that academic environment. We're making some progress. I'm not saying it's all that we need to do, but we're making some progress towards building research integrity right from the word go. But I should also say that all of these wonderful things that we're saying up here about how we don't care about scale, well, we actually kind of do in some ways, because if you don't have scale, you're going to be dwarfed and it's really hard to actually be financially sustainable.
So, you know. Yes, but yeah, and that scale is important. And I do argue I totally agree with your argument about the idea of low engagement. And honestly, it's the community that you're building. And I think that's a huge thing that will differentiate societies and associations in the future. I think that's the huge thing and we're working on that really closely at the AOA and that's what and the vibe like the really, really connecting with people.
That's a differentiator in my opinion. I want to highlight a couple themes that came up or a couple comments around apks around open access. I'm flashing back to I want to say it was maybe this meeting in 2016 and there are all the sessions about, you know, will gold open access be, you know, the way of open access will be apks. And so it's sort of a question of, you know, when we talk about sustainability, I think corporate publishers tend to get the worst rap around this.
You have these, you know, stories, $11,000 apks but I want to untangle that a little bit. To what degree is some of the issues you're discussing, the cost, the sustainability issues related to the model? So gold and apks period versus scale. So asking people to sort of maybe try and untangle those a little bit is a small publisher have going to have similar problems with an APC and gold model?
Or is there something also particular about large scale you know, big ag model publishing within gold? I'm curious to hear thoughts and I'll Jennifer RJ then can open it up to everyone. So I'll start off with that. And it's really interesting because when I started at the AOA in June of 2020, we did not offer any open access whatsoever, so we were purely subscription.
Our community was like a what? Like we would pay for any like, like they did not even have a grasp on what that meant. And so we have worked towards, you know, what does that mean? And educating the community about what's going on with, you know, open access and the different models of payment across the industry. And it's just been really interesting to see the way things have changed since then.
We have now, of course, have hybrid journals for our two subscription journals. And then we have a fully gold open access journal that we launched actually in August of last year, and it started publishing in January of this year in 2023. And it's just been interesting to see the evolution and how we've educated our community about what all of this means. Um, and the biggest, the biggest thing that happened right the day before I came to this conference here is that our biggest, um, person who was against this, our board of directors, our president of our board of directors was very against open access.
He said it was predatory, did not understand, had no concept. And then I had a submission from him just yesterday and, and he was like this. I just love that you accepted my idea. And I like, oh, OK, that's so great. Dr. and love you. I'm going to love you through this whole process. And we're going to work this whole submission through. But the whole point being that it's an education process and you know, what does that look like, though, for all of us?
I mean, you know, how do we work through all of these models? And I think that's what the whole point at the end of the day is, though, too, is I think it's not just saying open access must happen. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, too, like it just can't be OK. Open access is mandatory. I mean, think again. It's what we've been all working through for, what, 20, 25 years now?
How long has it been? I mean, we've all been talking about this for a long time. I'm pretty old now when I was young and we're talking about this was like, oh, this is fascinating. But now it's like, OK, look, let's all work this out. You guys. Um, there's different models here. There's different things that we need to work through. And also, there's a lot of education with our researchers.
They're just trying to get their, you know, their CVS, um, built up, you know, what does that look like and what is our part in all of this? So thank you were supposed to be the next one. I'm actually only 24 years old, so this is all new to me. So I don't have any experience necessarily with society publishing. So what I do have is I spent the first year of the pandemic, um, sitting in my bedroom office thinking about the food production metaphors.
So I'm going to I'm going to wedge that in too. So I'm going to stretch that food production metaphor to its limits here. So earlier said that large scale publishing helps a large number of authors, which is true. Large scale processes also require standardized inputs and they give you standardized outputs. And that can lead you with monocultures. Monocultures leave crops at risk of large scale problems like disease and invasive species.
So if you think about large scale commercial publishing, those species of publishers, they have traditionally Fed off read subscription revenues. And so as we change our environment to a way to a place where those species of publishers, they can't get the same amount of nutrients from that food source. They're either going to die or they're going to adapt and find other sources of revenue.
In this case, what we're talking about open access, publishing fees. So a few things happen when you change the environment like that. If you have a large scale species or publisher, habituating other species, in this case authors to live in an environment to where they understand that if they want to pollinate their ideas, they're going to have to give in return their funding and think.
When you habituate authors to be of a mindset that you pay to publish, I think that's how you set up an environment to allow for predatory species to thrive. Um, another thing that happens in that process of changing that environment is that your authors who don't quite offer the same nutritional value in terms of the dollars they can offer, it makes the landscape much more hostile for them to live and thrive in.
Really like that. Actually, the way you know, and the sorts of analogies are very powerful. I do. I think I said what I said already about gold open access. But I do think that part of this sort of the monoculture or the need to have not have a monoculture leads us to a range of models that might work rather sort of a balance of models.
I don't see anything evil in the word subscription, for example. I mean, I've talked to many librarians about this and what we call the palm librarian community, the physics astronomy, math librarian group, and they are very standing willing to support us as long as we provide a path to open, which we will likely do through green and diamond. We launched it diamond flagship journal recently, excitingly called communications of the American Medical Society.
But it's a really amazing quality journal. They it's funded by a donor who's provided four years of funding. And in the third year, well, assuming we've got the academic quality right, we'll endow the journal in perpetuity. So we'll live off the interest of that journal to cost it out though. So to address your point about costs, we it's not just you can't just throw a journal up on online.
It's got fully loaded costs. I mean my the cost of me is in there. Clearly that's not enough. It should be much higher. But the platform, all the various things that you need that sustain us should be in those costs. When you're thinking about it, I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but costs are a part of the discussion.
But I think it's about a balance. And on my weekly to do list, I know this sounds very silly, but on my weekly to do list right at the top is come up with new business model for open access. And if I can do that before I pass out because I know you're only 24. I actually I know I look 24, but I'm really 85. So 85 and I'm going to pass this down here.
But I'll just say we're doing this. We are doing a presentation tomorrow. I do argue that journals should be a vibe as well. I really do argue that. So I'm going to just pass this down. Come talk to me about this tomorrow. OK OK riffing on the farming stuff from New Zealand know a lot about it. Um, but you know, the analogy goes so far, but one of the things, if we're going to go on this thread, one of things I want to tag on is that when it comes to technology, when you have a single vendor manufacturer, reseller larkins, you are beholden to the price of the technology that they provide and that's a problem.
So on the other hand, so you know, big industrial John Deere tractor manufacturers, you know, you're going to pay and the price they want you to pay, right? On the other hand, you don't want the farmers making the tractors themselves. Right? that's kind of doesn't sound great either. So if we're going to go for a middle ground, I would say that you want technology providers that are close to you, that have your best interests at heart and understand you and are not trying to extract exorbitant amounts of money from you, but are trying to help you do a better job at what you need to do.
So on the farming level, independent technology providers that are very good at what they do is kind of what I would advocate. Then you're diversifying the technology field and you have more choice and you have more choice in the ways that you want to work. Not too much more to add there. But I agree technology is key in how you use it and the type of technology that you use.
I also want to go back to a comment. What you put into the larger corporate publishers turns to what you get out, and systems are set in place for reasons. And so that's why I said earlier, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's really the expectation. What are you looking for and why did you partner in the first place?
Or why do you want to pawn it in the first place? So it's an interesting scenario, but it's really what the society or the publisher is looking for and how you decide to partner and what you want to do with it. All right. Ask the question right there, though, Brian. That's the question. That's like the provocative question right there.
Should we be partnering anymore? So so here's my question. Should we be partnering anymore? Jennifer, you started it. Nobody but nobody. So I'm personal biographical notes. I'm from a rural area in North Florida. It's culturally like Southern Georgia. We grew up working in a sawmill.
We had steer. A lot of my friends were, Uh, parents were farmers. And on this point, there was always an opportunity in risk when they wanted to get a contract with a larger company because it was guaranteed revenue. I think societies can sympathize with that. Um, staffing suddenly could become something that was diversified. It wasn't just your payroll, right?
The debt with the banks suddenly didn't feel like an issue. But there was also fear that you become dependent and that, um, that this is a first step towards becoming a vassal or essentially selling. Um, so on that. So I want to talk about partnerships. Maxine I know, I know when you were age, you, you worked, you worked with publishers can across the panel what do and Maxine, you're talking about this sort of sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but I'd love to hear more about goals and scenarios VMware partnership is really fruitful and then others might enjoy focusing on when it's less fruitful.
So I'd love to hear about that. Uh, sorry. Oh, and yes, you're correct. I was at Au when we partnered with Wiley and they partnered with Wiley. I was there then, not anymore. Um, and the partnership was strategic, and I think it worked for Au because of the, the way they approached it.
Um, firstly, the strategies that were placed with that is Au was very forward thinking in that they. Worked with membership and authors and editors earlier on in the process to say, this is what we're thinking. And gather feedback and then from there, you know, move towards what they did. It wasn't always good. It didn't start out good. And I'm sure I can say this because it's public information, but when the partnership first happened, it was it became the same factory mentality where there weren't.
It wasn't always what you expected would come out of the partnership, but the good thing is because they were strategic in how they did it, they retained a lot of rights and they were able to go to and say, here are some things that we would like to improve or change. And Wiley was receptive to that. Another thing is the partnership did not start with just taking all our publications and just go with it.
It was segmented in that retained in-house the peer review process, and that was largely because of the initial surveys and communication with membership and authors and such. The from what I recall, the membership and authors wanted to retain the peer review process in house to ensure that that section of it was to their standard and to exactly what they wanted before releasing it. So partnerships work.
In this case, Au and Wiley worked very well and they're still partners today, but it doesn't always work. I don't have any real scenarios of what doesn't work, but I know that when I did it, everything was not Seamless. A partnership, though, needs to be a marriage, in my opinion, and it needs to be very collaborative. And so when you have an organization that's saying, OK, you're just going to take care of my problems.
Commercial publisher. Here you go, take it all over. We're giving you peer review. We're giving you production the whole nine yards. I think that's a bad move. Um, but then. But, but, but, but, but if you're, like, really focusing in on saying, OK, we are going to do the dishes and we're going to watch the kids and then you are going to make all the beds and you're going to do all the laundry and you're really being mindful of that partnership.
I think it works, but I think it takes a lot of work in that regard, in my opinion. I agree. And I think that's why initially there were strategic in how they did it, and that's why they decided, OK, we will hand over or we will partner, for lack of a better term, with the production process, but not the peer review process. So that's when the segmentation happened.
So we're starting out this way. And as we grow, as our marriage becomes more intimate, then we can hand everything over. But for now, let's do this. And not this. And so that's kind of how I saw it. I love that as our marriage becomes more intimate, I assume they're not mean. It's like so true, though.
I assume they're not at the seven year itch yet. Oh, it's past that now. And it comes, though. That's like the whole thing. So that's another panel. But the itch, that itch starts early on. You know, when you're identifying things that are not going the way you want it to go, and then you have that stern conversation like like, this isn't our agreement.
We need to do this or that. So, you know, it's just comes the itch, I guess. We talk about the itch all the time on Twitter. No, I don't love my wife. What are you talking about? Come on, come on. Does him even want to say what I'm going to say? I'm just going to say if you're going to get into a marriage with a publisher, just, you know, sign a prenup.
Just like with like what Robert said, he's they've got a partnership with a they've got a benefactor and there's a plan for what happens going forward. So, um, when you get in that marriage, you can work it out bit by bit or you can kind of have it like sign the prenup up front and decide like, who's going to do the dishes or and in this case, actually, it's very, you know, with a donor in development, it's a little different in the sense that they get some say about whether they spend more money, but they don't get to say how that money is spent.
Um, and so in other words, once we have the money, we can do what we like. It's just if it were to fail, they could say we don't want any more part. I do think this notion of I'm not going to go the marriage route anymore, you know, um, but the idea of what a partnership really means, I mean, there are certainly more and more cases of societies who have partnered with some of the bigger publishers who are being told, well, you know, you're not that important to us anymore.
Um, you need to go and do things yourself or find another method. But actually, what are you left with as a society after you've become part of a large transformative deal or you're kind of your identity is being lost to some extent, and not just your identity, but the material of who you are, the ability to survive. So I think those things I think maybe it's the prenup that you need, but it's but then there has I do think scale is important, though, because there are so many things that the larger publishers have done that we can't do individually fight those paper Mills.
There's some real technology advances that actually the small independent societies may not have been able to achieve. And Wiley is touting its Wiley partner services. But it's even though this feels like full circle to some extent, that there are services in there that are really powerful services. And so why not as long as you have that the right relationship in place.
And Adam Yeah. Want to go to you because actually I also think this segues around technology because there's a theme questions here around leverage, around using prenup sort of protection, sort of what's the role of want to hear more on this, but including the role of technology and helping as an equalizer. So people you know, what's the relative strength of technology to help compete in this environment?
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I was at Frankfurt last year and it was really good meeting during a lot about collaboration. And then the last panel was really kind of scaremongering from large technology providers, large publishers providing technology, you know, and, and I really I felt that very viscerally that I felt that there was a kind of a movement from these technology providers to make you think that there's a really more complicated than you can.
Understand problem and that they are here to save you from it. And I see these technical services becoming bigger and bigger and part of the bloodstream of the Academy and you're going to be paying for them. And and I question that. I take your point. But we can provide that infrastructure. Open infrastructure is a real thing. We've already provisioned a lot of it and we can do a lot more.
And open infrastructure is a powerful force. If you look at the internet today, the infrastructure of the internet runs on is all open, all of it, all of it. And it wasn't made by one person or one organization. It was made by a lot of organizations putting into the same pot and building it up. And we can do that, too. We can absolutely do it.
Scholarly publishing is a much smaller piece of the puzzle than the internet is, and we have the resources to do it. So I wouldn't buy into the picture that you need these services from these large technical providers and that we can't do it ourselves. We absolutely can. That's yeah, great. Yeah so the argument that I would bring back is you control your technology and so that's what think about all the time at the AOA.
So again, we have a commercial partnership, but then we also have a platform at the aoa, something that I control and we control within the AOA called AOA news. And it's just a platform that we have complete rights to. We do not have a commercial partnership for. And the key there is that we really retain, like we have that connection with our community.
And that's what I keep bringing it back to. We have a world of artificial intelligence. We have a world of open access, we have a world of everything is spiraling around us. And what we don't have is human connection and AOA news is where we are able to do that, and that's where we're able to bring people back to our journal content. We're able to bring people back to our education content. We're able to bring people back to our guidelines and connect people back to things that are happening within the AOA.
And the reason I just even bring this to your attention is to say again, that human warm touch that is so lacking in this world that we know today, and that's really what we are focusing on and we're having a lot of success with as well. We're getting a lot of sponsorship revenue from that. We're getting a lot of folks really reaching out to us and saying, OK, how can we work with you so that we can reach your physicians?
Because this is different, this is unique. This is not, you know, a static, you know, advertising page. It's not a digital page, whatever. You know, it's different. It's really a connection with our membership. So that's what I encourage all of us to think about. How do you have those warm human touches in a world that is so benign and so artificial? That's my thought.
I also just wanted to go back to what Adam was saying. There are places in technology, I think, where societies know their community better. So in mathematics, we are really, really focused on accessibility at the AMS. In fact, Nicola pozo, who's the director of marketing and sales at the AMS, is in the back. She leads our internal accessibility working group. But what is accessibility in mathematics?
If it's not about technology, you have to basically you can't have an accessible PDF. So we've developed this really robust conversion from latech to I know it's very exciting with students. We start taking talking latech can everybody can take a nap, but but from latex to HTML and that's so robust now that and we've had the time and energy to focus on the math community to get that right. I don't think a large scale publisher would have had that energy and focus because they've got to serve any number of different disciplines and different, you know, ways of doing things.
And we have made part of that toolchain copyleft as well. So copyleft open, open source. So the idea there is to share what we've done as much as we feel we can without having to maintain it because we can't do that. Sorry well, no. And then want to jump right back on top of that and say came to our Journal of urology editorial board and spoke to us about that.
And obviously that has nothing to do with what we do in the urological community, but it has everything to do with what we do in the urological community and that comes back to the whole farming idea of sharing, like how are we building these crops, how are we engaging our communities and how do we share that knowledge with one another? And that is the biggest takeaway that I have and sharing that with everyone in this room and how do we make that really happen and how do we make that accessible partnerships, whatever aside, we really need to do that and really make this a human connection.
Right Thank you. And I want to move to some questions. We have a microphone here. So people can do can use that. If you aren't able to use that, say your question. I'll repeat it. And for the panel, I do want to end with examples of projects that you think using the analogy, small farms doing well because there are small farms that are struggling.
But if you think of examples of locally sourced publishing, that could be partnerships, but things that are a bright note in this world, that would be helpful. But first questions. Q&A I think I have a slide. Look at that. Oh, Thank you. Um, so I'm a librarian.
A question about, you know, when I'm seeing faculty and students coming to me and asking about publish, you know, we are signing on to a which is the sort of alternative not looking at impact factors, trying to have a more holistic research method. And it sounds like when we're looking at smaller sort of society solutions that you can get that human touch and maybe a bit more of that flavor.
And I'm interested in how to get that across. When you have researchers who are really looking for that big name. They only want to kind of when they're coming to you to ask about publishing, they're looking at like you're looking at transcripts and they're not necessarily digging in, especially maybe early career. They don't have any ties or any connections.
I'm curious as to how you get past that. So how do you handle? Because I'm not sure the mic was on, but Thank you for getting up. No, that's not on you. The early career researchers are coming in with a sense of brand recognition. And how do you sell a sort of locally the sort of local brand.
Any thoughts on that? OK so no, keep talking. But yes, I have a lot of thoughts about that. And I think it's super important to brand yourself as a human organization that, OK, you can reach out like at the aoa, you can reach out to Jennifer Regala and her team and say, we have a pre-submission inquiry. We have like this idea, we have a new article type, we have whatever, and there is a human touch.
There's like an actual face. There is a journal of urology Fanny pack. I'll send you guys like, like whatever there is like a human behind what is going on there. And then you can talk with me, you can vibe with me, and we'll be like, OK, let's talk this out. OK? that your idea is really weird or your idea is really awesome, or like, actually, let's take your weird idea and make it awesome or whatever it is.
And then honestly too, I have people reaching out to me all the time. They'll be like, oh, we submit it to the higher impact journal. But Jennifer, I'm so sorry. I promise you next time it will not happen. It's coming to you. And so how do you make that connection happen? And that's what I encourage you all in this room to think about.
Um, I would add to that, Jennifer, um, so I they're looking for the bigger names because this means a lot to their papers, but that human touch, that intimate feeling where you can pick up the phone or send an email and have someone directly respond to you telling you what the publishing process is, what to expect, and all those questions that person may have, that author. I think that's very important.
MHM Yeah. I think it's also related to membership of a society. I mean we, we have almost 30,000 members, some of whom are very mature and some of whom are less mature. But, but in that, within that, within that membership, um, you know, that's our opportunity to bring them along as a community. And they do see our math journals as being important to them.
I actually like, I think it's the American Psychological Association that has had this buddy system for peer review, bringing on sort of integumentary system to bring people along and to sort learn about what a community of peer reviewers may mean. That's something I'd love to do. We haven't done it yet, but I'm looking at that kind of a that kind of an enterprise. And I honestly think that's the way we actually build reputation at the AMS.
I can tell you that we think we're very important, but nobody else does. So and so sometimes we get a bit wrapped up in that. Is this on now? Let's let's see. Try it. Hello? I think so.
If not, I'll repeat it. Thank you. So, Matt jampala at the American Geophysical union. A little weird to have people talking about your marriage in front of everyone. Um, but so my question is. Yes so that is good. So my question is, 10 years ago and, you know, up until a few years ago, there was a certain dynamic driving societies to partner with commercial publishers.
And that dynamic, yes, but it was around subscriptions. So money around subscriptions. And as we're shifting more to open access and was is shifting more towards this author fee based open access there's a different dynamic there. There's a different field. Um, and Wiley and others are changing the way that they work with our partners. So there's opportunities all around.
But my question is about. Are there groups that are so there's technology out there that's cheap, there's opportunity for lower fees, things like that. How do you get in? How do people collaborate to make transformative deals that actually cover people that are not bound up with commercial publishers? Because it's really hard for one individual publisher to go around and negotiate with every library.
Yes Thank you. And real quick, because I think it wasn't on so briefly summarize given a changing dynamic compared to a few years ago where the subscription model was driving collaboration with publishers as we moved to open access. Are there groups or models for smaller publishers to be able to do transformative agreements?
Also I mean, where we stand is actually we've talked to librarians about transformative arrangements, and they tell us, well, certainly in our community, they tell us that actually we it's too much work for the somebody of your size to do it alone. It's too costly. We would rather we actually like the way you do subscriptions. And as long as you're providing a green path to open access, we'll continue to subscribe.
So on. And then there's this philosophical, you know, I don't like transformative arrangements, period. So that's because they're based on Article processing charges in most cases, at least not all. But, you know, I do think there's something to be said. So we have started you know, we talk to the Society of industrial and applied math a good deal.
Um, there are other math societies out there, the European math society, for example, who's using subscribe to open. And we talk a lot. We probably should talk more. But I do think there are ways in which societies can collaborate outside of commercial partnerships. OK collaboration over competition. And we are actually about to publish an editorial collaboration greater than competition.
Talk to your competitors. Work together. There is no room for competition in this area. You have to work together on die. You have to work together on sharing your peer review resources. You have to work together on open access. You have to work together on everything that is facing mathematics, urology, who cares?
Like whatever your subject area is, stop it with the competition. Get gather up and then also work with the people. Like I said, we have had Nicola from Am. We have had people from across this room. We have had we just had Paige wooden from Au speak to our editorial board. The point that I'm making is collaborate. Stop competing.
This is there's no time for a competition right now. We need to collaborate. Thank you. And unfortunately, for sake of time, I'm going to pause. We will. When we're done, we can take a question afterwards. Forever can stick around. But I want to ask the panel just in closing if there are any examples of, again, the small locally sourced projects or collaborations that you think are bring hope to this sort of model.
Open it up. Hey, jay, you moved. I'm just going to. I'm going to point to these two here. I'm going to just. I'm going to steal the time to say talk to lyricists, talk to MIT press, talk to arcadia, find those funders, those groups out there that will give you money and support and help that can make you a diamond open access journal.
That's there's different ways to transform. I don't really have any. Well, I mean, I've sort of listed some of the technology things and some of the things we're doing as a society that are pointing to success. So I the way I would characterize this is that we really need to find actual paths to collaborate in the same way that Jennifer was saying.
Um, so I'm not sure that, you know, we actually have a long history of basically piling everything back into prizes for mid-career Black mathematicians or travel grants. So as long as, you know, these models allow us to continue to spend our money on the community bringing along, we have congressional fellowships, we have all of these ways and means to bring along mathematicians, whether they're from underrepresented minorities or from wherever they are.
We want people. We want mathematicians. In my case at least, we want mathematicians not necessarily to be academic mathematicians, but to take math into the world and be able to sort of be literate in math and whatever industry, government, nonprofit job they may be in. Um, and it's all down to us still being sustainable.
So I want all of these models to sort of work and allow us to survive and appreciate everyone coming today. And if you can help me, Thank the panelists. This was a wonderful discussion. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Will might drift in from desert and that's perfectly fine. So welcome everyone, to the session. Locally sourced, locally owned independent society journal publishing to cede trust and transformation. You might notice those last words from the conference theme. My name is Brian Cody. I'm CEO and a co-founder of Scholastica and I'll be moderating today's session.
Thank you for joining us and Thank you to the panel. I'll introduce in a moment. First, a couple reminders. So if you haven't already, please be sure to visit the website to review the code of conduct. SSP is committed to diversity, equity and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment. Of course, that's also our goal for today's session.
You can visit the website to read the full code of conduct. This QR code, which is going to go away in about three seconds, can also direct you there. Three, two, one. Also want to note SSP, core values, community adaptability, inclusivity and integrity, which again fits in today's panel. So I'll do quick introductions of everyone. I'm not going to read everyone's extensive and impressive bios. These slides will be available.
Also you can peruse them on LinkedIn if you want to know more and I will go through this now. So as I mentioned, I'm with Scholastica. We have Maxine Aldridge, director of publications production, the American Society of Civil Engineers. Thank you, Maxine. Boston, scholarly communication librarian from Murray State University.
Welcome Robert Harrington, associate executive director of publishing, American Medical Society. Thank you, Robert. And Adam Hyde, co-founder, the collaborative knowledge foundation, as we all know as Coco. Thanks, Adam. And Jennifer Regala, director of publications, American Urological association, got it right.
And so we're going to go into a few topics. You've probably seen the session description. And talking about independent society publishing within the larger context where that's not potentially the predominant mode of publishing. And so we'll get into this. I'm going to leave these points up as we go. We will have Q&A at the end. So I'll have a timer.
This microphone in the middle will be for questions. But again, we're going to have a panel discussion first, then questions. So on that, I'm going to get going. So to sort of set the stage and get this going. I would like to ask the panel, what's the problem? Why are we talking about this? I think some sessions you can start off being descriptive or have people's theories, but I like to know what's the problem, what's the meat?
What is at risk with this topic? And so I want to go around and I'm going to start from the panelist closest to me and just let everyone essentially do an opening statement to that point. What is the problem? What are we talking about? In the session, it states, the world of journal publishing is grappling with sustainability crisis.
Is that true? Is that the problem or are there more important problems? So you chose the seat. I'm going to have you go first. He says, I chose his seat, but he said, hey, come sit here. So, all right, let me get this mic set up. I need it to be in the right spot so I can drop it when I'm done talking. All right.
And do you give me permission to live tweet as you're talking? Is that OK? Please I'll get out my phone and I'll retweet it. OK all right. Let me get set up so Robert doesn't copy off my notes. OK? so give me a really good profile here. Oh, look at that, you guys. Look at that. OK, OK, go ahead.
That's going to be a mess. All right. OK I'm going to take a deep breath. And we're going to start over. So large scale publishing, which is I think what we're starting off with here is it's a really great thing for authors because authors need a lot of chances to publish so large scale publishing it's really good for publishing at scale.
But in terms of sustainability, it's not great. When you fled the publishing submission systems with all these manuscripts because you may increase the number of manuscripts, but we only have so many peer reviewers to go around. So it's not sustainable from that perspective. And then as you grow more and more journals to cover more and more subdisciplines, that's also a really good thing for authors.
It's giving them more places to publish in journals that cater to their discipline. But again, speaking from a libraries perspective, that's just more titles that we have to try to keep up with. And as we saw with the big deal serials, subscription crisis, that's also not sustainable. So that's my piece. Like, say, I deliberately didn't sit-in the first seat. Um, I'm actually going to reword part of the question, if that's not too rebellious.
Um, and in the sense that I'm not going to suggest that we have a sustainability crisis, and it's something perhaps that Amy brand this morning talked to a little bit. It's more of perhaps we are in the midst of a community crisis and that's where sort of the difference, I think perhaps comes between what societies do that are independent and societies actually that partner to. But also and the big commercials.
The question is why are we here? And for me, that community crisis is sort of embodied in sort of the lack of trust that we see. What you want is a sort of a pool of your peers, peers around you, Uh, people who may mentor you, but people sort of supporting the next emerging careers of, of those in, in publishing, of those in the field that you might be serving. And for me, that needs work and it needs work at a society level.
It's partly publishing. It's partly what the society does, even beyond publishing. And that's sort of I think is really just driven by this the mission that we have. And that's where I'm that's why I'm sitting up here, I think, or at least one of those. In fact, Jennifer is also in that category. Yes, and that's true. So I'm Mia from the American Urological Association.
We are a very smaller medical association, and we are grappling with the whole reality of our community doesn't even understand what open access means. They don't understand all of these implications of what's going on in the scholarly, scholarly publishing world at large, to the point that I am working really hard. I actually have a session tomorrow that we're working on here at SSP talking about, um, you know, what does the world of scholarly publishing mean to the world of urology?
And there's really just so much to think about in that capacity. What does that mean to drill it down to folks who are very, very, very like Micro Focus on what they're doing. So we will get more into that. But I will pass this on down here to you. Yeah Thank you. Um, Kira, my name's Adam Adam Hyde from Coco.
Um, all the way from New Zealand. Howdy and, um, Coco makes. It's a not for profit organization. We make open source tools for publishers in the journal space. Kotahi is the tool we work on, but my point of view is around tooling. Surprise and see, Luis is here. Louis Russell.
I was reading an article of yours actually just yesterday because I was googling around about tools in the space as I do every now and then, and there's a good article about the limited number of tools that are available. And I thought, yeah, this is a good overview, what's happening? And I looked at the date of publication 2013, same tools. And I think that very little has changed there except for.
There's been a consolidation at the top end where a lot of these tools have been bought up by a number of main, very mainstream, large publishers, and we're lacking diversity in that ecosystem. And this is the tooling that supports the operations that you do. And I think this is a real problem. So we have to diversify those layers, I think, and have community involvement on the scholarly level publishing level with the tools that you use and community inverted commas, ownership, in other words, open source, best of breed tools.
Oh, Hello. First, Thanks for this opportunity. This is indeed an interesting topic. And as you see, each panelist addressed something slightly different. But I will go with what Jennifer has to say. And I think there is a potential crisis in publishing, particularly in the smaller societies and smaller publishers.
And I would tend to say it's the grappling, I think is the mandate for open access and what are we going to do with it and how are we looking at it? And so I'm from the American Society of civil engineer, and at the moment, we're looking at many areas, many ways to handle this and how do we inform our members and our authors and how we do it, how do we do a full transformation when this becomes necessary, which is fairly soon?
Yeah Thank you. Wonderful Thank you. And it's quite a list. So again, for the audience, when we talk about what is the problem or I guess based on this, what are the problems? So questions around finding peer reviews, there are more titles, which means more cost, a community crisis, lack of trust, a lack of diversity in the ecosystem, educating people, including what is scholarly publishing and what is open access, really mean?
How do we do the transformation to open access? Um, what about consolidation? So it's sort of all the problems. But I do want to ask the panel the follow up question. Robert, I'm going to start with you. We look at that list, to what degree does as we talk about locally sourced so smaller independent publishers, to what degree does that address those problems?
Because these could be systemic and small publishers independent, not solve that. So I'd like to almost hear the case for this being a solution, right? So I mean, as I was saying in the first sort of brief comment that I'm sort of framing this as a community crisis, perhaps as I was saying, Amy Brown touched on this morning. And the other thing I wanted to say before I even touch on this is that there are many different types of society.
I mean, we're at the American Medical Society. We're fortunate enough to be large enough to be independent, but that's not the case for many societies. It's not like there's a choice. So you have to sort of find a path that actually ends up meaning we, you know, as a smaller society, you have to partner. One of the things that I believe as an independent society at the American Medical Society is that we literally everything we do gets funneled back all the money that we make, 70% of the operating revenue of the American Medical Society actually comes from publishing.
It's actually been getting more and more from donations now, which which is great. So that percentage is dropping slightly, but more all of that gets funneled back to the community and everything that we do. And I might mention later some of the great things that we do, but I'm not going to bore you with that now. But and you know, so what are the examples of those sorts of things that actually are really tailored to the communities that we serve?
And Miriam Louis Burke, who I talked to, she's an advocate from Siam. She put it really well that, you know, in a sense, what we're doing here, sort of with the theme of this talk, what we're doing here is actually looking at sort of local organic farming. You know, when you go to your local market and pick up sort of really high quality produce or produce, depending on where you live, you know, and you love that quality.
It's not on scale, but the quality of what you have is just so much greater. And you appreciate that. And that's sort of where societies are coming from. We're not going to compete on scale and math, for example. Springer is huge compared to us, but we do compete in terms of what we offer to the community. A very particular example of that might be in response to when Maxine brought this up with the open access piece of it, with the memo that came out on 25th of August, the Nelson memorandum, my wonderful colleague Karen Sachs, who's the associate executive director for government relations, she got us into the National Science Foundation right there.
And then we were, I think, the first ones through the door. And we were at pains to talk to the program officers there about how we as a community, a math community would hope that the National Science Foundation may respond to a mandate on for immediate open access with no embargo. And the way we took it was that we had several things we thought were very, very important. We didn't want to see a proliferation of articles. We're very much personally as a society against article processing charges because we see that as an excuse just to publish more and more content and we don't need more content.
My community actually asked us to publish fewer articles if we can ever do it. And then there's the aspect of author equity, and this has come up and we brought this up in the sense that many mathematicians are not actually funded directly or they may receive low levels of funding, which is quite common. Most of the funding, if a mathematician gets one, is from the National Science Foundation.
And so we felt that actually you might end up with the two classes of authors to two levels of citizenship. And the math community want those who can and those who can't publish where they want to, to publish. So we brought these issues to the table. It was something that National Science Foundation wanted to think about very hard. But the third thing we did is we also at great pains to say, well, look, this is just us, what we think about equity.
The opinions that I may express, it doesn't mean that there is one size that fits all and a commercial company that's going to go hell for leather for article processing charges. They have very good reasons to do that because it's a profit making business and they we should have a range of different models. And that's sort of the third line that we pushed, we didn't want to say it was just what we think is right.
But this is an example of how we put our community first and foremost, how a society can do something different to perhaps the situation where you've got a smaller society partnered with a large commercial or a large commercial may say that was really much longer than I intended. Sorry so great. Thank you. And I want to open this up, Maxine, and then we'll open it up to everyone.
Want to see the idea of to what degree do to use Robert's point. And from the description, the sort of small independent farmers, the farmers market, the quality you appreciate, to what degree does that address some of the problems we were talking about? So that makes perfect sense if you equate it to the farming industry and much like the publishing industry. So yes, you do go to your intimate farmer's market and you get quality products and that's what we like and want.
With the society publishers, it's much the same. You are accustomed to creating your content to please your membership, your authors and so on and so on. And so it aligns perfectly. However, when you look at the larger scale and you look at partnership, it may not be that way because partnering with a commercial publisher, there's a set way of doing things. I hate to use the term, but it's more like a factory operation.
So you're no longer going to get that sentiment from the smaller society publisher or how you're accustomed to doing things, but it's more like you're in this mold and you put in and you get out and it's faster and it's more, but it's not necessarily the quality that you are accustomed to doing for your authors and membership. Um, it works and it doesn't work. So it's, there's pros and cons in how you look at this.
And again, it depends on the society. We, we, we're all different. We have our different ways of doing things. And For example, as we talk about the mandate of open access, you think one might say we don't want to impose open access fees because not everyone can. Not all our authors are able to do that. And not everyone has funding.
But in societies that largely depend on a subscription model, when we change to an open access model, then what do you do? Definitely funding is required. So an APC charge is necessary to continue with operations. It cost a lot of money to publish an article. We know that. Where is the funding going to be coming from if we no longer have a subscription model? Those are the things to think about.
OK and I'll open this up and Jennifer Adam. So I was just going to jump on to that and say it's like it's a huge it's a huge struggle. So you said that. And I'm like, oh, my goodness. Because so at the aoa, we do have a commercial partnership and we do appreciate our partnership. We work with Wolters kluwer. But the concern is, though, how do we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market?
How do we have that warm author touch? How do we also differentiate ourselves from our biggest competitors in the urology field? How do we actually be human in all of this? How do we educate our researchers on what open access means versus subscription? We've introduced in the AOA family of publications a new open access journal, like how do like, how do we make all of that make sense to everybody?
And it's a lot and it's a struggle. And it's actually really, um, it's a big thing that we think about constantly. Lee and, and, and really it's a huge focus of what we do at the AOA. So I agree. It's, it's a problem. Thank you. So, Jennifer, you were talking about your faculty, your researchers and urology, not quite knowing what open access is.
And I'll just offer that information like urine. It just needs to flow. It works best that way. Yes so in our panel discussion, our planning meetings, we kind of talked about this food and agriculture sort of metaphor along with publishing and how Robert and Maxine, you're kind of talking about society publishing as kind of being like this small batch, handcrafted, artisanal sort of publishing.
And there are certain things that society publishing can bring that you don't want at a mass scale. So we have I live in a small town in Murray, Kentucky. There's this one guy, this one farmer who serves raw Milka like that's not pasteurized, but everyone knows this guy and he's like trusted. And so it's like it seems safe to get your raw Milka from this guy, but it wouldn't scale to have raw Milka on shelves across America, not from like a big publisher or Milka producer.
I'm losing my bread. You know, like we pasteurize Milka for a reason, right? But like in certain contexts, it makes sense because you trust the community that you're in. You know, and that's what we're trying to build. Like that whole that whole vibe and that whole like, come and work with us. You can trust us. It's like, so what we even equate it to and we tell this to some of our authors, it's like leaving your kid off at daycare.
You can trust us to take care of your kid. Like we will make sure the good thing happens, um, within our family of publications, but also how do you make that known to the research community? And then also how does that realistically happen when you have a commercial partner? Um, so there's a lot involved in all of that. And we really mean it though.
We really want you to trust your research with us, but there's a lot to that. So Adams And I'm going to I know we don't quite have enough mix for everyone, but because we're also going to have a recording for people want to make sure we're using the mix judiciously. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just going to float it up to the tooling again and one of the problems is that your workflows and your data, if you are working with somebody else's technology, is in the hands of somebody else.
And that's automatically a question of trust right there. You want to ask yourself, you know how much you're paying for these systems and whether they enable you to work the way that you need to work to meet your community's needs. I think that's a question mark. And in my opinion, the know, the cost of technology should be if you look at Wordpress and this doesn't quite translate, but it almost translates Wordpress runs 30% of the internet today, right?
You can get a Wordpress site for how much a month? $2 more or less. $5? $10. This is the cost of what technology should be in the publishing sector. You should be paying something around that Figure Four your technology on a monthly basis. Ask yourself how much you're actually paying.
Technology is not expensive. It's expensive to build. It's not expensive to rent or operate. And so if you are not paying $510 in, what are you paying? And you know, where does that put you? Where does that put your apks? And I just wanted to add a couple more brief things. One, just going back again to the plenary this morning, the whole notion of trust and research integrity, I think is related to how a society works.
And and so if we can build the community and you have a community of peers that really understand how to work in an academic environment and then publish in that academic environment. We're making some progress. I'm not saying it's all that we need to do, but we're making some progress towards building research integrity right from the word go. But I should also say that all of these wonderful things that we're saying up here about how we don't care about scale, well, we actually kind of do in some ways, because if you don't have scale, you're going to be dwarfed and it's really hard to actually be financially sustainable.
So, you know. Yes, but yeah, and that scale is important. And I do argue I totally agree with your argument about the idea of low engagement. And honestly, it's the community that you're building. And I think that's a huge thing that will differentiate societies and associations in the future. I think that's the huge thing and we're working on that really closely at the AOA and that's what and the vibe like the really, really connecting with people.
That's a differentiator in my opinion. I want to highlight a couple themes that came up or a couple comments around apks around open access. I'm flashing back to I want to say it was maybe this meeting in 2016 and there are all the sessions about, you know, will gold open access be, you know, the way of open access will be apks. And so it's sort of a question of, you know, when we talk about sustainability, I think corporate publishers tend to get the worst rap around this.
You have these, you know, stories, $11,000 apks but I want to untangle that a little bit. To what degree is some of the issues you're discussing, the cost, the sustainability issues related to the model? So gold and apks period versus scale. So asking people to sort of maybe try and untangle those a little bit is a small publisher have going to have similar problems with an APC and gold model?
Or is there something also particular about large scale you know, big ag model publishing within gold? I'm curious to hear thoughts and I'll Jennifer RJ then can open it up to everyone. So I'll start off with that. And it's really interesting because when I started at the AOA in June of 2020, we did not offer any open access whatsoever, so we were purely subscription.
Our community was like a what? Like we would pay for any like, like they did not even have a grasp on what that meant. And so we have worked towards, you know, what does that mean? And educating the community about what's going on with, you know, open access and the different models of payment across the industry. And it's just been really interesting to see the way things have changed since then.
We have now, of course, have hybrid journals for our two subscription journals. And then we have a fully gold open access journal that we launched actually in August of last year, and it started publishing in January of this year in 2023. And it's just been interesting to see the evolution and how we've educated our community about what all of this means. Um, and the biggest, the biggest thing that happened right the day before I came to this conference here is that our biggest, um, person who was against this, our board of directors, our president of our board of directors was very against open access.
He said it was predatory, did not understand, had no concept. And then I had a submission from him just yesterday and, and he was like this. I just love that you accepted my idea. And I like, oh, OK, that's so great. Dr. and love you. I'm going to love you through this whole process. And we're going to work this whole submission through. But the whole point being that it's an education process and you know, what does that look like, though, for all of us?
I mean, you know, how do we work through all of these models? And I think that's what the whole point at the end of the day is, though, too, is I think it's not just saying open access must happen. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, too, like it just can't be OK. Open access is mandatory. I mean, think again. It's what we've been all working through for, what, 20, 25 years now?
How long has it been? I mean, we've all been talking about this for a long time. I'm pretty old now when I was young and we're talking about this was like, oh, this is fascinating. But now it's like, OK, look, let's all work this out. You guys. Um, there's different models here. There's different things that we need to work through. And also, there's a lot of education with our researchers.
They're just trying to get their, you know, their CVS, um, built up, you know, what does that look like and what is our part in all of this? So thank you were supposed to be the next one. I'm actually only 24 years old, so this is all new to me. So I don't have any experience necessarily with society publishing. So what I do have is I spent the first year of the pandemic, um, sitting in my bedroom office thinking about the food production metaphors.
So I'm going to I'm going to wedge that in too. So I'm going to stretch that food production metaphor to its limits here. So earlier said that large scale publishing helps a large number of authors, which is true. Large scale processes also require standardized inputs and they give you standardized outputs. And that can lead you with monocultures. Monocultures leave crops at risk of large scale problems like disease and invasive species.
So if you think about large scale commercial publishing, those species of publishers, they have traditionally Fed off read subscription revenues. And so as we change our environment to a way to a place where those species of publishers, they can't get the same amount of nutrients from that food source. They're either going to die or they're going to adapt and find other sources of revenue.
In this case, what we're talking about open access, publishing fees. So a few things happen when you change the environment like that. If you have a large scale species or publisher, habituating other species, in this case authors to live in an environment to where they understand that if they want to pollinate their ideas, they're going to have to give in return their funding and think.
When you habituate authors to be of a mindset that you pay to publish, I think that's how you set up an environment to allow for predatory species to thrive. Um, another thing that happens in that process of changing that environment is that your authors who don't quite offer the same nutritional value in terms of the dollars they can offer, it makes the landscape much more hostile for them to live and thrive in.
Really like that. Actually, the way you know, and the sorts of analogies are very powerful. I do. I think I said what I said already about gold open access. But I do think that part of this sort of the monoculture or the need to have not have a monoculture leads us to a range of models that might work rather sort of a balance of models.
I don't see anything evil in the word subscription, for example. I mean, I've talked to many librarians about this and what we call the palm librarian community, the physics astronomy, math librarian group, and they are very standing willing to support us as long as we provide a path to open, which we will likely do through green and diamond. We launched it diamond flagship journal recently, excitingly called communications of the American Medical Society.
But it's a really amazing quality journal. They it's funded by a donor who's provided four years of funding. And in the third year, well, assuming we've got the academic quality right, we'll endow the journal in perpetuity. So we'll live off the interest of that journal to cost it out though. So to address your point about costs, we it's not just you can't just throw a journal up on online.
It's got fully loaded costs. I mean my the cost of me is in there. Clearly that's not enough. It should be much higher. But the platform, all the various things that you need that sustain us should be in those costs. When you're thinking about it, I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but costs are a part of the discussion.
But I think it's about a balance. And on my weekly to do list, I know this sounds very silly, but on my weekly to do list right at the top is come up with new business model for open access. And if I can do that before I pass out because I know you're only 24. I actually I know I look 24, but I'm really 85. So 85 and I'm going to pass this down here.
But I'll just say we're doing this. We are doing a presentation tomorrow. I do argue that journals should be a vibe as well. I really do argue that. So I'm going to just pass this down. Come talk to me about this tomorrow. OK OK riffing on the farming stuff from New Zealand know a lot about it. Um, but you know, the analogy goes so far, but one of the things, if we're going to go on this thread, one of things I want to tag on is that when it comes to technology, when you have a single vendor manufacturer, reseller larkins, you are beholden to the price of the technology that they provide and that's a problem.
So on the other hand, so you know, big industrial John Deere tractor manufacturers, you know, you're going to pay and the price they want you to pay, right? On the other hand, you don't want the farmers making the tractors themselves. Right? that's kind of doesn't sound great either. So if we're going to go for a middle ground, I would say that you want technology providers that are close to you, that have your best interests at heart and understand you and are not trying to extract exorbitant amounts of money from you, but are trying to help you do a better job at what you need to do.
So on the farming level, independent technology providers that are very good at what they do is kind of what I would advocate. Then you're diversifying the technology field and you have more choice and you have more choice in the ways that you want to work. Not too much more to add there. But I agree technology is key in how you use it and the type of technology that you use.
I also want to go back to a comment. What you put into the larger corporate publishers turns to what you get out, and systems are set in place for reasons. And so that's why I said earlier, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's really the expectation. What are you looking for and why did you partner in the first place?
Or why do you want to pawn it in the first place? So it's an interesting scenario, but it's really what the society or the publisher is looking for and how you decide to partner and what you want to do with it. All right. Ask the question right there, though, Brian. That's the question. That's like the provocative question right there.
Should we be partnering anymore? So so here's my question. Should we be partnering anymore? Jennifer, you started it. Nobody but nobody. So I'm personal biographical notes. I'm from a rural area in North Florida. It's culturally like Southern Georgia. We grew up working in a sawmill.
We had steer. A lot of my friends were, Uh, parents were farmers. And on this point, there was always an opportunity in risk when they wanted to get a contract with a larger company because it was guaranteed revenue. I think societies can sympathize with that. Um, staffing suddenly could become something that was diversified. It wasn't just your payroll, right?
The debt with the banks suddenly didn't feel like an issue. But there was also fear that you become dependent and that, um, that this is a first step towards becoming a vassal or essentially selling. Um, so on that. So I want to talk about partnerships. Maxine I know, I know when you were age, you, you worked, you worked with publishers can across the panel what do and Maxine, you're talking about this sort of sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but I'd love to hear more about goals and scenarios VMware partnership is really fruitful and then others might enjoy focusing on when it's less fruitful.
So I'd love to hear about that. Uh, sorry. Oh, and yes, you're correct. I was at Au when we partnered with Wiley and they partnered with Wiley. I was there then, not anymore. Um, and the partnership was strategic, and I think it worked for Au because of the, the way they approached it.
Um, firstly, the strategies that were placed with that is Au was very forward thinking in that they. Worked with membership and authors and editors earlier on in the process to say, this is what we're thinking. And gather feedback and then from there, you know, move towards what they did. It wasn't always good. It didn't start out good. And I'm sure I can say this because it's public information, but when the partnership first happened, it was it became the same factory mentality where there weren't.
It wasn't always what you expected would come out of the partnership, but the good thing is because they were strategic in how they did it, they retained a lot of rights and they were able to go to and say, here are some things that we would like to improve or change. And Wiley was receptive to that. Another thing is the partnership did not start with just taking all our publications and just go with it.
It was segmented in that retained in-house the peer review process, and that was largely because of the initial surveys and communication with membership and authors and such. The from what I recall, the membership and authors wanted to retain the peer review process in house to ensure that that section of it was to their standard and to exactly what they wanted before releasing it. So partnerships work.
In this case, Au and Wiley worked very well and they're still partners today, but it doesn't always work. I don't have any real scenarios of what doesn't work, but I know that when I did it, everything was not Seamless. A partnership, though, needs to be a marriage, in my opinion, and it needs to be very collaborative. And so when you have an organization that's saying, OK, you're just going to take care of my problems.
Commercial publisher. Here you go, take it all over. We're giving you peer review. We're giving you production the whole nine yards. I think that's a bad move. Um, but then. But, but, but, but, but if you're, like, really focusing in on saying, OK, we are going to do the dishes and we're going to watch the kids and then you are going to make all the beds and you're going to do all the laundry and you're really being mindful of that partnership.
I think it works, but I think it takes a lot of work in that regard, in my opinion. I agree. And I think that's why initially there were strategic in how they did it, and that's why they decided, OK, we will hand over or we will partner, for lack of a better term, with the production process, but not the peer review process. So that's when the segmentation happened.
So we're starting out this way. And as we grow, as our marriage becomes more intimate, then we can hand everything over. But for now, let's do this. And not this. And so that's kind of how I saw it. I love that as our marriage becomes more intimate, I assume they're not mean. It's like so true, though.
I assume they're not at the seven year itch yet. Oh, it's past that now. And it comes, though. That's like the whole thing. So that's another panel. But the itch, that itch starts early on. You know, when you're identifying things that are not going the way you want it to go, and then you have that stern conversation like like, this isn't our agreement.
We need to do this or that. So, you know, it's just comes the itch, I guess. We talk about the itch all the time on Twitter. No, I don't love my wife. What are you talking about? Come on, come on. Does him even want to say what I'm going to say? I'm just going to say if you're going to get into a marriage with a publisher, just, you know, sign a prenup.
Just like with like what Robert said, he's they've got a partnership with a they've got a benefactor and there's a plan for what happens going forward. So, um, when you get in that marriage, you can work it out bit by bit or you can kind of have it like sign the prenup up front and decide like, who's going to do the dishes or and in this case, actually, it's very, you know, with a donor in development, it's a little different in the sense that they get some say about whether they spend more money, but they don't get to say how that money is spent.
Um, and so in other words, once we have the money, we can do what we like. It's just if it were to fail, they could say we don't want any more part. I do think this notion of I'm not going to go the marriage route anymore, you know, um, but the idea of what a partnership really means, I mean, there are certainly more and more cases of societies who have partnered with some of the bigger publishers who are being told, well, you know, you're not that important to us anymore.
Um, you need to go and do things yourself or find another method. But actually, what are you left with as a society after you've become part of a large transformative deal or you're kind of your identity is being lost to some extent, and not just your identity, but the material of who you are, the ability to survive. So I think those things I think maybe it's the prenup that you need, but it's but then there has I do think scale is important, though, because there are so many things that the larger publishers have done that we can't do individually fight those paper Mills.
There's some real technology advances that actually the small independent societies may not have been able to achieve. And Wiley is touting its Wiley partner services. But it's even though this feels like full circle to some extent, that there are services in there that are really powerful services. And so why not as long as you have that the right relationship in place.
And Adam Yeah. Want to go to you because actually I also think this segues around technology because there's a theme questions here around leverage, around using prenup sort of protection, sort of what's the role of want to hear more on this, but including the role of technology and helping as an equalizer. So people you know, what's the relative strength of technology to help compete in this environment?
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I was at Frankfurt last year and it was really good meeting during a lot about collaboration. And then the last panel was really kind of scaremongering from large technology providers, large publishers providing technology, you know, and, and I really I felt that very viscerally that I felt that there was a kind of a movement from these technology providers to make you think that there's a really more complicated than you can.
Understand problem and that they are here to save you from it. And I see these technical services becoming bigger and bigger and part of the bloodstream of the Academy and you're going to be paying for them. And and I question that. I take your point. But we can provide that infrastructure. Open infrastructure is a real thing. We've already provisioned a lot of it and we can do a lot more.
And open infrastructure is a powerful force. If you look at the internet today, the infrastructure of the internet runs on is all open, all of it, all of it. And it wasn't made by one person or one organization. It was made by a lot of organizations putting into the same pot and building it up. And we can do that, too. We can absolutely do it.
Scholarly publishing is a much smaller piece of the puzzle than the internet is, and we have the resources to do it. So I wouldn't buy into the picture that you need these services from these large technical providers and that we can't do it ourselves. We absolutely can. That's yeah, great. Yeah so the argument that I would bring back is you control your technology and so that's what think about all the time at the AOA.
So again, we have a commercial partnership, but then we also have a platform at the aoa, something that I control and we control within the AOA called AOA news. And it's just a platform that we have complete rights to. We do not have a commercial partnership for. And the key there is that we really retain, like we have that connection with our community.
And that's what I keep bringing it back to. We have a world of artificial intelligence. We have a world of open access, we have a world of everything is spiraling around us. And what we don't have is human connection and AOA news is where we are able to do that, and that's where we're able to bring people back to our journal content. We're able to bring people back to our education content. We're able to bring people back to our guidelines and connect people back to things that are happening within the AOA.
And the reason I just even bring this to your attention is to say again, that human warm touch that is so lacking in this world that we know today, and that's really what we are focusing on and we're having a lot of success with as well. We're getting a lot of sponsorship revenue from that. We're getting a lot of folks really reaching out to us and saying, OK, how can we work with you so that we can reach your physicians?
Because this is different, this is unique. This is not, you know, a static, you know, advertising page. It's not a digital page, whatever. You know, it's different. It's really a connection with our membership. So that's what I encourage all of us to think about. How do you have those warm human touches in a world that is so benign and so artificial? That's my thought.
I also just wanted to go back to what Adam was saying. There are places in technology, I think, where societies know their community better. So in mathematics, we are really, really focused on accessibility at the AMS. In fact, Nicola pozo, who's the director of marketing and sales at the AMS, is in the back. She leads our internal accessibility working group. But what is accessibility in mathematics?
If it's not about technology, you have to basically you can't have an accessible PDF. So we've developed this really robust conversion from latech to I know it's very exciting with students. We start taking talking latech can everybody can take a nap, but but from latex to HTML and that's so robust now that and we've had the time and energy to focus on the math community to get that right. I don't think a large scale publisher would have had that energy and focus because they've got to serve any number of different disciplines and different, you know, ways of doing things.
And we have made part of that toolchain copyleft as well. So copyleft open, open source. So the idea there is to share what we've done as much as we feel we can without having to maintain it because we can't do that. Sorry well, no. And then want to jump right back on top of that and say came to our Journal of urology editorial board and spoke to us about that.
And obviously that has nothing to do with what we do in the urological community, but it has everything to do with what we do in the urological community and that comes back to the whole farming idea of sharing, like how are we building these crops, how are we engaging our communities and how do we share that knowledge with one another? And that is the biggest takeaway that I have and sharing that with everyone in this room and how do we make that really happen and how do we make that accessible partnerships, whatever aside, we really need to do that and really make this a human connection.
Right Thank you. And I want to move to some questions. We have a microphone here. So people can do can use that. If you aren't able to use that, say your question. I'll repeat it. And for the panel, I do want to end with examples of projects that you think using the analogy, small farms doing well because there are small farms that are struggling.
But if you think of examples of locally sourced publishing, that could be partnerships, but things that are a bright note in this world, that would be helpful. But first questions. Q&A I think I have a slide. Look at that. Oh, Thank you. Um, so I'm a librarian.
A question about, you know, when I'm seeing faculty and students coming to me and asking about publish, you know, we are signing on to a which is the sort of alternative not looking at impact factors, trying to have a more holistic research method. And it sounds like when we're looking at smaller sort of society solutions that you can get that human touch and maybe a bit more of that flavor.
And I'm interested in how to get that across. When you have researchers who are really looking for that big name. They only want to kind of when they're coming to you to ask about publishing, they're looking at like you're looking at transcripts and they're not necessarily digging in, especially maybe early career. They don't have any ties or any connections.
I'm curious as to how you get past that. So how do you handle? Because I'm not sure the mic was on, but Thank you for getting up. No, that's not on you. The early career researchers are coming in with a sense of brand recognition. And how do you sell a sort of locally the sort of local brand.
Any thoughts on that? OK so no, keep talking. But yes, I have a lot of thoughts about that. And I think it's super important to brand yourself as a human organization that, OK, you can reach out like at the aoa, you can reach out to Jennifer Regala and her team and say, we have a pre-submission inquiry. We have like this idea, we have a new article type, we have whatever, and there is a human touch.
There's like an actual face. There is a journal of urology Fanny pack. I'll send you guys like, like whatever there is like a human behind what is going on there. And then you can talk with me, you can vibe with me, and we'll be like, OK, let's talk this out. OK? that your idea is really weird or your idea is really awesome, or like, actually, let's take your weird idea and make it awesome or whatever it is.
And then honestly too, I have people reaching out to me all the time. They'll be like, oh, we submit it to the higher impact journal. But Jennifer, I'm so sorry. I promise you next time it will not happen. It's coming to you. And so how do you make that connection happen? And that's what I encourage you all in this room to think about.
Um, I would add to that, Jennifer, um, so I they're looking for the bigger names because this means a lot to their papers, but that human touch, that intimate feeling where you can pick up the phone or send an email and have someone directly respond to you telling you what the publishing process is, what to expect, and all those questions that person may have, that author. I think that's very important.
MHM Yeah. I think it's also related to membership of a society. I mean we, we have almost 30,000 members, some of whom are very mature and some of whom are less mature. But, but in that, within that, within that membership, um, you know, that's our opportunity to bring them along as a community. And they do see our math journals as being important to them.
I actually like, I think it's the American Psychological Association that has had this buddy system for peer review, bringing on sort of integumentary system to bring people along and to sort learn about what a community of peer reviewers may mean. That's something I'd love to do. We haven't done it yet, but I'm looking at that kind of a that kind of an enterprise. And I honestly think that's the way we actually build reputation at the AMS.
I can tell you that we think we're very important, but nobody else does. So and so sometimes we get a bit wrapped up in that. Is this on now? Let's let's see. Try it. Hello? I think so.
If not, I'll repeat it. Thank you. So, Matt jampala at the American Geophysical union. A little weird to have people talking about your marriage in front of everyone. Um, but so my question is. Yes so that is good. So my question is, 10 years ago and, you know, up until a few years ago, there was a certain dynamic driving societies to partner with commercial publishers.
And that dynamic, yes, but it was around subscriptions. So money around subscriptions. And as we're shifting more to open access and was is shifting more towards this author fee based open access there's a different dynamic there. There's a different field. Um, and Wiley and others are changing the way that they work with our partners. So there's opportunities all around.
But my question is about. Are there groups that are so there's technology out there that's cheap, there's opportunity for lower fees, things like that. How do you get in? How do people collaborate to make transformative deals that actually cover people that are not bound up with commercial publishers? Because it's really hard for one individual publisher to go around and negotiate with every library.
Yes Thank you. And real quick, because I think it wasn't on so briefly summarize given a changing dynamic compared to a few years ago where the subscription model was driving collaboration with publishers as we moved to open access. Are there groups or models for smaller publishers to be able to do transformative agreements?
Also I mean, where we stand is actually we've talked to librarians about transformative arrangements, and they tell us, well, certainly in our community, they tell us that actually we it's too much work for the somebody of your size to do it alone. It's too costly. We would rather we actually like the way you do subscriptions. And as long as you're providing a green path to open access, we'll continue to subscribe.
So on. And then there's this philosophical, you know, I don't like transformative arrangements, period. So that's because they're based on Article processing charges in most cases, at least not all. But, you know, I do think there's something to be said. So we have started you know, we talk to the Society of industrial and applied math a good deal.
Um, there are other math societies out there, the European math society, for example, who's using subscribe to open. And we talk a lot. We probably should talk more. But I do think there are ways in which societies can collaborate outside of commercial partnerships. OK collaboration over competition. And we are actually about to publish an editorial collaboration greater than competition.
Talk to your competitors. Work together. There is no room for competition in this area. You have to work together on die. You have to work together on sharing your peer review resources. You have to work together on open access. You have to work together on everything that is facing mathematics, urology, who cares?
Like whatever your subject area is, stop it with the competition. Get gather up and then also work with the people. Like I said, we have had Nicola from Am. We have had people from across this room. We have had we just had Paige wooden from Au speak to our editorial board. The point that I'm making is collaborate. Stop competing.
This is there's no time for a competition right now. We need to collaborate. Thank you. And unfortunately, for sake of time, I'm going to pause. We will. When we're done, we can take a question afterwards. Forever can stick around. But I want to ask the panel just in closing if there are any examples of, again, the small locally sourced projects or collaborations that you think are bring hope to this sort of model.
Open it up. Hey, jay, you moved. I'm just going to. I'm going to point to these two here. I'm going to just. I'm going to steal the time to say talk to lyricists, talk to MIT press, talk to arcadia, find those funders, those groups out there that will give you money and support and help that can make you a diamond open access journal.
That's there's different ways to transform. I don't really have any. Well, I mean, I've sort of listed some of the technology things and some of the things we're doing as a society that are pointing to success. So I the way I would characterize this is that we really need to find actual paths to collaborate in the same way that Jennifer was saying.
Um, so I'm not sure that, you know, we actually have a long history of basically piling everything back into prizes for mid-career Black mathematicians or travel grants. So as long as, you know, these models allow us to continue to spend our money on the community bringing along, we have congressional fellowships, we have all of these ways and means to bring along mathematicians, whether they're from underrepresented minorities or from wherever they are.
We want people. We want mathematicians. In my case at least, we want mathematicians not necessarily to be academic mathematicians, but to take math into the world and be able to sort of be literate in math and whatever industry, government, nonprofit job they may be in. Um, and it's all down to us still being sustainable.
So I want all of these models to sort of work and allow us to survive and appreciate everyone coming today. And if you can help me, Thank the panelists. This was a wonderful discussion. Appreciate it. Thank you.
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