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Miles Conrad Award 2021 - Heather Joseph
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Miles Conrad Award 2021 - Heather Joseph
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TODD CARPENTER: I'm going to move on to the Miles Conrad Award presentation, which is a core function, a core feature, of the NFAIS and now NISO Plus Conference. Give you a little bit of background about who Miles Conrad was, since I'm sure many of you weren't active in the information industry when Miles Conrad was a leader.
TODD CARPENTER: In the 1950s, Miles Conrad was director of Biological Abstracts. Now it's BIOSIS Previews, which is distributed by Clarivate. But in 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of 14 A and I services to discuss the implications of the new government investments that were taking place in science, communications in the United States as a result of the Sputnik space launch.
TODD CARPENTER: And in 1958, that led to the formation of NFAIS face. Unfortunately, Miles Conrad passed away at the seemingly younger and younger age of 53 in 1964. Following Conrad's death, the NFAIS board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor that would be a central feature of the annual conference.
TODD CARPENTER: Some select members of the Miles Conrad Award recipient community include the CEO of EBSCO, Tim Collins; Dame Lynne Brindley, who was chief executive at the British Library; Frederick Kilgour, the founding director of OCLC. Béla Hatvany, who is co-founder of Silver Platter Information. Robert Massie, the president of Cambridge-- sorry, of Chemical Abstract Services.
TODD CARPENTER: Bob Snyder, founder and chairman of the Cambridge Information Group. And last year we honored Jim Neal, university librarian at Columbia University. It is an amazing list of industry leaders over the decades. And I'm pleased to recognize now Heather Joseph as the 2021 Miles Conrad Award winner for her lifetime achievements to the information community.
TODD CARPENTER: Heather Joseph is director of SPARC. She began her work in scholarly publishing at the American Astronomical Society, where she collaborated in the creation of one of the first fully-electronic journals-- electronic Astrophysical Journal Letters-- with some support and funding from the National Science Foundation. She left AAS for a brief stint at Elsevier before taking on the role of publications director at the Society for Neuroscience.
TODD CARPENTER: There she managed the transition of the Journal of Neuroscience from a print to web publication. Thereafter, she assumed the role of director of publishing at the American Society for Cell Biology where she led the transition of the-- implementation of online peer review system, transitioning the journal from print to online, and also saw the inclusion of that journal in the NIH's new PubMed Central database-- one of the first publications to be included.
TODD CARPENTER: It's a sign of how far we have come as an industry to think that these things are now commonplace. But back in the 1990s, these were big things to undertake and to achieve. In 2000, Heather was appointed president and COO of BioOne, a nonprofit collaboration. In this role, Joseph-- Heather led the start-up phase in an entrepreneurial environment, leading the business's operational, administrative, and strategic development.
TODD CARPENTER: She helped BioOne through its launch, through its first five years, setting the organization on solid footing for future growth, serving small- and medium-sized independent science publishers. Heather was appointed executive director of SPARC in 2005 and has since focused her energies on the mission of SPARC, which is to support the open and equitable sharing of articles, data, and educational resources.
TODD CARPENTER: Under her stewardship, SPARC has become among the leading international organizations, advocating for open-access policies, practices, and now has affiliates in Japan, Europe, and now Africa. SPARC represents a global network of more than 600 institutions worldwide. Heather is also a selfless contributor to community initiatives. Her services included terms on the board of directors of PLOS, the Public Resource, DuraSpace, EIFL, the Center for Open Science, OurResearch, and many others.
TODD CARPENTER: SPARC has grown tremendously under Heather's leadership. The activities have expanded both domestically and internationally. And while advocating for open access to scholarly research, SPARC has also become active in the areas supporting open educational resources and advocating for open data. We can all agree that over the past several decades, openness has been one of the most significant trends.
TODD CARPENTER: As a community, we have moved from a place where open access was a fringe, outlier activity amongst a small group of advocates to become widely accepted, if not a dominating force, in the science community. No longer are there debates about the viability or values associated with open access or its role in the scholarly ecosystem. Openness is widely accepted as an ideal to strive for, is driven communities forward toward sharing and recognizing the challenges of students facing affordable textbooks.
TODD CARPENTER: The openness movement has transformed the business and services across our industry. And Heather has played a crucial role in that. I've known Heather for coming on 20 years now and have the utmost respect for her and her leadership. She's an amazing person who's had a tremendous impact on our community and the future landscape of the information distribution industry.
TODD CARPENTER: Is my great honor to present Heather Joseph. I'm going to now pass to Ana Van Gulick who will introduce Heather so that she can provide the Miles Conrad Lecture. Ana, over to you.
ANA VAN GULICK: All right. Lovely. Thank you, Todd. Hi, everyone. I'm Ana Van Gulick from Figshare. And we're very happy to be sponsoring NISO Plus 2021 and to be hosting the NISO Plus repository in Figshare, where you'll be able to find-- where you can find all the available slides from last year's conference.
ANA VAN GULICK: And as soon as possible, you'll find all the slides from this year's conference. It's a great pleasure to introduce Heather Joseph winner of the 2021 Miles Conrad Award. As Todd said, Heather served as the executive director of SPARC since 2005, working to support broadening access to the results of scholarly research through enabling open access publishing, archiving, and policies on a local, national, and international level.
ANA VAN GULICK: She's also the convener of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, consumer groups, and student organizations who work to ensure that results of publicly-funded research are openly accessible to the public. Heather serves on the board of directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, including the Public Library of Science. And she a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general and on open access in particular.
ANA VAN GULICK: Congratulations to Heather, and I'll pass it over to her now for her talk.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you, Ana. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and get started. Great. Hopefully you can all see that and hear me well.
SPEAKER: You sound great.
TODD CARPENTER: Yes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'd like to, in particular, thank the board of directors of NISO for selecting me to receive the Miles Conrad Award. It's truly an honor, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to Todd for the lovely introduction, and Ana as well. But mostly thanks to all of you for Zooming in today. It's a pleasure to be here.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I only wish we were all together in person, but hopefully soon. It felt ridiculously odd to think that I've actually had a long enough career to even contemplate receiving something that's framed as a lifetime achievement award. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized it's actually been a pretty long haul for me. I've spent the last 32 years of my career working on scholarly communications and specifically, being focused on trying to advance a system of sharing knowledge that's both open by default and equitable by design-- a system where everyone, everywhere can contribute to and also benefit from the free exchange of knowledge.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I'd like to use my time together with you today to talk a little bit about why this focus on openness and increasingly, on the combination of openness and equity, has been such a central focus for myself and also for the community that I've been privileged to serve and take an honest look at both how far we've come, but also how far we still have left to go to make this vision a reality.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And over the course of my career, as Todd noted, I have worked as a managing editor, as a publisher, as an online product developer, as a policy person, and as an executive director-- really disparate-seeming roles. But at their heart, all of the work that I've done and that I continue to do is really advocacy work. It's work that is geared towards creating systems-level change, and it's also work that's firmly rooted in a social justice context.
HEATHER JOSEPH: In one of the last in-person meetings that I had the pleasure of participating in in the before times of the pandemic was a pan-African symposium on open access to knowledge in December of 2019 that took place just outside of Cape Town, where the opening keynote was the absolutely amazing Thuli Madonsela, who's a South African lawyer and law professor who is really well known for a wide variety of social justice advocacy work.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But she's probably best known as one of the drafters of South Africa's Constitution. And Thuli opened this Open Access Symposium by working to contextualize the importance of open access to knowledge and to information as a social justice issue in a social justice framing. And she reminded us that day that social justice movements may have really widely varying foci. They can be centered on gender equity, civil rights, anti-globalization, or any of a host of things.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But they all share the commonality that they're firmly rooted in the way in which human rights can be manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society, which is just super important to keep in mind when we're talking about open access to knowledge, because access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. And it's enshrined as such in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 of the Declaration notes that everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and in particular, to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The critical importance of this right is also reflected in the UN's Global Goals, which are also known as the Sustainable Development Goals, and which really serve as the UN's current blueprint and action plan through 2030 for ensuring a better future for all citizens of the world. And ensuring access to knowledge is both specifically called out in Goal 16, which calls for building effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions and ensuring public access to information, which is really important to have it called out in its own goal.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But what's even more important is that the UN has explicitly recognized that ensuring the free flow of knowledge-- open access to knowledge-- is a crosscutting priority that has the potential to accelerate progress towards all of these Global Goals. And when you look, and you unpack these goals, you recognize that they're almost all universally dependent on facilitating the free flow of information and knowledge among communities and across geographic borders.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And these are truly large-scale goals. They underscore that the changes that we need to make to improve the way we share knowledge have to also take place on this global systems level and also ideally to be firmly rooted in the principles of social justice. And we recognize-- and I think it's been a key driver for me and the organizations that I've had the privilege to work for-- we recognize that to be truly effective, our strategies and solutions for improving our collective knowledge-sharing system also have to comprehensively address all of the primary social justice principles.
HEATHER JOSEPH: All four of them-- access, participation, equity, and rights. And ultimately, this notion is what drives me and what drives SPARC and our community. But I want to be sure to point out that I didn't start out my career with this explicit vision and framing in the front of my mind, not by a long shot. It's grown and come into focus over the arc of my career. But I was really fortunate to have had the chance to work for and with some incredibly smart, visionary, and most importantly, unbelievably generous people, who gave me some foundational opportunities to progress.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I just want to take a moment to highlight three of those examples in particular. As Todd noted, my first job in scholarly communication was with the American Astronomical Society. And I actually started there in 1989 as their publications manager, not as a scientist. I'm not a scientist, not by a long shot. In fact, I thought I wanted to be a journalist when I started out my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I grew up in the era of Watergate, and I thought my ideal vision of a career was being some female, super version of Woodward and Bernstein combined, breaking major political stories. But I quickly learned in, really, my first investigative journalism class at American University, that I had neither the aptitude nor the inclination to want to ask people questions they didn't want to answer.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So investigative journalism was out. But what I did learn was that I loved being a part of the newspapers, and the publishing, and publications process, particularly the business aspect of the process. Which is, in fact, what brought me to the AAS in the first place, was that they offered tuition reimbursement to help me get my master's in business administration at night while I worked learning about scholarly communication.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I'm grateful to the AAS for that opportunity and for doing that for me. But working-- being a part of that organization did so much more. And it primarily did so much more because of the executive director at the time, Peter Boyce, who really had an approach to running a nonprofit scientific society and publishing organization that shaped everything that I do and everything that I've done in my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Peter really had a remarkable zest for approaching the communication of science. And I can remember really early-- it must have been in the first few months of working there that Peter came and said to the staff, hey, you guys need to be aware that there's this incredible thing called ARPANET. It wasn't the internet yet. It was ARPANET and the offshoot of NSFNET.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And Peter said to us, our scientists are already collecting their data electronically. They're sharing it with each other that way. And pretty soon, here's what's going to happen. They're going to turn to us and say, we're doing all of this stuff electronically, but when we want to submit an abstract for a meeting, or an article for ApJ or the AJ-- one of our journals-- we have to slow down, stop, and put it on paper.
HEATHER JOSEPH: You guys are a bottleneck, and we need to be ready for it. And the remarkable thing about Peter is he said this without one iota of any worry in his voice. He was just so excited. To Peter, the internet was a new opportunity to be welcomed and leveraged. It's kind of an amazing way to be introduced to this seminal changing technology. And Peter just had a particularly enthusiastic and endearing way of making you unafraid of technology, from broaching the internet to us that way by really making sure you were comfortable with technology, even if you hadn't grown up with it.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Which, frankly, in '89 and '90, most of us had not grown up with computers on our desks. One of my strongest memories, also of Peter, was him walking into my office and taking the-- with a screwdriver-- and taking the cover off of one of those big CPU units that used to go under your desk when you had one of the early PCs, and taking the blunt end of the screwdriver and whacking on the motherboard to show one of my colleagues that, see, you really can't do anything to hurt this thing.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Computers are here in service of you. You're not going to screw anything up. Just a remarkable way to make us comfortable with embracing the opportunities of technology. I'm really grateful that we heard the words tech and SGML in the introduction to George. So George, this portion is also for you. Peter threw us in the deep end, and he trusted that we'd be able to float.
HEATHER JOSEPH: One of the things that he did early on in my career was bring me into working with him to looking at how our scientists were writing-- their writing and sharing their abstracts for meetings and their papers for journals. And they were using LawTech, mainly because it can handle complex mathematical equations and the symbols that needed to be represented. And because of this, I dutifully went to all the tech users group meetings, TUG meetings that I needed to.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I became a part of our umbrella organizations-- the American Institute of Physics, RepTech Working Group-- working on creating a flavor of LawTech just for our particular journals. Although granted, I will grant you that I probably cried 9 times out of 10 on the way home from those meetings because I was in over my head. I never mastered it, but it didn't matter, because I learned enough to understand the role of markup language in the scientific communication process.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And this was just in time, because at this point, in the early '90s, the web was just emerging from CERN. And finding a way to take a LawTech and to represent it in a format that could take advantage of this emerging platform-- the web-- became the first major project that I worked on in my professional career. I worked with Peter and ultimately, with a wonderful, collaborative team of people from our publishing organizations-- The University of Chicago Press and the American Institute of Physics, from the federal agencies, particularly NASA and ADAS, the Astronomical Data and Abstracting Services, and also, probably most importantly to me, in partnership with librarians from the astronomical community-- from Space Telescope and NOAO and others.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We really focused on finding a way to convert LawTech to a language that would display on the web. And also, as we all know, what we've been spending our careers doing-- trying to make the scientific content and research content more easily discoverable and searchable at a granular level. And that meant, of course, using structured markup. At the time, SGML was the language that we used.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Again, as Todd said-- you did some pretty remarkable legwork, Todd, in that bio-- we got a grant from NSF to be able to do this. And again, even though I was a 20-something still newbie, Peter made me co-PI on that grant, and we were off to the races. It's some of the hardest work that I ever had to do, but also some of the most rewarding, because we also had fun as a team while we did it.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I can still remember, for example, one year, in order to get to the bar at our Christmas party at the AAS, you had to be able to say the phrase, as long as the core of your electronic publishing program is an SGML tag database, the possibilities for derivative products are endless. I can remember it. It's 30-some odd years later. What's more, my then boyfriend, now husband, who's a sociologist, can still repeat that phrase.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It was really something that shaped me. We ultimately delivered a successful prototype electronic journal out of the project. The electronic ApJ Letters-- electronic-- sorry, Astrophysical Journal of Letters. But more importantly, my entire world view of scientific communications and of sharing knowledge was shaped by my time at the AAS. It really taught me that scholarly communication and scientific communication was really all about figuring out how to help researchers communicate what they wanted, when they wanted, in the format and over the channels they wanted to use, and that the internet was an opportunity to be explored and to leverage to do this better.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It also struck me as I was looking back that it taught me something else-- that what we were actually communicating was information on behalf of the community, really just the building blocks of knowledge, and that the ultimate packaging that that information was displayed in was fluid and up to the community. And I think, because I didn't grow up, as I said, as a scientist-- I didn't grow up with journals.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Journal articles were never part of my psyche. And my first job, really, this first project, was deconstructing them. I think I just carried forward that they're just structured data, and that that data could easily be structured differently. And it wasn't up to me to dictate what that looked like. It was up to the community. And this grounding has really served me well throughout the work that I've done in my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And it served me particularly well when I left the physical sciences and went to work for the American Society for Cell Biology, where I had the second experience that added a critical dimension to my approach to knowledge sharing and scholarly communication. And that was being at the ASCB in 1999 when Harold Varmus-- who was then the director of NIH-- proposed a radically new approach to sharing science and scientific communication.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And again, Harold was motivated by something very similar to Peter's motivation. He was aware that, seven years after prototype ejournals came out, that people were still not-- the community still was not taking full advantage of the power of the internet to, not only communicate science widely but doing so without significant barriers in place. So Harold-- along with Pat Brown, who became the co-founder of Public Library of Science, and David Lipman, who went on to run PubMed Central-- proposed establishing a new platform called E-biomed, which would be housed by the NIH and that would hold quote unquote "reports of biomedical-- reports on biomedical research." And more importantly, make them openly available to all.
HEATHER JOSEPH: They proposed that authors could submit works directly to the platform where they could either be presented immediately to the community in the form of unreviewed pre-prints or move into any one of a number of peer review streams run by an existing journal or by just a subset of any disciplinary community. As those of you who were around then know and those of you who might not have gone through it personally can well imagine, the proposal was met by like a literal firestorm of controversy, and questions, and consternation throughout the community.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I went back to look at the proposal in preparation for this talk, and I found something that I didn't realize when it first came out. The E-biomed proposal came out in May of 1999. And a month later, it was reposted with an addendum that attempted to address some of the larger, more controversial aspects of it. And what I didn't notice until I went back was that one of the folks who actually helped to refine and shape the proposal was Anthony Fauci.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I don't think I would have noticed that if it hadn't been for this being pandemic and Fauci being ubiquitous. But I thought, that's pretty cool that he was involved in this. So just a little aside there. I'm smiling about it now, but I wasn't really smiling about it at the time. I think my reaction to this proposal was pretty similar to most other folks who were responsible for journal publications processes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that was, honestly, well, there's 10 years of my career down the tubes. But fortunately, I was once again in a position where really generously-thinking people that I worked with and for-- namely the editors of my journal, David Botstein, Keith Yamamoto, Elizabeth Blackburn, to name a few-- said, hey, as journal publishers, this makes us nervous.
HEATHER JOSEPH: This is kind of squirrely. But as scientists, we really like the way this proposal sounds. And they taught me to not make a snap judgment, but to stop, to think it through, and most importantly, to not be afraid to approach the folks who are proposing this new idea directly and have as many conversations with them as possible to try and understand where they were coming from and where they were trying to go and then to see if there were things that we could do to contribute to getting to be a part of it-- shaping the change from the inside, rather than just worrying about it from the outside.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And although E-biomed as a platform ultimately wasn't launched with that full vision, it did become PubMed Central. And I am incredibly proud that the journal that I managed at the time, Molecular Biology of the Cell, actually became the first journal to commit its full content to that database. But what was most important, perhaps, about the E-biomed proposal was that it was the first time I, and I'd wager that most people, really heard the term open access.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that's because the proposal really contains the fundamental elements of an open-knowledge and open access-knowledge environment. It's an author-driven environment that offers publishing on open platforms that are subsidized by the funder so that they're free to publish on and ultimately to access, with authors, the academy, retaining ownership of their own intellectual output, and peer review occurring where and when the community chooses it to happen.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Really important. And it leads me to my final piece of looking back. I was fortunate to be at SPARC when, in December of 2001, the Open Society Institutes brought together stakeholders who were already working on proposals, including E-biomed was one of those proposals, but working on proposals all over the world to optimize using the internet to share research articles-- that fundamental component.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The result of the meeting in Budapest, which SPARC participated in, was the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Declaration. And the meeting produced a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, a statement of commitment, but most importantly, it produced the beginning of a global movement-- the open access movement. The meeting in Budapest and the Declaration were followed almost immediately over the next year and a half by similar, seminal meetings in Bethesda, in Berlin, and Salvador, Bahia that quickly gained momentum and galvanized a community.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And for me, Budapest was notable for tying together the social justice angle and the technology pieces of the knowledge-sharing environment and puzzle. The Budapest Declaration is a document that I go back to time and time again as a lodestone, a touchstone, a guide star for the work that we're doing and the work that I do on a daily basis. It's a reminder of and an expression of the ethos that we're working towards.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The Declaration starts by saying, "an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good." It's a vision based on opportunity. This is just a theme that has gone through my entire career. The opportunity that we have with the advent of the internet to, for the first time in human history, marry this kind of new technology with the long tradition of scholars freely sharing the results of their work.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And of course, the public good that this can make possible is the worldwide distribution of this layer of literature coupled with the completely free and unrestricted access and use of this materials by all. And the Declaration would have been great, and Budapest would have been amazing if it had simply stopped there, but I think it's so important to understand that the Declaration went further.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It didn't just talk about openness as if that were the end unto itself. Not open because it's better than closed-- not open for open's sake, but open in order to do specific things. The Declaration goes on to talk about, specifically, opening up access in this way, to this layer of information, can accelerate the pace of research and discovery, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Declaration set us on the path to where we are today and where we are in the open access movement and the acceptance of open as an enabling strategy. And we have come so far. We, by and large, we're no longer having conversations about why open? Or whether open? But rather, how best to get there?
HEATHER JOSEPH: About implementation. Open access has just become far more ubiquitous to us. There's a lot of different ways that we can see its ubiquity. But I honestly have to say that I first realized how far we'd come in terms of open access becoming part of the landscape one day when I was doing a search on the Twitter hashtag, just Twitter hashtag for open access. And it no longer returned just a bunch of tweets by open access advocates arguing amongst ourselves about green versus gold or CC BY versus CC NC.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But rather, it returns open access content tagged as open access by individual authors, by labs, by museums, by publishers. It's really become part of the landscape. And we see this. We see this, obviously, in the way open access journal publishing has become the fastest growing segment of the journal landscape. We see it through having a growing set of, not only open access repositories worldwide, but increasingly, even more importantly, a growing set of highly-functional networks of repositories, with OpenAIRE in the European Union and the LA Referencia in Latin America being really standout examples of infrastructure that underpins this growing open knowledge environment.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Just as critically, we see a growing acceptance and adoption of open access as an enabling strategy. Open in order to do what? To help us achieve our core mission by institutions of all shapes and sizes around the world, not just academic institutions, although they are adopting OA, but also multinational organizations like the World Bank, which embraced open access by opening up access to its critical economic data and publications and partially in response to criticism that they were not operating transparently.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And certainly, as we know, as I noted earlier, the United Nations community of organizations, not just the UN but also UNESCO, have embraced open access as an accelerator for their global mission of improving society for all. And one of the things I think in the current environment that's so notable and stands out to me as really telling about where we've come in terms of openness and open access becoming part of the landscape, is that research funders are now among the leading advocates for open access and are actively collaborating to extend and amplify the uptake of open practices, whether they're collections or collectives of government and national funders, as we see in cOAlition S, or collections and collaboratives of private foundations and philanthropies, like the group of 15 of the largest biomedical research funders in the US that make up the Open Research Funders Group, which SPARC has the privilege of convening.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The Open Research Funders Group, I think, is an example, also, of what these research funders are doing in terms of adopting and promoting openness as an enabler of their core missions. This group of funders, which is pretty massive-- they have about $100 billion in assets and give out about $10 billion in research funding annually-- are not only utilizing the opportunity to enact policies to require open access to their research outputs, they're also catalyzing critical work on culture and behavioral change to realign incentives-- and research institutions and in their funding agencies to properly incentivize and support open behaviors as a priority.
HEATHER JOSEPH: People often ask me if I could go back to the beginning of the open access movement and change anything, what would it be? And there's two things that I would change. One would be this-- that we had tackled the need to change incentives explicitly earlier on, right at the onset of the open access movement, and that we hadn't shied away from it out of concerns that it was hard enough to, frankly, be working to turn the Queen Mary of journals and the journal industry, that adding on, trying to reform tenure, and promotion, and research evaluation, was just the third rail.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We would never make progress. I do wish we had deliberately taken that on earlier. And I'll talk about what the second thing is in a moment. But this really is something that I do wish we had had attacked earlier on. And the final observation that I want to make about where we are in the current acceptance of open access is just to observe that in the middle of a pandemic, one of the very first things that science and health ministers did from around the world was call for the creation of an open access database of all coronavirus-related papers, which was put together right in the beginning of the pandemic.
HEATHER JOSEPH: They recognized that they needed papers that were immediately freely available, that were formatted in a way to make them, essentially, AI ready, so they were fully machine searchable, and that you could advance computational analysis on. A database was put together. It contains about 125,000 papers. And that database has been accessed or downloaded for machining more than 120 million times since it was put together, again, at the end of March, at the beginning of the pandemic.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It's a breathtaking milestone. All of the things, to me, that I have related are breathtaking milestones. This one in particular stands out. And it stands out because it's both the symbol of how far we've come, and at the same time, just a crushing example of how far we have yet to go. We shouldn't have to wait for an emergency like a global health pandemic to break the glass and retrieve papers on a specific issue to create a corpus of machine-readable, open access papers.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We are long past the time where open availability and full computation for all journal literature should be the norm for us. And it's not just that we haven't met the full-access goal that presents a challenge in us going forward. If we're going to truly treat knowledge sharing as a universal human right and to truly optimize a system so that everyone can benefit, we need strategies and solutions that address the whole picture.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Leslie Chan, who's a wonderful open access advocate, I think plays a role that is really important in the open access movement. And we've been trying to be deliberate and get better at looking inward at what we're doing right and what we're not achieving. And Leslie has noted that we've been too focused on access and access barriers in specific and not focused enough as a movement on the various forms of structural powers in knowledge production and how they reconfigure and affect our value systems.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So it comes back to this notion of not just addressing the access portion of the social justice principles. We have to address all four principles-- access, participation, equity, and rights. And that's the second thing that I really would change if I could go back in time and change things about the open access movement, would honestly be the name. As pity open access is, access in the name implies that that's all we care about-- just getting to information.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that's, in fact, not the case. There's so many other elements and dimensions that we have to deliberately nurture in order to have a system that works in the way that makes it something that actually advances all of the interests of people globally and in particular, participation. At that same meeting in South Africa in December, Jaya Raju, who is a library leader at the University of Cape Town, eloquently talked about the need for unhindered, multi-directional, participate in knowledge dissemination and production.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Specifically hitting that need for addressing to making sure that we're hitting the participation angle. Who participates in the production of knowledge? Whose voices are represented in the global intellectual conversation that Budapest calls for? And whose voices are being left out? The open access community has been working hard to center those questions in our work over the past several years, and we've actually devoted the last few Open Access Week programming themes to directly working on the critical need to address issues of increasing participation in equity and knowledge sharing.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because we really do have a problem here. This is a map of the world s by the number of articles published by authors from each country, put together by Juan Pablo Alperin and his colleagues in the ScholCommLab in Vancouver. The data about publications by country is sourced from Scopus, and the population and GDP data is from the World Bank. And you can see from this representation that we have a tremendous imbalance in where voices are represented in the current journal literature.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And we don't just have-- although this particular map represents a North/South, developed/less developed countries divide and disparity-- if you took data, I think, from any level-- if you tried to recreate this map, for example, by looking at output by institutions in the United States-- we'd also see disparities and inequities there.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We'd see inequities and disparities of participation by less well-funded more well-funded institutions, gender differences, differences by regional and language disparities. We have a massive issue of under inclusion, not just in the scientific communications process, but also in the research process itself, unfortunately. Last month, Sudip Parikh, who is the fairly new CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, summed up the pressing need for a far more deliberate strategy for inclusiveness on a systems level in research in an essay that he published in Science.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And he highlighted that giving attention, highlighting the previously ignored, the underrepresented voices, does not invalidate the already admired. No one gets kicked out of the tent by us being more inclusive. The tent just gets bigger. We really need to think about large-scale changes in improving the way we share knowledge. And this points to doing so on a systems level.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And it can be really intimidating to think about how to even get started on making these kinds of changes on a systems level. And I think that it starts with us having to make consistent, deliberate, and individual actions on a daily basis. Whatever our role is in the research and education ecosystem, each one of us as individuals, we're each faced with making choices in our daily work that can have an impact, either positive or negative, on the system that we're working to build.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And this requires a really big change in our mindset. We're much more deliberative about thinking about all of the decisions that we make through the lens of our respective missions and values. We have to carefully and deliberately center inclusion and equity implications whose interests are served, who might be left out, when we're deciding everything from what business models we're choosing to support in our knowledge-sharing environment, what technology we're building and how we're building it, or what technology we're buying.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We need to center issues of exclusivity, participation, and rights when we decide-- when we're thinking about what rights we empower knowledge producers and knowledge users with. We need to center these issues when we're deciding what outputs and behaviors we're choosing to incentivize and reward. And also really importantly, to Leslie's point, we need to center them when we're deciding how we construct our leadership and our governance values-- our power structures within the community and within this system.
HEATHER JOSEPH: There's no single silver-bullet action that we can take to address this. We can only make these kinds of changes through a series of deliberate and consistent choices that can then cumulatively scale up to a systems level. And that's, really, the biggest, single biggest challenge, I think we have in front of us moving forward. That's recognizing that equity has to be deliberately and proactively built into the knowledge-sharing system at all of these possible, critical choice points.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It can't be left to be bolted on later as an afterthought in order to have a system of knowledge sharing that's both open by default and equitable by design for everybody. And we've seen from experience what happens when we don't make this a priority. Whenever we catch ourselves-- and I include myself in this front and center-- whenever we catch ourselves saying things like, when I'm making a decision, oh, I'll just do it this way for now and then figure out how to deal with equity issues later on, we're just fooling ourselves.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because once we make a decision, we lose the leverage for change. And inequities that we haven't addressed become baked into the system. They become entrenched. And we understand that, because we spent the last few decades trying to unpack and undo the fundamental imbalances and inequities in our system of sharing knowledge and, in particularly, our scholarly communication and research system.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We can't afford to repeat the same mistakes by treating issues of equity, of fundamental fairness, and ensuring that knowledge sharing is treated as a human right as an afterthought. Again, we've been trying to be very deliberate about this in the open community and using every opportunity that we can to stop, slow down, and think deliberately about taking action to build structural equity and inclusion into our systems.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, and that inextricable link between access to knowledge and the fulfillment of basic human rights serves as an essential reminder of the need for each of us to think critically and act deliberately, individually and together. I only wish that I had two lifetimes to work with you all towards making this vision a reality. Thank you very much.
HEATHER JOSEPH:
TODD CARPENTER: All right. Heather, thank you so much. That was a brilliant, brilliant talk, of course. First of all, before the questions, I want to acknowledge that there is a piece of hardware for you. We will have this shipped to you. It says, the NISO board of directors presents the 2021 Miles Conrad Memorial Award to Heather Joseph for her lifetime achievements in the information community.
TODD CARPENTER: I think no one is as deserving as you are, Heather. Thank you.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Kind of you to say. Thank you, Todd. And thank you, again, to the NISO board.
TODD CARPENTER: Some interesting question came in, and I have a couple of other interesting questions. So I will start with the question from the audience. Do you believe that open is still a movement? At what point, in your long view, does it stop becoming a movement and does it just start becoming the default? And what would that look like? And how can we get us closer to that default?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah. I think it's still is a movement, because we haven't gotten to the cultural change tipping point. When I define-- we use the phrase, SPARC's goal is setting the default to open in research and education. What does that mean? To me, it means that we will have achieved that goal when anybody walks on to a university, or college campus, a higher ed campus, or into a research facility, and expects to share the results of what they're working on and their teaching and learning materials, unless or until someone gives them a compelling reason not to.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And we're not there yet in having that be the automatic assumption. We're getting closer. But I think until we can really see that zeitgeist, that expectation in action, we're going to be a movement with work to do.
TODD CARPENTER: Always lots of work to do.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: Related to that, my question has to do with that map of global scientific output. There was an interesting talk on Tuesday, I think it was, showing how the average citation graph has moved from Europe, in the 18th century, over the Atlantic and moving towards Asia. Two questions related to that.
TODD CARPENTER: The first is, from your perspective, how is the worldwide community relating to open? But other, beyond that, are there practical things that we can bring this more equitable, more inclusive world into reality?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Those are-- it's a great observation, and also really good and hard questions. I think one of-- there's a bunch of things that we're struggling with. In terms of enabling participation to shift that citation graph, one of the things that we have to do is look at the kind of barriers that we're throwing up inadvertently, in terms of participation to people to add their voices.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Language barriers, first and foremost, being one of the major barriers. We also tend to think about the platforms and the containers of knowledge as being one thing, as being articles. We need to be better and more deliberate about being inclusive of other forms of scholarship that aren't articles. The ways of transmitting knowledge look very different in different cultures, and we haven't been activist enough in changing the structures-- technologically, who is making decisions about what's knowledge and what's not knowledge, whose knowledge is included in the record, who determines what the record is.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We really do, I think, have to be deliberate and thoughtful about reviewing and revising all of those structures to be able to be more inclusive for that shift to happen. Again, it's not easy. It's not like there is one silver bullet thing that you can say, well, if we just did x, this would happen. It takes, I think, each one of us relearning how we think about, and approaching, and retraining ourselves to approach this process completely differently in order for these actions to add up to something that results in a system that is much more along the lines of the inclusiveness that we want to see in power.
TODD CARPENTER: And related to that, you had talked a lot about incentives. And I think incentives are huge here. Both, not only-- that runs into what you were talking about the types of content. We force people into publishing-- you have to have a journal article. That's all tied to the incentive marketplace. What kind of strategies might we employ that are focused on connecting openness and recognition?
TODD CARPENTER: And are there maybe standards? Because NISO. But are there ways that we could connect those two things?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah. One of the first things that we can do is, I think, stop treating both the incentives and knowledge sharing as a market. That's a really, really tough barrier for people to overcome. We've commoditized the exchange of knowledge in a way and to a degree that incentives are part of propping up a market, which then puts up another barrier for people to be able to participate. Strategies for connecting openness to incentives-- the National Academies is convening that roundtable that the Open Research Funders Group is part of the cohort of looking at changing the incentive structure to better support open practices, open access, but open science practices in general by examining from two angles.
HEATHER JOSEPH: One, if I'm a research funder, I'm funding the research in order to achieve certain outputs. What I want to look at is, are those-- how well are those ultimate goals being achieved? And we're having them look at those goals in partnership with university leaders who share similar kinds of mission-critical goals-- the diffusion of knowledge, engaging the community with intellectual output.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Those are different kinds of things that we need to look at incentivizing that are directly tied to openness that we're not incentivizing now. Are there standards? Probably. Have we thought about them enough? No. Could NISO? Yes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: All sorts of things in that direction.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. I'd like to end on just to hear your thoughts a little bit about tying it back to mission. Because, as you said, incentives have to align with mission. Earlier this morning, there was a session on library assessment, and you can start an assessment process by, what can you count? But that's sort of backwards. If you should-- instead of saying, we want to incentivize you to do this, how does that tie to our mission?
TODD CARPENTER: And what is the mission of science communication? It's not commodity-- it's not monetizing their outputs. I'd like to just let you riff on that for a few seconds.
HEATHER JOSEPH: My whole talk was a riff on that, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: I know.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It's a good setup, though. And I do think that mission-critical focus is, I think, what's allowing us to make the kind of progress that we're making, particularly the funder-drive progress. Because they have recognized-- one of the most powerful statements that I heard about open access and funders came from Trevor Mundel, who's the head of the Global Health Initiative at the Gates Foundation. And that framing of, open in order to resonated with him, because the goal of the Global Health Program at Gates is to save lives.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And Trevor connected open access as taking out even one day's delay in getting data or knowledge into the hands of researchers, because even one day's delay could affect saving someone's life. So his, open in order to, which was mission critical, was to save lives. But you can fill in that blank wherever you are in the ecosystem. If you are, again, a university president, your mission is, maybe, the diffusion of knowledge with the community, maybe engagement.
HEATHER JOSEPH: If you're a student, you may want an open option for learning materials in order to be able to afford going to college, to be able to get an education. All kinds of different ways that you can look at open as an enabling strategy that meet individuals in our community, wherever we live at every level.
TODD CARPENTER: I think that is a fantastic place to end. Heather, thank you so, so very much for this talk, but also for everything that you've done to support scholarly communications and the information community. Thank you.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
TODD CARPENTER: All right, so that draws the Miles Conrad Lecture section to a close. Thank you all. We will be following this up with a social hour. Heather, I understand, will be joining us, so if you want to find her there and probe her with some other questions, I'm sure she'd appreciate that. But thank you all, and enjoy the rest of NISO Plus.
Segment:0 .
TODD CARPENTER: I'm going to move on to the Miles Conrad Award presentation, which is a core function, a core feature, of the NFAIS and now NISO Plus Conference. Give you a little bit of background about who Miles Conrad was, since I'm sure many of you weren't active in the information industry when Miles Conrad was a leader.
TODD CARPENTER: In the 1950s, Miles Conrad was director of Biological Abstracts. Now it's BIOSIS Previews, which is distributed by Clarivate. But in 1957, Conrad organized a meeting of 14 A and I services to discuss the implications of the new government investments that were taking place in science, communications in the United States as a result of the Sputnik space launch.
TODD CARPENTER: And in 1958, that led to the formation of NFAIS face. Unfortunately, Miles Conrad passed away at the seemingly younger and younger age of 53 in 1964. Following Conrad's death, the NFAIS board of directors established an annual lecture series named in his honor that would be a central feature of the annual conference.
TODD CARPENTER: Some select members of the Miles Conrad Award recipient community include the CEO of EBSCO, Tim Collins; Dame Lynne Brindley, who was chief executive at the British Library; Frederick Kilgour, the founding director of OCLC. Béla Hatvany, who is co-founder of Silver Platter Information. Robert Massie, the president of Cambridge-- sorry, of Chemical Abstract Services.
TODD CARPENTER: Bob Snyder, founder and chairman of the Cambridge Information Group. And last year we honored Jim Neal, university librarian at Columbia University. It is an amazing list of industry leaders over the decades. And I'm pleased to recognize now Heather Joseph as the 2021 Miles Conrad Award winner for her lifetime achievements to the information community.
TODD CARPENTER: Heather Joseph is director of SPARC. She began her work in scholarly publishing at the American Astronomical Society, where she collaborated in the creation of one of the first fully-electronic journals-- electronic Astrophysical Journal Letters-- with some support and funding from the National Science Foundation. She left AAS for a brief stint at Elsevier before taking on the role of publications director at the Society for Neuroscience.
TODD CARPENTER: There she managed the transition of the Journal of Neuroscience from a print to web publication. Thereafter, she assumed the role of director of publishing at the American Society for Cell Biology where she led the transition of the-- implementation of online peer review system, transitioning the journal from print to online, and also saw the inclusion of that journal in the NIH's new PubMed Central database-- one of the first publications to be included.
TODD CARPENTER: It's a sign of how far we have come as an industry to think that these things are now commonplace. But back in the 1990s, these were big things to undertake and to achieve. In 2000, Heather was appointed president and COO of BioOne, a nonprofit collaboration. In this role, Joseph-- Heather led the start-up phase in an entrepreneurial environment, leading the business's operational, administrative, and strategic development.
TODD CARPENTER: She helped BioOne through its launch, through its first five years, setting the organization on solid footing for future growth, serving small- and medium-sized independent science publishers. Heather was appointed executive director of SPARC in 2005 and has since focused her energies on the mission of SPARC, which is to support the open and equitable sharing of articles, data, and educational resources.
TODD CARPENTER: Under her stewardship, SPARC has become among the leading international organizations, advocating for open-access policies, practices, and now has affiliates in Japan, Europe, and now Africa. SPARC represents a global network of more than 600 institutions worldwide. Heather is also a selfless contributor to community initiatives. Her services included terms on the board of directors of PLOS, the Public Resource, DuraSpace, EIFL, the Center for Open Science, OurResearch, and many others.
TODD CARPENTER: SPARC has grown tremendously under Heather's leadership. The activities have expanded both domestically and internationally. And while advocating for open access to scholarly research, SPARC has also become active in the areas supporting open educational resources and advocating for open data. We can all agree that over the past several decades, openness has been one of the most significant trends.
TODD CARPENTER: As a community, we have moved from a place where open access was a fringe, outlier activity amongst a small group of advocates to become widely accepted, if not a dominating force, in the science community. No longer are there debates about the viability or values associated with open access or its role in the scholarly ecosystem. Openness is widely accepted as an ideal to strive for, is driven communities forward toward sharing and recognizing the challenges of students facing affordable textbooks.
TODD CARPENTER: The openness movement has transformed the business and services across our industry. And Heather has played a crucial role in that. I've known Heather for coming on 20 years now and have the utmost respect for her and her leadership. She's an amazing person who's had a tremendous impact on our community and the future landscape of the information distribution industry.
TODD CARPENTER: Is my great honor to present Heather Joseph. I'm going to now pass to Ana Van Gulick who will introduce Heather so that she can provide the Miles Conrad Lecture. Ana, over to you.
ANA VAN GULICK: All right. Lovely. Thank you, Todd. Hi, everyone. I'm Ana Van Gulick from Figshare. And we're very happy to be sponsoring NISO Plus 2021 and to be hosting the NISO Plus repository in Figshare, where you'll be able to find-- where you can find all the available slides from last year's conference.
ANA VAN GULICK: And as soon as possible, you'll find all the slides from this year's conference. It's a great pleasure to introduce Heather Joseph winner of the 2021 Miles Conrad Award. As Todd said, Heather served as the executive director of SPARC since 2005, working to support broadening access to the results of scholarly research through enabling open access publishing, archiving, and policies on a local, national, and international level.
ANA VAN GULICK: She's also the convener of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, consumer groups, and student organizations who work to ensure that results of publicly-funded research are openly accessible to the public. Heather serves on the board of directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, including the Public Library of Science. And she a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general and on open access in particular.
ANA VAN GULICK: Congratulations to Heather, and I'll pass it over to her now for her talk.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you, Ana. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and get started. Great. Hopefully you can all see that and hear me well.
SPEAKER: You sound great.
TODD CARPENTER: Yes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'd like to, in particular, thank the board of directors of NISO for selecting me to receive the Miles Conrad Award. It's truly an honor, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to Todd for the lovely introduction, and Ana as well. But mostly thanks to all of you for Zooming in today. It's a pleasure to be here.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I only wish we were all together in person, but hopefully soon. It felt ridiculously odd to think that I've actually had a long enough career to even contemplate receiving something that's framed as a lifetime achievement award. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized it's actually been a pretty long haul for me. I've spent the last 32 years of my career working on scholarly communications and specifically, being focused on trying to advance a system of sharing knowledge that's both open by default and equitable by design-- a system where everyone, everywhere can contribute to and also benefit from the free exchange of knowledge.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I'd like to use my time together with you today to talk a little bit about why this focus on openness and increasingly, on the combination of openness and equity, has been such a central focus for myself and also for the community that I've been privileged to serve and take an honest look at both how far we've come, but also how far we still have left to go to make this vision a reality.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And over the course of my career, as Todd noted, I have worked as a managing editor, as a publisher, as an online product developer, as a policy person, and as an executive director-- really disparate-seeming roles. But at their heart, all of the work that I've done and that I continue to do is really advocacy work. It's work that is geared towards creating systems-level change, and it's also work that's firmly rooted in a social justice context.
HEATHER JOSEPH: In one of the last in-person meetings that I had the pleasure of participating in in the before times of the pandemic was a pan-African symposium on open access to knowledge in December of 2019 that took place just outside of Cape Town, where the opening keynote was the absolutely amazing Thuli Madonsela, who's a South African lawyer and law professor who is really well known for a wide variety of social justice advocacy work.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But she's probably best known as one of the drafters of South Africa's Constitution. And Thuli opened this Open Access Symposium by working to contextualize the importance of open access to knowledge and to information as a social justice issue in a social justice framing. And she reminded us that day that social justice movements may have really widely varying foci. They can be centered on gender equity, civil rights, anti-globalization, or any of a host of things.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But they all share the commonality that they're firmly rooted in the way in which human rights can be manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society, which is just super important to keep in mind when we're talking about open access to knowledge, because access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. And it's enshrined as such in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 of the Declaration notes that everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and in particular, to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The critical importance of this right is also reflected in the UN's Global Goals, which are also known as the Sustainable Development Goals, and which really serve as the UN's current blueprint and action plan through 2030 for ensuring a better future for all citizens of the world. And ensuring access to knowledge is both specifically called out in Goal 16, which calls for building effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions and ensuring public access to information, which is really important to have it called out in its own goal.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But what's even more important is that the UN has explicitly recognized that ensuring the free flow of knowledge-- open access to knowledge-- is a crosscutting priority that has the potential to accelerate progress towards all of these Global Goals. And when you look, and you unpack these goals, you recognize that they're almost all universally dependent on facilitating the free flow of information and knowledge among communities and across geographic borders.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And these are truly large-scale goals. They underscore that the changes that we need to make to improve the way we share knowledge have to also take place on this global systems level and also ideally to be firmly rooted in the principles of social justice. And we recognize-- and I think it's been a key driver for me and the organizations that I've had the privilege to work for-- we recognize that to be truly effective, our strategies and solutions for improving our collective knowledge-sharing system also have to comprehensively address all of the primary social justice principles.
HEATHER JOSEPH: All four of them-- access, participation, equity, and rights. And ultimately, this notion is what drives me and what drives SPARC and our community. But I want to be sure to point out that I didn't start out my career with this explicit vision and framing in the front of my mind, not by a long shot. It's grown and come into focus over the arc of my career. But I was really fortunate to have had the chance to work for and with some incredibly smart, visionary, and most importantly, unbelievably generous people, who gave me some foundational opportunities to progress.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I just want to take a moment to highlight three of those examples in particular. As Todd noted, my first job in scholarly communication was with the American Astronomical Society. And I actually started there in 1989 as their publications manager, not as a scientist. I'm not a scientist, not by a long shot. In fact, I thought I wanted to be a journalist when I started out my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I grew up in the era of Watergate, and I thought my ideal vision of a career was being some female, super version of Woodward and Bernstein combined, breaking major political stories. But I quickly learned in, really, my first investigative journalism class at American University, that I had neither the aptitude nor the inclination to want to ask people questions they didn't want to answer.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So investigative journalism was out. But what I did learn was that I loved being a part of the newspapers, and the publishing, and publications process, particularly the business aspect of the process. Which is, in fact, what brought me to the AAS in the first place, was that they offered tuition reimbursement to help me get my master's in business administration at night while I worked learning about scholarly communication.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I'm grateful to the AAS for that opportunity and for doing that for me. But working-- being a part of that organization did so much more. And it primarily did so much more because of the executive director at the time, Peter Boyce, who really had an approach to running a nonprofit scientific society and publishing organization that shaped everything that I do and everything that I've done in my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Peter really had a remarkable zest for approaching the communication of science. And I can remember really early-- it must have been in the first few months of working there that Peter came and said to the staff, hey, you guys need to be aware that there's this incredible thing called ARPANET. It wasn't the internet yet. It was ARPANET and the offshoot of NSFNET.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And Peter said to us, our scientists are already collecting their data electronically. They're sharing it with each other that way. And pretty soon, here's what's going to happen. They're going to turn to us and say, we're doing all of this stuff electronically, but when we want to submit an abstract for a meeting, or an article for ApJ or the AJ-- one of our journals-- we have to slow down, stop, and put it on paper.
HEATHER JOSEPH: You guys are a bottleneck, and we need to be ready for it. And the remarkable thing about Peter is he said this without one iota of any worry in his voice. He was just so excited. To Peter, the internet was a new opportunity to be welcomed and leveraged. It's kind of an amazing way to be introduced to this seminal changing technology. And Peter just had a particularly enthusiastic and endearing way of making you unafraid of technology, from broaching the internet to us that way by really making sure you were comfortable with technology, even if you hadn't grown up with it.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Which, frankly, in '89 and '90, most of us had not grown up with computers on our desks. One of my strongest memories, also of Peter, was him walking into my office and taking the-- with a screwdriver-- and taking the cover off of one of those big CPU units that used to go under your desk when you had one of the early PCs, and taking the blunt end of the screwdriver and whacking on the motherboard to show one of my colleagues that, see, you really can't do anything to hurt this thing.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Computers are here in service of you. You're not going to screw anything up. Just a remarkable way to make us comfortable with embracing the opportunities of technology. I'm really grateful that we heard the words tech and SGML in the introduction to George. So George, this portion is also for you. Peter threw us in the deep end, and he trusted that we'd be able to float.
HEATHER JOSEPH: One of the things that he did early on in my career was bring me into working with him to looking at how our scientists were writing-- their writing and sharing their abstracts for meetings and their papers for journals. And they were using LawTech, mainly because it can handle complex mathematical equations and the symbols that needed to be represented. And because of this, I dutifully went to all the tech users group meetings, TUG meetings that I needed to.
HEATHER JOSEPH: I became a part of our umbrella organizations-- the American Institute of Physics, RepTech Working Group-- working on creating a flavor of LawTech just for our particular journals. Although granted, I will grant you that I probably cried 9 times out of 10 on the way home from those meetings because I was in over my head. I never mastered it, but it didn't matter, because I learned enough to understand the role of markup language in the scientific communication process.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And this was just in time, because at this point, in the early '90s, the web was just emerging from CERN. And finding a way to take a LawTech and to represent it in a format that could take advantage of this emerging platform-- the web-- became the first major project that I worked on in my professional career. I worked with Peter and ultimately, with a wonderful, collaborative team of people from our publishing organizations-- The University of Chicago Press and the American Institute of Physics, from the federal agencies, particularly NASA and ADAS, the Astronomical Data and Abstracting Services, and also, probably most importantly to me, in partnership with librarians from the astronomical community-- from Space Telescope and NOAO and others.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We really focused on finding a way to convert LawTech to a language that would display on the web. And also, as we all know, what we've been spending our careers doing-- trying to make the scientific content and research content more easily discoverable and searchable at a granular level. And that meant, of course, using structured markup. At the time, SGML was the language that we used.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Again, as Todd said-- you did some pretty remarkable legwork, Todd, in that bio-- we got a grant from NSF to be able to do this. And again, even though I was a 20-something still newbie, Peter made me co-PI on that grant, and we were off to the races. It's some of the hardest work that I ever had to do, but also some of the most rewarding, because we also had fun as a team while we did it.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I can still remember, for example, one year, in order to get to the bar at our Christmas party at the AAS, you had to be able to say the phrase, as long as the core of your electronic publishing program is an SGML tag database, the possibilities for derivative products are endless. I can remember it. It's 30-some odd years later. What's more, my then boyfriend, now husband, who's a sociologist, can still repeat that phrase.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It was really something that shaped me. We ultimately delivered a successful prototype electronic journal out of the project. The electronic ApJ Letters-- electronic-- sorry, Astrophysical Journal of Letters. But more importantly, my entire world view of scientific communications and of sharing knowledge was shaped by my time at the AAS. It really taught me that scholarly communication and scientific communication was really all about figuring out how to help researchers communicate what they wanted, when they wanted, in the format and over the channels they wanted to use, and that the internet was an opportunity to be explored and to leverage to do this better.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It also struck me as I was looking back that it taught me something else-- that what we were actually communicating was information on behalf of the community, really just the building blocks of knowledge, and that the ultimate packaging that that information was displayed in was fluid and up to the community. And I think, because I didn't grow up, as I said, as a scientist-- I didn't grow up with journals.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Journal articles were never part of my psyche. And my first job, really, this first project, was deconstructing them. I think I just carried forward that they're just structured data, and that that data could easily be structured differently. And it wasn't up to me to dictate what that looked like. It was up to the community. And this grounding has really served me well throughout the work that I've done in my career.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And it served me particularly well when I left the physical sciences and went to work for the American Society for Cell Biology, where I had the second experience that added a critical dimension to my approach to knowledge sharing and scholarly communication. And that was being at the ASCB in 1999 when Harold Varmus-- who was then the director of NIH-- proposed a radically new approach to sharing science and scientific communication.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And again, Harold was motivated by something very similar to Peter's motivation. He was aware that, seven years after prototype ejournals came out, that people were still not-- the community still was not taking full advantage of the power of the internet to, not only communicate science widely but doing so without significant barriers in place. So Harold-- along with Pat Brown, who became the co-founder of Public Library of Science, and David Lipman, who went on to run PubMed Central-- proposed establishing a new platform called E-biomed, which would be housed by the NIH and that would hold quote unquote "reports of biomedical-- reports on biomedical research." And more importantly, make them openly available to all.
HEATHER JOSEPH: They proposed that authors could submit works directly to the platform where they could either be presented immediately to the community in the form of unreviewed pre-prints or move into any one of a number of peer review streams run by an existing journal or by just a subset of any disciplinary community. As those of you who were around then know and those of you who might not have gone through it personally can well imagine, the proposal was met by like a literal firestorm of controversy, and questions, and consternation throughout the community.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So I went back to look at the proposal in preparation for this talk, and I found something that I didn't realize when it first came out. The E-biomed proposal came out in May of 1999. And a month later, it was reposted with an addendum that attempted to address some of the larger, more controversial aspects of it. And what I didn't notice until I went back was that one of the folks who actually helped to refine and shape the proposal was Anthony Fauci.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And I don't think I would have noticed that if it hadn't been for this being pandemic and Fauci being ubiquitous. But I thought, that's pretty cool that he was involved in this. So just a little aside there. I'm smiling about it now, but I wasn't really smiling about it at the time. I think my reaction to this proposal was pretty similar to most other folks who were responsible for journal publications processes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that was, honestly, well, there's 10 years of my career down the tubes. But fortunately, I was once again in a position where really generously-thinking people that I worked with and for-- namely the editors of my journal, David Botstein, Keith Yamamoto, Elizabeth Blackburn, to name a few-- said, hey, as journal publishers, this makes us nervous.
HEATHER JOSEPH: This is kind of squirrely. But as scientists, we really like the way this proposal sounds. And they taught me to not make a snap judgment, but to stop, to think it through, and most importantly, to not be afraid to approach the folks who are proposing this new idea directly and have as many conversations with them as possible to try and understand where they were coming from and where they were trying to go and then to see if there were things that we could do to contribute to getting to be a part of it-- shaping the change from the inside, rather than just worrying about it from the outside.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And although E-biomed as a platform ultimately wasn't launched with that full vision, it did become PubMed Central. And I am incredibly proud that the journal that I managed at the time, Molecular Biology of the Cell, actually became the first journal to commit its full content to that database. But what was most important, perhaps, about the E-biomed proposal was that it was the first time I, and I'd wager that most people, really heard the term open access.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that's because the proposal really contains the fundamental elements of an open-knowledge and open access-knowledge environment. It's an author-driven environment that offers publishing on open platforms that are subsidized by the funder so that they're free to publish on and ultimately to access, with authors, the academy, retaining ownership of their own intellectual output, and peer review occurring where and when the community chooses it to happen.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Really important. And it leads me to my final piece of looking back. I was fortunate to be at SPARC when, in December of 2001, the Open Society Institutes brought together stakeholders who were already working on proposals, including E-biomed was one of those proposals, but working on proposals all over the world to optimize using the internet to share research articles-- that fundamental component.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The result of the meeting in Budapest, which SPARC participated in, was the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Declaration. And the meeting produced a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, a statement of commitment, but most importantly, it produced the beginning of a global movement-- the open access movement. The meeting in Budapest and the Declaration were followed almost immediately over the next year and a half by similar, seminal meetings in Bethesda, in Berlin, and Salvador, Bahia that quickly gained momentum and galvanized a community.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And for me, Budapest was notable for tying together the social justice angle and the technology pieces of the knowledge-sharing environment and puzzle. The Budapest Declaration is a document that I go back to time and time again as a lodestone, a touchstone, a guide star for the work that we're doing and the work that I do on a daily basis. It's a reminder of and an expression of the ethos that we're working towards.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The Declaration starts by saying, "an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good." It's a vision based on opportunity. This is just a theme that has gone through my entire career. The opportunity that we have with the advent of the internet to, for the first time in human history, marry this kind of new technology with the long tradition of scholars freely sharing the results of their work.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And of course, the public good that this can make possible is the worldwide distribution of this layer of literature coupled with the completely free and unrestricted access and use of this materials by all. And the Declaration would have been great, and Budapest would have been amazing if it had simply stopped there, but I think it's so important to understand that the Declaration went further.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It didn't just talk about openness as if that were the end unto itself. Not open because it's better than closed-- not open for open's sake, but open in order to do specific things. The Declaration goes on to talk about, specifically, opening up access in this way, to this layer of information, can accelerate the pace of research and discovery, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Declaration set us on the path to where we are today and where we are in the open access movement and the acceptance of open as an enabling strategy. And we have come so far. We, by and large, we're no longer having conversations about why open? Or whether open? But rather, how best to get there?
HEATHER JOSEPH: About implementation. Open access has just become far more ubiquitous to us. There's a lot of different ways that we can see its ubiquity. But I honestly have to say that I first realized how far we'd come in terms of open access becoming part of the landscape one day when I was doing a search on the Twitter hashtag, just Twitter hashtag for open access. And it no longer returned just a bunch of tweets by open access advocates arguing amongst ourselves about green versus gold or CC BY versus CC NC.
HEATHER JOSEPH: But rather, it returns open access content tagged as open access by individual authors, by labs, by museums, by publishers. It's really become part of the landscape. And we see this. We see this, obviously, in the way open access journal publishing has become the fastest growing segment of the journal landscape. We see it through having a growing set of, not only open access repositories worldwide, but increasingly, even more importantly, a growing set of highly-functional networks of repositories, with OpenAIRE in the European Union and the LA Referencia in Latin America being really standout examples of infrastructure that underpins this growing open knowledge environment.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Just as critically, we see a growing acceptance and adoption of open access as an enabling strategy. Open in order to do what? To help us achieve our core mission by institutions of all shapes and sizes around the world, not just academic institutions, although they are adopting OA, but also multinational organizations like the World Bank, which embraced open access by opening up access to its critical economic data and publications and partially in response to criticism that they were not operating transparently.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And certainly, as we know, as I noted earlier, the United Nations community of organizations, not just the UN but also UNESCO, have embraced open access as an accelerator for their global mission of improving society for all. And one of the things I think in the current environment that's so notable and stands out to me as really telling about where we've come in terms of openness and open access becoming part of the landscape, is that research funders are now among the leading advocates for open access and are actively collaborating to extend and amplify the uptake of open practices, whether they're collections or collectives of government and national funders, as we see in cOAlition S, or collections and collaboratives of private foundations and philanthropies, like the group of 15 of the largest biomedical research funders in the US that make up the Open Research Funders Group, which SPARC has the privilege of convening.
HEATHER JOSEPH: The Open Research Funders Group, I think, is an example, also, of what these research funders are doing in terms of adopting and promoting openness as an enabler of their core missions. This group of funders, which is pretty massive-- they have about $100 billion in assets and give out about $10 billion in research funding annually-- are not only utilizing the opportunity to enact policies to require open access to their research outputs, they're also catalyzing critical work on culture and behavioral change to realign incentives-- and research institutions and in their funding agencies to properly incentivize and support open behaviors as a priority.
HEATHER JOSEPH: People often ask me if I could go back to the beginning of the open access movement and change anything, what would it be? And there's two things that I would change. One would be this-- that we had tackled the need to change incentives explicitly earlier on, right at the onset of the open access movement, and that we hadn't shied away from it out of concerns that it was hard enough to, frankly, be working to turn the Queen Mary of journals and the journal industry, that adding on, trying to reform tenure, and promotion, and research evaluation, was just the third rail.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We would never make progress. I do wish we had deliberately taken that on earlier. And I'll talk about what the second thing is in a moment. But this really is something that I do wish we had had attacked earlier on. And the final observation that I want to make about where we are in the current acceptance of open access is just to observe that in the middle of a pandemic, one of the very first things that science and health ministers did from around the world was call for the creation of an open access database of all coronavirus-related papers, which was put together right in the beginning of the pandemic.
HEATHER JOSEPH: They recognized that they needed papers that were immediately freely available, that were formatted in a way to make them, essentially, AI ready, so they were fully machine searchable, and that you could advance computational analysis on. A database was put together. It contains about 125,000 papers. And that database has been accessed or downloaded for machining more than 120 million times since it was put together, again, at the end of March, at the beginning of the pandemic.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It's a breathtaking milestone. All of the things, to me, that I have related are breathtaking milestones. This one in particular stands out. And it stands out because it's both the symbol of how far we've come, and at the same time, just a crushing example of how far we have yet to go. We shouldn't have to wait for an emergency like a global health pandemic to break the glass and retrieve papers on a specific issue to create a corpus of machine-readable, open access papers.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We are long past the time where open availability and full computation for all journal literature should be the norm for us. And it's not just that we haven't met the full-access goal that presents a challenge in us going forward. If we're going to truly treat knowledge sharing as a universal human right and to truly optimize a system so that everyone can benefit, we need strategies and solutions that address the whole picture.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Leslie Chan, who's a wonderful open access advocate, I think plays a role that is really important in the open access movement. And we've been trying to be deliberate and get better at looking inward at what we're doing right and what we're not achieving. And Leslie has noted that we've been too focused on access and access barriers in specific and not focused enough as a movement on the various forms of structural powers in knowledge production and how they reconfigure and affect our value systems.
HEATHER JOSEPH: So it comes back to this notion of not just addressing the access portion of the social justice principles. We have to address all four principles-- access, participation, equity, and rights. And that's the second thing that I really would change if I could go back in time and change things about the open access movement, would honestly be the name. As pity open access is, access in the name implies that that's all we care about-- just getting to information.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And that's, in fact, not the case. There's so many other elements and dimensions that we have to deliberately nurture in order to have a system that works in the way that makes it something that actually advances all of the interests of people globally and in particular, participation. At that same meeting in South Africa in December, Jaya Raju, who is a library leader at the University of Cape Town, eloquently talked about the need for unhindered, multi-directional, participate in knowledge dissemination and production.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Specifically hitting that need for addressing to making sure that we're hitting the participation angle. Who participates in the production of knowledge? Whose voices are represented in the global intellectual conversation that Budapest calls for? And whose voices are being left out? The open access community has been working hard to center those questions in our work over the past several years, and we've actually devoted the last few Open Access Week programming themes to directly working on the critical need to address issues of increasing participation in equity and knowledge sharing.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because we really do have a problem here. This is a map of the world s by the number of articles published by authors from each country, put together by Juan Pablo Alperin and his colleagues in the ScholCommLab in Vancouver. The data about publications by country is sourced from Scopus, and the population and GDP data is from the World Bank. And you can see from this representation that we have a tremendous imbalance in where voices are represented in the current journal literature.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And we don't just have-- although this particular map represents a North/South, developed/less developed countries divide and disparity-- if you took data, I think, from any level-- if you tried to recreate this map, for example, by looking at output by institutions in the United States-- we'd also see disparities and inequities there.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We'd see inequities and disparities of participation by less well-funded more well-funded institutions, gender differences, differences by regional and language disparities. We have a massive issue of under inclusion, not just in the scientific communications process, but also in the research process itself, unfortunately. Last month, Sudip Parikh, who is the fairly new CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, summed up the pressing need for a far more deliberate strategy for inclusiveness on a systems level in research in an essay that he published in Science.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And he highlighted that giving attention, highlighting the previously ignored, the underrepresented voices, does not invalidate the already admired. No one gets kicked out of the tent by us being more inclusive. The tent just gets bigger. We really need to think about large-scale changes in improving the way we share knowledge. And this points to doing so on a systems level.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And it can be really intimidating to think about how to even get started on making these kinds of changes on a systems level. And I think that it starts with us having to make consistent, deliberate, and individual actions on a daily basis. Whatever our role is in the research and education ecosystem, each one of us as individuals, we're each faced with making choices in our daily work that can have an impact, either positive or negative, on the system that we're working to build.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And this requires a really big change in our mindset. We're much more deliberative about thinking about all of the decisions that we make through the lens of our respective missions and values. We have to carefully and deliberately center inclusion and equity implications whose interests are served, who might be left out, when we're deciding everything from what business models we're choosing to support in our knowledge-sharing environment, what technology we're building and how we're building it, or what technology we're buying.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We need to center issues of exclusivity, participation, and rights when we decide-- when we're thinking about what rights we empower knowledge producers and knowledge users with. We need to center these issues when we're deciding what outputs and behaviors we're choosing to incentivize and reward. And also really importantly, to Leslie's point, we need to center them when we're deciding how we construct our leadership and our governance values-- our power structures within the community and within this system.
HEATHER JOSEPH: There's no single silver-bullet action that we can take to address this. We can only make these kinds of changes through a series of deliberate and consistent choices that can then cumulatively scale up to a systems level. And that's, really, the biggest, single biggest challenge, I think we have in front of us moving forward. That's recognizing that equity has to be deliberately and proactively built into the knowledge-sharing system at all of these possible, critical choice points.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It can't be left to be bolted on later as an afterthought in order to have a system of knowledge sharing that's both open by default and equitable by design for everybody. And we've seen from experience what happens when we don't make this a priority. Whenever we catch ourselves-- and I include myself in this front and center-- whenever we catch ourselves saying things like, when I'm making a decision, oh, I'll just do it this way for now and then figure out how to deal with equity issues later on, we're just fooling ourselves.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because once we make a decision, we lose the leverage for change. And inequities that we haven't addressed become baked into the system. They become entrenched. And we understand that, because we spent the last few decades trying to unpack and undo the fundamental imbalances and inequities in our system of sharing knowledge and, in particularly, our scholarly communication and research system.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We can't afford to repeat the same mistakes by treating issues of equity, of fundamental fairness, and ensuring that knowledge sharing is treated as a human right as an afterthought. Again, we've been trying to be very deliberate about this in the open community and using every opportunity that we can to stop, slow down, and think deliberately about taking action to build structural equity and inclusion into our systems.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Because access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, and that inextricable link between access to knowledge and the fulfillment of basic human rights serves as an essential reminder of the need for each of us to think critically and act deliberately, individually and together. I only wish that I had two lifetimes to work with you all towards making this vision a reality. Thank you very much.
HEATHER JOSEPH:
TODD CARPENTER: All right. Heather, thank you so much. That was a brilliant, brilliant talk, of course. First of all, before the questions, I want to acknowledge that there is a piece of hardware for you. We will have this shipped to you. It says, the NISO board of directors presents the 2021 Miles Conrad Memorial Award to Heather Joseph for her lifetime achievements in the information community.
TODD CARPENTER: I think no one is as deserving as you are, Heather. Thank you.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Kind of you to say. Thank you, Todd. And thank you, again, to the NISO board.
TODD CARPENTER: Some interesting question came in, and I have a couple of other interesting questions. So I will start with the question from the audience. Do you believe that open is still a movement? At what point, in your long view, does it stop becoming a movement and does it just start becoming the default? And what would that look like? And how can we get us closer to that default?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah. I think it's still is a movement, because we haven't gotten to the cultural change tipping point. When I define-- we use the phrase, SPARC's goal is setting the default to open in research and education. What does that mean? To me, it means that we will have achieved that goal when anybody walks on to a university, or college campus, a higher ed campus, or into a research facility, and expects to share the results of what they're working on and their teaching and learning materials, unless or until someone gives them a compelling reason not to.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And we're not there yet in having that be the automatic assumption. We're getting closer. But I think until we can really see that zeitgeist, that expectation in action, we're going to be a movement with work to do.
TODD CARPENTER: Always lots of work to do.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: Related to that, my question has to do with that map of global scientific output. There was an interesting talk on Tuesday, I think it was, showing how the average citation graph has moved from Europe, in the 18th century, over the Atlantic and moving towards Asia. Two questions related to that.
TODD CARPENTER: The first is, from your perspective, how is the worldwide community relating to open? But other, beyond that, are there practical things that we can bring this more equitable, more inclusive world into reality?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Those are-- it's a great observation, and also really good and hard questions. I think one of-- there's a bunch of things that we're struggling with. In terms of enabling participation to shift that citation graph, one of the things that we have to do is look at the kind of barriers that we're throwing up inadvertently, in terms of participation to people to add their voices.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Language barriers, first and foremost, being one of the major barriers. We also tend to think about the platforms and the containers of knowledge as being one thing, as being articles. We need to be better and more deliberate about being inclusive of other forms of scholarship that aren't articles. The ways of transmitting knowledge look very different in different cultures, and we haven't been activist enough in changing the structures-- technologically, who is making decisions about what's knowledge and what's not knowledge, whose knowledge is included in the record, who determines what the record is.
HEATHER JOSEPH: We really do, I think, have to be deliberate and thoughtful about reviewing and revising all of those structures to be able to be more inclusive for that shift to happen. Again, it's not easy. It's not like there is one silver bullet thing that you can say, well, if we just did x, this would happen. It takes, I think, each one of us relearning how we think about, and approaching, and retraining ourselves to approach this process completely differently in order for these actions to add up to something that results in a system that is much more along the lines of the inclusiveness that we want to see in power.
TODD CARPENTER: And related to that, you had talked a lot about incentives. And I think incentives are huge here. Both, not only-- that runs into what you were talking about the types of content. We force people into publishing-- you have to have a journal article. That's all tied to the incentive marketplace. What kind of strategies might we employ that are focused on connecting openness and recognition?
TODD CARPENTER: And are there maybe standards? Because NISO. But are there ways that we could connect those two things?
HEATHER JOSEPH: Yeah. One of the first things that we can do is, I think, stop treating both the incentives and knowledge sharing as a market. That's a really, really tough barrier for people to overcome. We've commoditized the exchange of knowledge in a way and to a degree that incentives are part of propping up a market, which then puts up another barrier for people to be able to participate. Strategies for connecting openness to incentives-- the National Academies is convening that roundtable that the Open Research Funders Group is part of the cohort of looking at changing the incentive structure to better support open practices, open access, but open science practices in general by examining from two angles.
HEATHER JOSEPH: One, if I'm a research funder, I'm funding the research in order to achieve certain outputs. What I want to look at is, are those-- how well are those ultimate goals being achieved? And we're having them look at those goals in partnership with university leaders who share similar kinds of mission-critical goals-- the diffusion of knowledge, engaging the community with intellectual output.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Those are different kinds of things that we need to look at incentivizing that are directly tied to openness that we're not incentivizing now. Are there standards? Probably. Have we thought about them enough? No. Could NISO? Yes.
HEATHER JOSEPH: All sorts of things in that direction.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. I'd like to end on just to hear your thoughts a little bit about tying it back to mission. Because, as you said, incentives have to align with mission. Earlier this morning, there was a session on library assessment, and you can start an assessment process by, what can you count? But that's sort of backwards. If you should-- instead of saying, we want to incentivize you to do this, how does that tie to our mission?
TODD CARPENTER: And what is the mission of science communication? It's not commodity-- it's not monetizing their outputs. I'd like to just let you riff on that for a few seconds.
HEATHER JOSEPH: My whole talk was a riff on that, Todd.
TODD CARPENTER: I know.
HEATHER JOSEPH: It's a good setup, though. And I do think that mission-critical focus is, I think, what's allowing us to make the kind of progress that we're making, particularly the funder-drive progress. Because they have recognized-- one of the most powerful statements that I heard about open access and funders came from Trevor Mundel, who's the head of the Global Health Initiative at the Gates Foundation. And that framing of, open in order to resonated with him, because the goal of the Global Health Program at Gates is to save lives.
HEATHER JOSEPH: And Trevor connected open access as taking out even one day's delay in getting data or knowledge into the hands of researchers, because even one day's delay could affect saving someone's life. So his, open in order to, which was mission critical, was to save lives. But you can fill in that blank wherever you are in the ecosystem. If you are, again, a university president, your mission is, maybe, the diffusion of knowledge with the community, maybe engagement.
HEATHER JOSEPH: If you're a student, you may want an open option for learning materials in order to be able to afford going to college, to be able to get an education. All kinds of different ways that you can look at open as an enabling strategy that meet individuals in our community, wherever we live at every level.
TODD CARPENTER: I think that is a fantastic place to end. Heather, thank you so, so very much for this talk, but also for everything that you've done to support scholarly communications and the information community. Thank you.
HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
TODD CARPENTER: All right, so that draws the Miles Conrad Lecture section to a close. Thank you all. We will be following this up with a social hour. Heather, I understand, will be joining us, so if you want to find her there and probe her with some other questions, I'm sure she'd appreciate that. But thank you all, and enjoy the rest of NISO Plus.
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