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Platform Strategies 2023: Coopetition: Partnership Models for Independent Businesses
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Platform Strategies 2023: Coopetition: Partnership Models for Independent Businesses
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Segment:0 .
VERONICA SHOWERS: Hello and welcome. My name is Veronica Showers. I am in my three months at Silverchair as the-- a third month as the Vice President of Customer Success. So welcome. I'll be serving as your moderator for this session. And in this session, we're going to be focusing on supporting small and mid-sized publishers because they're finding it increasingly difficult to remain independent.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And I think everyone in this room could guess why. I think we all know, ever-changing publishing policies, new business models, especially away, and, of course, fast-changing technology. I think we really talked about that this morning and through lunch. In response to that, we've had a number of members of this community create collaborative and aggregation programs to support those small and mid-sized publishers.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And the panelists here today are going to be sharing their thoughts and experience running these programs that I find incredibly, incredibly important and powerful in our industry. But before I begin, I do have a little bit of housekeeping. I really want this to be a discussion, so I'm going to ask-- I have some questions prepared, so please jot down your questions as we're talking because I want it to be a real collaborative discussion here.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And you can also use the app and ask questions in the app. So if you haven't looked at that, there's a little bubble that you use for the session, and you can ask your questions there as well. So let's get started. First let's meet our panelists. Welcome.
ALLISON BELAN: Thank you.
WENDY QUEEN: Thank you.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you for being here. I would be grateful if you could please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the partnership models you represent including the size and number of participants starting with Phoebe.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So we're probably the smallest of the organizations up here. GeoScienceWorld is-- well, we were founded in 2004 by seven of the most-- well, not the largest, but certainly leading geoscience society publishers and professional societies. And they got together, really, in this idea of being faced with lots of challenges mainly back in the time when they were going from print to digital.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And at that point, the only option was, really, to either go to a larger publisher or figure out some other way. And so GeoScienceWorld was really founded with coopetition and collaboration in mind. Today, we are now 35-plus publishers. We have 50-plus journals. We have 2,500 books. We serve over a quarter of a million geoscientists worldwide through the platform.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're on the Silverchair platform now. And it is an organization that's small with $10 million revenue, but over the years, we have delivered $60 million back to the organizations that partner with us.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic. Thank you, and welcome, Phoebe. Allison, please introduce yourself.
ALLISON BELAN: Thank you. So my name is Allison Belan, and I'm with Duke University Press, and we are home to two collaborations. And I think the piece that is relevant to know about DUP is that we've got about 20 years experience of selling digital journals, ebooks, and digital collections directly to the institutional market and to supporting librarians and with [INAUDIBLE]. So we have a lot of infrastructure, and we've used that to build these collaborations.
ALLISON BELAN: So the first one that I'm going to talk about is Project Euclid. So it was founded in 2000, and built by Cornell University libraries. And then Cornell University Library and Duke University Press formed a strategic partnership around 2015 that brought a lot of management and sales to Duke University Press. So Project Euclid is a math and stats hosting service.
ALLISON BELAN: It has about a hundred publications from all over the world, 35 different partners, and about 80% of that content is open access. And so in addition to the hosting service, there is also an aggregation product, a digital collection that is sold that helps sustain the publishers. And then the second collaboration is much newer. It's the Scholarly Publishing Collective, it was founded in 2021.
ALLISON BELAN: And through the collective, other nonprofit mission-driven publishers can avail themselves of managed journal hosting, sales, marketing, customer support for institutional sales, digital fulfillment, and print fulfillment. And that initiative, at this time, has six partners, mostly university presses and a couple of societies, and 155 journals hosted.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Wow. Great. Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: Well, first, thank you for inviting me to speak here today. So I am the Director of Project MUSE. And Project MUSE is a unique aggregation as part of a university press at Johns Hopkins University. We're nearly 30 years old and learning that we're about the same age as Silverchair today. And we began as a collaboration between a university press and a library. We sell and market journals and books and other content types in the humanities and social sciences to thousands of libraries globally and provide access to millions of users.
WENDY QUEEN: Many of our users are unaffiliated with libraries through our OA programs. And currently, our holdings include more than 800 journals, about 100,000 books from more than 400 nonprofit publishers. A significant portion of the publishers are small and may only publish one journal title or a handful of books, and for those publishers, we're often their only digital publishing solution. And it's also worth noting our mission and revenue structure is to return as much royalties back to the publishers as possible as many of our publishers need those MUSE revenues to stay afloat.
WENDY QUEEN: A few specifics about the platform. We build our platform internally with the internal technical staff and with some IT services provided by the press and the university. And there are certain pieces of functionality we outsource to third parties, but the majority of our functionality and services are constructed in-house and are custom to MUSE. And just currently, we're delicately balancing the needs of the traditional sales models while supporting many flavors of open access.
WENDY QUEEN: So many of our efforts have been supported through grants through the Mellon Foundation. Even so, it's a slow progression for the humanities, and I think that there's a very big difference here in the humanities and other disciplines here to find their pathways forward towards OA. And in the past, we've supported such models that those publishers have brought to us, and we had to switch that around and start providing models to our publishers that fit the needs of more publishers at one time.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll just say, notably, in 2025, we're launching a subscribe to open model for our journals collection, and are working on a collective model for books.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic. Well, thank you for being here. Now, I think all of your programs have very similar missions but very different audiences, and I want to dive deeper into your programs and learn a little bit more about them. So collaboratives like you really fulfill unique needs in our industry. What role does your model serve, and what impact do you see in the community you serve?
VERONICA SHOWERS: And that question will go to you first, Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: OK. And I'm going to take the liberty for speaking for a few aggregators that are in the room here.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic.
WENDY QUEEN: A lot of this is not specific for MUSE, but I would say one of the overarching values of a content aggregator is to provide scale in terms of flexibility, costs, services, and as Thane said this morning in his opening remarks, provide a unique partnership that extends beyond that content and services. It really becomes a trust bond in many ways. In the case of MUSE, we are a nonprofit aggregation that partners with nonprofit publishers of all sizes.
WENDY QUEEN: And perhaps some of our larger publishers have their own resources and have some redundancy, maybe even their own platform, but many of our smaller publishers, we are their lifeline in that way, and we take that role very seriously. There are two areas, I'll say, among many, many, many, we could have a laundry list of these things, that often prevent a smaller publisher from working independently towards a solution.
WENDY QUEEN: One being technology, whether that's the ability to build, or even manage, or even write the RFP to have a solution versus building their own platform and managing all of those complex downstream activities. And as I hear most often amongst our publishers, the ability to market and promote globally, that's where they're really looking for that scale. And the spirit and mission of MUSE has remained consistent for the last three decades.
WENDY QUEEN: We want to support publishers, researchers, and libraries while keeping the costs low to libraries and returning high royalties to publishers. Again, we may be their only lifeline there. And we provide those services at scale, and really look towards that partnership that we're talking about to help us determine our roadmap for growth, but also many of those lean on us to tell them what their roadmap should be for growth.
WENDY QUEEN: And lastly on the OA front, but this really applies to all types of business models, alongside the value of incorporating OA content being discoverable amongst a large corpus of content, it's really about that developing and supporting business models at scale that's really critical for an aggregation.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Interesting. That's a great perspective. I want to hear from Allison, your perspective on the impact that you're making within the communities that you serve as well.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. So I will start with Project Euclid, which serves, very specifically, the math research and scholar community and math adjacent fields. And I think that the impact has been that within the math discipline, so many journals, historically, were published independently by their society or a huge number independently by an academic department.
ALLISON BELAN: And when we went from print to digital, they were left without a solution operating at such small scale. So very similar to what you're saying, Wendy, about they needed a lifeline, and Project Euclid as a hosting solution was that lifeline for the ones who could manage their own subscriptions and stuff. And then the Project Euclid aggregation, which if the publisher's content is in the aggregation, they get paid royalties through a revenue lifeline and access to the institutionals market through the sales team.
ALLISON BELAN: So the impact has been interesting because it's become this academy-owned-- and in a not surprisingly and very much the same way-- archive also founded at Cornell University libraries, was it's become this academy-owned hub for math and statistics. And when we go to math conferences to just promote its use and awareness of it, mathematicians scream to our booth and tell us how much they love Project Euclid.
ALLISON BELAN: So as a hosting site because it's so focused, we've been able to develop features that are very math-specific, identifiers that are math-specific, and sophisticated math displays, and just really focus on that discipline. And I think that the impact has been that mathematics has been able-- as a set of scholarly publishers, they've been able to remain independent at probably a much higher proportion, not just because of Project Euclid, but.
ALLISON BELAN: So we're really proud of that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And supporting that, yeah.
ALLISON BELAN: And supporting that. And so then with the Scholarly Publishing Collective, that's a different audience. Still independent, still relatively small compared to the big people of the world, but that's really focused on mission-driven publishers who rely on those journal revenues to sustain their larger mission. And so with consolidation with the expense, especially within these-- excuse me, society and university press worlds of the cost of owning your own fulfillment system, employing your own sales team, employing your own marketing team, your own customer support team, employing the people that you need to actually manage the technology and pay for the technology is just too much.
ALLISON BELAN: And then for many years, Project MUSE has supported that and still does support, like, all of our publishers have content in the MUSE aggregation, but they also want to sell direct title subscriptions to librarians. And for many years, JSTOR had a service that supported them. Well, JSTOR ended that service that hosting service. And we had already been in conversation with our peers, essentially, who know that we do the thing they do, and do some things that they want to be doing, and we'd already been in conversations about sales services.
ALLISON BELAN: And when that happened, we just had to pivot and be like, OK, we're going to build a platform for you, and we're going to manage it. And so the impact has been that these publishers who really rely on these journal revenues now have a platform to brand their program to potential journal partners and show value to their existing journal partners to brand the journal to those partner's members, or the partner's author community, and attract them, and to keep those as partners instead of having them migrate to the larger commercial publishers, or, at least, delay the migration while we all figure something new out.
ALLISON BELAN: And yeah, so this is a way for them to keep generating those revenues that make, in many cases, their book publishing, their money-losing scholarly monograph publishing program able to function.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you. You have a very similar mission, but you have a niche community. Can you tell us a little bit more about the impact you're making?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So very much echo what Allison said. We were formed by these societies to make publishing viable, but more importantly-- I mean, that is our mission today is to maintain independence, viable geoscience publishing now and in the future. Second to that, our mission is, obviously, to just serve the larger geoscience research community, which we do.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But, again, these societies, they have such important education programs, K-12. So when I think about impact of what we do, the indirect impact is that they are able to carry on these other more important programs to help inspire kids to be scientists, or climate change scientists, or seismologists, whatever it is. So the reach goes much further than what you just think about like we're giving them a check.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: It supports lobbying efforts to Congress. Many of them spend a lot of time having lobbyists go up to Congress, and when there's really difficult decisions about funding, about whether you're going to fund earthquake science, climate science, whatever, these are the organizations that are there at the forefront to persuade and talk about the importance of the geosciences. And so, yes, there is the they get the check, they have their publishing programs, but it funds a lot more.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But I also, in the context of our way, we don't really-- it's happening very organically. I think the geosciences, we are not early adopters. I say we as a geoscientist. We are very slow to move. We think in geologic time a lot. So it is a challenge to get them to do it. I think, also, the funding is really different in the geosciences.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: There are a lot of subdisciplines that have zero funding, which is almost very similar to humanities in that respect. So the other thing that we've been able to impact is also their authors. When they were trying to figure out what to do with OA, we actually got together and formed an open access community journal with seven of the societies because none of them had an open access option.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And the idea was that it would cascade, they would send their authors to publish. That has worked not so great for many cultural reasons, I think, and we could get into the whole cultural challenges of working with many different societies. But, really, the impact trickles down in ways that you would just not expect, and they really rely on that funding because of that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Interesting. So everything that you're doing is supporting the organizations as a whole, it's not just sending that check. And that's amazing, that mission is incredibly important. And that's definitely a theme I've been hearing from all of you. Another thing I've been hearing from all of you is that of technology and how significant technology plays in all of your work. If you could each tell me a little bit about what role does technology play in these models.
VERONICA SHOWERS: What challenges do you face? I'm thinking integrations, I'm thinking data health, et cetera. And what efficiencies have you gained from that technology? Starting with Allison.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. So Project Euclid in 2000, it was essentially a technology-- it was a technology response to a technology-driven crisis. It was all about scholarship now needed to be online, and that was the preferred way to find it, use it, buy it, and it needed to be there. So technology played a huge role, and it was a technology play. Over time, it had to become more than a technology play, and that's roughly when Cornell University libraries and Duke University Press partnered because it needed a sustainability model to keep the platform alive.
ALLISON BELAN: And that particular platform was built at Cornell University libraries on an open source software that turned out to have no supporting community over time. And there was one man who built it, and one man who sustained it, and he was about to retire, so yeah. So a couple of years ago, we had to make a big technology change, and that has actually, in some ways, led to-- this is now wholly managed by Duke University Press.
ALLISON BELAN: Cornell is still a big fan and ours, but they wanted to shift what resources they had left in it to other priorities. And I think that with the Scholarly Publishing Collective emerging in 2021, it's reflective of how technology is important, but it's not the only important thing. And it's really more about what can technology enable. So with the Scholarly Publishing Collective, again, those conversations started around, hey, Duke University Press knows how to sell university press content, knows how to manage consortial relationships, knows how to engage sales agents, could you do that for us?
ALLISON BELAN: And so it was as much about extending our people and our 20 years of acquired skill and knowledge in running all of this operation to our peers and our colleagues. And in terms of what have we gained, we've gained perspective. It's amazing to be deeply embedded in university press journal and book publishing, and then to start to talk to three other university presses who you think they do what we do, and then define the differences.
ALLISON BELAN: So we are able to take all those differences and use them to build new features and affordances within the platform and the technology, or to develop new ways of supporting and managing subscribers and customers and members because we're seeing new challenges. And, of course, there is the efficiency of sharing costs, spreading that overhead out a little bit more, and for our partners, not having to go suddenly instantly employ 10 people that they don't even know how to manage what they're doing.
ALLISON BELAN: So I think of the world of technology with the collective-- I think of the collective as a tech-enabled service not a technology play.
VERONICA SHOWERS: OK. Interesting. What are your thoughts on the technology component for you, Phoebe, in your group?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Again, I very much echo that in that the driver for GSW was the technology shifts that were happening. I see that we're coming to that again with AI. I see even GSW, which has resources, and we have the operational capabilities, we are providing many of the same services, but I think that our societies often look to us for guidance on their roadmaps.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But also, we know we couldn't do it without, let's say, Silverchair. We were similar. We were on highwire at first launch, and then that just wasn't keeping up with what the end user researcher needed. And so it's a bit of technology and the ways that innovations are driving that change, but also, I think, the demands of the end users, and we're trying to have to stay on top of both.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And then we have some societies that-- one of them actually has their own membership portal that they have on Atypon. And so then the rest of the societies are on Silverchair, and then you're starting to think about, well, should we be doing this, too? You don't want to lose any of your societies to another platform. So there's lots of challenges of just managing the needs of the researchers that then bubble up to the societies, that then bubble up to you.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And I think the biggest challenge that I see in all of this is culture, is the cultural differences between all of our partners. Some are very tech-savvy. Some have no staff, it's purely volunteers. They have one journal, they publish eight articles a year. They're there just for the paycheck, and that's that. And then there are some that are really trying to decide, how do we license our content to Exxon or Chevron and protect our IP but help advance the science?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So culture, to me, is the biggest challenge. Technology is the thing that brought us together, and I think will continue to keep us together. Because we have big competition. We are competing with the commercial publishers and trying to maintain independence.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Great. Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: When I first read this question, I was like, what do you mean? It's all technology, of course, it's embedded in everything that we do. And then I started thinking about the question a little bit differently about, we share a lot of similarities about how we came to be and what we were trying to solve. But I would say, a recent shift in our world has been using technology to, let's say, prevent nefarious activities.
WENDY QUEEN: So not about what we're doing with technology, but what we're trying to prevent happening by other technology. And they've been some of the largest expenses in developing the platform. And when you talk specifically about AI, I mean, we are super charged about all the efficiencies that we can gather, we've been doing experiments with AI for years now about relating content and things like that.
WENDY QUEEN: But on Phoebe's note of culture, as an aggregator, I'm in a situation where we have some publishers on the aggregation that will say, use my content to train because this is for the good of humanity, this is the content that's worthwhile to get out there. I have another subset on the spectrum that's like, lock it down, do not let anybody touch it, and tell me that, do you promise 100% that nothing like this could ever happen?
WENDY QUEEN: So a lot of efforts, investments, resources are going to be going into, what are we allowing or not allowing? And that's a very big shift alongside with MUSE starting-- getting heavily into open access a few years back and realizing that, actually, this was a huge technology lift for us to actually support open content. And that was actually a shock to me, right?
WENDY QUEEN: It's like before we had this lovely existence that it was a gated little community, and we knew everybody that came through the front gate and everybody that left, and now it's the world. But I'd be remiss if I didn't find a way to say this today. And technology, since it applies to everything, I'm really hoping that with some of the AI advantages, that MUSE can help our publishers create more accessible content and really help those that are going to have struggles meeting the July 2025 European goals deadline.
WENDY QUEEN: Are there things that we can do that may not be perfect but are good enough? And I look at that as like the early days of OCR. Everybody's like, what's good enough? Is it 89%? Is it 94%? But whatever it was, it was better than having nothing, and I'm hoping I can promote, embrace, and I have a technical staff that's really on the forefront of this to use it for that greater good as well.
WENDY QUEEN: So--
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Can I just--
WENDY QUEEN: That's my technology answer.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And about, also, the technology, I know we've been focusing a lot on platforms, but I think when I look at our tech stack, we talked about marketing this morning, Salesforce, HubSpot, we seem to be the ones that are using these tools and then educating. Again, some are better than others, but technology extends to so much part of our operations. It's so critical picking the right tool. There are so many tools.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're trying to figure that out, and we're grateful, also, to have technology partners that help us do that, so the rest of them. We're not all doing the same thing and struggling with the same problems. We can come up with a solution, and then pass that information out, which I think is great.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. One thing that's been interesting in terms of DUP's role within the collective is there is some technology for which we are the explainer and the teacher. Obviously, the platform, they have their own vendors, they load their own files, they have to get them through the publishing process, and all of that.
ALLISON BELAN: Our partners for the most part right now are pretty-- it's a small group-- are pretty sophisticated publishers. They may not have had to be managing their own platform to date, but they really understand subscribers, members, what they need in terms of data about them, what they need in terms of data usage. They understand VOIs, they understand all this stuff. So right now, at least, it's been interesting to see the community evolve in parts of plugging informational gaps with each other, and with us, and learning from each other.
ALLISON BELAN: And that is largely around technical things, and just the value of having a community group-- work on a problem as a group, or say like, oh, you didn't know about that? Well, let me tell you about this, and plug all those little holes. And, again, at the moment, what's interesting compared to the diversity of your publishers on both your platforms is how similar the partners are on our platform because they also all-- like, they needed a host after JSTOR stopped hosting them.
ALLISON BELAN: So they all came at the same time, they all came from the same experience with the same set of expectations, and that's going to be an interesting thing to watch and to manage as that community diversifies.
VERONICA SHOWERS: It's really interesting. I think with all of the different technologies that you're talking about, with how you're serving your constituencies, how do you make decisions? I mean, you shared that you have a publisher with one journal, they publish eight articles a year, and then you have more robust-- you have partners that have bigger programs. How do you make strategic decisions?
VERONICA SHOWERS: Do you have a spectrum you can say, hey, here's what we offer, and then you can say-- or on the other side of the spectrum you can say, OK, give us feedback, give us-- what do you need us to do for you? How are you making those decisions, those strategic decisions, especially with technology in mind, and what are the benefits and the challenges for both sides of the spectrum?
VERONICA SHOWERS: [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah, Phoebe, that one's yours, yeah.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Usually, it's who's ever screaming the loudest, or has-- [LAUGHTER] I think, definitely, the ones that come to us with ideas. There's lots of ideas. I think the ones that are willing to support and work with us versus like, oh, here, here's this idea, go off and do it. But I think we have so many-- as everybody does, right?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We have so many competing priorities, and we are trying to-- GSW as a whole as I'm sure some of our other societies, we're really trying to take that data-driven approach, and not just make decisions on who's screaming the loudest, or who we're closest to, or who we've worked longest with, or biggest need. It's looking at the data, but then also developing a process where you're constantly engaging with your societies to figure out which problem is the biggest problem to solve, which can we do that creates the least amount of risk?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Because there are some ideas that come up that are good for GSW as growing, but it's not good for our societies because we might put ourselves in competition with them. And there's that coopetition thing again, and we will-- if we come across that, we will not pursue that. Because first and foremost, our mission is to maintain viable sustainable growth in their publishing programs.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So that's the number one driver is, is it competing with our mission? Does it contradict our mission? And then second is if it doesn't do that, well then, OK, we have our own process. We're developing prioritization canvasses and ways to have a more, I guess, disciplined approach to the ideas that we take forward.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you. Wendy, how do you approach decision making?
WENDY QUEEN: In somewhat similar ways to Phoebe, I'll add that we do do a lot of communications programs directly with our publishers and libraries. And a benefit of being part of a university and being part of a university press, you also gets to serve on the scholarly communications steering committees at the university and things like that. And then we use some very old school survey, all those types of methods. And I'll mention that there's a part of our publishers that are looking to contribute to that, and then there's a part of our publishers that are saying, you tell us what the roadmap should be.
WENDY QUEEN: You tell us where we should be focusing on growth as well. And then on the AI front, I find this funny that this is-- I don't know if you consider this a plus or minus of being embedded in a university, but some items around making strategic decisions there, that governance is going to be made for me as being part of a university, right? So I will not have that independence to say, I don't agree with Hopkins, and therefore this is the way MUSE is going to do it.
WENDY QUEEN: So I think that being in a university adds so much support and so many positives, but it is a-- there's a few other layers of complexity that you're following along what's put forth at your host institution.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. And those layers are the ones that tend to really slow you down when you're trying to innovate in publishing and publishing technology. So basically, what we have to go through to partner with a new technology vendor, or to try some new e-commerce-driven-- like, I have one way I can take credit cards. I can't contract with anybody else that will take credit cards with our brand on it.
ALLISON BELAN: So I don't remember how long ago it was, but Twitter came out with a buy link in a tweet, and I was like, that would be so cool. No way that's ever happening. So yeah, why not? Come on. University keeps us safe. I love it. Yeah.
ALLISON BELAN: So with Project Euclid, at this point, it's a pretty mature collaboration. It's a mature aggregation product. It's a mature technology solution. The big decision was to change platforms when the old technology-- and that really wasn't a decision we had a choice in making. The platform that had been built had not been significantly upgraded.
ALLISON BELAN: It couldn't do all the things that we need platforms to do, and the person was retiring. Project Euclid has always had an advisory board, and when it was a joint venture between Cornell and Duke, it also had a governance cabinet that big decisions had to be reviewed and okayed by. So those are two mechanisms other than partner needs, emerging partner needs that can influence Project Euclid.
ALLISON BELAN: I think the next big decisions that are going to come up there that Euclid will lead on and be pushing our partners for will be-- most of math is still-- math research is still locked in a PDF because that's the output of LaTeX. So pushing for full text HTML, especially for accessibility, and then other accessibility practices. And then I think we're also-- Project Euclid already has an OA model.
ALLISON BELAN: I think we're going to be asked to experiment and support in new OA models. And then for the Collective, just again, a whole different context. This was a situation where we had to move super fast to meet the need. Like, there was an expiration date on their content being online.
ALLISON BELAN: We had all the technology, so basically, it was a process of Duke saying like, here's what we know we can do and do well, and pretty much guarantee you we can deliver on it in this amount of time, and that basically set the level. So we're only a couple years in, and I think our partners are really just settling in to the tools that they have now and the data that they're getting. So I think we're at the very front end of how are we going to mediate decision making and input because it hasn't really started emerging yet as everybody recovers from migrating their whole corpus.
ALLISON BELAN: But I think no matter what, it is almost always going to come back to-- as long as DUP is managing it and managing the technology and is the team out there on the ground doing it, it's always going to come back to, do we think we can deliver? We won't commit to something that we're not pretty certain we can figure out and be confident that we can deliver on because the margins are just too thin to completely fail.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Definitely have to deliver, absolutely. Well, I think this is the time to go ahead and open it up for questions. Whoever asks a question gets a car, just kidding. You get a car, and you get a car. So if you have a question, please get a microphone, or if you have one in the app, please let us know. Go ahead. There's a question right here. We have a mic coming your way.
AUDIENCE: Coming your way.
SCOTT HENRY: I'm Scott Henry from ASM International. I assume that there's got to be some degree of standardization when you're working with multiple partners. On the other hand, I'm sure there's lots of pressure to, well, we want to do it this way, can you work with us? How do you manage that push-pull between having it be manageable on your end, but also accommodating what the partners are able to do or willing to do?
ALLISON BELAN: So I'll take that one because I've been thinking a lot about this. We didn't open up the whole toolbox to our partners. Again, we said, here's how it-- in some cases we said, here's how it will be. In some cases we said, here are the choices we can offer. And it's all because, what could we sustain? What could we continue to respond to the emails with, and what could we make sure that the site didn't suddenly go down or look crazy?
ALLISON BELAN: And so we have offered a pretty standard set of site features and configuration options in templates. And, again, moment in time, because they all came from the same place where it wasn't even their brand or their journals brand, it was the platform, the JSTOR brand, they didn't have huge expectations around that. So we just said, all right, they're thrilled with what they have now, again, will that last for two more years?
ALLISON BELAN: Will it last for five more years? I don't know. But yeah, we've got to be very careful about what we commit to in terms of, well, yes, we know we could be editing the text in that widget any time you wanted to, but we're not going to, yeah.
WENDY QUEEN: I'll say we participated in the same migration from JSTOR, and the reality of it is in the humanities and social sciences, we're not turning anybody away. So we do backflips, we bend over backwards, we do a lot of education around-- [INAUDIBLE] That's why I'm leaning over this way because every time I get close. So we do a lot of, I'd say, hand holding all the way through with, here's where you are, here's where we need you to get to be.
WENDY QUEEN: Either you need to do it, or we're going to need to do it for you, but we'll get there eventually. And so we don't play hard ball on those goals.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: If I could just add, I think it's a lot of negotiation and discussions and communication, but also sometimes just asking like, well, why? Why do you want this thing? What is it delivering for you versus-- and then trying to meet them there or figure out a way in the construct of the platform to get it done. But, again, I think it goes back to that culture thing. Just, again, they have their publishing programs.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Some of them are 200 years old, they have ways of doing things. Governance gets in the way a lot. But yeah, it's always a push-pull of like, what are we both trying to achieve? And we both have this-- in some sense, our societies and ourselves have the same mission. And so it's been working out so far.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Yeah. I think we have time for one more question. We have two different questions. Eeny meeny miney moe, just kidding. Who wants to go? We got two people here that have one more question. We have a mic right there. Fantastic.
SCOTT DINEEN: Scott Dineen, Optica Publishing Group. So your talk is called coopetition, and I have a question about that. So you talked about how technology can really help protect us and create economies of scale, but are there any cases where cooperation prevented the kind of advances you get from competition? Any cases you think where you have taken cooperation too far at the expense of competition driving change?
VERONICA SHOWERS: That's one.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So I think the most recent example that I can think of is that as a platform aggregator, we want to grow the platform. We want to add more content to the platform. In the geosciences, we know that we have gaps in particular areas that are trending in the geoscience academic world, and our societies that we work with today, they may not have that content. And we often have publishers, no longer just societies, but university presses and some commercial publishers coming to us and asking if we could put their journals on our platform as another sales channel.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And that's where you're saying, the competition, it helps GSW. It's collaborative. It's good for the researchers who are coming to the platform, but it creates a very competitive, sticky environment for us to work in. I don't know that our societies-- and our board actually had to deal with this of like, how do we continue to be GSW as a collective of societies but have this platform that we know we want to grow but we're competing with ourselves?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're adding content that's now competing with our own societies for the good of all societies. It's complex. It's not easy. And I don't know that we've totally solved that yet, and I'm sure there's going to be many more sticky situations like that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: All right. We're at time. Before we close out the session, we do have the breakout sessions immediately following this session. Those breakout sessions are content syndication, integrating digital event workflows, and ethics in publishing. There is going to be signage in the hall, and everything should be on this floor, so it should be easy to get to.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And with that, I would like for you to join me in thanking our panelists with a round of applause. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
VERONICA SHOWERS: Hello and welcome. My name is Veronica Showers. I am in my three months at Silverchair as the-- a third month as the Vice President of Customer Success. So welcome. I'll be serving as your moderator for this session. And in this session, we're going to be focusing on supporting small and mid-sized publishers because they're finding it increasingly difficult to remain independent.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And I think everyone in this room could guess why. I think we all know, ever-changing publishing policies, new business models, especially away, and, of course, fast-changing technology. I think we really talked about that this morning and through lunch. In response to that, we've had a number of members of this community create collaborative and aggregation programs to support those small and mid-sized publishers.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And the panelists here today are going to be sharing their thoughts and experience running these programs that I find incredibly, incredibly important and powerful in our industry. But before I begin, I do have a little bit of housekeeping. I really want this to be a discussion, so I'm going to ask-- I have some questions prepared, so please jot down your questions as we're talking because I want it to be a real collaborative discussion here.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And you can also use the app and ask questions in the app. So if you haven't looked at that, there's a little bubble that you use for the session, and you can ask your questions there as well. So let's get started. First let's meet our panelists. Welcome.
ALLISON BELAN: Thank you.
WENDY QUEEN: Thank you.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you for being here. I would be grateful if you could please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the partnership models you represent including the size and number of participants starting with Phoebe.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So we're probably the smallest of the organizations up here. GeoScienceWorld is-- well, we were founded in 2004 by seven of the most-- well, not the largest, but certainly leading geoscience society publishers and professional societies. And they got together, really, in this idea of being faced with lots of challenges mainly back in the time when they were going from print to digital.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And at that point, the only option was, really, to either go to a larger publisher or figure out some other way. And so GeoScienceWorld was really founded with coopetition and collaboration in mind. Today, we are now 35-plus publishers. We have 50-plus journals. We have 2,500 books. We serve over a quarter of a million geoscientists worldwide through the platform.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're on the Silverchair platform now. And it is an organization that's small with $10 million revenue, but over the years, we have delivered $60 million back to the organizations that partner with us.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic. Thank you, and welcome, Phoebe. Allison, please introduce yourself.
ALLISON BELAN: Thank you. So my name is Allison Belan, and I'm with Duke University Press, and we are home to two collaborations. And I think the piece that is relevant to know about DUP is that we've got about 20 years experience of selling digital journals, ebooks, and digital collections directly to the institutional market and to supporting librarians and with [INAUDIBLE]. So we have a lot of infrastructure, and we've used that to build these collaborations.
ALLISON BELAN: So the first one that I'm going to talk about is Project Euclid. So it was founded in 2000, and built by Cornell University libraries. And then Cornell University Library and Duke University Press formed a strategic partnership around 2015 that brought a lot of management and sales to Duke University Press. So Project Euclid is a math and stats hosting service.
ALLISON BELAN: It has about a hundred publications from all over the world, 35 different partners, and about 80% of that content is open access. And so in addition to the hosting service, there is also an aggregation product, a digital collection that is sold that helps sustain the publishers. And then the second collaboration is much newer. It's the Scholarly Publishing Collective, it was founded in 2021.
ALLISON BELAN: And through the collective, other nonprofit mission-driven publishers can avail themselves of managed journal hosting, sales, marketing, customer support for institutional sales, digital fulfillment, and print fulfillment. And that initiative, at this time, has six partners, mostly university presses and a couple of societies, and 155 journals hosted.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Wow. Great. Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: Well, first, thank you for inviting me to speak here today. So I am the Director of Project MUSE. And Project MUSE is a unique aggregation as part of a university press at Johns Hopkins University. We're nearly 30 years old and learning that we're about the same age as Silverchair today. And we began as a collaboration between a university press and a library. We sell and market journals and books and other content types in the humanities and social sciences to thousands of libraries globally and provide access to millions of users.
WENDY QUEEN: Many of our users are unaffiliated with libraries through our OA programs. And currently, our holdings include more than 800 journals, about 100,000 books from more than 400 nonprofit publishers. A significant portion of the publishers are small and may only publish one journal title or a handful of books, and for those publishers, we're often their only digital publishing solution. And it's also worth noting our mission and revenue structure is to return as much royalties back to the publishers as possible as many of our publishers need those MUSE revenues to stay afloat.
WENDY QUEEN: A few specifics about the platform. We build our platform internally with the internal technical staff and with some IT services provided by the press and the university. And there are certain pieces of functionality we outsource to third parties, but the majority of our functionality and services are constructed in-house and are custom to MUSE. And just currently, we're delicately balancing the needs of the traditional sales models while supporting many flavors of open access.
WENDY QUEEN: So many of our efforts have been supported through grants through the Mellon Foundation. Even so, it's a slow progression for the humanities, and I think that there's a very big difference here in the humanities and other disciplines here to find their pathways forward towards OA. And in the past, we've supported such models that those publishers have brought to us, and we had to switch that around and start providing models to our publishers that fit the needs of more publishers at one time.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll just say, notably, in 2025, we're launching a subscribe to open model for our journals collection, and are working on a collective model for books.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic. Well, thank you for being here. Now, I think all of your programs have very similar missions but very different audiences, and I want to dive deeper into your programs and learn a little bit more about them. So collaboratives like you really fulfill unique needs in our industry. What role does your model serve, and what impact do you see in the community you serve?
VERONICA SHOWERS: And that question will go to you first, Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: OK. And I'm going to take the liberty for speaking for a few aggregators that are in the room here.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Fantastic.
WENDY QUEEN: A lot of this is not specific for MUSE, but I would say one of the overarching values of a content aggregator is to provide scale in terms of flexibility, costs, services, and as Thane said this morning in his opening remarks, provide a unique partnership that extends beyond that content and services. It really becomes a trust bond in many ways. In the case of MUSE, we are a nonprofit aggregation that partners with nonprofit publishers of all sizes.
WENDY QUEEN: And perhaps some of our larger publishers have their own resources and have some redundancy, maybe even their own platform, but many of our smaller publishers, we are their lifeline in that way, and we take that role very seriously. There are two areas, I'll say, among many, many, many, we could have a laundry list of these things, that often prevent a smaller publisher from working independently towards a solution.
WENDY QUEEN: One being technology, whether that's the ability to build, or even manage, or even write the RFP to have a solution versus building their own platform and managing all of those complex downstream activities. And as I hear most often amongst our publishers, the ability to market and promote globally, that's where they're really looking for that scale. And the spirit and mission of MUSE has remained consistent for the last three decades.
WENDY QUEEN: We want to support publishers, researchers, and libraries while keeping the costs low to libraries and returning high royalties to publishers. Again, we may be their only lifeline there. And we provide those services at scale, and really look towards that partnership that we're talking about to help us determine our roadmap for growth, but also many of those lean on us to tell them what their roadmap should be for growth.
WENDY QUEEN: And lastly on the OA front, but this really applies to all types of business models, alongside the value of incorporating OA content being discoverable amongst a large corpus of content, it's really about that developing and supporting business models at scale that's really critical for an aggregation.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Interesting. That's a great perspective. I want to hear from Allison, your perspective on the impact that you're making within the communities that you serve as well.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. So I will start with Project Euclid, which serves, very specifically, the math research and scholar community and math adjacent fields. And I think that the impact has been that within the math discipline, so many journals, historically, were published independently by their society or a huge number independently by an academic department.
ALLISON BELAN: And when we went from print to digital, they were left without a solution operating at such small scale. So very similar to what you're saying, Wendy, about they needed a lifeline, and Project Euclid as a hosting solution was that lifeline for the ones who could manage their own subscriptions and stuff. And then the Project Euclid aggregation, which if the publisher's content is in the aggregation, they get paid royalties through a revenue lifeline and access to the institutionals market through the sales team.
ALLISON BELAN: So the impact has been interesting because it's become this academy-owned-- and in a not surprisingly and very much the same way-- archive also founded at Cornell University libraries, was it's become this academy-owned hub for math and statistics. And when we go to math conferences to just promote its use and awareness of it, mathematicians scream to our booth and tell us how much they love Project Euclid.
ALLISON BELAN: So as a hosting site because it's so focused, we've been able to develop features that are very math-specific, identifiers that are math-specific, and sophisticated math displays, and just really focus on that discipline. And I think that the impact has been that mathematics has been able-- as a set of scholarly publishers, they've been able to remain independent at probably a much higher proportion, not just because of Project Euclid, but.
ALLISON BELAN: So we're really proud of that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And supporting that, yeah.
ALLISON BELAN: And supporting that. And so then with the Scholarly Publishing Collective, that's a different audience. Still independent, still relatively small compared to the big people of the world, but that's really focused on mission-driven publishers who rely on those journal revenues to sustain their larger mission. And so with consolidation with the expense, especially within these-- excuse me, society and university press worlds of the cost of owning your own fulfillment system, employing your own sales team, employing your own marketing team, your own customer support team, employing the people that you need to actually manage the technology and pay for the technology is just too much.
ALLISON BELAN: And then for many years, Project MUSE has supported that and still does support, like, all of our publishers have content in the MUSE aggregation, but they also want to sell direct title subscriptions to librarians. And for many years, JSTOR had a service that supported them. Well, JSTOR ended that service that hosting service. And we had already been in conversation with our peers, essentially, who know that we do the thing they do, and do some things that they want to be doing, and we'd already been in conversations about sales services.
ALLISON BELAN: And when that happened, we just had to pivot and be like, OK, we're going to build a platform for you, and we're going to manage it. And so the impact has been that these publishers who really rely on these journal revenues now have a platform to brand their program to potential journal partners and show value to their existing journal partners to brand the journal to those partner's members, or the partner's author community, and attract them, and to keep those as partners instead of having them migrate to the larger commercial publishers, or, at least, delay the migration while we all figure something new out.
ALLISON BELAN: And yeah, so this is a way for them to keep generating those revenues that make, in many cases, their book publishing, their money-losing scholarly monograph publishing program able to function.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you. You have a very similar mission, but you have a niche community. Can you tell us a little bit more about the impact you're making?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So very much echo what Allison said. We were formed by these societies to make publishing viable, but more importantly-- I mean, that is our mission today is to maintain independence, viable geoscience publishing now and in the future. Second to that, our mission is, obviously, to just serve the larger geoscience research community, which we do.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But, again, these societies, they have such important education programs, K-12. So when I think about impact of what we do, the indirect impact is that they are able to carry on these other more important programs to help inspire kids to be scientists, or climate change scientists, or seismologists, whatever it is. So the reach goes much further than what you just think about like we're giving them a check.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: It supports lobbying efforts to Congress. Many of them spend a lot of time having lobbyists go up to Congress, and when there's really difficult decisions about funding, about whether you're going to fund earthquake science, climate science, whatever, these are the organizations that are there at the forefront to persuade and talk about the importance of the geosciences. And so, yes, there is the they get the check, they have their publishing programs, but it funds a lot more.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But I also, in the context of our way, we don't really-- it's happening very organically. I think the geosciences, we are not early adopters. I say we as a geoscientist. We are very slow to move. We think in geologic time a lot. So it is a challenge to get them to do it. I think, also, the funding is really different in the geosciences.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: There are a lot of subdisciplines that have zero funding, which is almost very similar to humanities in that respect. So the other thing that we've been able to impact is also their authors. When they were trying to figure out what to do with OA, we actually got together and formed an open access community journal with seven of the societies because none of them had an open access option.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And the idea was that it would cascade, they would send their authors to publish. That has worked not so great for many cultural reasons, I think, and we could get into the whole cultural challenges of working with many different societies. But, really, the impact trickles down in ways that you would just not expect, and they really rely on that funding because of that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Interesting. So everything that you're doing is supporting the organizations as a whole, it's not just sending that check. And that's amazing, that mission is incredibly important. And that's definitely a theme I've been hearing from all of you. Another thing I've been hearing from all of you is that of technology and how significant technology plays in all of your work. If you could each tell me a little bit about what role does technology play in these models.
VERONICA SHOWERS: What challenges do you face? I'm thinking integrations, I'm thinking data health, et cetera. And what efficiencies have you gained from that technology? Starting with Allison.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. So Project Euclid in 2000, it was essentially a technology-- it was a technology response to a technology-driven crisis. It was all about scholarship now needed to be online, and that was the preferred way to find it, use it, buy it, and it needed to be there. So technology played a huge role, and it was a technology play. Over time, it had to become more than a technology play, and that's roughly when Cornell University libraries and Duke University Press partnered because it needed a sustainability model to keep the platform alive.
ALLISON BELAN: And that particular platform was built at Cornell University libraries on an open source software that turned out to have no supporting community over time. And there was one man who built it, and one man who sustained it, and he was about to retire, so yeah. So a couple of years ago, we had to make a big technology change, and that has actually, in some ways, led to-- this is now wholly managed by Duke University Press.
ALLISON BELAN: Cornell is still a big fan and ours, but they wanted to shift what resources they had left in it to other priorities. And I think that with the Scholarly Publishing Collective emerging in 2021, it's reflective of how technology is important, but it's not the only important thing. And it's really more about what can technology enable. So with the Scholarly Publishing Collective, again, those conversations started around, hey, Duke University Press knows how to sell university press content, knows how to manage consortial relationships, knows how to engage sales agents, could you do that for us?
ALLISON BELAN: And so it was as much about extending our people and our 20 years of acquired skill and knowledge in running all of this operation to our peers and our colleagues. And in terms of what have we gained, we've gained perspective. It's amazing to be deeply embedded in university press journal and book publishing, and then to start to talk to three other university presses who you think they do what we do, and then define the differences.
ALLISON BELAN: So we are able to take all those differences and use them to build new features and affordances within the platform and the technology, or to develop new ways of supporting and managing subscribers and customers and members because we're seeing new challenges. And, of course, there is the efficiency of sharing costs, spreading that overhead out a little bit more, and for our partners, not having to go suddenly instantly employ 10 people that they don't even know how to manage what they're doing.
ALLISON BELAN: So I think of the world of technology with the collective-- I think of the collective as a tech-enabled service not a technology play.
VERONICA SHOWERS: OK. Interesting. What are your thoughts on the technology component for you, Phoebe, in your group?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Again, I very much echo that in that the driver for GSW was the technology shifts that were happening. I see that we're coming to that again with AI. I see even GSW, which has resources, and we have the operational capabilities, we are providing many of the same services, but I think that our societies often look to us for guidance on their roadmaps.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: But also, we know we couldn't do it without, let's say, Silverchair. We were similar. We were on highwire at first launch, and then that just wasn't keeping up with what the end user researcher needed. And so it's a bit of technology and the ways that innovations are driving that change, but also, I think, the demands of the end users, and we're trying to have to stay on top of both.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And then we have some societies that-- one of them actually has their own membership portal that they have on Atypon. And so then the rest of the societies are on Silverchair, and then you're starting to think about, well, should we be doing this, too? You don't want to lose any of your societies to another platform. So there's lots of challenges of just managing the needs of the researchers that then bubble up to the societies, that then bubble up to you.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And I think the biggest challenge that I see in all of this is culture, is the cultural differences between all of our partners. Some are very tech-savvy. Some have no staff, it's purely volunteers. They have one journal, they publish eight articles a year. They're there just for the paycheck, and that's that. And then there are some that are really trying to decide, how do we license our content to Exxon or Chevron and protect our IP but help advance the science?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So culture, to me, is the biggest challenge. Technology is the thing that brought us together, and I think will continue to keep us together. Because we have big competition. We are competing with the commercial publishers and trying to maintain independence.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Great. Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: When I first read this question, I was like, what do you mean? It's all technology, of course, it's embedded in everything that we do. And then I started thinking about the question a little bit differently about, we share a lot of similarities about how we came to be and what we were trying to solve. But I would say, a recent shift in our world has been using technology to, let's say, prevent nefarious activities.
WENDY QUEEN: So not about what we're doing with technology, but what we're trying to prevent happening by other technology. And they've been some of the largest expenses in developing the platform. And when you talk specifically about AI, I mean, we are super charged about all the efficiencies that we can gather, we've been doing experiments with AI for years now about relating content and things like that.
WENDY QUEEN: But on Phoebe's note of culture, as an aggregator, I'm in a situation where we have some publishers on the aggregation that will say, use my content to train because this is for the good of humanity, this is the content that's worthwhile to get out there. I have another subset on the spectrum that's like, lock it down, do not let anybody touch it, and tell me that, do you promise 100% that nothing like this could ever happen?
WENDY QUEEN: So a lot of efforts, investments, resources are going to be going into, what are we allowing or not allowing? And that's a very big shift alongside with MUSE starting-- getting heavily into open access a few years back and realizing that, actually, this was a huge technology lift for us to actually support open content. And that was actually a shock to me, right?
WENDY QUEEN: It's like before we had this lovely existence that it was a gated little community, and we knew everybody that came through the front gate and everybody that left, and now it's the world. But I'd be remiss if I didn't find a way to say this today. And technology, since it applies to everything, I'm really hoping that with some of the AI advantages, that MUSE can help our publishers create more accessible content and really help those that are going to have struggles meeting the July 2025 European goals deadline.
WENDY QUEEN: Are there things that we can do that may not be perfect but are good enough? And I look at that as like the early days of OCR. Everybody's like, what's good enough? Is it 89%? Is it 94%? But whatever it was, it was better than having nothing, and I'm hoping I can promote, embrace, and I have a technical staff that's really on the forefront of this to use it for that greater good as well.
WENDY QUEEN: So--
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Can I just--
WENDY QUEEN: That's my technology answer.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And about, also, the technology, I know we've been focusing a lot on platforms, but I think when I look at our tech stack, we talked about marketing this morning, Salesforce, HubSpot, we seem to be the ones that are using these tools and then educating. Again, some are better than others, but technology extends to so much part of our operations. It's so critical picking the right tool. There are so many tools.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're trying to figure that out, and we're grateful, also, to have technology partners that help us do that, so the rest of them. We're not all doing the same thing and struggling with the same problems. We can come up with a solution, and then pass that information out, which I think is great.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. One thing that's been interesting in terms of DUP's role within the collective is there is some technology for which we are the explainer and the teacher. Obviously, the platform, they have their own vendors, they load their own files, they have to get them through the publishing process, and all of that.
ALLISON BELAN: Our partners for the most part right now are pretty-- it's a small group-- are pretty sophisticated publishers. They may not have had to be managing their own platform to date, but they really understand subscribers, members, what they need in terms of data about them, what they need in terms of data usage. They understand VOIs, they understand all this stuff. So right now, at least, it's been interesting to see the community evolve in parts of plugging informational gaps with each other, and with us, and learning from each other.
ALLISON BELAN: And that is largely around technical things, and just the value of having a community group-- work on a problem as a group, or say like, oh, you didn't know about that? Well, let me tell you about this, and plug all those little holes. And, again, at the moment, what's interesting compared to the diversity of your publishers on both your platforms is how similar the partners are on our platform because they also all-- like, they needed a host after JSTOR stopped hosting them.
ALLISON BELAN: So they all came at the same time, they all came from the same experience with the same set of expectations, and that's going to be an interesting thing to watch and to manage as that community diversifies.
VERONICA SHOWERS: It's really interesting. I think with all of the different technologies that you're talking about, with how you're serving your constituencies, how do you make decisions? I mean, you shared that you have a publisher with one journal, they publish eight articles a year, and then you have more robust-- you have partners that have bigger programs. How do you make strategic decisions?
VERONICA SHOWERS: Do you have a spectrum you can say, hey, here's what we offer, and then you can say-- or on the other side of the spectrum you can say, OK, give us feedback, give us-- what do you need us to do for you? How are you making those decisions, those strategic decisions, especially with technology in mind, and what are the benefits and the challenges for both sides of the spectrum?
VERONICA SHOWERS: [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah, Phoebe, that one's yours, yeah.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Usually, it's who's ever screaming the loudest, or has-- [LAUGHTER] I think, definitely, the ones that come to us with ideas. There's lots of ideas. I think the ones that are willing to support and work with us versus like, oh, here, here's this idea, go off and do it. But I think we have so many-- as everybody does, right?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We have so many competing priorities, and we are trying to-- GSW as a whole as I'm sure some of our other societies, we're really trying to take that data-driven approach, and not just make decisions on who's screaming the loudest, or who we're closest to, or who we've worked longest with, or biggest need. It's looking at the data, but then also developing a process where you're constantly engaging with your societies to figure out which problem is the biggest problem to solve, which can we do that creates the least amount of risk?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Because there are some ideas that come up that are good for GSW as growing, but it's not good for our societies because we might put ourselves in competition with them. And there's that coopetition thing again, and we will-- if we come across that, we will not pursue that. Because first and foremost, our mission is to maintain viable sustainable growth in their publishing programs.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So that's the number one driver is, is it competing with our mission? Does it contradict our mission? And then second is if it doesn't do that, well then, OK, we have our own process. We're developing prioritization canvasses and ways to have a more, I guess, disciplined approach to the ideas that we take forward.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Thank you. Wendy, how do you approach decision making?
WENDY QUEEN: In somewhat similar ways to Phoebe, I'll add that we do do a lot of communications programs directly with our publishers and libraries. And a benefit of being part of a university and being part of a university press, you also gets to serve on the scholarly communications steering committees at the university and things like that. And then we use some very old school survey, all those types of methods. And I'll mention that there's a part of our publishers that are looking to contribute to that, and then there's a part of our publishers that are saying, you tell us what the roadmap should be.
WENDY QUEEN: You tell us where we should be focusing on growth as well. And then on the AI front, I find this funny that this is-- I don't know if you consider this a plus or minus of being embedded in a university, but some items around making strategic decisions there, that governance is going to be made for me as being part of a university, right? So I will not have that independence to say, I don't agree with Hopkins, and therefore this is the way MUSE is going to do it.
WENDY QUEEN: So I think that being in a university adds so much support and so many positives, but it is a-- there's a few other layers of complexity that you're following along what's put forth at your host institution.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah. And those layers are the ones that tend to really slow you down when you're trying to innovate in publishing and publishing technology. So basically, what we have to go through to partner with a new technology vendor, or to try some new e-commerce-driven-- like, I have one way I can take credit cards. I can't contract with anybody else that will take credit cards with our brand on it.
ALLISON BELAN: So I don't remember how long ago it was, but Twitter came out with a buy link in a tweet, and I was like, that would be so cool. No way that's ever happening. So yeah, why not? Come on. University keeps us safe. I love it. Yeah.
ALLISON BELAN: So with Project Euclid, at this point, it's a pretty mature collaboration. It's a mature aggregation product. It's a mature technology solution. The big decision was to change platforms when the old technology-- and that really wasn't a decision we had a choice in making. The platform that had been built had not been significantly upgraded.
ALLISON BELAN: It couldn't do all the things that we need platforms to do, and the person was retiring. Project Euclid has always had an advisory board, and when it was a joint venture between Cornell and Duke, it also had a governance cabinet that big decisions had to be reviewed and okayed by. So those are two mechanisms other than partner needs, emerging partner needs that can influence Project Euclid.
ALLISON BELAN: I think the next big decisions that are going to come up there that Euclid will lead on and be pushing our partners for will be-- most of math is still-- math research is still locked in a PDF because that's the output of LaTeX. So pushing for full text HTML, especially for accessibility, and then other accessibility practices. And then I think we're also-- Project Euclid already has an OA model.
ALLISON BELAN: I think we're going to be asked to experiment and support in new OA models. And then for the Collective, just again, a whole different context. This was a situation where we had to move super fast to meet the need. Like, there was an expiration date on their content being online.
ALLISON BELAN: We had all the technology, so basically, it was a process of Duke saying like, here's what we know we can do and do well, and pretty much guarantee you we can deliver on it in this amount of time, and that basically set the level. So we're only a couple years in, and I think our partners are really just settling in to the tools that they have now and the data that they're getting. So I think we're at the very front end of how are we going to mediate decision making and input because it hasn't really started emerging yet as everybody recovers from migrating their whole corpus.
ALLISON BELAN: But I think no matter what, it is almost always going to come back to-- as long as DUP is managing it and managing the technology and is the team out there on the ground doing it, it's always going to come back to, do we think we can deliver? We won't commit to something that we're not pretty certain we can figure out and be confident that we can deliver on because the margins are just too thin to completely fail.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Definitely have to deliver, absolutely. Well, I think this is the time to go ahead and open it up for questions. Whoever asks a question gets a car, just kidding. You get a car, and you get a car. So if you have a question, please get a microphone, or if you have one in the app, please let us know. Go ahead. There's a question right here. We have a mic coming your way.
AUDIENCE: Coming your way.
SCOTT HENRY: I'm Scott Henry from ASM International. I assume that there's got to be some degree of standardization when you're working with multiple partners. On the other hand, I'm sure there's lots of pressure to, well, we want to do it this way, can you work with us? How do you manage that push-pull between having it be manageable on your end, but also accommodating what the partners are able to do or willing to do?
ALLISON BELAN: So I'll take that one because I've been thinking a lot about this. We didn't open up the whole toolbox to our partners. Again, we said, here's how it-- in some cases we said, here's how it will be. In some cases we said, here are the choices we can offer. And it's all because, what could we sustain? What could we continue to respond to the emails with, and what could we make sure that the site didn't suddenly go down or look crazy?
ALLISON BELAN: And so we have offered a pretty standard set of site features and configuration options in templates. And, again, moment in time, because they all came from the same place where it wasn't even their brand or their journals brand, it was the platform, the JSTOR brand, they didn't have huge expectations around that. So we just said, all right, they're thrilled with what they have now, again, will that last for two more years?
ALLISON BELAN: Will it last for five more years? I don't know. But yeah, we've got to be very careful about what we commit to in terms of, well, yes, we know we could be editing the text in that widget any time you wanted to, but we're not going to, yeah.
WENDY QUEEN: I'll say we participated in the same migration from JSTOR, and the reality of it is in the humanities and social sciences, we're not turning anybody away. So we do backflips, we bend over backwards, we do a lot of education around-- [INAUDIBLE] That's why I'm leaning over this way because every time I get close. So we do a lot of, I'd say, hand holding all the way through with, here's where you are, here's where we need you to get to be.
WENDY QUEEN: Either you need to do it, or we're going to need to do it for you, but we'll get there eventually. And so we don't play hard ball on those goals.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: If I could just add, I think it's a lot of negotiation and discussions and communication, but also sometimes just asking like, well, why? Why do you want this thing? What is it delivering for you versus-- and then trying to meet them there or figure out a way in the construct of the platform to get it done. But, again, I think it goes back to that culture thing. Just, again, they have their publishing programs.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: Some of them are 200 years old, they have ways of doing things. Governance gets in the way a lot. But yeah, it's always a push-pull of like, what are we both trying to achieve? And we both have this-- in some sense, our societies and ourselves have the same mission. And so it's been working out so far.
VERONICA SHOWERS: Yeah. I think we have time for one more question. We have two different questions. Eeny meeny miney moe, just kidding. Who wants to go? We got two people here that have one more question. We have a mic right there. Fantastic.
SCOTT DINEEN: Scott Dineen, Optica Publishing Group. So your talk is called coopetition, and I have a question about that. So you talked about how technology can really help protect us and create economies of scale, but are there any cases where cooperation prevented the kind of advances you get from competition? Any cases you think where you have taken cooperation too far at the expense of competition driving change?
VERONICA SHOWERS: That's one.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: So I think the most recent example that I can think of is that as a platform aggregator, we want to grow the platform. We want to add more content to the platform. In the geosciences, we know that we have gaps in particular areas that are trending in the geoscience academic world, and our societies that we work with today, they may not have that content. And we often have publishers, no longer just societies, but university presses and some commercial publishers coming to us and asking if we could put their journals on our platform as another sales channel.
PHOEBE MCMELLON: And that's where you're saying, the competition, it helps GSW. It's collaborative. It's good for the researchers who are coming to the platform, but it creates a very competitive, sticky environment for us to work in. I don't know that our societies-- and our board actually had to deal with this of like, how do we continue to be GSW as a collective of societies but have this platform that we know we want to grow but we're competing with ourselves?
PHOEBE MCMELLON: We're adding content that's now competing with our own societies for the good of all societies. It's complex. It's not easy. And I don't know that we've totally solved that yet, and I'm sure there's going to be many more sticky situations like that.
VERONICA SHOWERS: All right. We're at time. Before we close out the session, we do have the breakout sessions immediately following this session. Those breakout sessions are content syndication, integrating digital event workflows, and ethics in publishing. There is going to be signage in the hall, and everything should be on this floor, so it should be easy to get to.
VERONICA SHOWERS: And with that, I would like for you to join me in thanking our panelists with a round of applause. [APPLAUSE]
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