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Digital Strategy, Platform Technology, and Open Access. Thoughts as You Adapt Your Publishing Business.
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Digital Strategy, Platform Technology, and Open Access. Thoughts as You Adapt Your Publishing Business.
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Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're going to have a kind of far-ranging conversation around open access. And just to help gauge the room at lunch today, how many folks talked about open access, Plan S, transformative deals, something of that kind. OK. That's good to know. And what we wanted to focus on in our conversation today is actually more about the necessary technology and infrastructure to support wider skill open access because so much has been said about kind of the business model or economic or equity concerns.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we're getting to the point where the rubber's hitting the road. And some of us are entering pilots. Many of us need to begin adapting our systems and our technology stack. So we're going to try to offer some thoughts and perhaps the best advice we can.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think this is a really important part of the discussion about open access. We tend to focus very much on the impact of the business models, the policy agenda. And I think, wherever we stand on the spectrum of our views about open access-- whether we're openly embracing it or being dragged kicking and screaming-- it is something that we're going to have to engage with.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I see us moving, over the next few years, into an era where the pace of change, if you can believe it, is going to accelerate, certainly when it comes to open access. And I think over the last decade or two, we've had the luxury, in some ways, of a somewhat gradual adaptation to open access. And I think something like Plan S, the big rock thrown into the pond is really changing that.
ALISON MUDDITT: And we're all going to have to learn how to adapt. And this sort of crucial infrastructure piece is really important if we're going to be able to do that successfully.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we're going to have a discussion in four parts today. We're going to start talking a bit about what we see as a necessary infrastructure in technology for things like Plan S or transformative deals. We're going to spend just a little bit of time talking about the role of the library in all of this. And then we're going to offer probably just a few short thoughts on what we see for the future and then turn to you all for questions.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I hope we do an OK job with that. So Alison, we know PLOS has been a wholly open access publisher. And because of that, one might presume that you are ahead of the game in supporting transformative deals or even Plan S. Is that presumption right?
ALISON MUDDITT: I mean, the honest answer to that is yes and no. And I think the yes part is that PLOS has been Plan S compliant since day one. So there is no compliance issue for us in that sense of the word. And transformative deals really aren't a thing for us because, again, we're fully compliant. And so we do not have a subscription business to migrate or transform in the sense that transformative deals are understood. .
ALISON MUDDITT: But I don't think that leaves us without challenges in the transition to the Plan S world. Native OA publishers, like PLOS, I think are challenged by the fact that our focus has been very much on the B2C model, the author. And so the risk for us in a Plan S world, and one of the things I think I've talked about fairly extensively elsewhere, is the danger that if we don't develop sort of the equivalent of a transformative deal for a native open access publisher, that we continue to be cut out of the library piece of the budget pie, if you like.
ALISON MUDDITT: And that's certainly been the case for us so far. All of our APCs pretty much come from grant funding. That limits us in terms of-- I think it limits us in terms of our ability to grow. There are, of course, other problems with the APC model. And so I think it actually pushes us to think differently about a couple of things. One is very much our relationships with libraries and how we think about building those relationships in terms of building the equivalent of a transformative deal, whatever that looks like for PLOS.
ALISON MUDDITT: So that's one area that we're focused on. And then the second one I think, actually, for us is really starting to look beyond the APC and recognizing the limitations of the APC. And how do we think about models that will perhaps work in parallel to the APC for those who like them, but develop something that's going to be far more effective for the many people who struggle with being able to pay an APC?
WILL SCHWEITZER: I want to stop on this theme of this shift from the business consumer mindset to business to business, and what that kind of means for your organization. I have some colleagues from my former organization in this room, AAAS, where I helped launch Science Advances, which is a pretty large-scale open access journal. And when we thought about the infrastructure we needed to support that journal, it was very much a B2C mindset.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And so I'm sorry, guys, that you're a few steps behind where you need to be. I'll buy you a drink later. But I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about what that shift means for PLOS's operations for your mindset.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. I think it has to start with mindset because across the organization, each of our teams has really been set up with this very sort of singular focus on the author as customer. Whether or not it's actually the APC funds coming out of the author's pocket, the author has been the decision maker about when to send their paper. That remains the case going forward, but I think with the start of transformative deals and other bundled APC models, it sort of challenges us to think differently about that.
ALISON MUDDITT: So our marketing department has been entirely focused on marketing to authors and driving submissions in that way. The editorial department is entirely focused on authors. The technology teams are entirely focused on developing our platform to serve the needs of authors. And so, arguably, I think even to this point in our history, that has resulted in us not paying enough attention to readers, for example.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think that becomes challenging because as we all know, readers and authors are one and the same person, in many cases, just wearing different hats at different times. So it requires us, across the organization I think, to really sort of refocus how we think about who are users and customers are. And then I think when it comes to libraries, PLOS has, in the past, had a fairly deep relationship with libraries that has sort of been allowed to languish, I think, over the years.
ALISON MUDDITT: And a number of us who've come into the organization more recently, recognizing the critical importance of us at that going forward. And so we're really rethinking-- again, across the organization-- how we re-engage libraries and consortia as critical partners in the future of our business.
WILL SCHWEITZER: That's really interesting. So kind of picking up on that pace of change in complexity and changes within PLOS-- you've written about this. You've been very transparent that PLOS has a long history of building or developing a lot of your technology in-house. And I think a lot of societies, a lot of publishers are recognizing, as you said in your opening remarks, the market's changing faster.
WILL SCHWEITZER: These are much more complex workflows, particularly for institution-driven open access deals. And what does that really mean for how PLOS approaches new solutions and, say, working with partners or vendors?
ALISON MUDDITT: It's funny, I was just talking to Anne about this because she was talking about a very similar set of issues yesterday. But I hope-- and I think the good news is that she and I pretty much aligned on these issues. I mean, going back to the history of PLOS, the rationale for building our own technology in the early days I think made a lot of sense because there were no other open access publishers out there, with the exception of BMC.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so the kind of needs that we had weren't well met by vendors at the time. And there was no point in us going to a standard platform vendor, for example, because there's a huge piece of that-- the authentication layers, and so on-- that we simply don't want, and we don't want to pay for. And other pieces of the technology are article-level metrics, which were developed ahead of all metrics and were the first attempt to replace impact factor in that way.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think it was really about building technology that didn't exist at the time. However, if we sort of fast forward to where we are today, as you're saying, technology itself has shifted enormously. I think our view of what we need from technology has also shifted. A good example of that I think is sort of renewed focus on discoverability and reader experience, things that I think have probably been neglected by open access publishers as sort of an assumption of, if it's open, it's going to be discovered.
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, not the case. Whether it comes to the challenges of indexing open access content through library systems, or whether it's just simple searches through Google or other, but we need to be paying far more attention to those kinds of issues. So I think we're sort of really rethinking what that looks like going forward. And I think probably it's going to be taking a more sort of pragmatic approach to that.
ALISON MUDDITT: I do see areas in which it will make sense for us to continue to build our own technology, but I suspect that that will be primarily for point solutions, where we have something specific. So another piece of technology that we built in-house is a system called PLOS Match, which matches incoming papers to PLOS ONE, with one of the 6,000 PLOS members of our academic editorial board. So you can imagine the idea of the thousands and thousands of papers that come into us every single week, trying to manually match those.
ALISON MUDDITT: So there's a system that's set up algorithmically to match those papers to our editorial board. So maintaining and replacing that with newer technology is probably something that we would continue to do ourselves. But certainly, as we look at other systems, I think it's going to make more and more sense for us to be looking out-of-house. And I think the honest truth as well, and I've talked about this quite openly since I got to PLOS, one of the first things I needed to do when I got there was to assess where we were with the development of Aperta, which was the manuscripts submission and workflow system that PLOS had been working on for a number of years at that point.
ALISON MUDDITT: And it was a tough decision to walk away from that after many years and many millions of dollars of investment. But I think the lesson that we learned in a somewhat painful and expensive way was that building that kind of enterprise-wide system is actually really hard. And I think we underestimated how hard it was. And honestly, we overestimated our own capabilities to be able to do that.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think we learned the lesson the hard way there. And I think that certainly influences the way I think about how we will deal with, certainly, those bigger systems going forward.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And what's really interesting-- I think it's Anne pointed out in our comments yesterday-- PLOS ONE is one of the world's largest journal-makes-software-cry. So it seems like you'll need to still have some capabilities in-house.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes, yes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we've talked a lot about today. We certainly talked a lot about open source solutions in the industry, and I was wondering what your view of that space is.
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, I think this is another area where Anne and I are pretty aligned on this. But from a pure mission and ethos perspective, I mean, PLOS is open by nature. And so the idea of being able to use open source is clearly incredibly attractive. And so I love the idea of doing that. I think the challenge for us is that what's available at the moment doesn't really scale to what we need. And again, much of that comes back to PLOS ONE in particular.
ALISON MUDDITT: Looking at what's been developed either in terms of platforms or in terms of submission and review systems, they just don't scale to PLOS ONE. And I think that's going to continue to be a real challenge for us. But beyond PLOS ONE, I think there's a real gap for a pretty large number of publishers right now. I was part of an SSP webinar on this last fall. And Angela [? Cochran ?] and I were on the same panel.
ALISON MUDDITT: And the point that we were making was that there's this gap for what I would call sort of mid-sized publishers. So if you're one of the larger publishers, you probably have a very large technology team who can either develop their own systems. Or you have enough people to be able to support and customize the systems that are out there to really meet your needs. If you're a much smaller publisher, then you can probably survive on some of the cheaper open source systems, like an OJS.
ALISON MUDDITT: And then there are a lot of us in the middle who I think are not well served by what's out there. And I'm not sure what the answer to that is. I mean, I look around at sort of some of the open source things that are in development, whether it's COCO or some of the other things. And I have high hopes for them, but that's about all they are at the moment. And a lot of these things have been in development for a number of years.
ALISON MUDDITT: And one of my fears is that they're going to run into some of the challenges that we did with something like a Aperta. And I think another lesson that we learned from Aperta was just, I think, probably trying to bite off more than we could chew. And so when I look at trying to develop a full end-to-end solution that's going to take many years, I wonder if we would have been more successful, and if others might be more successful if they focused on a real problem, like author submission or something, which we all know authors hate in pretty much every system.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if we just focused on that chunk in six to 12 month increments of actually being able to get something done. My concern is that-- we certainly found this with Aperta, that if you're four years in, the problem you set out to solve has moved on a pretty long way by the time you get to the end at that point. And so I think there may well be something in that that we should all take away.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Yes. And it is-- I think want to amplify one of your comments there-- that it it's very hard if you are a publisher or society in this midmarket, like choices are easier for you to make if you are small or if you are very large. But one of the things I think I've observed with these open source solutions-- and I'm biased, obviously, sitting here, doing what I do-- is that even for some of my previous organizations, like Science, these were actually really complex solutions.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And then even though we had a lot of technology talent in-house-- they had built many pieces of their content-hosting platform for, say, their news content-- it would be really difficult for, I think-- [? Sadani ?] can correct me if I'm wrong with this later-- but I think it would actually be really difficult, actually, for AAAS to leverage that in a sustainable way. There's just there's just not enough maturity there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So let's switch gears and talk a little bit about the library. And in that shift from B to C, to B to B within open access, it seems the library is going to remain a central figure. They have dollars, and those dollars may need to be reallocated. But they have a lot of experience or expertise in dealing with publishers, in negotiating licenses. They have some systems in place, probably more so than publishers, to administer these transformative deals.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And they have a considerable history in negotiating with publishers. So you've talked a bit about PLOS reinvesting in those library relationships. But can you tell us a bit more about how you're changing your approach?
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes, so I think this has sort of been a pretty big shift for us this year, is we've really started to think-- I mean, it's partly as a result of what's been happening with the advent of transformative deals and Plan S-- but I think it's also as we've been thinking more clearly about how we want to really build and grow our business.
ALISON MUDDITT: I mean, part of that has been about creating new positions in-house. We created a new role for director of strategic partnerships, which Sarah Rue from Digital Science joined us in that role. And so she's playing a key role there. Dan Morgan joined us as director of community relations. And so those are roles that are working very closely together in terms of thinking about how we build those relationships.
ALISON MUDDITT: Then I think we've really been spending a lot of time talking to both librarians and consortia leaders, trying to think about what it is that they're really looking for from publishers. And of course, I think that's the piece that becomes very challenging, right? As any of us who've worked closely with librarians know, there is many answers, if not more answers to that question as there are librarians.
ALISON MUDDITT: And that, I think, is a fundamental challenge as we look at how to structure these deals. And, I mean, it's interesting-- I can quote Ralf Schimmer of the Max Planck Institute on this, as a librarian. I was talking to Ralf recently about some of the blockers to OA. And his view was that librarians themselves have been one of the primary blockers.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if you actually look at it from a budget perspective, they're the ones who really do control budget. And if there is such a desire to focus on more OA, then they actually have been the keys to the kingdom in that sense, and really could help drive a bigger transformation. So I think there are challenges with the right ways to engage with librarians that help move them forward. But then there's the whole technology piece, and just some of the early conversations that we've been having about what does a transformative deal look like with a native open access publisher.
ALISON MUDDITT: And we're fairly deep into conversations with a few libraries and consortia about that. And there's kinds of requests that we're getting around workflow, on what they'd like their idea workflows to look like. I mean, as we were looking at, would be six to 12 months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars for each library.
ALISON MUDDITT: And, I mean, that's clearly not scalable. And so I think that is a real challenge that we're running into. And I know other publishers who are engaging in transformative deals-- I've had similar conversations with them, with Cambridge, and with ACS, and others. And they're seeing very much the same thing. So I think we're back to sort of educating the librarians again, in many ways.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think that's going to be a real challenge for us.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think this has been talked about in many contexts, that publishers are going to have to operate in two different worlds, between largely Europe and the rest of the world. And one of the things that I think I've been puzzling about is just this, that so many publishers are now forming pilots about how they can support these things. Libraries are articulating their needs. And there doesn't actually seem to be a lot of talk from one publisher to another yet.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think there's just some very fledgling efforts with groups like EESAC about figuring out what libraries standards should be.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. I mean, one of the things that we've been trying to do at PLOS-- I mean we're looking at piloting two or three different business models, our own version of a sort of bundled APC model, which I think is sort of the equivalent of a transformative deal for us.
ALISON MUDDITT: Then looking at alternatives to the APC, and what we're trying to understand, and all of this what's happening in Anne's groups, is really trying to understand what's the commonality in terms of needs across those, so that we're not sort of reinventing the wheel for each one of those. And thinking about, what are the common needs there? So a common need is for when an author submits to us, for us to automatically be able to know what kind of deal that author's institution has in place.
ALISON MUDDITT: Now, not all of the pieces are there, the institution identifiers, our ability to identify that author with a particular institution if they're not using an ORCID, or they're not using their institutional email address. So there are a number of pieces there that are missing for us to be able to do that. But that's fundamental, I think, for all of us, and fundamental regardless of the type of deal. So we're trying to establish what some of those common elements are that we can then work towards at least being able to meet the needs for those.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent. So before we turn over to questions, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the future. You've mentioned wanting to find the alternative to the ABC for PLOS. A lot of publishers are, of course, experimenting with business models and launching new products as a way of charting out their futures. What else is PLOS thinking about?
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think one of the things that I've been thinking about since I got to PLOS and, really, I think my primary challenge from the board when I was hired was about charting the next big horizon for PLOS after the APC model in open access and after PLOS ONE. I think it was recognized, both internally and externally, that PLOS had drifted a little bit. And we were sort of trying to find out what that next big thing was. That said, we've spent a lot of time since I've been starting to think about that, but really making sure that we had firm foundations to build from at the same time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think my attention is now really sort of turning to that. And PLOS is a really interesting organization because we were not founded to be a publisher. And so I sort of think of us as a somewhat reluctant publisher. I mean, Pat Brown and Mike Eisen started PLOS to kind of disrupt and sort of kill the industry. And it's somewhat ironic in some ways that we've ended up being this large publisher. But I think what I come back to is the fact that PLOS was founded to be a catalyst, and not to be a large, successful publisher.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so I see my charge as sort of refining our inner catalyst and thinking about, how do we think about the way in which both the catalytic and the operational sides of the organization work together? PLOS has been successful as a catalyst, not only with open access, but if you look at the data policy that was instituted four or five years ago, we were the first publisher to require data submission with publication.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I can remember-- I was at UC Press at the time. And I think a lot of us from the outside were looking at PLOS and thinking, it's going to kill submissions, nobody is going to do that. Neither of those things happened. I mean, I can look back at the data now and see there was no discernible impact on submissions at all.
ALISON MUDDITT: And the fact that PLOS was prepared to take that risk and to require that, not just on one journal as a pilot but right across every single journal, I think has normalized it to some degree and made it easier for others to do that. So there's a way in which we had this catalytic role. But having this large publishing organization as well enables us to sort of prove some of those newer things at scale, which then I think makes industry-wide adoption easier.
ALISON MUDDITT: So from sort of high level, that's sort of how I'm thinking about things. Some of the specifics that we're thinking about were-- a lot of the things that were talked about in that final session this morning. I mean, we've been working very closely with John and his team at bioRxiv back the ways in which we can continue to develop the pilots and experiments we've been doing with preprints.
ALISON MUDDITT: We're very much looking at how we open up publication and not just publication, but how we think about both incentivizing and crediting the publication and sharing of other outputs beyond the final journal article. That, I think, is another reason for thinking about models beyond the APC because I think if you start thinking about APCs for micro-publications or anything like that, it breaks down very, very quickly. So those are a couple of areas I think that we're really focused on right now.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent. It's great to hear about. I think reluctant publisher was my LinkedIn headline for a good number of years. I wanted to turn to something John raised, actually, in the last discussion, which was how difficult it is to talk about our costs in publishing, and that a component of transformative deals and Plan S is actually price transparency, and price transparency with the stated goal of creating downward pressure in the market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that's pretty dangerous conversational ground for a lot of reasons.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But I think there's a technology and strategy question here, which is are there things that PLOS is doing, or that publishers should consider doing, to make our processes more efficient and scalable?
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah, I'm just going to sort of comment on the first part of that before I come to answering that. And I think there is an increasing recognition among those who've been pushing for transparency that they need to be very clear about differentiating between cost and price, and that those are two quite different things. And the study that Alicia [INAUDIBLE] is now undertaking on behalf of the Plan S and the societies I think is trying to understand that-- and even talking to some of the drivers of planners fairly recently, I think they are increasingly seeing that there's a clear differential between what you get at different levels.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I'm sort of feeling encouraged that there's a growing recognition that a highly selective journal, like PLOS Biology that has heavy editorial input into every single paper from PhD scientists in-house, is quite different to what we're doing with a paper that comes into PLOS ONE. And so I think that there's growing recognition of that, which I think is good for all of us. That said, I think there are things that we need to be focused on.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think there are three areas in which we're looking at that. The first is automation. And I think technology is growing. We've got a number of-- a couple of pilots underway in areas of machine learning that might help with something like PLOS Match that currently works based on algorithms. We've seen that begin to deteriorate over time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So our matching rate four or five years ago for papers coming in was around 85%. It's now dropped to somewhere around 55%. And we've taken a look at that. Some of that is around needing to tweak the algorithms. But one of the challenges we have with PLOS ONE is how many papers we are now receiving that are multidisciplinary in nature. And so the idea of being able to match that to a single editor is much, much harder.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so we need to be able to look more broadly at the metadata we're getting, even being able to scan and understand the article abstract to really gain a clear understanding of what the paper is about, and therefore, who the appropriate reviewers are. So I think there are ways in which smart automation can help with all of those things. Scans-- in other things, we have a series of fairly clear technical but ethical scans and other things for papers that come in right away, before we do anything.
ALISON MUDDITT: That's particularly important on PLOS ONE. Given the volume of submissions, we don't want to be sending things out for review that are a waste of our time or a reviewer's time. And I do see things there that can be automated. There are some of those that I think are still going to need an eye on them afterwards. But I think we could take away a significant amount of work there.
ALISON MUDDITT: The second is industry standards, as it's interesting. We were having a conversation about this over dinner last night, and why industry standards taking a long time to develop. Or even when they are developed with things like ORCID, why is it taking us so long to have them sort of really widely implemented? And I think our conversation, admittedly, after a few glasses of wine last night, came down to money, and the fact that you look at an organization like orchid, and it's operating on a shoestring.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if ORCID is something that's so important to all of us, that doesn't feel like a good thing to be happening. So how do we collectively solve that problem? And then some of it is around politics, I think if we're honest about it. I mean, this is a smallish industry. And we've got a few big players, but then we've got tons of smaller players. And I think we all like to think about the ways in which we differentiate ourselves from each other, far more than we think about our common interests, and the way in which we need to collaborate for the greater good of all.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so I think that really sort of hampers us with a lot of these initiatives. And then I think the third area that I think about is some way of sort of standardizing the way in which we work with libraries and consortia. And I'm not sure that that's possible or even desirable, necessarily, to do fully across publishers. But I think as we're sort of going into this, I learned a lot from implementing big deals going back 10, 15 years when I was at Sage.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think, coming away from that, what we're trying to do it at PLOS is to have our definition of, here are the three things we can offer, and then maybe small tweaks that we can offer to those. But the idea that we're going to do a distinctive deal for every single library or consortia that we speak with just isn't something that we want to get into, because it's just not scalable.
ALISON MUDDITT: And it's even less scalable, I think, in an open access world, where the revenues are not the same, and the margins are not the same, as they were for a subscription business, in many cases.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Well, thank you. And I think Alison and I would be happy to take some questions from the room. Sorry, we're grabbing a mic. While we're working on that, actually, I've been out of the library discussion around open access now for about seven months. But I was getting the impression, and I wonder if you share it, that there were some organizations, like Jisc or Max Planck, that really seemed to be setting the standard, or the standard for approach for some of these transformative deals.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Is that your perspective?
ALISON MUDDITT: I think that's the case. But I mean, you alluded earlier to the growing bifurcation I think between Europe and North America in terms of use to model for open access. And certainly I think, driven by OA 2020, the model in Europe has been very much around transformative deals. That's less so in the US. I think even with the lead that California Digital Library is taking in this, there are plenty of libraries that don't agree with their approach.
ALISON MUDDITT: And Spark doesn't agree with their approach. And it's interesting, just looking within the UC, which I know pretty well from my years within the UC, there are fairly strong disagreements among the UC librarians around whether this APC transformative deal model is the right one, versus trying to look for alternatives. So I think that that's one of the biggest challenges, is that different people want different things.
ROBERT HARINGTON: Yes, I have the microphone. So it's Robert, Robert Harington from the American Mathematical Society, and my question's around mission, really. I mean, our mission is squarely to serve our global mathematical community. And the publications that we have allow us to do that. So 70% of our revenues come from those publications. So we have a very clear mission. And it sounds as if PLOS's original mission was a disrupting mission, in a sense.
ROBERT HARINGTON: Is there a sort of collective vision for PLOS to come up with new business models that might be sustainable? I mean, what is the actual mission? What is the definable mission of PLOS for the future? Is it in that vein, or is it to serve the people that are publishing, the authors? I know you alluded to that, but I just wanted a little bit more articulation.
ALISON MUDDITT: So PLOS's mission actually hasn't changed since day one. And PLOS's mission is to drive a transformation in scientific communication. And so it's a little different to the society's mission. I think we would like to think of that as very much serving our communities of scientists. But it's about driving that transformation. And I think that's where that catalytic piece that I alluded to comes from.
ALISON MUDDITT: So the way in which I think of that vision for the future is continuing to push those boundaries in terms of how we can more effectively serve the researchers, and the research in doing that. And so some of that, early, in our first phase, I think that's been very much about open access as we move forward. I think it's about the whole, the broader spectrum of open science.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so items on the agenda would be around things like hoping to change the incentives and credit for sharing different parts of research output, for example. And also things like items on the reproducibility agenda and how we can support moves in those areas. So I think it's across multiple different areas. But all of it I think is about pushing forward that transformation.
ALISON MUDDITT: For us, we recognize that that creates a challenge, in some ways, of how far ahead do we get of our researchers. And I think we recognize that within our communities, we have scientists who are at very different stages. And it was interesting-- I've forgotten his name, but the guy who was here from Columbia this morning, and he's kind of representative of pretty much every single early career researcher I've talked to, where they are, by default, open.
ALISON MUDDITT: They don't get the current system. They're frustrated by it. They play the game as much as they have to. And so much of our focus is really on how do we empower those scientists who are early in their career to become the change that we sort of seek going forward. But we recognize that there are other scientists who may want to take baby steps, if you like, in the direction of open and to try and make sure that we're meeting their needs as well.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I mean, we've been mapping that, using that sort of very traditional innovation bell curve, where we try and think of our journals and our products as having something to offer for everybody, from the early adopters through to the sort of late people right over at the other end of the curve.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Jakey.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Hi, Alison and Will-- Jake Zarnegar from Silverchair. I have a question about a group that has come on the scene, who is also delivering open platforms and the platforms of funders, direct platforms of funders and libraries. Sorry to come [INAUDIBLE]. I'd like to hear your thoughts about the future trajectory of those players, as far as directly publishing open content, and how you see them evolving.
ALISON MUDDITT: I think that's interesting. From sort of PLOS's, I would say we don't view them as competitive in the sense that the more open content, the better. So I mean, the more people who are playing in this space, we see that as a mission win. And the fact that, in many ways, we now have far more competition from other APC-based publishers, that's a win as far as we're concerned. Open access has made sort of dramatic improvements.
ALISON MUDDITT: So it's a good thing. I think some of the challenges that they have are the ones that many of us face, coming back to the problems of the tenure and promotion system. And I mean, if you look at the welcome platform at this point, I think there are somewhere above a couple hundred papers or something. And so at the current point, it's just not the choice for authors to publish there.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think some of that is around prestige. But I think the other thing that is perhaps underestimated by some of those platforms is that a journal is also a community. And if you look back at the data, and you see this repeatedly in the Ithaca data and other surveys that come out regularly-- and I haven't seen that change in the few decades I've been in publishing about why authors publish where they publish.
ALISON MUDDITT: And publishing for their communities is always been right up there in the top two or three. And I think that's still going to be a fundamental challenge. That said, I think they can play a role for other kinds of publication, for example, for someone like the Gates Foundation, publication of research from parts of the world that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day, particularly with APC business models.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think there's a different role for them, perhaps, than head-on challenge with the existing journal system.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I would say that most of these funder publication platforms-- and they will be at pains to say they're not journals and shouldn't be thought of as that-- that they hit the pain points that we've discussed in earlier panels, that they're also intended to be outlets for null studies and data papers and additional outlets that, quite frankly, publishers, societies, and/or journals haven't accommodated.
SPEAKER: One more?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Sure. One last question.
SPEAKER: Anybody?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Anybody? OK. Well, Alison, thank you very, very much. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're going to have a kind of far-ranging conversation around open access. And just to help gauge the room at lunch today, how many folks talked about open access, Plan S, transformative deals, something of that kind. OK. That's good to know. And what we wanted to focus on in our conversation today is actually more about the necessary technology and infrastructure to support wider skill open access because so much has been said about kind of the business model or economic or equity concerns.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And we're getting to the point where the rubber's hitting the road. And some of us are entering pilots. Many of us need to begin adapting our systems and our technology stack. So we're going to try to offer some thoughts and perhaps the best advice we can.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think this is a really important part of the discussion about open access. We tend to focus very much on the impact of the business models, the policy agenda. And I think, wherever we stand on the spectrum of our views about open access-- whether we're openly embracing it or being dragged kicking and screaming-- it is something that we're going to have to engage with.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I see us moving, over the next few years, into an era where the pace of change, if you can believe it, is going to accelerate, certainly when it comes to open access. And I think over the last decade or two, we've had the luxury, in some ways, of a somewhat gradual adaptation to open access. And I think something like Plan S, the big rock thrown into the pond is really changing that.
ALISON MUDDITT: And we're all going to have to learn how to adapt. And this sort of crucial infrastructure piece is really important if we're going to be able to do that successfully.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we're going to have a discussion in four parts today. We're going to start talking a bit about what we see as a necessary infrastructure in technology for things like Plan S or transformative deals. We're going to spend just a little bit of time talking about the role of the library in all of this. And then we're going to offer probably just a few short thoughts on what we see for the future and then turn to you all for questions.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I hope we do an OK job with that. So Alison, we know PLOS has been a wholly open access publisher. And because of that, one might presume that you are ahead of the game in supporting transformative deals or even Plan S. Is that presumption right?
ALISON MUDDITT: I mean, the honest answer to that is yes and no. And I think the yes part is that PLOS has been Plan S compliant since day one. So there is no compliance issue for us in that sense of the word. And transformative deals really aren't a thing for us because, again, we're fully compliant. And so we do not have a subscription business to migrate or transform in the sense that transformative deals are understood. .
ALISON MUDDITT: But I don't think that leaves us without challenges in the transition to the Plan S world. Native OA publishers, like PLOS, I think are challenged by the fact that our focus has been very much on the B2C model, the author. And so the risk for us in a Plan S world, and one of the things I think I've talked about fairly extensively elsewhere, is the danger that if we don't develop sort of the equivalent of a transformative deal for a native open access publisher, that we continue to be cut out of the library piece of the budget pie, if you like.
ALISON MUDDITT: And that's certainly been the case for us so far. All of our APCs pretty much come from grant funding. That limits us in terms of-- I think it limits us in terms of our ability to grow. There are, of course, other problems with the APC model. And so I think it actually pushes us to think differently about a couple of things. One is very much our relationships with libraries and how we think about building those relationships in terms of building the equivalent of a transformative deal, whatever that looks like for PLOS.
ALISON MUDDITT: So that's one area that we're focused on. And then the second one I think, actually, for us is really starting to look beyond the APC and recognizing the limitations of the APC. And how do we think about models that will perhaps work in parallel to the APC for those who like them, but develop something that's going to be far more effective for the many people who struggle with being able to pay an APC?
WILL SCHWEITZER: I want to stop on this theme of this shift from the business consumer mindset to business to business, and what that kind of means for your organization. I have some colleagues from my former organization in this room, AAAS, where I helped launch Science Advances, which is a pretty large-scale open access journal. And when we thought about the infrastructure we needed to support that journal, it was very much a B2C mindset.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And so I'm sorry, guys, that you're a few steps behind where you need to be. I'll buy you a drink later. But I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about what that shift means for PLOS's operations for your mindset.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. I think it has to start with mindset because across the organization, each of our teams has really been set up with this very sort of singular focus on the author as customer. Whether or not it's actually the APC funds coming out of the author's pocket, the author has been the decision maker about when to send their paper. That remains the case going forward, but I think with the start of transformative deals and other bundled APC models, it sort of challenges us to think differently about that.
ALISON MUDDITT: So our marketing department has been entirely focused on marketing to authors and driving submissions in that way. The editorial department is entirely focused on authors. The technology teams are entirely focused on developing our platform to serve the needs of authors. And so, arguably, I think even to this point in our history, that has resulted in us not paying enough attention to readers, for example.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think that becomes challenging because as we all know, readers and authors are one and the same person, in many cases, just wearing different hats at different times. So it requires us, across the organization I think, to really sort of refocus how we think about who are users and customers are. And then I think when it comes to libraries, PLOS has, in the past, had a fairly deep relationship with libraries that has sort of been allowed to languish, I think, over the years.
ALISON MUDDITT: And a number of us who've come into the organization more recently, recognizing the critical importance of us at that going forward. And so we're really rethinking-- again, across the organization-- how we re-engage libraries and consortia as critical partners in the future of our business.
WILL SCHWEITZER: That's really interesting. So kind of picking up on that pace of change in complexity and changes within PLOS-- you've written about this. You've been very transparent that PLOS has a long history of building or developing a lot of your technology in-house. And I think a lot of societies, a lot of publishers are recognizing, as you said in your opening remarks, the market's changing faster.
WILL SCHWEITZER: These are much more complex workflows, particularly for institution-driven open access deals. And what does that really mean for how PLOS approaches new solutions and, say, working with partners or vendors?
ALISON MUDDITT: It's funny, I was just talking to Anne about this because she was talking about a very similar set of issues yesterday. But I hope-- and I think the good news is that she and I pretty much aligned on these issues. I mean, going back to the history of PLOS, the rationale for building our own technology in the early days I think made a lot of sense because there were no other open access publishers out there, with the exception of BMC.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so the kind of needs that we had weren't well met by vendors at the time. And there was no point in us going to a standard platform vendor, for example, because there's a huge piece of that-- the authentication layers, and so on-- that we simply don't want, and we don't want to pay for. And other pieces of the technology are article-level metrics, which were developed ahead of all metrics and were the first attempt to replace impact factor in that way.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think it was really about building technology that didn't exist at the time. However, if we sort of fast forward to where we are today, as you're saying, technology itself has shifted enormously. I think our view of what we need from technology has also shifted. A good example of that I think is sort of renewed focus on discoverability and reader experience, things that I think have probably been neglected by open access publishers as sort of an assumption of, if it's open, it's going to be discovered.
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, not the case. Whether it comes to the challenges of indexing open access content through library systems, or whether it's just simple searches through Google or other, but we need to be paying far more attention to those kinds of issues. So I think we're sort of really rethinking what that looks like going forward. And I think probably it's going to be taking a more sort of pragmatic approach to that.
ALISON MUDDITT: I do see areas in which it will make sense for us to continue to build our own technology, but I suspect that that will be primarily for point solutions, where we have something specific. So another piece of technology that we built in-house is a system called PLOS Match, which matches incoming papers to PLOS ONE, with one of the 6,000 PLOS members of our academic editorial board. So you can imagine the idea of the thousands and thousands of papers that come into us every single week, trying to manually match those.
ALISON MUDDITT: So there's a system that's set up algorithmically to match those papers to our editorial board. So maintaining and replacing that with newer technology is probably something that we would continue to do ourselves. But certainly, as we look at other systems, I think it's going to make more and more sense for us to be looking out-of-house. And I think the honest truth as well, and I've talked about this quite openly since I got to PLOS, one of the first things I needed to do when I got there was to assess where we were with the development of Aperta, which was the manuscripts submission and workflow system that PLOS had been working on for a number of years at that point.
ALISON MUDDITT: And it was a tough decision to walk away from that after many years and many millions of dollars of investment. But I think the lesson that we learned in a somewhat painful and expensive way was that building that kind of enterprise-wide system is actually really hard. And I think we underestimated how hard it was. And honestly, we overestimated our own capabilities to be able to do that.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think we learned the lesson the hard way there. And I think that certainly influences the way I think about how we will deal with, certainly, those bigger systems going forward.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And what's really interesting-- I think it's Anne pointed out in our comments yesterday-- PLOS ONE is one of the world's largest journal-makes-software-cry. So it seems like you'll need to still have some capabilities in-house.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes, yes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So we've talked a lot about today. We certainly talked a lot about open source solutions in the industry, and I was wondering what your view of that space is.
ALISON MUDDITT: Well, I think this is another area where Anne and I are pretty aligned on this. But from a pure mission and ethos perspective, I mean, PLOS is open by nature. And so the idea of being able to use open source is clearly incredibly attractive. And so I love the idea of doing that. I think the challenge for us is that what's available at the moment doesn't really scale to what we need. And again, much of that comes back to PLOS ONE in particular.
ALISON MUDDITT: Looking at what's been developed either in terms of platforms or in terms of submission and review systems, they just don't scale to PLOS ONE. And I think that's going to continue to be a real challenge for us. But beyond PLOS ONE, I think there's a real gap for a pretty large number of publishers right now. I was part of an SSP webinar on this last fall. And Angela [? Cochran ?] and I were on the same panel.
ALISON MUDDITT: And the point that we were making was that there's this gap for what I would call sort of mid-sized publishers. So if you're one of the larger publishers, you probably have a very large technology team who can either develop their own systems. Or you have enough people to be able to support and customize the systems that are out there to really meet your needs. If you're a much smaller publisher, then you can probably survive on some of the cheaper open source systems, like an OJS.
ALISON MUDDITT: And then there are a lot of us in the middle who I think are not well served by what's out there. And I'm not sure what the answer to that is. I mean, I look around at sort of some of the open source things that are in development, whether it's COCO or some of the other things. And I have high hopes for them, but that's about all they are at the moment. And a lot of these things have been in development for a number of years.
ALISON MUDDITT: And one of my fears is that they're going to run into some of the challenges that we did with something like a Aperta. And I think another lesson that we learned from Aperta was just, I think, probably trying to bite off more than we could chew. And so when I look at trying to develop a full end-to-end solution that's going to take many years, I wonder if we would have been more successful, and if others might be more successful if they focused on a real problem, like author submission or something, which we all know authors hate in pretty much every system.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if we just focused on that chunk in six to 12 month increments of actually being able to get something done. My concern is that-- we certainly found this with Aperta, that if you're four years in, the problem you set out to solve has moved on a pretty long way by the time you get to the end at that point. And so I think there may well be something in that that we should all take away.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Yes. And it is-- I think want to amplify one of your comments there-- that it it's very hard if you are a publisher or society in this midmarket, like choices are easier for you to make if you are small or if you are very large. But one of the things I think I've observed with these open source solutions-- and I'm biased, obviously, sitting here, doing what I do-- is that even for some of my previous organizations, like Science, these were actually really complex solutions.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And then even though we had a lot of technology talent in-house-- they had built many pieces of their content-hosting platform for, say, their news content-- it would be really difficult for, I think-- [? Sadani ?] can correct me if I'm wrong with this later-- but I think it would actually be really difficult, actually, for AAAS to leverage that in a sustainable way. There's just there's just not enough maturity there.
WILL SCHWEITZER: So let's switch gears and talk a little bit about the library. And in that shift from B to C, to B to B within open access, it seems the library is going to remain a central figure. They have dollars, and those dollars may need to be reallocated. But they have a lot of experience or expertise in dealing with publishers, in negotiating licenses. They have some systems in place, probably more so than publishers, to administer these transformative deals.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And they have a considerable history in negotiating with publishers. So you've talked a bit about PLOS reinvesting in those library relationships. But can you tell us a bit more about how you're changing your approach?
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes, so I think this has sort of been a pretty big shift for us this year, is we've really started to think-- I mean, it's partly as a result of what's been happening with the advent of transformative deals and Plan S-- but I think it's also as we've been thinking more clearly about how we want to really build and grow our business.
ALISON MUDDITT: I mean, part of that has been about creating new positions in-house. We created a new role for director of strategic partnerships, which Sarah Rue from Digital Science joined us in that role. And so she's playing a key role there. Dan Morgan joined us as director of community relations. And so those are roles that are working very closely together in terms of thinking about how we build those relationships.
ALISON MUDDITT: Then I think we've really been spending a lot of time talking to both librarians and consortia leaders, trying to think about what it is that they're really looking for from publishers. And of course, I think that's the piece that becomes very challenging, right? As any of us who've worked closely with librarians know, there is many answers, if not more answers to that question as there are librarians.
ALISON MUDDITT: And that, I think, is a fundamental challenge as we look at how to structure these deals. And, I mean, it's interesting-- I can quote Ralf Schimmer of the Max Planck Institute on this, as a librarian. I was talking to Ralf recently about some of the blockers to OA. And his view was that librarians themselves have been one of the primary blockers.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if you actually look at it from a budget perspective, they're the ones who really do control budget. And if there is such a desire to focus on more OA, then they actually have been the keys to the kingdom in that sense, and really could help drive a bigger transformation. So I think there are challenges with the right ways to engage with librarians that help move them forward. But then there's the whole technology piece, and just some of the early conversations that we've been having about what does a transformative deal look like with a native open access publisher.
ALISON MUDDITT: And we're fairly deep into conversations with a few libraries and consortia about that. And there's kinds of requests that we're getting around workflow, on what they'd like their idea workflows to look like. I mean, as we were looking at, would be six to 12 months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars for each library.
ALISON MUDDITT: And, I mean, that's clearly not scalable. And so I think that is a real challenge that we're running into. And I know other publishers who are engaging in transformative deals-- I've had similar conversations with them, with Cambridge, and with ACS, and others. And they're seeing very much the same thing. So I think we're back to sort of educating the librarians again, in many ways.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think that's going to be a real challenge for us.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think this has been talked about in many contexts, that publishers are going to have to operate in two different worlds, between largely Europe and the rest of the world. And one of the things that I think I've been puzzling about is just this, that so many publishers are now forming pilots about how they can support these things. Libraries are articulating their needs. And there doesn't actually seem to be a lot of talk from one publisher to another yet.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I think there's just some very fledgling efforts with groups like EESAC about figuring out what libraries standards should be.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. I mean, one of the things that we've been trying to do at PLOS-- I mean we're looking at piloting two or three different business models, our own version of a sort of bundled APC model, which I think is sort of the equivalent of a transformative deal for us.
ALISON MUDDITT: Then looking at alternatives to the APC, and what we're trying to understand, and all of this what's happening in Anne's groups, is really trying to understand what's the commonality in terms of needs across those, so that we're not sort of reinventing the wheel for each one of those. And thinking about, what are the common needs there? So a common need is for when an author submits to us, for us to automatically be able to know what kind of deal that author's institution has in place.
ALISON MUDDITT: Now, not all of the pieces are there, the institution identifiers, our ability to identify that author with a particular institution if they're not using an ORCID, or they're not using their institutional email address. So there are a number of pieces there that are missing for us to be able to do that. But that's fundamental, I think, for all of us, and fundamental regardless of the type of deal. So we're trying to establish what some of those common elements are that we can then work towards at least being able to meet the needs for those.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent. So before we turn over to questions, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the future. You've mentioned wanting to find the alternative to the ABC for PLOS. A lot of publishers are, of course, experimenting with business models and launching new products as a way of charting out their futures. What else is PLOS thinking about?
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think one of the things that I've been thinking about since I got to PLOS and, really, I think my primary challenge from the board when I was hired was about charting the next big horizon for PLOS after the APC model in open access and after PLOS ONE. I think it was recognized, both internally and externally, that PLOS had drifted a little bit. And we were sort of trying to find out what that next big thing was. That said, we've spent a lot of time since I've been starting to think about that, but really making sure that we had firm foundations to build from at the same time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think my attention is now really sort of turning to that. And PLOS is a really interesting organization because we were not founded to be a publisher. And so I sort of think of us as a somewhat reluctant publisher. I mean, Pat Brown and Mike Eisen started PLOS to kind of disrupt and sort of kill the industry. And it's somewhat ironic in some ways that we've ended up being this large publisher. But I think what I come back to is the fact that PLOS was founded to be a catalyst, and not to be a large, successful publisher.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so I see my charge as sort of refining our inner catalyst and thinking about, how do we think about the way in which both the catalytic and the operational sides of the organization work together? PLOS has been successful as a catalyst, not only with open access, but if you look at the data policy that was instituted four or five years ago, we were the first publisher to require data submission with publication.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I can remember-- I was at UC Press at the time. And I think a lot of us from the outside were looking at PLOS and thinking, it's going to kill submissions, nobody is going to do that. Neither of those things happened. I mean, I can look back at the data now and see there was no discernible impact on submissions at all.
ALISON MUDDITT: And the fact that PLOS was prepared to take that risk and to require that, not just on one journal as a pilot but right across every single journal, I think has normalized it to some degree and made it easier for others to do that. So there's a way in which we had this catalytic role. But having this large publishing organization as well enables us to sort of prove some of those newer things at scale, which then I think makes industry-wide adoption easier.
ALISON MUDDITT: So from sort of high level, that's sort of how I'm thinking about things. Some of the specifics that we're thinking about were-- a lot of the things that were talked about in that final session this morning. I mean, we've been working very closely with John and his team at bioRxiv back the ways in which we can continue to develop the pilots and experiments we've been doing with preprints.
ALISON MUDDITT: We're very much looking at how we open up publication and not just publication, but how we think about both incentivizing and crediting the publication and sharing of other outputs beyond the final journal article. That, I think, is another reason for thinking about models beyond the APC because I think if you start thinking about APCs for micro-publications or anything like that, it breaks down very, very quickly. So those are a couple of areas I think that we're really focused on right now.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Excellent. It's great to hear about. I think reluctant publisher was my LinkedIn headline for a good number of years. I wanted to turn to something John raised, actually, in the last discussion, which was how difficult it is to talk about our costs in publishing, and that a component of transformative deals and Plan S is actually price transparency, and price transparency with the stated goal of creating downward pressure in the market.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And that's pretty dangerous conversational ground for a lot of reasons.
ALISON MUDDITT: Yes.
WILL SCHWEITZER: But I think there's a technology and strategy question here, which is are there things that PLOS is doing, or that publishers should consider doing, to make our processes more efficient and scalable?
ALISON MUDDITT: Yeah, I'm just going to sort of comment on the first part of that before I come to answering that. And I think there is an increasing recognition among those who've been pushing for transparency that they need to be very clear about differentiating between cost and price, and that those are two quite different things. And the study that Alicia [INAUDIBLE] is now undertaking on behalf of the Plan S and the societies I think is trying to understand that-- and even talking to some of the drivers of planners fairly recently, I think they are increasingly seeing that there's a clear differential between what you get at different levels.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I'm sort of feeling encouraged that there's a growing recognition that a highly selective journal, like PLOS Biology that has heavy editorial input into every single paper from PhD scientists in-house, is quite different to what we're doing with a paper that comes into PLOS ONE. And so I think that there's growing recognition of that, which I think is good for all of us. That said, I think there are things that we need to be focused on.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think there are three areas in which we're looking at that. The first is automation. And I think technology is growing. We've got a number of-- a couple of pilots underway in areas of machine learning that might help with something like PLOS Match that currently works based on algorithms. We've seen that begin to deteriorate over time.
ALISON MUDDITT: So our matching rate four or five years ago for papers coming in was around 85%. It's now dropped to somewhere around 55%. And we've taken a look at that. Some of that is around needing to tweak the algorithms. But one of the challenges we have with PLOS ONE is how many papers we are now receiving that are multidisciplinary in nature. And so the idea of being able to match that to a single editor is much, much harder.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so we need to be able to look more broadly at the metadata we're getting, even being able to scan and understand the article abstract to really gain a clear understanding of what the paper is about, and therefore, who the appropriate reviewers are. So I think there are ways in which smart automation can help with all of those things. Scans-- in other things, we have a series of fairly clear technical but ethical scans and other things for papers that come in right away, before we do anything.
ALISON MUDDITT: That's particularly important on PLOS ONE. Given the volume of submissions, we don't want to be sending things out for review that are a waste of our time or a reviewer's time. And I do see things there that can be automated. There are some of those that I think are still going to need an eye on them afterwards. But I think we could take away a significant amount of work there.
ALISON MUDDITT: The second is industry standards, as it's interesting. We were having a conversation about this over dinner last night, and why industry standards taking a long time to develop. Or even when they are developed with things like ORCID, why is it taking us so long to have them sort of really widely implemented? And I think our conversation, admittedly, after a few glasses of wine last night, came down to money, and the fact that you look at an organization like orchid, and it's operating on a shoestring.
ALISON MUDDITT: And if ORCID is something that's so important to all of us, that doesn't feel like a good thing to be happening. So how do we collectively solve that problem? And then some of it is around politics, I think if we're honest about it. I mean, this is a smallish industry. And we've got a few big players, but then we've got tons of smaller players. And I think we all like to think about the ways in which we differentiate ourselves from each other, far more than we think about our common interests, and the way in which we need to collaborate for the greater good of all.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so I think that really sort of hampers us with a lot of these initiatives. And then I think the third area that I think about is some way of sort of standardizing the way in which we work with libraries and consortia. And I'm not sure that that's possible or even desirable, necessarily, to do fully across publishers. But I think as we're sort of going into this, I learned a lot from implementing big deals going back 10, 15 years when I was at Sage.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think, coming away from that, what we're trying to do it at PLOS is to have our definition of, here are the three things we can offer, and then maybe small tweaks that we can offer to those. But the idea that we're going to do a distinctive deal for every single library or consortia that we speak with just isn't something that we want to get into, because it's just not scalable.
ALISON MUDDITT: And it's even less scalable, I think, in an open access world, where the revenues are not the same, and the margins are not the same, as they were for a subscription business, in many cases.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Well, thank you. And I think Alison and I would be happy to take some questions from the room. Sorry, we're grabbing a mic. While we're working on that, actually, I've been out of the library discussion around open access now for about seven months. But I was getting the impression, and I wonder if you share it, that there were some organizations, like Jisc or Max Planck, that really seemed to be setting the standard, or the standard for approach for some of these transformative deals.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Is that your perspective?
ALISON MUDDITT: I think that's the case. But I mean, you alluded earlier to the growing bifurcation I think between Europe and North America in terms of use to model for open access. And certainly I think, driven by OA 2020, the model in Europe has been very much around transformative deals. That's less so in the US. I think even with the lead that California Digital Library is taking in this, there are plenty of libraries that don't agree with their approach.
ALISON MUDDITT: And Spark doesn't agree with their approach. And it's interesting, just looking within the UC, which I know pretty well from my years within the UC, there are fairly strong disagreements among the UC librarians around whether this APC transformative deal model is the right one, versus trying to look for alternatives. So I think that that's one of the biggest challenges, is that different people want different things.
ROBERT HARINGTON: Yes, I have the microphone. So it's Robert, Robert Harington from the American Mathematical Society, and my question's around mission, really. I mean, our mission is squarely to serve our global mathematical community. And the publications that we have allow us to do that. So 70% of our revenues come from those publications. So we have a very clear mission. And it sounds as if PLOS's original mission was a disrupting mission, in a sense.
ROBERT HARINGTON: Is there a sort of collective vision for PLOS to come up with new business models that might be sustainable? I mean, what is the actual mission? What is the definable mission of PLOS for the future? Is it in that vein, or is it to serve the people that are publishing, the authors? I know you alluded to that, but I just wanted a little bit more articulation.
ALISON MUDDITT: So PLOS's mission actually hasn't changed since day one. And PLOS's mission is to drive a transformation in scientific communication. And so it's a little different to the society's mission. I think we would like to think of that as very much serving our communities of scientists. But it's about driving that transformation. And I think that's where that catalytic piece that I alluded to comes from.
ALISON MUDDITT: So the way in which I think of that vision for the future is continuing to push those boundaries in terms of how we can more effectively serve the researchers, and the research in doing that. And so some of that, early, in our first phase, I think that's been very much about open access as we move forward. I think it's about the whole, the broader spectrum of open science.
ALISON MUDDITT: And so items on the agenda would be around things like hoping to change the incentives and credit for sharing different parts of research output, for example. And also things like items on the reproducibility agenda and how we can support moves in those areas. So I think it's across multiple different areas. But all of it I think is about pushing forward that transformation.
ALISON MUDDITT: For us, we recognize that that creates a challenge, in some ways, of how far ahead do we get of our researchers. And I think we recognize that within our communities, we have scientists who are at very different stages. And it was interesting-- I've forgotten his name, but the guy who was here from Columbia this morning, and he's kind of representative of pretty much every single early career researcher I've talked to, where they are, by default, open.
ALISON MUDDITT: They don't get the current system. They're frustrated by it. They play the game as much as they have to. And so much of our focus is really on how do we empower those scientists who are early in their career to become the change that we sort of seek going forward. But we recognize that there are other scientists who may want to take baby steps, if you like, in the direction of open and to try and make sure that we're meeting their needs as well.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I mean, we've been mapping that, using that sort of very traditional innovation bell curve, where we try and think of our journals and our products as having something to offer for everybody, from the early adopters through to the sort of late people right over at the other end of the curve.
WILL SCHWEITZER: Jakey.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Hi, Alison and Will-- Jake Zarnegar from Silverchair. I have a question about a group that has come on the scene, who is also delivering open platforms and the platforms of funders, direct platforms of funders and libraries. Sorry to come [INAUDIBLE]. I'd like to hear your thoughts about the future trajectory of those players, as far as directly publishing open content, and how you see them evolving.
ALISON MUDDITT: I think that's interesting. From sort of PLOS's, I would say we don't view them as competitive in the sense that the more open content, the better. So I mean, the more people who are playing in this space, we see that as a mission win. And the fact that, in many ways, we now have far more competition from other APC-based publishers, that's a win as far as we're concerned. Open access has made sort of dramatic improvements.
ALISON MUDDITT: So it's a good thing. I think some of the challenges that they have are the ones that many of us face, coming back to the problems of the tenure and promotion system. And I mean, if you look at the welcome platform at this point, I think there are somewhere above a couple hundred papers or something. And so at the current point, it's just not the choice for authors to publish there.
ALISON MUDDITT: And I think some of that is around prestige. But I think the other thing that is perhaps underestimated by some of those platforms is that a journal is also a community. And if you look back at the data, and you see this repeatedly in the Ithaca data and other surveys that come out regularly-- and I haven't seen that change in the few decades I've been in publishing about why authors publish where they publish.
ALISON MUDDITT: And publishing for their communities is always been right up there in the top two or three. And I think that's still going to be a fundamental challenge. That said, I think they can play a role for other kinds of publication, for example, for someone like the Gates Foundation, publication of research from parts of the world that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day, particularly with APC business models.
ALISON MUDDITT: So I think there's a different role for them, perhaps, than head-on challenge with the existing journal system.
WILL SCHWEITZER: And I would say that most of these funder publication platforms-- and they will be at pains to say they're not journals and shouldn't be thought of as that-- that they hit the pain points that we've discussed in earlier panels, that they're also intended to be outlets for null studies and data papers and additional outlets that, quite frankly, publishers, societies, and/or journals haven't accommodated.
SPEAKER: One more?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Sure. One last question.
SPEAKER: Anybody?
WILL SCHWEITZER: Anybody? OK. Well, Alison, thank you very, very much. [APPLAUSE]
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