Cadmore media player playing video Redefining Value Propositions in Scholarly Communications
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Redefining Value Propositions in Scholarly Communications
Description:
Redefining Value Propositions in Scholarly Communications
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/b66116f3-0674-4332-b1a3-d4f4ad133828/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T00H58M15S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/b66116f3-0674-4332-b1a3-d4f4ad133828
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/b66116f3-0674-4332-b1a3-d4f4ad133828/session_3b__redefining_value_propositions_in_scholarly_commu.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=00hWnJU53WNUhYmx84RreixQDxFPKXQDVBK53lBB95k%3D&st=2025-04-29T21%3A14%3A45Z&se=2025-04-29T23%3A19%3A45Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-12-03T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Alice Meadows. I'm one of the co-founders of the more brains cooperative, which is a small consultancy that offers services mostly around open research and research infrastructure to publishers and others. I have a fabulous panel here today. Alison Demby at the end from Oxford University Press. Simone Taylor from the American Psychiatric Association. Karen Wolff who's job title is too long affiliation Brown University library.
She'll tell you a big long. John Carter Brown Library. Brown University, something like that. Sorry she will tell you properly. And Adam Hyde from Coco. The rest are easy. Sorry, Karen. It's lovely to be here with you. We're going to be talking about redefining the value proposition for scholarly communications organizations.
I'm massively impressed at how many of you are here early on time. And here to join us. And we are hoping that this will be a somewhat interactive session. So we're hoping that you will, as well as us talking about value propositions, that you will share some of your experiences and recommendations and also ask us questions.
So start off with the important stuff. So the code of conduct as the Society for scholarly publishing is committed to diversity, equity, and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct. And if you need more information, you can either visit our website or scan the QR code.
So I want to start off with a few thoughts about from just set the context really for this, you're not going to be hearing very much from me. You'll probably be glad to hear after my terrible introductions. You'll be hearing much more from the speakers. But I did want to give us a little bit of context for this conversation. So the definition at the top is from Wikipedia, of course. So a value proposition is a statement, which identifies clear, measurable, and demonstrable benefits that consumers get when buying a particular product or service.
You may also know of value propositions as USP's. There's a lot of similarities between the two. Unique, unique selling propositions. That was a phrase that tended to get bandied around more a few years ago, I guess. Again, quoting Wikipedia, the unique benefit exhibited by a company, service, product or brand that enables it to stand out from competitors. Back in the day, when I first started in marketing, we talked about features and benefits, and we didn't have things like USP's or value propositions, but really it's all part of the same thing.
It's really sort of understanding your product or service and why it's going to be of value to your customers or your community. So I tweaked that definition a little bit, because I think in a way that I think is more appropriate for the work that many of us are doing. So rather than consumers, I think what we're doing is we want to be able to demonstrate benefits to individuals and communities.
And it's not just about buying. It's also about investing in and advocating for a particular organization initiative as well as products or services. So some of what you're going to hear about from the speakers is less about value propositions for a specific product and more about a community value proposition. Now, again, back in the day, I am an old lady, and back in the day when I started in publishing, it was super.
We didn't have value propositions, and it was very easy to talk about what the benefits of. For example, being a publisher were. We did editorial, we did production, we did marketing, we did distribution. Nobody could really do those things on their own. The internet didn't exist. You had to do things like printing and typesetting. It was all so it made communicating the value of what you did very easy.
You were basically selling a service that people needed because they couldn't do it themselves. For societies, the value proposition, what would now be known as the value proposition was around things like networking, prestige, career development, and for libraries. It was around things like access to content and research support. All these things are now much more doable yourself on the internet or in smaller groups or whatever.
The move to digital has made all of this much more complex. And of course, I think the value proposition for infrastructure, certainly digital infrastructure, because by its nature has always been digital, has always been challenging. So we need to think again. I think many of us already are redefining what we mean by a value proposition in scholarly communications.
But that's what we're going to talk about now. So we need to redefine our value propositions. And we need to do so because we still need that support for our organizations. We still need people to invest in them in order that we can continue to provide the services that they do need. And thinking about our value proposition, we need to understand what it is, what it means for the different stakeholders overall, as well as for our organization.
We need to be able to articulate it really clearly and effectively, and I think that means passionately. I think we need to care when we articulate our value proposition, and it also means we need to be able to adapt it to meet the evolving needs and changing circumstances of the communities that we serve. So that's about all I had to say. But I did want to ask a few of you to ask you some questions before we move on, because these are the questions that the panel has been considering as they are going to spend a few minutes talking about their value propositions for their organizations, and then we're going to open it up to more of a discussion.
So first of all, how many of you have a clear understanding of your organization's value proposition. Hands up. Some of you. OK how many of you feel confident articulating it. Interesting OK.
Possibly slightly more. Feel confident articulating it than understanding it, which is interesting, but OK. Let's go with that. How often do you revisit or adapt your organization's value proposition. Let's say every year. Anyone every two years. OK, good.
Five years. OK, so we have work to do. People, I think it's fair to say so. With that, I am going to hand over to. Oh, I hope we've got. No, we don't seem to have the next slide, which is a bit unfortunate. OK all right.
I'm going to hand over to Adam who's going to talk about cocoa. I did have some slides, but I was going to stand for those. But I'm going to stand anyway. I get a little nervous talking. My name is Adam Hyatt from cocoa. We built open infrastructure, so I'm here as to represent open infrastructure amongst the panel. And we have developed several value propositions, but the problem that we come up against is that we have a lot going on within the organization.
So we are a lot about community. We run the open publishing awards, open publishing festival. We also build multiple different platforms, all open source from typesetting engines to scholarly publishing systems, book production engines. We have AI designers, et cetera and also we work with organizations to build products for them. So we've built products for NIH and products for Caltech, et cetera there's a fully fledged platforms, everything from assessment builders through to micro publications, platforms, et cetera.
So we have a lot going on, and we've never been really good at being able to nail down the exact proposition of the organization. And also because we are a bootstrapped organization, open infrastructure has very little overheads for often hand-to-mouth organizations. We are technology first organizations, so we don't think about marketing as much as we should, and we don't have the resources to market.
So it's tricky. So a lot of how we achieve market adoption is through organic processes, which is articulating the value of your organization through interpersonal conversations and conveying the passion for what we do. And so it's very difficult for us to actually encapsulate that in a bottle and put it on a screen and say, OK, that's what we do.
So yeah, I'm here to actually, I actually did come up with the value proposition, but I can't I don't know it off the top of my head because it's on the slide and I'm not very good at being succinct. One good observation a friend of mine said when I asked me to do an elevator pitch for him, and I said, how was that. And he said, that was a great elevator pitch.
Amazing It was a very slow elevator on a very tall building. So that is my problem. And also, I think Alice may have once said that we're the most interesting open infrastructure organization you never heard of. And these are some of the reasons why. Low to the ground, very little overhead to think about these things.
No marketing budget. And we're doing a lot of stuff. So that's kind of the stresses that we encounter when we're trying to turn this into a potted value proposition. And I do have your value propositions. If you would like me to read one out for you. Yeah if you have it there, the latest one. So luckily, I do have on my phone the most recent the current value proposition innovating and modernizing publishing with ocea, streamline workflows, support emergent models and enhanced collaboration.
Yeah that's it. As I say, there's no way I can remember that. But I will just add, the point is that Adam can talk to that. He may not remember those exact words, but he knows that that's the value proposition that they've developed and he can speak about it. And really that's one of the lessons I think we want you to go away with today. It's not about memorizing specific words.
It's about understanding what your value proposition is and feeling comfortable about talking it in the way that you. That makes sense to you and that makes sense to the people you're talking to. OK, if this doesn't work, you might switch to the next person. All right, so we're going to sorry, we're a bit technically challenged today. We do have one slide that really does need to be shown.
What it is though, I don't know. We thought it was. Yeah it's on a thumb drive but the thumb drive the. I don't think so. I'm going to suggest as you suggest Simone, could we hand over to you and we will see if we can figure out Allison's slide in the meantime. Is that all right.
OK sorry. OK can everyone hear me. Yes can everyone hear me. Yes OK. So I work for a society publisher. I work for the American Psychiatric Association. And we like to think of ourselves as mission driven organizations.
For obvious reasons, the American Psychiatric society's mission is to deliver universal and equitable access to health for all people suffering from mental disorders. But in addition to that, it also has a mission to support the professional needs of its members to promote and advance the field of psychiatry, and to make sure that all of those systems are supported.
So how does a publishing arm supports that mission and how do we articulate value through that. One of the key things we do, clearly as publishers is to provide the infrastructure to support that mission. That means providing the information and the peer reviewed resources and the content that people might need. But in doing that, it's not just about providing access to the profession, but to the people that the profession cares for.
And these things are becoming, in the current climate, a lot more challenging as we try to focus on delivery, as we try to meet the demands of authors, but ultimately sorry. Ultimately, the aim there is to make sure that we have the resources that all our constituents can come to and rely on. So that would mean not just creating a place for psychiatrists who are authors, but also the ones who need to learn from the resources that we put through.
So I'll hand over to Alison. Alison Alison. Sorry for the disruption there. Yes I'm going to move this to the very close. I think apparently we need to use the handheld mic. Oh, OK. Yeah these weren't working very well. Hello I am delighted to be here. I'm Alison Denby of Oxford University Press.
And for context, we've been around for 500 and some years. And I just noticed my colleague in the room going. We don't change our value proposition. So I'm going to dispute the fact that it needs redefining. I'm going to present the concept that it's how we deliver the value proposition that's changing radically right now. It's not really the core of what we do, at least for us, that's mission.
Back to the point earlier about mission, and that's our anchor. And for us, that's improving research and education and through publishing, in our case as a part of the University of Oxford. But the press and so but what I've been looking at is the changes in the threats to what we do and what's happening in our industry, and all the different evolutions of how we'll source content, who pays for the content or and at which end do they pay at the input end as authors potentially, or funders.
Do they pay at the output end. What does that look like as we start to see our outputs change quite radically? And what is it that we do in the middle, the special sauce that really determines our long term value. And I think to quote, I don't know if anybody was in the last session that. And Michael basically said, if we don't evolve with the times to use the modern tools, change what we do, we won't be there.
So part of rationale is to make sure we continue to exist and find the stakeholders we can deliver things that matter to. So I sort of captured some of this. What we've always done is attracted excellent quality content. Now where that's going to come from is going to change. I think we'll see it from the research environment, from the funder environment.
I think we're going to see a lot more AI generated content that then we need to think about how do we match that with human specialty and expertise. And at the output end, we are then making sure that content can be found, found, built upon and reused appropriately. But what do we do in the middle now as all of this starts to change. So I think what we've started to look at is content and the atomization of content, long form content is hardly read or ready.
I think we almost all have to admit that to some degree. And the way people are going to ingest content is going to shift. So the fact that we're sort of in the death of an IP moment, at least as our value and the underpinning of our value, that's not really what matters. It's the IP and context, it's the content in context and how that can be exploited much more broadly. So what we have to do is won the trust and integrity.
That's pretty much implicit, at least for our content has to be trusted. And that's one of our values. And so using the modern tools, everything we can to make sure we're really making sure that we're verifying content, validating content, curating content, making sure we're publishing. And this is to quote another colleague in the room, the stuff that has signals, not just all the noise, there's a lot of noise.
How do we separate the signals out. And make sure that those are available. And so how do we also make sure we tag all of this content. We understand who's produced it, where it's come from. How can you trust it. What are those markers beyond traditional trust markers, but I think also what's its impact. Why is this content important and to whom. So when you are searching for something in our new world, whatever that might be, whenever it might be, and you might be a policymaker and you're looking for content that's had policy influence, what we can do is add to the core content corpus with all the signals around that content and really develop that.
So you pull in the Altmetric scores, for example, as well as citations usage. There's going to be all sorts of ways to measure the usefulness of content to different communities. And so I think that's one of the things I think we can help to start to think about how we deliver that value proposition. How do we draw all that together to add unique value to all our stakeholders.
And I don't know who they all will be yet. And then hopefully monetization follows. And I mean, again, we're a University press. That's not our prime objective. But clearly there's a lot of investment here. There's a lot of thought going into how do we do this and the tools that we will use and making sure that we can continue to support our mission. So we also have to be obviously financially successful and think about how do we demonstrate the value back to those stakeholders.
So the idea that we need to show an author. What we've delivered for them, that we need to show a funder how that content has been impactful because we've improved it. And et cetera. Et cetera. So that's the it's not really the change in the value proposition. It's the how do we deliver that value proposition.
I think is the question were asking. So one of these things is not like the other. So I'm here in historian. Conference in Boston. But I'm a historian. I used to run a Research Institute with a publishing arm, and I'm now the librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, an independent research library on the campus at Brown.
I'm also a history professor. So the value proposition. And that's not my whole title. The value proposition for legacy library collections has shifted a lot over the last decades. It used to be taken for granted that what we did was to collect and preserve the historical record. Ours mine is a library focused on the early Americas. So North and South America and the Caribbean, from roughly the mid 1400s to the early 1800s, materials produced by and about the early Americas.
So these are rare, often unique items. And it's kind of the best in the world, which is cool. So collection was first the work of elite amateurs and actually often outside the library world. It still is. A lot of the stuff that's in my library is stuff that collectors like, very rich collectors, think is cool, and these materials require specific environmental care, they can require conservation expertise.
Collecting, holding and preserving was understood to be the value proposition of a library like mine, and it's still actually an important part of what we do. There are historical moments, and I think we are in one right now, when sometimes just holding witness account to history is the most that you can do. But there's been a two-fold shift in thinking about collections, including both expanded service to supporting expertise and to access for general community engagement.
In other words, what can be produced from these materials, not just what is the value of the materials themselves. The value now comes in large measure from what new knowledge the collections support and that knowledge from research, but also knowledge shared among communities, non-expert but stakeholder communities, local and global. So I'd sum this up as gatekeeping is bad, but supporting expertise is good.
And I mean research libraries generally about 50 years moved significantly towards developing research fellowships for Humanities, mostly humanities scholars, and thinking of themselves as research institutes. The Huntington Library, the Newberry, the Massachusetts Historical Society. We're in a kind of collection of independent research libraries that includes mine.
But in the last decade in particular, we have also looked to provide expanded access to our materials for a much wider constituency. As a library of the early Americas that essentially documents the work of colonialism. Access to these materials can speak to a diverse set of stakeholders. We hold materials in hundreds of Indigenous languages, for example, sometimes of the very few, occasionally the only examples in that language.
So digitizing and making those materials available has supported language reclamation projects across the Americas. Expanding discoverability by investing in strong cataloging and super enriched metadata serves both of these constituencies, expert researchers and community members alike, and developing a new digital platform, which we did last year. Americana, JCP library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks.
If I had a slide that would be on it for robust discovery, open access to all our materials and a commitment to full digitization of the library in 10 years serves both of those constituencies. If I did have other slides today, I could show you some examples of these materials, and that would offer an example of our value proposition as well. Returning to the original purpose of collections like ours to collect and hold materials, one of the impulses that fueled this sense of collecting was a sense of wonder and inspiration about the past.
In the 19th century, when ours and many collections were created, the circulation of information was slight. Museums and other collections came about to expose people to past cultures and diverse peoples, often freighted with racist ideas and colonial contexts. But we still do this, that is, that we still offer access to these materials to inspire and to inform. And if I showed you slides of some of our manuscript dictionaries from the 16th or 17th centuries in Quechua, written in Guatemala, or Guarani written in Paraguay, or the Bible, published not far from here in Cambridge in 1660, written in Algonquin, you would probably think, Wow, that's something that's different.
It's a testament to different people who lived in a different place at a different time, with different values and experiences. But when I think about the value proposition of the work of historians researching archival materials in the libraries and archives that keep and make discoverable these materials for experts in the wider community alike, I think about how much.
Before we go on people at the back, there are some seats at the front. If any of you do want to sit down, so please feel free to come forward if you want to. I want to pause for a minute and just see if there are any specific questions for any of the speakers before we go into the discussion bit. Does anybody have any questions on the. So this is a very specific question for you.
Oop is both a originator and publisher of your own materials, books, journals, and so forth, and you publish on behalf of a lot of societies and other learned organizations. Do you ever get whiplash and how do you deal with it between the very different value propositions for your constituency, or is it one set of value props that really sits over all of that.
And I hope that's not putting you on the spot too much. Not at all. And I think what defines who we work with, how we work with them is very similar. So all our partners care about the same types of qualities and most of the not for profit where we are working on behalf of others. So we share that, but also very much mission oriented dedicated to the advancement of research and education.
So those it's pretty much every time we go to talk to one of our society partners. And that's what resonates. We look at their mission, we look at our mission, and usually they're just in keeping. And what we do is benefit them from their experience, subject matter expertise and their member communities. So what it gives us a diversity of perspective, working with many different organizations.
And I think to talk a little bit also a diversity of content from humanities all the way through clinical science, which I think is also critical here. I think our new AI world needs all of that, and we have a job somehow to preserve that in a financially sustainable way. But yeah, and then that goes right the way through to the material that we originate, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary.
So we have people on staff actually writers there on staff and everything in between. So we have a lot of commissioning editors who are working to find books and book content monographs. So yeah, you're right. Real diversity of our inputs. But consistency in the idea that they will advance in whatever way. It can be in many, many different ways, advanced research and education.
OK I don't see any other questions. So we're going to we've got I've got a few questions for the speakers. As I said, we would love to also get your thoughts. So I'm going to ask the speakers. Each question and then see whether you have anything to contribute from your perspectives. And also leave a little bit of time at the end for some general Q&A from you.
So we've deliberately kept the talking, the sort of slides in inverted commas, bit quite short to allow for plenty of time for this. So first question, and I think I'm going to ask you first, started because I know you've been doing some thinking about this very recently is when thinking about the value propositions that you've been sharing, how did you go about developing them. Was it a sort of natural evolution.
Was there something there already that you built on. Did you use some kind of formal framework. Who did you involve. How did you kind of get from OK, I think I need to be able to convey this message to actually having a message that you feel comfortable conveying. Thank you. So historically, we've had several value propositions over the years that sort of evolved organically from the organization through conversation and needing largely needing to come up material for a website, essentially as real estate.
That's a forcing function. But as the organization grew and changed shape many times over the last, especially the last three years, we had to incorporate more and more into it. So we changed quite a lot. And that would happen quite organically as well. And then our most recent update came about three weeks ago, because you invited me to be on this panel, and I looked at our value proposition and I thought, this is really needs updating.
And so my process was I went to ChatGPT and I took the previous value propositions and some content from the website and feed it into ChatGPT and an iterated a few times. And then I said, and then each time I'd say something like, because you'll notice that recent one is multi-part. And we do this and that's because it did help me refine and get clarity on the kind of scope of what we're doing.
But the scope was still relatively broad. So the process was ChatGPT gave me some options. I say, give me five options, and then I say number three. But what about this. And it just add it onto the end. And that's how I got there. And I don't think it was a bad process. And I think that the outcome is not as succinct as previous propositions, but it is closer to what we are doing.
But our challenge, I think, when I look at it now, is more that I'm starting to realize, and I've thinking about this for some time, that actually. So our scope of our organization is too large. And now I'm starting to think about what that picture of the organization. Yeah you want us to keep going, but.
That's OK. So I laughed when Allison said that oop is 500 years old when many things in our library are I'm like oh, you're youngsters. But I really meant it when I said 50-50 years ago, the library community sort of made this kind of commitment to funding humanistic research in a kind of concerted way through fellowship programs. And only in the last 10 years has there been this reorientation to thinking about broader community service.
So these are not like no, nothing got Fed into ChatGPT. Do you know what I mean. These are kind of deep values with really long standing kinds of cultural institutions that. But what I will say is that in the last couple of years, that commitment to community service and particularly to Indigenous communities has taken on a kind of sharper focus. It's not something we put into a value proposition or even into something that goes on the website, in part because the commitment to that service is one that has to actually be quiet.
It actually has to not be something that we speak about all the time publicly. So I think it's interesting because Alice, when you asked us to think about value propositions, you asked us to think about. How do we articulate our value to our communities. And some of that meant thinking about what's already what's so implicit, the implicit value in having all of this remarkable old stuff, the explicit value in supporting scholarship and what has had to be teased out, which is how do you take those kinds of institutions with that kind of presumed natural constituency and shift their focus to a broader kind of support for the people who are actually are represented in those collections.
So an evolution is what I would say, rather than any kind of a sharp shift. Thank you. Building on that point, I think the range of stakeholders that an organization serves also serves to define the shift in how the values, the values evolve. To use Karen's words. So in the case of a scholarly association that also serves a profession with very many different stakeholders, so that the students who need something from the Association that's also serving the people who are in current professional practice, but there's also serving the education and the research needs.
And building on what Karen said, the history of what brought us to this point. So again, there are a lot of overlapping themes in what we do, but it is important. We're not as old as Oxford University Press, but those same drivers exist in preserving the information, preserving the content, making sure that it's retrievable, making sure that we store it for future generations, to learn from what we learn, from what we've built on, to build on what we've learned from the past.
So these are things that will continue to evolve. I mean, I don't want to open up the whole artificial intelligence discussion here, but Adam's just mentioned that. And that will also have an impact on how we collect information and how we use that information to drive what happens in the future. Thank you. And I want to pick up on two points there. One, the stakeholder question.
And it goes back to that diversity of our community as well, and where our content comes from, and convincing many of our stakeholders of the urgency of change. And some of the things that have mattered for a long time, that might not matter in the future, how to let go of some of the history and the weight that we bear with that 500 years is a problem, not an advantage. Because you've got to let it go and you've got to keep moving forward.
And I think this is one of the things in the evolution of what we're doing right now is one of the hardest to take everybody on this journey, not a fearful journey. It's an opportunity journey. And I think open access is as much opportunity as it is a threat to us and we have to embrace it that way. But many of our constituents are part of the legacy, a long legacy of doing things a certain way. Journals honestly, I don't think they've changed since the 1800s, really, if you think about it.
We're still looking at PDFs of articles just in the way we were many, many years ago. That is about we've got so many opportunities to change that and change how research is discovered, advanced. But taking people on the journey. And I think the fear, right now of change and how do we encourage people to.
Make some mistakes. We're not a community that likes to in a point in time where we're going to have to make some mistakes in going forward, while doing our very best to protect what we think matters. And I think that's the bit that I think is the definitional point right now for us, what actually matters and how do we capture what matters and continue to deliver something that matters to our stakeholders.
OK Thanks, everyone. At this point, I want to see whether any of you, particularly those of you who do feel that you have a value proposition that you understand and you occasionally update, would like to share how your process for that do you. Is it something that evolves naturally. Is it something that you've done personally as opposed to at an organizational level.
Have you done something quite formal. Does anyone would anybody like to share anything. No I'm going to have to find a way of getting you all talking at some point, because we can't talk forever. So in the absence of anything from the audience, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we've been doing it at WildBrain. Oh Hi, Alice.
My name is Ron. I'm with the American Academy of Pediatrics. I work in our journals division, and like Simone and association publisher where we're also mission driven. But we're also challenged by some of the same things. A lot of other societies and associations are less people are subscribing. We just started a new open access journal. We're trying to walk that fine line between mission and profit, because profit is honestly the thing that gives me a job and keeps the lights on.
And so for us, we're actively evaluating now some of our journals, we have a journal, for example, that is a literature Review Journal in medicine. And frankly, all of the subscribers and readers are older, retiring or dying. And so we have to rethink rethink that journal, rebrand that journal. And that process of evaluating what that value proposition has been a result of several surveys that we've done.
We're actively rethinking that. Essentially as like a video first literature Review Journal making more of like a video club as we have some peers in the space. Jama, for example, is doing something very similar. So we're kind of asking our readers, we're looking at the competition and then redefining the value proposition ourselves. I'll let you know what the output of that is like in a year or two when we actually get to do that.
But I think it's just a constant evaluation process, asking the bigger questions and then figuring out what will be sustainable and profitable for us. Sorry Thank you. Well, I'm going to because we do have enough time. I'm going to tell you just a little bit about how we do it, partly because it's different.
It's very it was very I was not expecting ChatGPT to come up. So good. But mostly, I think it sounds like people are evolving your value propositions, which completely makes sense. But because one of the things that we've done for a couple of clients is to help them work through their value propositions, we decided we needed to eat our own dog food and give that process a try ourselves and see whether it works.
So I don't want to go into the details, but it has actually been quite interesting to take some time to look at what our value proposition is, as a consultancy looks like for publishers, and not just for publishers, but for society publishers, for University presses, for big commercial publishers, so that I think there are benefits for all the approaches. But we have certainly found it, partly a good bonding thing to do as a team, but also a sort of intellectually interesting thing to do, to look in some detail week by week at what a value proposition for what we do would look like, for our main constituencies.
And we have an online question. So from the virtual audience, how do you encourage internal customers and colleagues who might be resistant to embrace change in how their roles and performed tasks are and add value to the product. This quote we've always added value this way. End quote. So I shouldn't change what I'm doing mindset.
So how do you address that, especially in some of these older, long established societies and organizations. So this actually this question actually does translate pretty well. I admitted in this way.
But it means that lots of people are doing slightly different things. And my. Short answer, and I'd love to know how this works with more complex organizations with a very different focus, especially publishers. The really wants people to understand this is how I can contribute, and this is how my work fits with my colleagues, who are now also doing slightly different things.
Anyway, it's been great. I Dakotas, I think to Karen's point, change is always hard and always difficult, but I think if we're all honest, part of that difficulty is because we can only see how it might adversely affect us. We tend not to see immediately that actually the change might be of value. And I think the journey then is to start with trying to explain why the change is important and the fact that we all need to move somehow, because there's always a tendency to say, this is successful, why are you trying to change it.
This is the way it's always been done. Why do we need to do anything any differently. But we do need to do things differently. That's how we've evolved to survive. So many millions of years. So I think but ultimately trying to encourage people to understand that the change is beneficial and it might just change the way we work, but ultimately it moves us forward, is a way to go, and it can be quite rewarding to get to that stage when suddenly it becomes clearer and then you can all move on.
Wow I think this is the hardest thing, right. I have no idea, honestly. And it's what's going to damage us most, I think. We do so much work trying to encourage people to reskill, to rethink. We're trying to educate all the way. This is not the death of our industry. Not unless we keep up with it and do some new things. But the resistance is genuine and real.
And again, in a larger organization, and especially one as one is associated with a research institution. And again, the weight of all of that purity and the need to do things perfectly is going to really, really stymie us long term. So there's a degree of it's going to happen anyway, and just keeping moving forward and making sure we have enough people able to do that.
There's a degree of natural attrition because it becomes so uncomfortable, unfortunately for some people, to work in that environment. And then hopefully we've got a good cohort in the middle that are just not the early adopters, right. We've got to take them on the journey and we have to keep repeating. We've been talking about the shift from print to digital. I mean, you would have thought that's not exactly radical, really, especially as a journal publisher.
I don't know for how long. And we're still working on people who are absolutely wedded to print. So if anybody can answer that question, I would love to talk to you later. Yeah so. I guess in our role, we try to convince those people to change from a point of view of making their workflows more efficient.
And so in a former life, I built systems and were involved in building systems that would take a future position and say, that's where you should be. And so now we build systems to meet the people where they are and let them incrementally move forward. And I think there's something in there that's interesting. And we're finding more success in that approach. Thank you. And that was actually a fantastic question to segue into my next question for all of you, which is around.
Oh, the question I think here, where there I was. Sorry I had my hand up earlier just for the question on how you develop this value proposition within your company. And I have had very much the experience of knowing myself what this value proposition is, but not being able to get that across to the audience.
So having also gone through a list of OK, this is what we think we have for society publishers within our product catalog. And then really sometimes it takes almost a year to find the. Exact words that just incrementally get put life. You realize, Oh, this is a piece of the argument that you had in a conference over coffee, and this is the next piece, and this is the next piece.
So just like sometimes it's really just a small words until suddenly you realize, oh, now the person sitting on the other side now everybody can actually is understanding this. So sometimes it really is I think in that aspect, ChatGPT can't probably really condense that experience of just like having those discussions and seeing what's the thing that makes people spark how get that spark in their eye that you think, OK.
Oh, they understood now. For virtual we only have one mic. So there's a delay in the answers. And Yeah. Thanks, Stephanie. I think that's a really good point. And I also think this is where there's a value in having a collective organizational view of your value propositions, but there's also a real value in having a sort of personal view that you can communicate passionately and with meaning and with stories and examples to people, which they're then going to remember.
So I think both things are important. But you're absolutely right, particularly the personal one I think will and should keep evolving all the time as you encounter new ways of developing your story, your value proposition. I do want to move on to something. Another question now, which I think is a really interesting one around the complexity of what we do versus the value of what we do, because when we had our planning meeting for this, one of the things that the speakers highlighted, I think very correctly, is that a lot of what we all do, what we spend a lot of time on, isn't necessarily what people are interested in, but we want to talk about it because we're interested in it.
And we spend a lot of our time on it. So how do you balance that complexity of what we do versus what other people see in the value of what we're doing. And I don't know if any of you remember a few years ago there was a series of Scully kitchen blog posts called things like 63 things that publishers do, then 75.5 things that publishers do, 102 things that publishers do. And the intention was to demonstrate the value of what we do.
But actually in many cases, it really backfired because people were like, oh yeah, sure, whatever. You do this little thing and this little thing, who cares. So I think it's a challenge for us to communicate the value of what we do and the fact that it is complex, but in a way that makes people understand why it's valued, why there's a value in it for them as well. So that wasn't a question.
But the question is. How do you tackle this kind of complexity versus value issue, which I know from my personal experience in infrastructure is always a very big deal. So I'm going to just ease pass down the line again, if that's all right. Yeah I mean. Had my first son 3 and 1/2 years ago.
And one of the things I used to do to get him to sleep was tell him exactly what I was passionate about for. And I'm passionate about format conversion as one of many things. So I'd tell him about why document converters are important for publishing, and why we need a robust online word processors that can actually manage the fidelity of the content that publishers require, and why that needs to be coupled with typesetting engines, and why we built all of those three things and how they fit into the greater universe.
And actually, I really believe that. I really believe that there are just fundamental components in the open infrastructure world that there'd be very few people that want to talk to me about it. But they are critical to I think, everybody in this room, and if we solve these problems, should have been solved 20 years ago and they haven't been solved. PDF conversion is one big one. It's just especially in the pre-print world, it's going to just cause a lot of harm unless we solve that very soon.
So it's very hard I want to talk about those things, but instead I'm talking about people's day to day and their workflow and how to solve the problems and meet them, as I said before, where they are and move them on from there incrementally. So it's unfortunate because I actually want to say to everyone in this room, everybody give me $500 each to solve the PDF problem, and we'll do it for you.
It's that kind of thing. We just need a lump of cash and a lot of your problems would go away. But that story is not interesting to publishers, not interesting to funders. So Yeah. Well so just to be contrary a little bit, Alice, I think, and I love your story. I think one of the biggest challenges that we face collectively is that we're not willing to pay even a little bit of attention to how.
Complex and how much access to everything. Like, how often do people think that, oh, I could do that or anybody could do that, or what does it take to do that. Or I mean, they're just endless cliches around this. But I think from the guys who are Wow, I was watching the garbage trucks being collected this morning and good God, the level of expertise that these guys display is unbelievable.
So actually, I think it's important to be clear about expertise and complexity, and I don't think that's a bad thing anyway. So I said, yeah, I Yes, I suppose so, but I feel like there's a point to saying, look. So here's an example from my world. Researchers come into our library and they want to see these cool things. They ask to see them.
We bring them out there in a reading room where somebody has just delivered up to them this amazing thing. There is a whole back of house there of many dozens of people who have to function in order for this thing to arrive on the research desk for them to look at. I actually want them to know a little bit about the fact that there's this whole back of house thing that happens. There's a cataloger that has to do all of this work.
There's somebody who has to composite the digitization, like digitization. Turns out it isn't just taking a picture on your phone and putting it on the web, like, right. That drives us crazy. Anyway so sometimes actually I do these little lectures at researchers. Anyway, I was the wrong person to ask this question because. Thanks, Karen, but I think you do make an important point that especially the digital evolution has suddenly masked the complexity of what we do.
So everyone can build a website. Everyone can just write something in Word or design it and post it to a website. And people think that's all publishers do. And there's a whole infrastructure behind making your content available on the web, making sure we follow standards. There are certain rules we have to follow, and there's a whole back office to use your word behind all of that effort, but we don't take the time to explain it or to give examples or to just say, give the real time involved in trying to take something that was once only ever available in print.
Break it down. Put it online. Make sure it's there. It's archivable and it's retrievable. So I think it's a complex question. Alice, Thank you for raising it. But I think we'll have to spend time. And I think we do have to spend time trying to articulate that value and making sure people understand the effort that goes into it.
Yeah, I mean, lots of complexity. And I think one of our problems goes back to Alice's point. We try to overexplain it and we lose everybody. So the view I take is you've got to find what matters to that stakeholder. And from their perspective and speaking their language. Why is this helping you. And those answers can be very different depending on who you're talking to.
A society partner, somebody's writing something for the dictionary, an author, a funder who's paid for content. An institution subscribing or purchasing publish rights. Their needs from what we do for them are quite different, and the language that they demonstrate success from their investment. However you shape that investment. Whatever form that takes is different. So you have to speak in their language and make sure that you're delivering something that matches what they actually need in the way that they need to prove to their own stakeholders the value of what they've just done.
And very easy to say. Probably not so easy to do, but I think that's the critical nature. And the we get wrong often is not thinking from the listener's perspective. We're thinking from our own perspective and all the stuff that matters to us, not what matters to the person we're talking at, where we should be actually having a conversation.
Totally, totally agree with that. OK, I have one more question for the speakers, but I think we only have about a few minutes left, so I'd like to open it up and see if there are any other comments or questions from anybody in the audience. Stand up so I can see.
Yeah I have a question about how you calibrate your values with the values of the community that you serve. Because those really can change quite significantly. I feel like a lot of times in publishing we're 10 steps ahead, and then we often have to bring the community along with us. So it's that can cause a lot of tension.
There's a mixture of enthusiasm, and here's how we've dealt with that. That's right. Well, you can see from the enthusiasm to take the mic that this is a very, very difficult question because somebody made the point earlier that as publishers, even as not for profit outfits, you are challenged with making sure that your work is profitable.
And sometimes it's even more challenging in a small not for profit, because slight changes can really affect what you do, and the consequences of losing some revenue or losing some losing parts of your profits can be quite significant, because all that revenue goes back into funding programs for the very people that you might not be able to bring along with you. So I think what we try to do, as just a matter of course, is to make this a partnership and try to understand, be in constant dialogue with the people that you want to help and try to make sure that you can meet their needs.
But it's a constant effort and there are tensions there because you have to make decisions sometimes that people may not understand. But when you can try and bring people along with you. I hope that helps. Yeah, I agree, it's a really tricky thing. And I think one of the things is work with the communities that mirror your own values.
I think that's really important. So what we care about is advancing research and education, and if we're working with others who care about that, it's slightly easier to convince them to do some of the difficult things because you can posit it back to look, we care about the same things. We're trying to deliver the outcomes you want, and then there's an element of really understanding their specific goals from whatever perspective they are, and trying to help to demonstrate whatever this change is and however hard it feels, actually does support their goals.
It goes back to that. You've got to put it into somebody else's language and think from that stakeholder's perspective in communicating how do you move forward without hurting and damaging what we all believe in. We're here to do. And I think that's the biggest thing. The fear is we're going to do something that damages whatever we care about.
And so it's making sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We actually preserve what matters and understand it, which is not always easy. So understand the nuance and difference by discipline. We're not trying to do the same thing for every discipline. We can't. It wouldn't be right. But where.
It doesn't matter. And that's the hard bit. The things that don't matter that we can change, that can become more efficient. Taking them on a journey of why this isn't going to damage what you care about. Storytelling, I think. Alex that's right.
And I think that perhaps one missing word from that, although very implicit, is trust. If you're working with a community that trusts you and vice versa, that you trust them, bringing that making those changes does become easier. It's never easy. Change is never easy for anyone, but at least if you bring them along on the journey and you trust each other, the chances of success are much higher.
And so I think building those relationships is kind of fundamental to all of this. I think we're pretty much out of time. So please join me in thanking our speakers and apologies for the technical issues.
Segment:0 .
Alice Meadows. I'm one of the co-founders of the more brains cooperative, which is a small consultancy that offers services mostly around open research and research infrastructure to publishers and others. I have a fabulous panel here today. Alison Demby at the end from Oxford University Press. Simone Taylor from the American Psychiatric Association. Karen Wolff who's job title is too long affiliation Brown University library.
She'll tell you a big long. John Carter Brown Library. Brown University, something like that. Sorry she will tell you properly. And Adam Hyde from Coco. The rest are easy. Sorry, Karen. It's lovely to be here with you. We're going to be talking about redefining the value proposition for scholarly communications organizations.
I'm massively impressed at how many of you are here early on time. And here to join us. And we are hoping that this will be a somewhat interactive session. So we're hoping that you will, as well as us talking about value propositions, that you will share some of your experiences and recommendations and also ask us questions.
So start off with the important stuff. So the code of conduct as the Society for scholarly publishing is committed to diversity, equity, and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct. And if you need more information, you can either visit our website or scan the QR code.
So I want to start off with a few thoughts about from just set the context really for this, you're not going to be hearing very much from me. You'll probably be glad to hear after my terrible introductions. You'll be hearing much more from the speakers. But I did want to give us a little bit of context for this conversation. So the definition at the top is from Wikipedia, of course. So a value proposition is a statement, which identifies clear, measurable, and demonstrable benefits that consumers get when buying a particular product or service.
You may also know of value propositions as USP's. There's a lot of similarities between the two. Unique, unique selling propositions. That was a phrase that tended to get bandied around more a few years ago, I guess. Again, quoting Wikipedia, the unique benefit exhibited by a company, service, product or brand that enables it to stand out from competitors. Back in the day, when I first started in marketing, we talked about features and benefits, and we didn't have things like USP's or value propositions, but really it's all part of the same thing.
It's really sort of understanding your product or service and why it's going to be of value to your customers or your community. So I tweaked that definition a little bit, because I think in a way that I think is more appropriate for the work that many of us are doing. So rather than consumers, I think what we're doing is we want to be able to demonstrate benefits to individuals and communities.
And it's not just about buying. It's also about investing in and advocating for a particular organization initiative as well as products or services. So some of what you're going to hear about from the speakers is less about value propositions for a specific product and more about a community value proposition. Now, again, back in the day, I am an old lady, and back in the day when I started in publishing, it was super.
We didn't have value propositions, and it was very easy to talk about what the benefits of. For example, being a publisher were. We did editorial, we did production, we did marketing, we did distribution. Nobody could really do those things on their own. The internet didn't exist. You had to do things like printing and typesetting. It was all so it made communicating the value of what you did very easy.
You were basically selling a service that people needed because they couldn't do it themselves. For societies, the value proposition, what would now be known as the value proposition was around things like networking, prestige, career development, and for libraries. It was around things like access to content and research support. All these things are now much more doable yourself on the internet or in smaller groups or whatever.
The move to digital has made all of this much more complex. And of course, I think the value proposition for infrastructure, certainly digital infrastructure, because by its nature has always been digital, has always been challenging. So we need to think again. I think many of us already are redefining what we mean by a value proposition in scholarly communications.
But that's what we're going to talk about now. So we need to redefine our value propositions. And we need to do so because we still need that support for our organizations. We still need people to invest in them in order that we can continue to provide the services that they do need. And thinking about our value proposition, we need to understand what it is, what it means for the different stakeholders overall, as well as for our organization.
We need to be able to articulate it really clearly and effectively, and I think that means passionately. I think we need to care when we articulate our value proposition, and it also means we need to be able to adapt it to meet the evolving needs and changing circumstances of the communities that we serve. So that's about all I had to say. But I did want to ask a few of you to ask you some questions before we move on, because these are the questions that the panel has been considering as they are going to spend a few minutes talking about their value propositions for their organizations, and then we're going to open it up to more of a discussion.
So first of all, how many of you have a clear understanding of your organization's value proposition. Hands up. Some of you. OK how many of you feel confident articulating it. Interesting OK.
Possibly slightly more. Feel confident articulating it than understanding it, which is interesting, but OK. Let's go with that. How often do you revisit or adapt your organization's value proposition. Let's say every year. Anyone every two years. OK, good.
Five years. OK, so we have work to do. People, I think it's fair to say so. With that, I am going to hand over to. Oh, I hope we've got. No, we don't seem to have the next slide, which is a bit unfortunate. OK all right.
I'm going to hand over to Adam who's going to talk about cocoa. I did have some slides, but I was going to stand for those. But I'm going to stand anyway. I get a little nervous talking. My name is Adam Hyatt from cocoa. We built open infrastructure, so I'm here as to represent open infrastructure amongst the panel. And we have developed several value propositions, but the problem that we come up against is that we have a lot going on within the organization.
So we are a lot about community. We run the open publishing awards, open publishing festival. We also build multiple different platforms, all open source from typesetting engines to scholarly publishing systems, book production engines. We have AI designers, et cetera and also we work with organizations to build products for them. So we've built products for NIH and products for Caltech, et cetera there's a fully fledged platforms, everything from assessment builders through to micro publications, platforms, et cetera.
So we have a lot going on, and we've never been really good at being able to nail down the exact proposition of the organization. And also because we are a bootstrapped organization, open infrastructure has very little overheads for often hand-to-mouth organizations. We are technology first organizations, so we don't think about marketing as much as we should, and we don't have the resources to market.
So it's tricky. So a lot of how we achieve market adoption is through organic processes, which is articulating the value of your organization through interpersonal conversations and conveying the passion for what we do. And so it's very difficult for us to actually encapsulate that in a bottle and put it on a screen and say, OK, that's what we do.
So yeah, I'm here to actually, I actually did come up with the value proposition, but I can't I don't know it off the top of my head because it's on the slide and I'm not very good at being succinct. One good observation a friend of mine said when I asked me to do an elevator pitch for him, and I said, how was that. And he said, that was a great elevator pitch.
Amazing It was a very slow elevator on a very tall building. So that is my problem. And also, I think Alice may have once said that we're the most interesting open infrastructure organization you never heard of. And these are some of the reasons why. Low to the ground, very little overhead to think about these things.
No marketing budget. And we're doing a lot of stuff. So that's kind of the stresses that we encounter when we're trying to turn this into a potted value proposition. And I do have your value propositions. If you would like me to read one out for you. Yeah if you have it there, the latest one. So luckily, I do have on my phone the most recent the current value proposition innovating and modernizing publishing with ocea, streamline workflows, support emergent models and enhanced collaboration.
Yeah that's it. As I say, there's no way I can remember that. But I will just add, the point is that Adam can talk to that. He may not remember those exact words, but he knows that that's the value proposition that they've developed and he can speak about it. And really that's one of the lessons I think we want you to go away with today. It's not about memorizing specific words.
It's about understanding what your value proposition is and feeling comfortable about talking it in the way that you. That makes sense to you and that makes sense to the people you're talking to. OK, if this doesn't work, you might switch to the next person. All right, so we're going to sorry, we're a bit technically challenged today. We do have one slide that really does need to be shown.
What it is though, I don't know. We thought it was. Yeah it's on a thumb drive but the thumb drive the. I don't think so. I'm going to suggest as you suggest Simone, could we hand over to you and we will see if we can figure out Allison's slide in the meantime. Is that all right.
OK sorry. OK can everyone hear me. Yes can everyone hear me. Yes OK. So I work for a society publisher. I work for the American Psychiatric Association. And we like to think of ourselves as mission driven organizations.
For obvious reasons, the American Psychiatric society's mission is to deliver universal and equitable access to health for all people suffering from mental disorders. But in addition to that, it also has a mission to support the professional needs of its members to promote and advance the field of psychiatry, and to make sure that all of those systems are supported.
So how does a publishing arm supports that mission and how do we articulate value through that. One of the key things we do, clearly as publishers is to provide the infrastructure to support that mission. That means providing the information and the peer reviewed resources and the content that people might need. But in doing that, it's not just about providing access to the profession, but to the people that the profession cares for.
And these things are becoming, in the current climate, a lot more challenging as we try to focus on delivery, as we try to meet the demands of authors, but ultimately sorry. Ultimately, the aim there is to make sure that we have the resources that all our constituents can come to and rely on. So that would mean not just creating a place for psychiatrists who are authors, but also the ones who need to learn from the resources that we put through.
So I'll hand over to Alison. Alison Alison. Sorry for the disruption there. Yes I'm going to move this to the very close. I think apparently we need to use the handheld mic. Oh, OK. Yeah these weren't working very well. Hello I am delighted to be here. I'm Alison Denby of Oxford University Press.
And for context, we've been around for 500 and some years. And I just noticed my colleague in the room going. We don't change our value proposition. So I'm going to dispute the fact that it needs redefining. I'm going to present the concept that it's how we deliver the value proposition that's changing radically right now. It's not really the core of what we do, at least for us, that's mission.
Back to the point earlier about mission, and that's our anchor. And for us, that's improving research and education and through publishing, in our case as a part of the University of Oxford. But the press and so but what I've been looking at is the changes in the threats to what we do and what's happening in our industry, and all the different evolutions of how we'll source content, who pays for the content or and at which end do they pay at the input end as authors potentially, or funders.
Do they pay at the output end. What does that look like as we start to see our outputs change quite radically? And what is it that we do in the middle, the special sauce that really determines our long term value. And I think to quote, I don't know if anybody was in the last session that. And Michael basically said, if we don't evolve with the times to use the modern tools, change what we do, we won't be there.
So part of rationale is to make sure we continue to exist and find the stakeholders we can deliver things that matter to. So I sort of captured some of this. What we've always done is attracted excellent quality content. Now where that's going to come from is going to change. I think we'll see it from the research environment, from the funder environment.
I think we're going to see a lot more AI generated content that then we need to think about how do we match that with human specialty and expertise. And at the output end, we are then making sure that content can be found, found, built upon and reused appropriately. But what do we do in the middle now as all of this starts to change. So I think what we've started to look at is content and the atomization of content, long form content is hardly read or ready.
I think we almost all have to admit that to some degree. And the way people are going to ingest content is going to shift. So the fact that we're sort of in the death of an IP moment, at least as our value and the underpinning of our value, that's not really what matters. It's the IP and context, it's the content in context and how that can be exploited much more broadly. So what we have to do is won the trust and integrity.
That's pretty much implicit, at least for our content has to be trusted. And that's one of our values. And so using the modern tools, everything we can to make sure we're really making sure that we're verifying content, validating content, curating content, making sure we're publishing. And this is to quote another colleague in the room, the stuff that has signals, not just all the noise, there's a lot of noise.
How do we separate the signals out. And make sure that those are available. And so how do we also make sure we tag all of this content. We understand who's produced it, where it's come from. How can you trust it. What are those markers beyond traditional trust markers, but I think also what's its impact. Why is this content important and to whom. So when you are searching for something in our new world, whatever that might be, whenever it might be, and you might be a policymaker and you're looking for content that's had policy influence, what we can do is add to the core content corpus with all the signals around that content and really develop that.
So you pull in the Altmetric scores, for example, as well as citations usage. There's going to be all sorts of ways to measure the usefulness of content to different communities. And so I think that's one of the things I think we can help to start to think about how we deliver that value proposition. How do we draw all that together to add unique value to all our stakeholders.
And I don't know who they all will be yet. And then hopefully monetization follows. And I mean, again, we're a University press. That's not our prime objective. But clearly there's a lot of investment here. There's a lot of thought going into how do we do this and the tools that we will use and making sure that we can continue to support our mission. So we also have to be obviously financially successful and think about how do we demonstrate the value back to those stakeholders.
So the idea that we need to show an author. What we've delivered for them, that we need to show a funder how that content has been impactful because we've improved it. And et cetera. Et cetera. So that's the it's not really the change in the value proposition. It's the how do we deliver that value proposition.
I think is the question were asking. So one of these things is not like the other. So I'm here in historian. Conference in Boston. But I'm a historian. I used to run a Research Institute with a publishing arm, and I'm now the librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, an independent research library on the campus at Brown.
I'm also a history professor. So the value proposition. And that's not my whole title. The value proposition for legacy library collections has shifted a lot over the last decades. It used to be taken for granted that what we did was to collect and preserve the historical record. Ours mine is a library focused on the early Americas. So North and South America and the Caribbean, from roughly the mid 1400s to the early 1800s, materials produced by and about the early Americas.
So these are rare, often unique items. And it's kind of the best in the world, which is cool. So collection was first the work of elite amateurs and actually often outside the library world. It still is. A lot of the stuff that's in my library is stuff that collectors like, very rich collectors, think is cool, and these materials require specific environmental care, they can require conservation expertise.
Collecting, holding and preserving was understood to be the value proposition of a library like mine, and it's still actually an important part of what we do. There are historical moments, and I think we are in one right now, when sometimes just holding witness account to history is the most that you can do. But there's been a two-fold shift in thinking about collections, including both expanded service to supporting expertise and to access for general community engagement.
In other words, what can be produced from these materials, not just what is the value of the materials themselves. The value now comes in large measure from what new knowledge the collections support and that knowledge from research, but also knowledge shared among communities, non-expert but stakeholder communities, local and global. So I'd sum this up as gatekeeping is bad, but supporting expertise is good.
And I mean research libraries generally about 50 years moved significantly towards developing research fellowships for Humanities, mostly humanities scholars, and thinking of themselves as research institutes. The Huntington Library, the Newberry, the Massachusetts Historical Society. We're in a kind of collection of independent research libraries that includes mine.
But in the last decade in particular, we have also looked to provide expanded access to our materials for a much wider constituency. As a library of the early Americas that essentially documents the work of colonialism. Access to these materials can speak to a diverse set of stakeholders. We hold materials in hundreds of Indigenous languages, for example, sometimes of the very few, occasionally the only examples in that language.
So digitizing and making those materials available has supported language reclamation projects across the Americas. Expanding discoverability by investing in strong cataloging and super enriched metadata serves both of these constituencies, expert researchers and community members alike, and developing a new digital platform, which we did last year. Americana, JCP library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks.
If I had a slide that would be on it for robust discovery, open access to all our materials and a commitment to full digitization of the library in 10 years serves both of those constituencies. If I did have other slides today, I could show you some examples of these materials, and that would offer an example of our value proposition as well. Returning to the original purpose of collections like ours to collect and hold materials, one of the impulses that fueled this sense of collecting was a sense of wonder and inspiration about the past.
In the 19th century, when ours and many collections were created, the circulation of information was slight. Museums and other collections came about to expose people to past cultures and diverse peoples, often freighted with racist ideas and colonial contexts. But we still do this, that is, that we still offer access to these materials to inspire and to inform. And if I showed you slides of some of our manuscript dictionaries from the 16th or 17th centuries in Quechua, written in Guatemala, or Guarani written in Paraguay, or the Bible, published not far from here in Cambridge in 1660, written in Algonquin, you would probably think, Wow, that's something that's different.
It's a testament to different people who lived in a different place at a different time, with different values and experiences. But when I think about the value proposition of the work of historians researching archival materials in the libraries and archives that keep and make discoverable these materials for experts in the wider community alike, I think about how much.
Before we go on people at the back, there are some seats at the front. If any of you do want to sit down, so please feel free to come forward if you want to. I want to pause for a minute and just see if there are any specific questions for any of the speakers before we go into the discussion bit. Does anybody have any questions on the. So this is a very specific question for you.
Oop is both a originator and publisher of your own materials, books, journals, and so forth, and you publish on behalf of a lot of societies and other learned organizations. Do you ever get whiplash and how do you deal with it between the very different value propositions for your constituency, or is it one set of value props that really sits over all of that.
And I hope that's not putting you on the spot too much. Not at all. And I think what defines who we work with, how we work with them is very similar. So all our partners care about the same types of qualities and most of the not for profit where we are working on behalf of others. So we share that, but also very much mission oriented dedicated to the advancement of research and education.
So those it's pretty much every time we go to talk to one of our society partners. And that's what resonates. We look at their mission, we look at our mission, and usually they're just in keeping. And what we do is benefit them from their experience, subject matter expertise and their member communities. So what it gives us a diversity of perspective, working with many different organizations.
And I think to talk a little bit also a diversity of content from humanities all the way through clinical science, which I think is also critical here. I think our new AI world needs all of that, and we have a job somehow to preserve that in a financially sustainable way. But yeah, and then that goes right the way through to the material that we originate, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary.
So we have people on staff actually writers there on staff and everything in between. So we have a lot of commissioning editors who are working to find books and book content monographs. So yeah, you're right. Real diversity of our inputs. But consistency in the idea that they will advance in whatever way. It can be in many, many different ways, advanced research and education.
OK I don't see any other questions. So we're going to we've got I've got a few questions for the speakers. As I said, we would love to also get your thoughts. So I'm going to ask the speakers. Each question and then see whether you have anything to contribute from your perspectives. And also leave a little bit of time at the end for some general Q&A from you.
So we've deliberately kept the talking, the sort of slides in inverted commas, bit quite short to allow for plenty of time for this. So first question, and I think I'm going to ask you first, started because I know you've been doing some thinking about this very recently is when thinking about the value propositions that you've been sharing, how did you go about developing them. Was it a sort of natural evolution.
Was there something there already that you built on. Did you use some kind of formal framework. Who did you involve. How did you kind of get from OK, I think I need to be able to convey this message to actually having a message that you feel comfortable conveying. Thank you. So historically, we've had several value propositions over the years that sort of evolved organically from the organization through conversation and needing largely needing to come up material for a website, essentially as real estate.
That's a forcing function. But as the organization grew and changed shape many times over the last, especially the last three years, we had to incorporate more and more into it. So we changed quite a lot. And that would happen quite organically as well. And then our most recent update came about three weeks ago, because you invited me to be on this panel, and I looked at our value proposition and I thought, this is really needs updating.
And so my process was I went to ChatGPT and I took the previous value propositions and some content from the website and feed it into ChatGPT and an iterated a few times. And then I said, and then each time I'd say something like, because you'll notice that recent one is multi-part. And we do this and that's because it did help me refine and get clarity on the kind of scope of what we're doing.
But the scope was still relatively broad. So the process was ChatGPT gave me some options. I say, give me five options, and then I say number three. But what about this. And it just add it onto the end. And that's how I got there. And I don't think it was a bad process. And I think that the outcome is not as succinct as previous propositions, but it is closer to what we are doing.
But our challenge, I think, when I look at it now, is more that I'm starting to realize, and I've thinking about this for some time, that actually. So our scope of our organization is too large. And now I'm starting to think about what that picture of the organization. Yeah you want us to keep going, but.
That's OK. So I laughed when Allison said that oop is 500 years old when many things in our library are I'm like oh, you're youngsters. But I really meant it when I said 50-50 years ago, the library community sort of made this kind of commitment to funding humanistic research in a kind of concerted way through fellowship programs. And only in the last 10 years has there been this reorientation to thinking about broader community service.
So these are not like no, nothing got Fed into ChatGPT. Do you know what I mean. These are kind of deep values with really long standing kinds of cultural institutions that. But what I will say is that in the last couple of years, that commitment to community service and particularly to Indigenous communities has taken on a kind of sharper focus. It's not something we put into a value proposition or even into something that goes on the website, in part because the commitment to that service is one that has to actually be quiet.
It actually has to not be something that we speak about all the time publicly. So I think it's interesting because Alice, when you asked us to think about value propositions, you asked us to think about. How do we articulate our value to our communities. And some of that meant thinking about what's already what's so implicit, the implicit value in having all of this remarkable old stuff, the explicit value in supporting scholarship and what has had to be teased out, which is how do you take those kinds of institutions with that kind of presumed natural constituency and shift their focus to a broader kind of support for the people who are actually are represented in those collections.
So an evolution is what I would say, rather than any kind of a sharp shift. Thank you. Building on that point, I think the range of stakeholders that an organization serves also serves to define the shift in how the values, the values evolve. To use Karen's words. So in the case of a scholarly association that also serves a profession with very many different stakeholders, so that the students who need something from the Association that's also serving the people who are in current professional practice, but there's also serving the education and the research needs.
And building on what Karen said, the history of what brought us to this point. So again, there are a lot of overlapping themes in what we do, but it is important. We're not as old as Oxford University Press, but those same drivers exist in preserving the information, preserving the content, making sure that it's retrievable, making sure that we store it for future generations, to learn from what we learn, from what we've built on, to build on what we've learned from the past.
So these are things that will continue to evolve. I mean, I don't want to open up the whole artificial intelligence discussion here, but Adam's just mentioned that. And that will also have an impact on how we collect information and how we use that information to drive what happens in the future. Thank you. And I want to pick up on two points there. One, the stakeholder question.
And it goes back to that diversity of our community as well, and where our content comes from, and convincing many of our stakeholders of the urgency of change. And some of the things that have mattered for a long time, that might not matter in the future, how to let go of some of the history and the weight that we bear with that 500 years is a problem, not an advantage. Because you've got to let it go and you've got to keep moving forward.
And I think this is one of the things in the evolution of what we're doing right now is one of the hardest to take everybody on this journey, not a fearful journey. It's an opportunity journey. And I think open access is as much opportunity as it is a threat to us and we have to embrace it that way. But many of our constituents are part of the legacy, a long legacy of doing things a certain way. Journals honestly, I don't think they've changed since the 1800s, really, if you think about it.
We're still looking at PDFs of articles just in the way we were many, many years ago. That is about we've got so many opportunities to change that and change how research is discovered, advanced. But taking people on the journey. And I think the fear, right now of change and how do we encourage people to.
Make some mistakes. We're not a community that likes to in a point in time where we're going to have to make some mistakes in going forward, while doing our very best to protect what we think matters. And I think that's the bit that I think is the definitional point right now for us, what actually matters and how do we capture what matters and continue to deliver something that matters to our stakeholders.
OK Thanks, everyone. At this point, I want to see whether any of you, particularly those of you who do feel that you have a value proposition that you understand and you occasionally update, would like to share how your process for that do you. Is it something that evolves naturally. Is it something that you've done personally as opposed to at an organizational level.
Have you done something quite formal. Does anyone would anybody like to share anything. No I'm going to have to find a way of getting you all talking at some point, because we can't talk forever. So in the absence of anything from the audience, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we've been doing it at WildBrain. Oh Hi, Alice.
My name is Ron. I'm with the American Academy of Pediatrics. I work in our journals division, and like Simone and association publisher where we're also mission driven. But we're also challenged by some of the same things. A lot of other societies and associations are less people are subscribing. We just started a new open access journal. We're trying to walk that fine line between mission and profit, because profit is honestly the thing that gives me a job and keeps the lights on.
And so for us, we're actively evaluating now some of our journals, we have a journal, for example, that is a literature Review Journal in medicine. And frankly, all of the subscribers and readers are older, retiring or dying. And so we have to rethink rethink that journal, rebrand that journal. And that process of evaluating what that value proposition has been a result of several surveys that we've done.
We're actively rethinking that. Essentially as like a video first literature Review Journal making more of like a video club as we have some peers in the space. Jama, for example, is doing something very similar. So we're kind of asking our readers, we're looking at the competition and then redefining the value proposition ourselves. I'll let you know what the output of that is like in a year or two when we actually get to do that.
But I think it's just a constant evaluation process, asking the bigger questions and then figuring out what will be sustainable and profitable for us. Sorry Thank you. Well, I'm going to because we do have enough time. I'm going to tell you just a little bit about how we do it, partly because it's different.
It's very it was very I was not expecting ChatGPT to come up. So good. But mostly, I think it sounds like people are evolving your value propositions, which completely makes sense. But because one of the things that we've done for a couple of clients is to help them work through their value propositions, we decided we needed to eat our own dog food and give that process a try ourselves and see whether it works.
So I don't want to go into the details, but it has actually been quite interesting to take some time to look at what our value proposition is, as a consultancy looks like for publishers, and not just for publishers, but for society publishers, for University presses, for big commercial publishers, so that I think there are benefits for all the approaches. But we have certainly found it, partly a good bonding thing to do as a team, but also a sort of intellectually interesting thing to do, to look in some detail week by week at what a value proposition for what we do would look like, for our main constituencies.
And we have an online question. So from the virtual audience, how do you encourage internal customers and colleagues who might be resistant to embrace change in how their roles and performed tasks are and add value to the product. This quote we've always added value this way. End quote. So I shouldn't change what I'm doing mindset.
So how do you address that, especially in some of these older, long established societies and organizations. So this actually this question actually does translate pretty well. I admitted in this way.
But it means that lots of people are doing slightly different things. And my. Short answer, and I'd love to know how this works with more complex organizations with a very different focus, especially publishers. The really wants people to understand this is how I can contribute, and this is how my work fits with my colleagues, who are now also doing slightly different things.
Anyway, it's been great. I Dakotas, I think to Karen's point, change is always hard and always difficult, but I think if we're all honest, part of that difficulty is because we can only see how it might adversely affect us. We tend not to see immediately that actually the change might be of value. And I think the journey then is to start with trying to explain why the change is important and the fact that we all need to move somehow, because there's always a tendency to say, this is successful, why are you trying to change it.
This is the way it's always been done. Why do we need to do anything any differently. But we do need to do things differently. That's how we've evolved to survive. So many millions of years. So I think but ultimately trying to encourage people to understand that the change is beneficial and it might just change the way we work, but ultimately it moves us forward, is a way to go, and it can be quite rewarding to get to that stage when suddenly it becomes clearer and then you can all move on.
Wow I think this is the hardest thing, right. I have no idea, honestly. And it's what's going to damage us most, I think. We do so much work trying to encourage people to reskill, to rethink. We're trying to educate all the way. This is not the death of our industry. Not unless we keep up with it and do some new things. But the resistance is genuine and real.
And again, in a larger organization, and especially one as one is associated with a research institution. And again, the weight of all of that purity and the need to do things perfectly is going to really, really stymie us long term. So there's a degree of it's going to happen anyway, and just keeping moving forward and making sure we have enough people able to do that.
There's a degree of natural attrition because it becomes so uncomfortable, unfortunately for some people, to work in that environment. And then hopefully we've got a good cohort in the middle that are just not the early adopters, right. We've got to take them on the journey and we have to keep repeating. We've been talking about the shift from print to digital. I mean, you would have thought that's not exactly radical, really, especially as a journal publisher.
I don't know for how long. And we're still working on people who are absolutely wedded to print. So if anybody can answer that question, I would love to talk to you later. Yeah so. I guess in our role, we try to convince those people to change from a point of view of making their workflows more efficient.
And so in a former life, I built systems and were involved in building systems that would take a future position and say, that's where you should be. And so now we build systems to meet the people where they are and let them incrementally move forward. And I think there's something in there that's interesting. And we're finding more success in that approach. Thank you. And that was actually a fantastic question to segue into my next question for all of you, which is around.
Oh, the question I think here, where there I was. Sorry I had my hand up earlier just for the question on how you develop this value proposition within your company. And I have had very much the experience of knowing myself what this value proposition is, but not being able to get that across to the audience.
So having also gone through a list of OK, this is what we think we have for society publishers within our product catalog. And then really sometimes it takes almost a year to find the. Exact words that just incrementally get put life. You realize, Oh, this is a piece of the argument that you had in a conference over coffee, and this is the next piece, and this is the next piece.
So just like sometimes it's really just a small words until suddenly you realize, oh, now the person sitting on the other side now everybody can actually is understanding this. So sometimes it really is I think in that aspect, ChatGPT can't probably really condense that experience of just like having those discussions and seeing what's the thing that makes people spark how get that spark in their eye that you think, OK.
Oh, they understood now. For virtual we only have one mic. So there's a delay in the answers. And Yeah. Thanks, Stephanie. I think that's a really good point. And I also think this is where there's a value in having a collective organizational view of your value propositions, but there's also a real value in having a sort of personal view that you can communicate passionately and with meaning and with stories and examples to people, which they're then going to remember.
So I think both things are important. But you're absolutely right, particularly the personal one I think will and should keep evolving all the time as you encounter new ways of developing your story, your value proposition. I do want to move on to something. Another question now, which I think is a really interesting one around the complexity of what we do versus the value of what we do, because when we had our planning meeting for this, one of the things that the speakers highlighted, I think very correctly, is that a lot of what we all do, what we spend a lot of time on, isn't necessarily what people are interested in, but we want to talk about it because we're interested in it.
And we spend a lot of our time on it. So how do you balance that complexity of what we do versus what other people see in the value of what we're doing. And I don't know if any of you remember a few years ago there was a series of Scully kitchen blog posts called things like 63 things that publishers do, then 75.5 things that publishers do, 102 things that publishers do. And the intention was to demonstrate the value of what we do.
But actually in many cases, it really backfired because people were like, oh yeah, sure, whatever. You do this little thing and this little thing, who cares. So I think it's a challenge for us to communicate the value of what we do and the fact that it is complex, but in a way that makes people understand why it's valued, why there's a value in it for them as well. So that wasn't a question.
But the question is. How do you tackle this kind of complexity versus value issue, which I know from my personal experience in infrastructure is always a very big deal. So I'm going to just ease pass down the line again, if that's all right. Yeah I mean. Had my first son 3 and 1/2 years ago.
And one of the things I used to do to get him to sleep was tell him exactly what I was passionate about for. And I'm passionate about format conversion as one of many things. So I'd tell him about why document converters are important for publishing, and why we need a robust online word processors that can actually manage the fidelity of the content that publishers require, and why that needs to be coupled with typesetting engines, and why we built all of those three things and how they fit into the greater universe.
And actually, I really believe that. I really believe that there are just fundamental components in the open infrastructure world that there'd be very few people that want to talk to me about it. But they are critical to I think, everybody in this room, and if we solve these problems, should have been solved 20 years ago and they haven't been solved. PDF conversion is one big one. It's just especially in the pre-print world, it's going to just cause a lot of harm unless we solve that very soon.
So it's very hard I want to talk about those things, but instead I'm talking about people's day to day and their workflow and how to solve the problems and meet them, as I said before, where they are and move them on from there incrementally. So it's unfortunate because I actually want to say to everyone in this room, everybody give me $500 each to solve the PDF problem, and we'll do it for you.
It's that kind of thing. We just need a lump of cash and a lot of your problems would go away. But that story is not interesting to publishers, not interesting to funders. So Yeah. Well so just to be contrary a little bit, Alice, I think, and I love your story. I think one of the biggest challenges that we face collectively is that we're not willing to pay even a little bit of attention to how.
Complex and how much access to everything. Like, how often do people think that, oh, I could do that or anybody could do that, or what does it take to do that. Or I mean, they're just endless cliches around this. But I think from the guys who are Wow, I was watching the garbage trucks being collected this morning and good God, the level of expertise that these guys display is unbelievable.
So actually, I think it's important to be clear about expertise and complexity, and I don't think that's a bad thing anyway. So I said, yeah, I Yes, I suppose so, but I feel like there's a point to saying, look. So here's an example from my world. Researchers come into our library and they want to see these cool things. They ask to see them.
We bring them out there in a reading room where somebody has just delivered up to them this amazing thing. There is a whole back of house there of many dozens of people who have to function in order for this thing to arrive on the research desk for them to look at. I actually want them to know a little bit about the fact that there's this whole back of house thing that happens. There's a cataloger that has to do all of this work.
There's somebody who has to composite the digitization, like digitization. Turns out it isn't just taking a picture on your phone and putting it on the web, like, right. That drives us crazy. Anyway so sometimes actually I do these little lectures at researchers. Anyway, I was the wrong person to ask this question because. Thanks, Karen, but I think you do make an important point that especially the digital evolution has suddenly masked the complexity of what we do.
So everyone can build a website. Everyone can just write something in Word or design it and post it to a website. And people think that's all publishers do. And there's a whole infrastructure behind making your content available on the web, making sure we follow standards. There are certain rules we have to follow, and there's a whole back office to use your word behind all of that effort, but we don't take the time to explain it or to give examples or to just say, give the real time involved in trying to take something that was once only ever available in print.
Break it down. Put it online. Make sure it's there. It's archivable and it's retrievable. So I think it's a complex question. Alice, Thank you for raising it. But I think we'll have to spend time. And I think we do have to spend time trying to articulate that value and making sure people understand the effort that goes into it.
Yeah, I mean, lots of complexity. And I think one of our problems goes back to Alice's point. We try to overexplain it and we lose everybody. So the view I take is you've got to find what matters to that stakeholder. And from their perspective and speaking their language. Why is this helping you. And those answers can be very different depending on who you're talking to.
A society partner, somebody's writing something for the dictionary, an author, a funder who's paid for content. An institution subscribing or purchasing publish rights. Their needs from what we do for them are quite different, and the language that they demonstrate success from their investment. However you shape that investment. Whatever form that takes is different. So you have to speak in their language and make sure that you're delivering something that matches what they actually need in the way that they need to prove to their own stakeholders the value of what they've just done.
And very easy to say. Probably not so easy to do, but I think that's the critical nature. And the we get wrong often is not thinking from the listener's perspective. We're thinking from our own perspective and all the stuff that matters to us, not what matters to the person we're talking at, where we should be actually having a conversation.
Totally, totally agree with that. OK, I have one more question for the speakers, but I think we only have about a few minutes left, so I'd like to open it up and see if there are any other comments or questions from anybody in the audience. Stand up so I can see.
Yeah I have a question about how you calibrate your values with the values of the community that you serve. Because those really can change quite significantly. I feel like a lot of times in publishing we're 10 steps ahead, and then we often have to bring the community along with us. So it's that can cause a lot of tension.
There's a mixture of enthusiasm, and here's how we've dealt with that. That's right. Well, you can see from the enthusiasm to take the mic that this is a very, very difficult question because somebody made the point earlier that as publishers, even as not for profit outfits, you are challenged with making sure that your work is profitable.
And sometimes it's even more challenging in a small not for profit, because slight changes can really affect what you do, and the consequences of losing some revenue or losing some losing parts of your profits can be quite significant, because all that revenue goes back into funding programs for the very people that you might not be able to bring along with you. So I think what we try to do, as just a matter of course, is to make this a partnership and try to understand, be in constant dialogue with the people that you want to help and try to make sure that you can meet their needs.
But it's a constant effort and there are tensions there because you have to make decisions sometimes that people may not understand. But when you can try and bring people along with you. I hope that helps. Yeah, I agree, it's a really tricky thing. And I think one of the things is work with the communities that mirror your own values.
I think that's really important. So what we care about is advancing research and education, and if we're working with others who care about that, it's slightly easier to convince them to do some of the difficult things because you can posit it back to look, we care about the same things. We're trying to deliver the outcomes you want, and then there's an element of really understanding their specific goals from whatever perspective they are, and trying to help to demonstrate whatever this change is and however hard it feels, actually does support their goals.
It goes back to that. You've got to put it into somebody else's language and think from that stakeholder's perspective in communicating how do you move forward without hurting and damaging what we all believe in. We're here to do. And I think that's the biggest thing. The fear is we're going to do something that damages whatever we care about.
And so it's making sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We actually preserve what matters and understand it, which is not always easy. So understand the nuance and difference by discipline. We're not trying to do the same thing for every discipline. We can't. It wouldn't be right. But where.
It doesn't matter. And that's the hard bit. The things that don't matter that we can change, that can become more efficient. Taking them on a journey of why this isn't going to damage what you care about. Storytelling, I think. Alex that's right.
And I think that perhaps one missing word from that, although very implicit, is trust. If you're working with a community that trusts you and vice versa, that you trust them, bringing that making those changes does become easier. It's never easy. Change is never easy for anyone, but at least if you bring them along on the journey and you trust each other, the chances of success are much higher.
And so I think building those relationships is kind of fundamental to all of this. I think we're pretty much out of time. So please join me in thanking our speakers and apologies for the technical issues.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode