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The Article of the Future Revisited
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Oh, and welcome. Hello and welcome to the third SSP webinar of 2021 you are joining us for the discussion, the Article of the Future revisited. I'm David Myers with more disclosure and a member of the SAP webinars working group. And we're pleased you could join us today. In a moment, we'll get started during the session. Please note your audio will be muted automatically in consideration of our presenters and your fellow participants.
Please use the Q&A feature to send your questions. The moderator will review and present it to the panelists. To help her. Please specify which panelist you would like your questions directed to. And please send your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email.
We encourage you to provide feedback so we can continually improve the SAP webinar program. You will also receive a link via email to recorded broadcast of this webinar. Our moderator today is Hannah Hector. As director of product strategy, Hannah works to inform, prioritize and execute on the Silverchair platform development plan. She has worked with an academic publishing for over 10 years and has experience both commercial and non-profit publishing.
Hannah, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, David, happy to be here and Thanks so much to speed for organizing this webinar and Thanks so much to our panelists that we have here today. So with the 2010 introduction of their article of the future format suppressed, created a new container for research that included supporting data center user needs and reflected the need for more stackable and shareable content.
These elements at this point have really become rigueur, really seen as the norm. So what's next? When I was talking about this webinar, my colleagues, one of them said to me, article of the future, isn't that a tweet? I think he may have some point there. But these panelists that we've gathered here today, we'll talk through a number of really engaging and intriguing projects that their organizations are undertaking to address the needs of modern researchers as well as the consumers of that content.
We'll start today with Seana buttery. She is the lead editor of star protocols, and she will at first touch on an overview of the Article of the Future project. Then we'll hear from Kari etling, the director of strategic initiatives at MIT press, regarding the press's breakthrough new project. Rapid reviews covid-19. Following terry, we'll hear from Heather Norton Blackburn the director of scholarly journals at the American Diabetes association, and she'll be speaking about their living standards project following Heather Research Square's editor in chief, Michelle outis are waiting.
That present on how a preprints figure in the future of scholarly communications and will close the senior product manager, patty Davis from eskow, who will present on takeaways from projects that her team have undertaken regarding how research can best address the growing audience for scholarly content. After these brief presentations will go into conversation speaking about the opportunities that the future holds for the communication of scholarly research, shared obstacles in the communication of that research, how evidence based decisions can be made regarding the creation of new products, and maybe do a little daydreaming about what we might be talking about 10 years from now.
Please, as David said, submit your questions so that we can incorporate these thoughts into our discussion. Shonna, we'll start with you. Let me pull up your slides here one moment. OK OK, Shana, Thanks so much, Hanna, and Thanks to the organizers for inviting me. I'm really pleased to be representing Bill press and Elsevier here. And if you can, go ahead to the next blog.
So what was article of the future? This was actually launched in 20, 2009, and it's really more of a process that we went through to iterate and design a new format for scientific articles. And we got input from researchers and found that what they really wanted. And you can see some of the screenshots of some of the original design features, some of which have followed through and made it through a lot of different iterations of updates of our websites, and some have not because they just weren't as useful to users.
So you can see here that we have pab, so you can flexibly read through the paper based on how you want to read paper. We have a highlight in graphical apps section to give a simple overview of the paper. We had figures, movies, content associated with the document that were on the sidebar for viewing with relevant text. We also included a lot of new features, including paper clips and short videos to describe the articles.
Next slide. This was later rolled out to Elsevier and this is what the Article of the Future look like in 2010. And once it's and when it was on science direct, which is the view you can see here, things changed a little bit, of course, but there was still the graphical abstract and highlight the flexible viewing figures and the tab navigation screen. And I think one thing that was really exciting was having this enriched and hyperlinked content.
So any time you had something that was associated with it, whether it was a 3D structure that you could view, it would be in that sidebar and you can really get a bigger picture of the article. And I think what's important about the article in the future is highlighting that, again, based on the user needs, based on what readers and what researchers want out of an article today. And so we're constantly iterating and changing based on research and feedback.
So with that background check, but this is what we're doing now in terms of that base, so I'm representing some protocols on the web editor for that journal and we're using that same sort of test and learn approach to improve how scientists use and share scientific protocols. What we did is we've gone through an iterative design process to find out how people work with protocols and how we can best improve that process.
So one of the things I wanted to share is the graphical abstract template. So I think this is a nice iteration on the Article of the Future. But we took it and we found that people liked the idea of the article, the graphical abstract, but that it was a pain point for authors. So we found a way to iterate on this, make a template so that it would be a little bit easier for authors.
The other things we did is we basically redesigned the article page in a little bit to make it focused on the use case of taking a protocol to the bench to repeat an experiment. And I'm sure you'll see more exciting things to start protocols in the future, mixi, and of course, our protocols is part of a bigger idea at elsevier, we're calling research elements, journals, and these are journals that are aimed at supporting the researcher at all parts of the research cycle, which you can see on the left.
And these new article titles enable and incentivize the sharing of all types of research that open access their peer reviewed, indexed and fully citable. And we make them really easy to prepare because we have author templates for all of these journals and of course, their links on Science Direct that you can find them on that right. Sidebar that I showed you earlier with the associated articles.
So it really creates this more three dimensional article than what we had before. And you can see some of the examples of the journals we have that allow researchers to share data code, hardware methods, protocols, other lab resources that are all associated with their full length research article. Thanks so much. And I look forward to finding out what you all think the Article of the Future will look like.
Thank you so much. Terry ovidio. Great, thanks, Hannah. So rapid reviews covid-19 was launched exactly a year ago. It's an overlay journal and its development was prompted by the surge of prints that were provoked by the Pentagon. To give you an example.
Currently, there are 17,000 sars-cov-2 related prints available on that archive and biological COVID related prints represent a significant portion of the covid-19 literature that was made publicly available in 2020. We can say with confidence. Now that the pandemic induced, essentially forced innovation. Pure scientists and journals needed access to research results very quickly, and that invariably meant preprints.
But they also needed assurance that the results were trustworthy. So MIT in the editorial office, which is based at the School of Public Health at Uc Berkeley, are essentially focused on developing refining the process quickly and efficiently, peer reviewing preprint. So we're not of the preprint business, but rather in peer reviewing those preprint, specifically on covid-19 related research across all disciplines.
And we link those reviews directly to the preprint Institute in the relevant repositories. So for us, it's bioRxiv that archives are in, say, archives of Pacheco. And our goal essentially is to shift the praxis of peer review forward. So far are seeing antinous published 208 reviews of 127 preprint over the last 12 months. So this is really about speed plus need and then speed to market.
We felt that by incorporating reviews of work that was previously carried, no particularly no particular qualitative signal, we created a topography for what is essentially a flat environment, which is the heterogenous STEM preprint repository. We wanted to document how science and its research outputs have progressed differently during the pandemic from normal science period.
Responding rapidly to the signal shift in the dynamics of how research is conducted and shared is one of the notable contributions of this novel emerging model. And I have to say that we are not the only ones that are operating in this space. Obviously, life is there. Pre review is there. There are a number of different efforts. E-life, for instance, just launched society.
That list, I think about six different preprint services that are now currently active. But the pandemic and in effect, raise the profile and value of preprints in the biological sciences. So, again, I think that there are issues with doing overly journals like this, some of which will need to address in the course of the next year. This is still very much bespoke publishing.
We need to drive down costs and develop new, more efficient workflows. And sustainability, of course, is a crucial issue. Some of the cultural issues we've encountered are reviewing footprints without the author's permission that has been raised before. And will probably continue to be with us as we continue with this model. Working with preprint servers is still a work in progress and but it's been mostly a positive experience.
And then how can we influence mainstream coverage? Science journals, for instance, need to report out very, very quickly when important new research that it becomes available. And that's somewhat asynchronous with most turnaround schedules that conventional and novel publishing models now deploy. That's it for me on the side. So I'm turning it back over to you. Thank you so much, Terry.
Heather will now hear from you. Do we have Heather with us? She was maybe going to be OK. Here we go. See you, Heather. It would help if I unmute. Thank you. And I'm honored to dissipate alongside such Talented women in leadership roles, first and foremost from my perspective, which is that of the society publisher.
The article, the future meets the needs of the present out of necessity. When publishing clinical practice guidelines, it can mean a difference in treatment decisions at the ADA publishing guidelines. As old hat. We've been doing this for decades. However, our mission outgrew our ability to make the most immediate impact.
And I say that because of the numbers, the number of people with diabetes is over $34 million in the Uc alone, the number of clinical triage on current and new diabetes medications and various phases as the right now is 37 and the number of drugs and devices that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for diabetes, that's 46 different types of events, one in 62 different types of medication.
Perhaps most important, throughout the year, the FDA issues Black box warnings that relate very serious information that was previously unknown about a drug and yet prior to 2018 slide. Next slide, please. Yet prior to 2018 the standards of care guidelines were only updated one time a year, so no sooner than it was published, it was out of date.
We clearly had to step up our game at that point. Our chief science and medicine officer, he's now who is now with the NIH, encouraged us to find a creative solution, which four years later has proven to be pretty successful. Our solution is to publish the updates to the standard of care in the form of annotations directly on the version of record, so that anyone arriving at the standards of care is greeted by an alien branded annotation pain Sourcefire or powered by hypothesis, explaining the most recent update in context with rationale, updated verbiage and additional resources references.
We also publish an accompanying addendum for each updated section in order to officially add that information to the scholarly record. Then we go about promoting the heck out of the updates next time. Here is a brief look at how it works, so we collect and compile private comments outside of hypotheses all year long, each section of the standards of care encourages people to send feedback through an online form.
We have a professional practice committee made up of experts in the field who vote, and a majority, a majority vote ratifies the change. We then annotate simultaneously publish the addenda. And every time an update is released, we issue a press release. We placed ads in print and online. We promoted via social media. We deliver email blast, cover the changes in the professional newsletter.
We get megaphones just getting wet. So what makes this a success? Again, it's the numbers, the total annual accesses jump from 700,000 to two million our first year, and it's continued on an upward trend, albeit much less steep. The living standards of care really represents a paradigm shift for us. We just we see that guidelines don't fit neatly into a journal article containers.
And we feel that we have to free them from the traditional restraints and continue to find ways to try to stay ahead of the curve. Thank you. Thank you so much, Heather. That was really great. We're now going to go over to Michelle apsa waiting Michelle.
In Canada, I am serving as the editor in chief of the reserve Square preprint platform, which is a multidisciplinary journal, integrated platform that launched in 2018. And in thinking about why I use this picture, thinking about the article, the future. My first notion is that we probably don't need a Crystal ball because we are part of an industry that has classically been among the slowest to change, even as the tech revolution is completely transformed.
Other industries scholarly publishing is not known for its agility, but it does seem, as terry, just to echo what Terry said, that we are the big we, the scholarly communications enterprise has been forced to accelerate our own transformation during the last year, year and a half, and that parents have been hugely important. Part of that. You can go to the next slide.
So we're just one of many platforms that are trying to design for the future article and pay attention to the expectations of readers, authors in the broader publishing industry and stakeholders like funders around what aspects of a manuscript should be prioritized at the stage and beyond. And so some of the attributes that are already characteristic of preference, things like versioning linking to associated publications, perhaps registered reports in the future, looking forward to versions of record and a particular emphasis on open data sharing.
All of those things are likely to persist and be reinforced in the future as well. Various interactive features like executable code, interactive figures and tables and annotation. And I think some of the more agile preprint platforms are able to start experimenting with these things. Now and journals as well. So I think we're starting to see the seeds of that germinating already and even go to the next slide and.
And there are other aspects to so the way that parents have effectively decoupled the dissemination of research from its evaluation, that's sort of the risen d'être of parents in general. And as a result, the way the articles are being received and assessed is also undergoing a fundamental shift. We're seeing this happen with efforts like rapid reviews, for example, and many others.
And this is where all the different platforms are now trying to accommodate this in various ways, make sure that the information that's coming in from these third party evaluation systems is visible in scite to. There is an expectation of multiple tracks now for providing feedback on a pre-print and validating its quality. Talking about human assessments, automated assessments, and then these disparate types of preprint review or community peer review platforms and so that we have a means of validating the quality and also on multiple different ways for nonexperts to understand those evaluations.
So I expect that this process will continue to evolve until we've really developed a multidimensional and dynamic validation system that has the potential to change even between versions of a paper and be dynamic in a way that we have not been used to thus far with the way that we've communicated science. So there will be a just, I think this general move away from the binary marker of published, not published.
That's that's the marker that we've been going on for many decades now. And this will begin to evolve into a much more multidimensional and dynamic, as I said, system. So perhaps the final mark of endorsement that follows all of those other forms of scrutiny and assessment will be the journal endorsement. Right but but that will no longer be the way that we assess articles.
And so I think that preprint have been a big part of leading the charge and moving us into that future. That's it. I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Michelle. Last but not least, we'll hear from Patty from upscale. Thank you again, had done it myself.
Thanks so much. I'm here the article to talk about the Article of the Future and focusing on what the new article of the future is going to be. The article of the future, written back back in the day, focused on the researchers reader and the changes in the formats and enhancements were from their perspective. And we have to broaden our perspective and include more people.
Even some of the speakers today have talked about the need to include nonexperts in that. We need to include students, even the general public. And this myth that this idea that researchers are only writing for other researchers is a myth. Escosa users are mainly student researchers, the entire spectrum from undergraduate to PhD candidates.
And in the past two years, my division has been focusing on undergraduate users as researchers and we have conducted research on how they engage with journal articles. And the results were predictable in some ways and surprising in others. What our research found was the PDF is still King. Those students who have had access to a computer their entire lives still want a PDF.
They still download it, they still save it, and to some degree they still print it out. And I have to say, this kind of surprised me a little. I was expecting this from 50-year-old professors, but not from 20-year-old students. Students also have trouble understanding, remembering and referring to journal articles. I thought academic writing had gotten a little better in the two decades, I've been in publishing, but apparently it hasn't.
I have just gotten better at understanding academic articles, so we are still missing the mark on that regard. Alongside that, students still don't understand what peer review is and why it is important. They don't understand the difference between scholarly resources and any of the other resources they find on the internet. They are persistent in their desire to use Wikipedia as a source, and they don't understand the difference between an article written by a scholar and an article written by a journalist or an expert who is not a scholar.
And they don't know how to cite the resources that they do find. Next time. A lot of these issues are not something that needs to be addressed in the new article of butut, they need to be addressed in other ways in literacy education that librarians are doing. But the one finding that we can and should address is the use of plain language jargon, passive writing, use of acronyms and just poor writing and poor structure of the article continues to be persistent in scholarly publishing.
And this leads two student researchers and people who have gotten hold of the article outside of academia to being unable to understand the articles they glaze over and they have little desire to dig deeper into the topic, or they seek out sources in the general media that may not be as accurate. Even researchers appreciate plain language articles. Recent research in the Journal of marketing found that plain language articles are cited more frequently.
We continue to ignore the problem of poor academic writing in this myth that scholars are only writing for other scholars is going to persist as open access accelerates, the unintended consequences are dire. People are going to misuse, misunderstand and misinterpret research, the results of which we already are aware that vaccine causes autism, aluminum in the antiperspirants causes Alzheimer's and our breast cancer and COVID vaccine.
Covid-19 vaccine wasn't properly tested for safety because it happened so quickly. Next slide. So what is doing? We are building a new database that is plain language academic articles geared specifically to students. The articles are shorter and have more graphics and are meant to create a bridge between the resources they used in high schools such as newspapers, magazines and anything they could find on the internet and the resources they should be using in college, which is peer reviewed journal articles and scholarly books.
But we're not alone in doing this. Plain language summaries are being produced by societies and Association publishers as well as other publishers. And I would be really interested in knowing from the audience. I know there are audience members out there who are from organizations that are developing or have plain language summaries, and I'd be interested to hear from them on what their impetus for doing that was.
But in short, the Article of the Future needs to recognize that the audience just isn't other researchers. The audience is more broad than that. That's it for me. Wonderful Thank you so much. Patty will now enter the conversation portion of today's talk.
I, for one, have thought of a lot of really a lot of topics that I want to discuss with you all. So I might just kick off with some questions of my own. And I will then go through questions from the attendees. I think that Michelle's imagery of the magic glass ball being maybe a little bit lofty was a really good one to think about. I was thinking maybe instead of a magical glass ball, we maybe just need to put on reading glasses in order to inform development in scholarly publishing and just look at what's happening on sites in our content, around our content.
So what are the things that should be looked at the most? Do we look at the practices of what is happening now? When do we try to change those practices? We've been trying to talk about killing the PDF forever, but it's what people are looking for and it's what they're going for. So it would, I think, be really helpful if the panelist could talk about what evidence and use cases your organization looks for and maybe of which items of those feedback put the thumb on the scale the most.
Let's go ahead and start with you. That's a great point, and telling the kids I was really surprised to hear from Patty that result, because that's always been my thinking around the PDF, is that it's just a habit. It's just what people have learned over time. But there must be something unique about that. So it's going to be a really interesting question to get to the bottom of why even a student audience is going after the kids.
As for looking at signals, I think the example I'm thinking of here is for star protocol because we're looking at the specific use case of taking the paper to the bench. We asked researchers what they needed and they said, yeah, typically I would print out the PDF, but I would only take part of it or I transform it into a Word document. And then I'd kind of copy and paste what I needed and put together the protocol I needed.
And then based on that, we created a Word document version of the PDF. So that would give them a little bit more flexibility. People are usually able to edit a Word document, a little bit more easily than they are a PDF. So that's, I think, the main example, I can think of and I'll probably come up with another one once I hear some great things, terry, where it was their specific user feedback that MIT Press looks at when changing products, creating new products.
Not specifically. So in the case of RC 19, the environment that we use a hosting environment is club, it was built here to team the target delivery is native HTML in the browser, but an end user can download up to eight different formats. So PDF being one of them. So PDF is generated on the floor if that's what they want. But also bear in mind that we're dealing with reviews which are very, very brief and we haven't seen much indication that there's a need to deliver in other formats, so they're willing to consume it within the browser environment.
The other thing we've been discussing is whether, in fact, again, to accelerate speed to market, we can, instead of offering written reviews or in parallel, we could offer audio reviews. So in other words, reviewers could actually talk us through the review and we would make the audio files available along with a performance. Oh, that's really interesting, Heather.
It would be great to hear from you how the ADA balances user feedback as well along with your mission. So like which is heavier, what your users are doing on your site, your mission. I imagine there's some overlap there as well. Well, Ah, there's a lot of overlap. Our audience there are authors, there are readers, there are clinicians, there are primary care doctors.
And they're all looking at the clinical practice recommendations as a reference document. And they need to go there quickly and find what they need. It needs to be up to date, the type of which kind of poses problems for us PDF, because then we offer everything right on the version of record. But because people are holding onto those CDS, we still have to go to the PDF annotate that just like you would make comments on a PDF just so that it's portable, which defeats the purpose of it being a living document.
But it's something that you just have to accommodate And the type of feedback and might be straying from your question. But I wanted to mention that the type of feedback we've received has been after the fact, when people realize the utility of the living standards. For example, a colleague of mine was presenting at the American College of Cardiology and a doctor stood up and thanked her for the standards of care because it allowed him to prescribe the latest medication, not only for him to prescribe it, but for his patients to be able to afford it because insurance carriers aren't going to cover it until it's recommended in a clinical practice guideline.
And so it's very impactful that way. Wow, it's a great example of creating something that then folks realize how useful it is. Michelle, do you have anything to add as far as how user feedback has maybe dictated directions for research? Where yeah, I'm also surprised by the PDF wisdom there, maybe preprint users have a slightly different demographic.
In a way, there has been a demand for HTML like full text, HTML for preprints and something that we've emphasized. I know the Cold Spring Harbor preprint servers as well really made a push to at one point, all of menaka was PDF and now they've converted everything to HTML. And so there is a demand for that. But there's also an internal demand for it because of how it enables search, universal search and enables an interoperability and the ability to annotate and create that living document that we're talking about is just not going to be possible to do from a PDF.
So I do think that there is a little bit of if you build it, they will come aspect of this where the more that we show what's possible with HTML that isn't possible with PDF, the more people will value it. They'll start to see that. OK, I'm getting so much more context from this format than I could ever get from a PDF then I think it will take time for people to understand the value of that.
We haven't actually done to any of our own user research on that particular point. We certainly don't get complaints. I will mention that some of our articles can't be converted to HTML because they're really equation heavy or and we just don't have the capacity or the resources to convert every kind of Article to some of those live as a PDF. And it's not like we have droves of people coming to us to shout about the fact that there are articles and available in each format.
So I don't think there is the demand for it that we would have expected. So I guess that is somewhat in line with what the research that has been done. But it would be worth us pulling our own authors to see what they understand about what's possible with the PDF versus HTML. And we actually have a question for paddy that I think would feed into this line of conversation as well, it's a question from agentive Vaccaro.
She says that they've brought public health statements and significant statements into their journals for some of the reasons that you, paddy, listed in your presentation. So this is a question saying, have you found a way to track the efficacy of plain language summaries that you mentioned or prove the value of these efforts to editors or authors who might not see their value? Right and we have not we do have our plain language articles, peer reviewed.
They are peer reviewed, though, by professors teaching the courses that we have identified would be useful for them. And as for the authors, that that's a good question that I think we will have to investigate when we start to look at how we're going to evolve this over the years to the efficacy with the actual authors. And that's a good point.
Great, Thank you so in. It seems like it seems like there's some other chats in here before we go into that and realizing, as we've discussed here, we've been talking about an article of the future. But I wonder whether this is more of a question of a process of the future. I think that so many of these challenges and opportunities could also be maybe not solved, but aided by taking a second look at how we ten-year our professors, how we acknowledge items in the publication record, you know, how we look at the communication of scholarly content overall.
So just wanted to position this to the group, see if you all had any thoughts there. Are there areas of the process that you think are ripe for innovation? Are there areas where you think there's some really good stuff starting to happen? I'll open that up to you all. I'll take that one, Hannah.
I think that there's been a lot of push towards versioning types of software and capabilities, and I really think that that could be the way that the standards of care head. But then we have that problem that you mentioned of the scholarly record. How do you document versions of things in the scholarly record without publishing an official term or addenda? So I think that there's going to have to be a huge shift and I don't know how we get there in order to disentangle that.
Yeah, I'll echo that, I agree that it is a process and also a culture change that we're looking for here. And I think that in particularly around how feedback goes know happens on an article, Terry alluded to this, too, that there's pushback to the idea of openly reviewing an article that's about that's publicly available for everyone to see.
And this is a genuinely difficult problem. Right, because now you've taken a process that was, you know, previously kind of a private exchange and interaction between an author and an editor and a couple of reviewers and turns it into what could become a public spectacle in some cases, especially in the more hot button sort of issues, much of which there have been many during the course of the 90s, that we've had a very interesting practice run here with it, with covid-19 to see how, you know, something highly contentious and politicized and plays out when you post that paper as a pre-print and then see how the feedback comes at it from various different sources.
So and I think that there are just genuinely debates that have to happen around this and the kind of an agreement, that kind of decorum and a level of discourse that we have to agree on as a community that and like limitations on what we're willing to do and not do. I think it's just it's genuinely a difficult, difficult problem. And there needs to be more conversations about it, especially with researchers and across the different career stages, because the implications here for early career researchers versus more senior researchers are pretty huge.
So, yeah, one of those conversations. I would agree with Michelle there, this is a very, very fluid time. Things are very dynamic. And I would say at the end of the day, this is about sociology, about software. So there could be a lot of tech innovations. But I think the real innovations will be cultural committees are still struggling with how to deal with gray literature, although we know from experience I used to work with archive when I was at Cornell and those prints have been cited for decades, not the final version of record, but the paper itself within the archive repository.
So so I think we'll see a significant change in its 10 years in what we value. I think it'll be shifted forward. I totally agree, I think going back to this idea of incentivizing sharing of resources outside and making that OK for researchers, I was actually in a workshop just last week with the NIH about this topic, and they want to create a new way for people to share data around their article.
And we, as publishers all said, yes, we're happy to help you do this, but you have to make it easy for researchers and you have to incentivize them to do it. And by incentivizing them, it's really, you know, making sure that as a funder, you either require it or their promotion and tenure committees understand the value of it and their protocols that we were really surprised.
We thought, oh, we just want to create something totally new. You know, people are sharing their protocols very openly. Why don't we just create the same sort of thing. And let them just upload their protocols? And when we asked researchers to do that, they said, why would I do that? I want a publication credit. I need that for my tenure. I need that for, you know, my NIH progress report or my grant progress report.
So I think that, you know, systemic issue is one thing that is going to be hard to overcome. But I'm hopeful because we have funders starting to get involved in this conversation. And funders that are encouraging preprint and encouraging open access. I think having that as part of it is such an important element to change.
Yeah, I think that's why I love the idea of sociology, not software, solving these problems and protocols specifically and thinking of when I was previously a science magazine, we were looking into projects that would involve lab notebooks, electronic lab notebooks and the publication of protocols. And in speaking to some researchers, it was also communicated that this would then just be another thing that they had to do.
And it's like these researchers are already doing so much to publish their research show that they are utilizing their grant funding. So then it's saying, OK, so we're now asking them to communicate in a way that would be more readable by a general audience, by a high school audience, and also asking them, oh, well, this piece of your research process needs to also be published already.
So this then gets into a carrot and stick conversations that I don't think we're going to solve in the space of an hour long webinar. But I think that they're very interesting areas to look at and how funder mandates have, I think, helped a lot in getting a lot of these items published. But yeah, looking at that process and making this process more fruitful in publication outputs that are then person readable and machine readable, I think is something that would be great to work towards.
On the subject of readability, patty, it would be great to hear from you maybe ideas or takeaways or thoughts on how we could better, you know, precipitate more lay summaries or just improve the writing. Any thoughts there? Well, yeah, there are some thoughts and I think it falls into the line to promotion and tenure and the issue of publishing for promote, it's like whose problem is it?
And that's why it's persisting, because this problem is it is even in the research that we've done at eskow librarians, when we've done the library, the research with librarians in there, what they look for when they are deciding where they're going to put their dollars, where, what products they're going to buy, readability and plain language is not you know, it's about middle of the road.
It falls way below that. There's a big disconnect with the actual, you know, students and what they consider to be important, big disconnect with what librarians consider to be important and what students consider to be important. They're not seeing eye to eye at all. And then where in the writers themselves, the authors, they need to get published.
Are they spending the time that they need to spend to get it to be less jargon filled, to have the proper structure? They're concerned about what the reviewers are going to be saying about it, what the editors are going to be saying about it? Well, what happens down the road with the article and how it gets seen? And we do know all of us know that people are persistent with trying to find articles behind paywall.
So even if it's not open access, it's still going to be seen. They're not worried about that at all, and neither are editors and peer reviewers. And so the persists the why it's persisting is systemic issues that are also prevalent in the promotion and tenure process. Whose problem is it is basically. Why continues and how do we resolve that, and that's a good question, because when we have our newly minted PhDs there, they're concerned about promotion and tenure, which is how this all relates to each other.
They're not they're not concerned about how their research is being perceived by people who are not on their promotion and tenure committee and who are not within the realm of scholarly publishing, whether they are writing for their peers. And How's that for not answering the question, I have raised your question with a larger issue.
No one is talking about plain language summaries. It occurs to me, too, that it's just a matter of resources because we would love to have a plain language summary with every article asking an author to write, that is. Is you might as well be writing it because you're going to rewrite it, right? Right and with the amount of content that we push out, it just seems like it will be very difficult to implement such a thing, even though it's something we're very interested in participating in.
If some of you some of the people who have been publishing for a long time might remember a program called patient and inform where it was a collaboration of societies that would agree to. All right. These plain language summaries and in turn offer free access to the person accessing the article through the summary with the assumption that that person is probably not a researcher with access.
So just the thought is a lot of our resources, but definitely a useful thing, certainly. What happens what happens to that initiative over time? I think that publishers just took those sort of operations into their own hands and it dissolved over 10 years ago. I think also it's very important to keep in mind non-native English speakers in this conversation as well, because we wouldn't want to incorporate things into this publication process that would alienate them.
So yet another wrinkle to solving this issue. Any other thoughts on this topic before we go to the next question? OK, great, I'm just going to check. I think we haven't received any other questions, so as we reach the 10 minute mark, I think it would be great to get in a time machine 10 years from now and think about what we might be speaking about in a similar webinar in 10 years time.
So thoughts from the group? I think there might also be another Q&A item here. So, terry, I might start with you. OK, this is a look into the future. Yes, that the one we're addressing. OK 10 years is an awful long time in internet space. I'm going to March down to New content types.
So I think that what might happen here is what we're trying to do is the application of AI fairly aggressively to the preprinted review selection process to speed up time to product in time to market as a see knowledge graphs and then data networks, meaning related data clusters. So what could happen is that data talks to itself, to other kinds of data sets that are available within a particular ecosystem.
And I think that would be very, very interesting to take a look at. So beyond the narrative, beyond the text, how can data sets themselves interact across different platforms and environments? Great suggestions. I look forward to seeing those take shape, Michelle. 10 years from now, what do you think we'll be talking about? I think really dealing with a new scale of research in 10 years, especially with the more full adoption of friends there already.
I think their estimate is like 30,000 published each month versus 150,000 around published journal articles. So it's already a substantial fraction of that. And, you know, and that's with relatively low adoption rates right now for reprints, I think, compared to where we will be in 10 years or sooner than that. So we're going to need ways of dealing with that. And it's going to be it's going to be machine readable articles and señores at the same workshop with you.
And I found it fascinating. I think that those are the kinds of things maybe it won't look exactly like what we discussed in that workshop, but it will look something like that. Right and we're going to need easier ways of parsing the dense information that is now part and parcel of every article that comes out and turning it into something that, you know, that is machine readable and that is applicable to other data sets and that everything can talk to each other, as Terry said again.
So more emphasis on the data itself, less on the narrative, except that I do think that lay summaries are going to because everything is going to be open. There's going to have to be something there. So maybe that the emphasis on the narrative will be more about the narrative for non subject matter experts and less on the negative 4 four other researchers. Other researchers will maybe have to learn to read things in a much more stark way that it's basically boiled down to individual snippets, assertions, infographics, videos and summaries, significant statements.
All of these things, I think, will play that part in helping to sort of bridge the gap for between researchers and the public eye. There is going to be a need for that covid-19 made that really clear, is even a very good research, very solid, excellent research was misused, misinterpreted, given a couple of talks on this now. And we've tried to do our best to sort of run interference on those things, but we need to be more proactive so that we can avoid these spiraling out of control issues that occurred during the pandemic.
And then lastly, just greater interactivity, I think, is just going to be a major feature, executable code and interactive HTML, as someone mentioned in the Q&A few more figures, maybe a bit more interactive figures and tables, and I think that will be a part as well. So, Yeah. Great Thank you, Michelle. Heather, you get to speak. I wanted to piggyback off of that a little bit.
And what's been said already, it's just occurs to me that the sheer amount of content is just it's long been overwhelming, especially for a clinician who treats patients. So a feature, hopefully 10 years, who knows? We'll be able to serve it to them in the way in ways that they can digest it quickly and read through it quickly. And perhaps that's sort of an AI tools or something. But we're going to have to sort of be able to personalize this content in some way without eliminating the discoverability aspect.
It's the yeah, just the sheer amount of content. We're going to need ways to sort through it and dice it and dish it appropriately for people who need it quickly. Great, thanks, Heather Seana. I think that's a great point, heather, and I think and elsewhere. There are a number of AI initiatives in the clinical space, in the Health Sciences space, but not as much in the biological and less more translational space.
And I'm pretty excited to have some of these things like share path and clinical key to really start to be used on the side of the bench. Researcher and the clinical not quite in the clinical space and preclinical phase. And I think that's going to be really exciting. And of course, the other thing is really having this, you know, not necessarily stuck in the PDF, have an email that is connected to all the bits and pieces of what goes into a research article.
A lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of resources. And let's encourage authors and make it easy for them to share the bits and pieces that are associated with that article and make that reusable so people can find it and really be able to serve it up to the next person who's looking at that article. And they're looking at it for the protocol. They're looking at it for the code.
They're looking at it for the specs on the hardware so they can build that microscope and to be able to find a way to deliver people what they need. You know, I think that that covers the idea of this kind of three dimensional PDF that I'm hoping to see in the future. And hopefully HTML will no longer be heard it here first. The PDF. It's still going to be here in ten, '10 years, guys.
OK, so, Patti, thoughts on what you think we're going to be talking about in 10 years? Well, I think that we're still going to be talking about this big disconnect between what librarians spend their money on and what readers want, because we also found in our research that librarians don't value videos and interactive graphs. And yet that's what readers want. And so I think we're going to see more of that.
Personally, what I hope we see more of is I hope that blockchain technology, as applied to some of these issues that we're facing in tech, in scholarly publishing, will solve some of these issues. If we can apply blockchain technology to data, then perhaps researchers will be more willing to share their data if we can apply it to version control.
And then perhaps this issue of the version of record will no longer be keeping research static instead of moving it beyond what it is, is that the data that it's already outdated by the time it's published and hopefully blockchain technology can deal with that as well. So I'm hoping that. In 10 years from now, I'm going to be retired, so I won't be replaced.
I hope I'll ask two of years more so. So who knows what we'll be talking about? It won't be me talking about it. Well, great. Thank you so much. I think that the themes of speaking to the lay audience and also speaking to the machine readable audience is really important in thinking of the future here, distilling those research artifacts into their most granular version so that there can be metadata connections between those elements.
Focusing on creating that metadata ecosystem I think will be huge as we move forward and continuing the conversation, seeing the research outputs as outputs from people that are trying to further their career, I think will be also really important things to keep in mind as we look forward and thinking of the audience. Overall, user feedback, sheet maps, user groups speaking directly to those end users will be really important.
But Thank you so much to this panel. It has been wonderful talking with you all this morning, afternoon, et cetera. I believe David might have some housekeeping before we close up, but just Thank you so much to our wonderful women panelists today. And Thank you to Hannah, Michelle, Shauna, Patrick Harris is a great discussion for everybody attending. Please take the time to respond to the webinar survey that you'll receive by email that does help us feedback.
My feedback does help us continually improve the webinar program. On July RA21. There will be an open access seminar. So please check out all the educational opportunities available on the SSP website. We are now concluded. Enjoy the rest of your day. The
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Oh, and welcome. Hello and welcome to the third SSP webinar of 2021 you are joining us for the discussion, the Article of the Future revisited. I'm David Myers with more disclosure and a member of the SAP webinars working group. And we're pleased you could join us today. In a moment, we'll get started during the session. Please note your audio will be muted automatically in consideration of our presenters and your fellow participants.
Please use the Q&A feature to send your questions. The moderator will review and present it to the panelists. To help her. Please specify which panelist you would like your questions directed to. And please send your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email.
We encourage you to provide feedback so we can continually improve the SAP webinar program. You will also receive a link via email to recorded broadcast of this webinar. Our moderator today is Hannah Hector. As director of product strategy, Hannah works to inform, prioritize and execute on the Silverchair platform development plan. She has worked with an academic publishing for over 10 years and has experience both commercial and non-profit publishing.
Hannah, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, David, happy to be here and Thanks so much to speed for organizing this webinar and Thanks so much to our panelists that we have here today. So with the 2010 introduction of their article of the future format suppressed, created a new container for research that included supporting data center user needs and reflected the need for more stackable and shareable content.
These elements at this point have really become rigueur, really seen as the norm. So what's next? When I was talking about this webinar, my colleagues, one of them said to me, article of the future, isn't that a tweet? I think he may have some point there. But these panelists that we've gathered here today, we'll talk through a number of really engaging and intriguing projects that their organizations are undertaking to address the needs of modern researchers as well as the consumers of that content.
We'll start today with Seana buttery. She is the lead editor of star protocols, and she will at first touch on an overview of the Article of the Future project. Then we'll hear from Kari etling, the director of strategic initiatives at MIT press, regarding the press's breakthrough new project. Rapid reviews covid-19. Following terry, we'll hear from Heather Norton Blackburn the director of scholarly journals at the American Diabetes association, and she'll be speaking about their living standards project following Heather Research Square's editor in chief, Michelle outis are waiting.
That present on how a preprints figure in the future of scholarly communications and will close the senior product manager, patty Davis from eskow, who will present on takeaways from projects that her team have undertaken regarding how research can best address the growing audience for scholarly content. After these brief presentations will go into conversation speaking about the opportunities that the future holds for the communication of scholarly research, shared obstacles in the communication of that research, how evidence based decisions can be made regarding the creation of new products, and maybe do a little daydreaming about what we might be talking about 10 years from now.
Please, as David said, submit your questions so that we can incorporate these thoughts into our discussion. Shonna, we'll start with you. Let me pull up your slides here one moment. OK OK, Shana, Thanks so much, Hanna, and Thanks to the organizers for inviting me. I'm really pleased to be representing Bill press and Elsevier here. And if you can, go ahead to the next blog.
So what was article of the future? This was actually launched in 20, 2009, and it's really more of a process that we went through to iterate and design a new format for scientific articles. And we got input from researchers and found that what they really wanted. And you can see some of the screenshots of some of the original design features, some of which have followed through and made it through a lot of different iterations of updates of our websites, and some have not because they just weren't as useful to users.
So you can see here that we have pab, so you can flexibly read through the paper based on how you want to read paper. We have a highlight in graphical apps section to give a simple overview of the paper. We had figures, movies, content associated with the document that were on the sidebar for viewing with relevant text. We also included a lot of new features, including paper clips and short videos to describe the articles.
Next slide. This was later rolled out to Elsevier and this is what the Article of the Future look like in 2010. And once it's and when it was on science direct, which is the view you can see here, things changed a little bit, of course, but there was still the graphical abstract and highlight the flexible viewing figures and the tab navigation screen. And I think one thing that was really exciting was having this enriched and hyperlinked content.
So any time you had something that was associated with it, whether it was a 3D structure that you could view, it would be in that sidebar and you can really get a bigger picture of the article. And I think what's important about the article in the future is highlighting that, again, based on the user needs, based on what readers and what researchers want out of an article today. And so we're constantly iterating and changing based on research and feedback.
So with that background check, but this is what we're doing now in terms of that base, so I'm representing some protocols on the web editor for that journal and we're using that same sort of test and learn approach to improve how scientists use and share scientific protocols. What we did is we've gone through an iterative design process to find out how people work with protocols and how we can best improve that process.
So one of the things I wanted to share is the graphical abstract template. So I think this is a nice iteration on the Article of the Future. But we took it and we found that people liked the idea of the article, the graphical abstract, but that it was a pain point for authors. So we found a way to iterate on this, make a template so that it would be a little bit easier for authors.
The other things we did is we basically redesigned the article page in a little bit to make it focused on the use case of taking a protocol to the bench to repeat an experiment. And I'm sure you'll see more exciting things to start protocols in the future, mixi, and of course, our protocols is part of a bigger idea at elsevier, we're calling research elements, journals, and these are journals that are aimed at supporting the researcher at all parts of the research cycle, which you can see on the left.
And these new article titles enable and incentivize the sharing of all types of research that open access their peer reviewed, indexed and fully citable. And we make them really easy to prepare because we have author templates for all of these journals and of course, their links on Science Direct that you can find them on that right. Sidebar that I showed you earlier with the associated articles.
So it really creates this more three dimensional article than what we had before. And you can see some of the examples of the journals we have that allow researchers to share data code, hardware methods, protocols, other lab resources that are all associated with their full length research article. Thanks so much. And I look forward to finding out what you all think the Article of the Future will look like.
Thank you so much. Terry ovidio. Great, thanks, Hannah. So rapid reviews covid-19 was launched exactly a year ago. It's an overlay journal and its development was prompted by the surge of prints that were provoked by the Pentagon. To give you an example.
Currently, there are 17,000 sars-cov-2 related prints available on that archive and biological COVID related prints represent a significant portion of the covid-19 literature that was made publicly available in 2020. We can say with confidence. Now that the pandemic induced, essentially forced innovation. Pure scientists and journals needed access to research results very quickly, and that invariably meant preprints.
But they also needed assurance that the results were trustworthy. So MIT in the editorial office, which is based at the School of Public Health at Uc Berkeley, are essentially focused on developing refining the process quickly and efficiently, peer reviewing preprint. So we're not of the preprint business, but rather in peer reviewing those preprint, specifically on covid-19 related research across all disciplines.
And we link those reviews directly to the preprint Institute in the relevant repositories. So for us, it's bioRxiv that archives are in, say, archives of Pacheco. And our goal essentially is to shift the praxis of peer review forward. So far are seeing antinous published 208 reviews of 127 preprint over the last 12 months. So this is really about speed plus need and then speed to market.
We felt that by incorporating reviews of work that was previously carried, no particularly no particular qualitative signal, we created a topography for what is essentially a flat environment, which is the heterogenous STEM preprint repository. We wanted to document how science and its research outputs have progressed differently during the pandemic from normal science period.
Responding rapidly to the signal shift in the dynamics of how research is conducted and shared is one of the notable contributions of this novel emerging model. And I have to say that we are not the only ones that are operating in this space. Obviously, life is there. Pre review is there. There are a number of different efforts. E-life, for instance, just launched society.
That list, I think about six different preprint services that are now currently active. But the pandemic and in effect, raise the profile and value of preprints in the biological sciences. So, again, I think that there are issues with doing overly journals like this, some of which will need to address in the course of the next year. This is still very much bespoke publishing.
We need to drive down costs and develop new, more efficient workflows. And sustainability, of course, is a crucial issue. Some of the cultural issues we've encountered are reviewing footprints without the author's permission that has been raised before. And will probably continue to be with us as we continue with this model. Working with preprint servers is still a work in progress and but it's been mostly a positive experience.
And then how can we influence mainstream coverage? Science journals, for instance, need to report out very, very quickly when important new research that it becomes available. And that's somewhat asynchronous with most turnaround schedules that conventional and novel publishing models now deploy. That's it for me on the side. So I'm turning it back over to you. Thank you so much, Terry.
Heather will now hear from you. Do we have Heather with us? She was maybe going to be OK. Here we go. See you, Heather. It would help if I unmute. Thank you. And I'm honored to dissipate alongside such Talented women in leadership roles, first and foremost from my perspective, which is that of the society publisher.
The article, the future meets the needs of the present out of necessity. When publishing clinical practice guidelines, it can mean a difference in treatment decisions at the ADA publishing guidelines. As old hat. We've been doing this for decades. However, our mission outgrew our ability to make the most immediate impact.
And I say that because of the numbers, the number of people with diabetes is over $34 million in the Uc alone, the number of clinical triage on current and new diabetes medications and various phases as the right now is 37 and the number of drugs and devices that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for diabetes, that's 46 different types of events, one in 62 different types of medication.
Perhaps most important, throughout the year, the FDA issues Black box warnings that relate very serious information that was previously unknown about a drug and yet prior to 2018 slide. Next slide, please. Yet prior to 2018 the standards of care guidelines were only updated one time a year, so no sooner than it was published, it was out of date.
We clearly had to step up our game at that point. Our chief science and medicine officer, he's now who is now with the NIH, encouraged us to find a creative solution, which four years later has proven to be pretty successful. Our solution is to publish the updates to the standard of care in the form of annotations directly on the version of record, so that anyone arriving at the standards of care is greeted by an alien branded annotation pain Sourcefire or powered by hypothesis, explaining the most recent update in context with rationale, updated verbiage and additional resources references.
We also publish an accompanying addendum for each updated section in order to officially add that information to the scholarly record. Then we go about promoting the heck out of the updates next time. Here is a brief look at how it works, so we collect and compile private comments outside of hypotheses all year long, each section of the standards of care encourages people to send feedback through an online form.
We have a professional practice committee made up of experts in the field who vote, and a majority, a majority vote ratifies the change. We then annotate simultaneously publish the addenda. And every time an update is released, we issue a press release. We placed ads in print and online. We promoted via social media. We deliver email blast, cover the changes in the professional newsletter.
We get megaphones just getting wet. So what makes this a success? Again, it's the numbers, the total annual accesses jump from 700,000 to two million our first year, and it's continued on an upward trend, albeit much less steep. The living standards of care really represents a paradigm shift for us. We just we see that guidelines don't fit neatly into a journal article containers.
And we feel that we have to free them from the traditional restraints and continue to find ways to try to stay ahead of the curve. Thank you. Thank you so much, Heather. That was really great. We're now going to go over to Michelle apsa waiting Michelle.
In Canada, I am serving as the editor in chief of the reserve Square preprint platform, which is a multidisciplinary journal, integrated platform that launched in 2018. And in thinking about why I use this picture, thinking about the article, the future. My first notion is that we probably don't need a Crystal ball because we are part of an industry that has classically been among the slowest to change, even as the tech revolution is completely transformed.
Other industries scholarly publishing is not known for its agility, but it does seem, as terry, just to echo what Terry said, that we are the big we, the scholarly communications enterprise has been forced to accelerate our own transformation during the last year, year and a half, and that parents have been hugely important. Part of that. You can go to the next slide.
So we're just one of many platforms that are trying to design for the future article and pay attention to the expectations of readers, authors in the broader publishing industry and stakeholders like funders around what aspects of a manuscript should be prioritized at the stage and beyond. And so some of the attributes that are already characteristic of preference, things like versioning linking to associated publications, perhaps registered reports in the future, looking forward to versions of record and a particular emphasis on open data sharing.
All of those things are likely to persist and be reinforced in the future as well. Various interactive features like executable code, interactive figures and tables and annotation. And I think some of the more agile preprint platforms are able to start experimenting with these things. Now and journals as well. So I think we're starting to see the seeds of that germinating already and even go to the next slide and.
And there are other aspects to so the way that parents have effectively decoupled the dissemination of research from its evaluation, that's sort of the risen d'être of parents in general. And as a result, the way the articles are being received and assessed is also undergoing a fundamental shift. We're seeing this happen with efforts like rapid reviews, for example, and many others.
And this is where all the different platforms are now trying to accommodate this in various ways, make sure that the information that's coming in from these third party evaluation systems is visible in scite to. There is an expectation of multiple tracks now for providing feedback on a pre-print and validating its quality. Talking about human assessments, automated assessments, and then these disparate types of preprint review or community peer review platforms and so that we have a means of validating the quality and also on multiple different ways for nonexperts to understand those evaluations.
So I expect that this process will continue to evolve until we've really developed a multidimensional and dynamic validation system that has the potential to change even between versions of a paper and be dynamic in a way that we have not been used to thus far with the way that we've communicated science. So there will be a just, I think this general move away from the binary marker of published, not published.
That's that's the marker that we've been going on for many decades now. And this will begin to evolve into a much more multidimensional and dynamic, as I said, system. So perhaps the final mark of endorsement that follows all of those other forms of scrutiny and assessment will be the journal endorsement. Right but but that will no longer be the way that we assess articles.
And so I think that preprint have been a big part of leading the charge and moving us into that future. That's it. I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Michelle. Last but not least, we'll hear from Patty from upscale. Thank you again, had done it myself.
Thanks so much. I'm here the article to talk about the Article of the Future and focusing on what the new article of the future is going to be. The article of the future, written back back in the day, focused on the researchers reader and the changes in the formats and enhancements were from their perspective. And we have to broaden our perspective and include more people.
Even some of the speakers today have talked about the need to include nonexperts in that. We need to include students, even the general public. And this myth that this idea that researchers are only writing for other researchers is a myth. Escosa users are mainly student researchers, the entire spectrum from undergraduate to PhD candidates.
And in the past two years, my division has been focusing on undergraduate users as researchers and we have conducted research on how they engage with journal articles. And the results were predictable in some ways and surprising in others. What our research found was the PDF is still King. Those students who have had access to a computer their entire lives still want a PDF.
They still download it, they still save it, and to some degree they still print it out. And I have to say, this kind of surprised me a little. I was expecting this from 50-year-old professors, but not from 20-year-old students. Students also have trouble understanding, remembering and referring to journal articles. I thought academic writing had gotten a little better in the two decades, I've been in publishing, but apparently it hasn't.
I have just gotten better at understanding academic articles, so we are still missing the mark on that regard. Alongside that, students still don't understand what peer review is and why it is important. They don't understand the difference between scholarly resources and any of the other resources they find on the internet. They are persistent in their desire to use Wikipedia as a source, and they don't understand the difference between an article written by a scholar and an article written by a journalist or an expert who is not a scholar.
And they don't know how to cite the resources that they do find. Next time. A lot of these issues are not something that needs to be addressed in the new article of butut, they need to be addressed in other ways in literacy education that librarians are doing. But the one finding that we can and should address is the use of plain language jargon, passive writing, use of acronyms and just poor writing and poor structure of the article continues to be persistent in scholarly publishing.
And this leads two student researchers and people who have gotten hold of the article outside of academia to being unable to understand the articles they glaze over and they have little desire to dig deeper into the topic, or they seek out sources in the general media that may not be as accurate. Even researchers appreciate plain language articles. Recent research in the Journal of marketing found that plain language articles are cited more frequently.
We continue to ignore the problem of poor academic writing in this myth that scholars are only writing for other scholars is going to persist as open access accelerates, the unintended consequences are dire. People are going to misuse, misunderstand and misinterpret research, the results of which we already are aware that vaccine causes autism, aluminum in the antiperspirants causes Alzheimer's and our breast cancer and COVID vaccine.
Covid-19 vaccine wasn't properly tested for safety because it happened so quickly. Next slide. So what is doing? We are building a new database that is plain language academic articles geared specifically to students. The articles are shorter and have more graphics and are meant to create a bridge between the resources they used in high schools such as newspapers, magazines and anything they could find on the internet and the resources they should be using in college, which is peer reviewed journal articles and scholarly books.
But we're not alone in doing this. Plain language summaries are being produced by societies and Association publishers as well as other publishers. And I would be really interested in knowing from the audience. I know there are audience members out there who are from organizations that are developing or have plain language summaries, and I'd be interested to hear from them on what their impetus for doing that was.
But in short, the Article of the Future needs to recognize that the audience just isn't other researchers. The audience is more broad than that. That's it for me. Wonderful Thank you so much. Patty will now enter the conversation portion of today's talk.
I, for one, have thought of a lot of really a lot of topics that I want to discuss with you all. So I might just kick off with some questions of my own. And I will then go through questions from the attendees. I think that Michelle's imagery of the magic glass ball being maybe a little bit lofty was a really good one to think about. I was thinking maybe instead of a magical glass ball, we maybe just need to put on reading glasses in order to inform development in scholarly publishing and just look at what's happening on sites in our content, around our content.
So what are the things that should be looked at the most? Do we look at the practices of what is happening now? When do we try to change those practices? We've been trying to talk about killing the PDF forever, but it's what people are looking for and it's what they're going for. So it would, I think, be really helpful if the panelist could talk about what evidence and use cases your organization looks for and maybe of which items of those feedback put the thumb on the scale the most.
Let's go ahead and start with you. That's a great point, and telling the kids I was really surprised to hear from Patty that result, because that's always been my thinking around the PDF, is that it's just a habit. It's just what people have learned over time. But there must be something unique about that. So it's going to be a really interesting question to get to the bottom of why even a student audience is going after the kids.
As for looking at signals, I think the example I'm thinking of here is for star protocol because we're looking at the specific use case of taking the paper to the bench. We asked researchers what they needed and they said, yeah, typically I would print out the PDF, but I would only take part of it or I transform it into a Word document. And then I'd kind of copy and paste what I needed and put together the protocol I needed.
And then based on that, we created a Word document version of the PDF. So that would give them a little bit more flexibility. People are usually able to edit a Word document, a little bit more easily than they are a PDF. So that's, I think, the main example, I can think of and I'll probably come up with another one once I hear some great things, terry, where it was their specific user feedback that MIT Press looks at when changing products, creating new products.
Not specifically. So in the case of RC 19, the environment that we use a hosting environment is club, it was built here to team the target delivery is native HTML in the browser, but an end user can download up to eight different formats. So PDF being one of them. So PDF is generated on the floor if that's what they want. But also bear in mind that we're dealing with reviews which are very, very brief and we haven't seen much indication that there's a need to deliver in other formats, so they're willing to consume it within the browser environment.
The other thing we've been discussing is whether, in fact, again, to accelerate speed to market, we can, instead of offering written reviews or in parallel, we could offer audio reviews. So in other words, reviewers could actually talk us through the review and we would make the audio files available along with a performance. Oh, that's really interesting, Heather.
It would be great to hear from you how the ADA balances user feedback as well along with your mission. So like which is heavier, what your users are doing on your site, your mission. I imagine there's some overlap there as well. Well, Ah, there's a lot of overlap. Our audience there are authors, there are readers, there are clinicians, there are primary care doctors.
And they're all looking at the clinical practice recommendations as a reference document. And they need to go there quickly and find what they need. It needs to be up to date, the type of which kind of poses problems for us PDF, because then we offer everything right on the version of record. But because people are holding onto those CDS, we still have to go to the PDF annotate that just like you would make comments on a PDF just so that it's portable, which defeats the purpose of it being a living document.
But it's something that you just have to accommodate And the type of feedback and might be straying from your question. But I wanted to mention that the type of feedback we've received has been after the fact, when people realize the utility of the living standards. For example, a colleague of mine was presenting at the American College of Cardiology and a doctor stood up and thanked her for the standards of care because it allowed him to prescribe the latest medication, not only for him to prescribe it, but for his patients to be able to afford it because insurance carriers aren't going to cover it until it's recommended in a clinical practice guideline.
And so it's very impactful that way. Wow, it's a great example of creating something that then folks realize how useful it is. Michelle, do you have anything to add as far as how user feedback has maybe dictated directions for research? Where yeah, I'm also surprised by the PDF wisdom there, maybe preprint users have a slightly different demographic.
In a way, there has been a demand for HTML like full text, HTML for preprints and something that we've emphasized. I know the Cold Spring Harbor preprint servers as well really made a push to at one point, all of menaka was PDF and now they've converted everything to HTML. And so there is a demand for that. But there's also an internal demand for it because of how it enables search, universal search and enables an interoperability and the ability to annotate and create that living document that we're talking about is just not going to be possible to do from a PDF.
So I do think that there is a little bit of if you build it, they will come aspect of this where the more that we show what's possible with HTML that isn't possible with PDF, the more people will value it. They'll start to see that. OK, I'm getting so much more context from this format than I could ever get from a PDF then I think it will take time for people to understand the value of that.
We haven't actually done to any of our own user research on that particular point. We certainly don't get complaints. I will mention that some of our articles can't be converted to HTML because they're really equation heavy or and we just don't have the capacity or the resources to convert every kind of Article to some of those live as a PDF. And it's not like we have droves of people coming to us to shout about the fact that there are articles and available in each format.
So I don't think there is the demand for it that we would have expected. So I guess that is somewhat in line with what the research that has been done. But it would be worth us pulling our own authors to see what they understand about what's possible with the PDF versus HTML. And we actually have a question for paddy that I think would feed into this line of conversation as well, it's a question from agentive Vaccaro.
She says that they've brought public health statements and significant statements into their journals for some of the reasons that you, paddy, listed in your presentation. So this is a question saying, have you found a way to track the efficacy of plain language summaries that you mentioned or prove the value of these efforts to editors or authors who might not see their value? Right and we have not we do have our plain language articles, peer reviewed.
They are peer reviewed, though, by professors teaching the courses that we have identified would be useful for them. And as for the authors, that that's a good question that I think we will have to investigate when we start to look at how we're going to evolve this over the years to the efficacy with the actual authors. And that's a good point.
Great, Thank you so in. It seems like it seems like there's some other chats in here before we go into that and realizing, as we've discussed here, we've been talking about an article of the future. But I wonder whether this is more of a question of a process of the future. I think that so many of these challenges and opportunities could also be maybe not solved, but aided by taking a second look at how we ten-year our professors, how we acknowledge items in the publication record, you know, how we look at the communication of scholarly content overall.
So just wanted to position this to the group, see if you all had any thoughts there. Are there areas of the process that you think are ripe for innovation? Are there areas where you think there's some really good stuff starting to happen? I'll open that up to you all. I'll take that one, Hannah.
I think that there's been a lot of push towards versioning types of software and capabilities, and I really think that that could be the way that the standards of care head. But then we have that problem that you mentioned of the scholarly record. How do you document versions of things in the scholarly record without publishing an official term or addenda? So I think that there's going to have to be a huge shift and I don't know how we get there in order to disentangle that.
Yeah, I'll echo that, I agree that it is a process and also a culture change that we're looking for here. And I think that in particularly around how feedback goes know happens on an article, Terry alluded to this, too, that there's pushback to the idea of openly reviewing an article that's about that's publicly available for everyone to see.
And this is a genuinely difficult problem. Right, because now you've taken a process that was, you know, previously kind of a private exchange and interaction between an author and an editor and a couple of reviewers and turns it into what could become a public spectacle in some cases, especially in the more hot button sort of issues, much of which there have been many during the course of the 90s, that we've had a very interesting practice run here with it, with covid-19 to see how, you know, something highly contentious and politicized and plays out when you post that paper as a pre-print and then see how the feedback comes at it from various different sources.
So and I think that there are just genuinely debates that have to happen around this and the kind of an agreement, that kind of decorum and a level of discourse that we have to agree on as a community that and like limitations on what we're willing to do and not do. I think it's just it's genuinely a difficult, difficult problem. And there needs to be more conversations about it, especially with researchers and across the different career stages, because the implications here for early career researchers versus more senior researchers are pretty huge.
So, yeah, one of those conversations. I would agree with Michelle there, this is a very, very fluid time. Things are very dynamic. And I would say at the end of the day, this is about sociology, about software. So there could be a lot of tech innovations. But I think the real innovations will be cultural committees are still struggling with how to deal with gray literature, although we know from experience I used to work with archive when I was at Cornell and those prints have been cited for decades, not the final version of record, but the paper itself within the archive repository.
So so I think we'll see a significant change in its 10 years in what we value. I think it'll be shifted forward. I totally agree, I think going back to this idea of incentivizing sharing of resources outside and making that OK for researchers, I was actually in a workshop just last week with the NIH about this topic, and they want to create a new way for people to share data around their article.
And we, as publishers all said, yes, we're happy to help you do this, but you have to make it easy for researchers and you have to incentivize them to do it. And by incentivizing them, it's really, you know, making sure that as a funder, you either require it or their promotion and tenure committees understand the value of it and their protocols that we were really surprised.
We thought, oh, we just want to create something totally new. You know, people are sharing their protocols very openly. Why don't we just create the same sort of thing. And let them just upload their protocols? And when we asked researchers to do that, they said, why would I do that? I want a publication credit. I need that for my tenure. I need that for, you know, my NIH progress report or my grant progress report.
So I think that, you know, systemic issue is one thing that is going to be hard to overcome. But I'm hopeful because we have funders starting to get involved in this conversation. And funders that are encouraging preprint and encouraging open access. I think having that as part of it is such an important element to change.
Yeah, I think that's why I love the idea of sociology, not software, solving these problems and protocols specifically and thinking of when I was previously a science magazine, we were looking into projects that would involve lab notebooks, electronic lab notebooks and the publication of protocols. And in speaking to some researchers, it was also communicated that this would then just be another thing that they had to do.
And it's like these researchers are already doing so much to publish their research show that they are utilizing their grant funding. So then it's saying, OK, so we're now asking them to communicate in a way that would be more readable by a general audience, by a high school audience, and also asking them, oh, well, this piece of your research process needs to also be published already.
So this then gets into a carrot and stick conversations that I don't think we're going to solve in the space of an hour long webinar. But I think that they're very interesting areas to look at and how funder mandates have, I think, helped a lot in getting a lot of these items published. But yeah, looking at that process and making this process more fruitful in publication outputs that are then person readable and machine readable, I think is something that would be great to work towards.
On the subject of readability, patty, it would be great to hear from you maybe ideas or takeaways or thoughts on how we could better, you know, precipitate more lay summaries or just improve the writing. Any thoughts there? Well, yeah, there are some thoughts and I think it falls into the line to promotion and tenure and the issue of publishing for promote, it's like whose problem is it?
And that's why it's persisting, because this problem is it is even in the research that we've done at eskow librarians, when we've done the library, the research with librarians in there, what they look for when they are deciding where they're going to put their dollars, where, what products they're going to buy, readability and plain language is not you know, it's about middle of the road.
It falls way below that. There's a big disconnect with the actual, you know, students and what they consider to be important, big disconnect with what librarians consider to be important and what students consider to be important. They're not seeing eye to eye at all. And then where in the writers themselves, the authors, they need to get published.
Are they spending the time that they need to spend to get it to be less jargon filled, to have the proper structure? They're concerned about what the reviewers are going to be saying about it, what the editors are going to be saying about it? Well, what happens down the road with the article and how it gets seen? And we do know all of us know that people are persistent with trying to find articles behind paywall.
So even if it's not open access, it's still going to be seen. They're not worried about that at all, and neither are editors and peer reviewers. And so the persists the why it's persisting is systemic issues that are also prevalent in the promotion and tenure process. Whose problem is it is basically. Why continues and how do we resolve that, and that's a good question, because when we have our newly minted PhDs there, they're concerned about promotion and tenure, which is how this all relates to each other.
They're not they're not concerned about how their research is being perceived by people who are not on their promotion and tenure committee and who are not within the realm of scholarly publishing, whether they are writing for their peers. And How's that for not answering the question, I have raised your question with a larger issue.
No one is talking about plain language summaries. It occurs to me, too, that it's just a matter of resources because we would love to have a plain language summary with every article asking an author to write, that is. Is you might as well be writing it because you're going to rewrite it, right? Right and with the amount of content that we push out, it just seems like it will be very difficult to implement such a thing, even though it's something we're very interested in participating in.
If some of you some of the people who have been publishing for a long time might remember a program called patient and inform where it was a collaboration of societies that would agree to. All right. These plain language summaries and in turn offer free access to the person accessing the article through the summary with the assumption that that person is probably not a researcher with access.
So just the thought is a lot of our resources, but definitely a useful thing, certainly. What happens what happens to that initiative over time? I think that publishers just took those sort of operations into their own hands and it dissolved over 10 years ago. I think also it's very important to keep in mind non-native English speakers in this conversation as well, because we wouldn't want to incorporate things into this publication process that would alienate them.
So yet another wrinkle to solving this issue. Any other thoughts on this topic before we go to the next question? OK, great, I'm just going to check. I think we haven't received any other questions, so as we reach the 10 minute mark, I think it would be great to get in a time machine 10 years from now and think about what we might be speaking about in a similar webinar in 10 years time.
So thoughts from the group? I think there might also be another Q&A item here. So, terry, I might start with you. OK, this is a look into the future. Yes, that the one we're addressing. OK 10 years is an awful long time in internet space. I'm going to March down to New content types.
So I think that what might happen here is what we're trying to do is the application of AI fairly aggressively to the preprinted review selection process to speed up time to product in time to market as a see knowledge graphs and then data networks, meaning related data clusters. So what could happen is that data talks to itself, to other kinds of data sets that are available within a particular ecosystem.
And I think that would be very, very interesting to take a look at. So beyond the narrative, beyond the text, how can data sets themselves interact across different platforms and environments? Great suggestions. I look forward to seeing those take shape, Michelle. 10 years from now, what do you think we'll be talking about? I think really dealing with a new scale of research in 10 years, especially with the more full adoption of friends there already.
I think their estimate is like 30,000 published each month versus 150,000 around published journal articles. So it's already a substantial fraction of that. And, you know, and that's with relatively low adoption rates right now for reprints, I think, compared to where we will be in 10 years or sooner than that. So we're going to need ways of dealing with that. And it's going to be it's going to be machine readable articles and señores at the same workshop with you.
And I found it fascinating. I think that those are the kinds of things maybe it won't look exactly like what we discussed in that workshop, but it will look something like that. Right and we're going to need easier ways of parsing the dense information that is now part and parcel of every article that comes out and turning it into something that, you know, that is machine readable and that is applicable to other data sets and that everything can talk to each other, as Terry said again.
So more emphasis on the data itself, less on the narrative, except that I do think that lay summaries are going to because everything is going to be open. There's going to have to be something there. So maybe that the emphasis on the narrative will be more about the narrative for non subject matter experts and less on the negative 4 four other researchers. Other researchers will maybe have to learn to read things in a much more stark way that it's basically boiled down to individual snippets, assertions, infographics, videos and summaries, significant statements.
All of these things, I think, will play that part in helping to sort of bridge the gap for between researchers and the public eye. There is going to be a need for that covid-19 made that really clear, is even a very good research, very solid, excellent research was misused, misinterpreted, given a couple of talks on this now. And we've tried to do our best to sort of run interference on those things, but we need to be more proactive so that we can avoid these spiraling out of control issues that occurred during the pandemic.
And then lastly, just greater interactivity, I think, is just going to be a major feature, executable code and interactive HTML, as someone mentioned in the Q&A few more figures, maybe a bit more interactive figures and tables, and I think that will be a part as well. So, Yeah. Great Thank you, Michelle. Heather, you get to speak. I wanted to piggyback off of that a little bit.
And what's been said already, it's just occurs to me that the sheer amount of content is just it's long been overwhelming, especially for a clinician who treats patients. So a feature, hopefully 10 years, who knows? We'll be able to serve it to them in the way in ways that they can digest it quickly and read through it quickly. And perhaps that's sort of an AI tools or something. But we're going to have to sort of be able to personalize this content in some way without eliminating the discoverability aspect.
It's the yeah, just the sheer amount of content. We're going to need ways to sort through it and dice it and dish it appropriately for people who need it quickly. Great, thanks, Heather Seana. I think that's a great point, heather, and I think and elsewhere. There are a number of AI initiatives in the clinical space, in the Health Sciences space, but not as much in the biological and less more translational space.
And I'm pretty excited to have some of these things like share path and clinical key to really start to be used on the side of the bench. Researcher and the clinical not quite in the clinical space and preclinical phase. And I think that's going to be really exciting. And of course, the other thing is really having this, you know, not necessarily stuck in the PDF, have an email that is connected to all the bits and pieces of what goes into a research article.
A lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of resources. And let's encourage authors and make it easy for them to share the bits and pieces that are associated with that article and make that reusable so people can find it and really be able to serve it up to the next person who's looking at that article. And they're looking at it for the protocol. They're looking at it for the code.
They're looking at it for the specs on the hardware so they can build that microscope and to be able to find a way to deliver people what they need. You know, I think that that covers the idea of this kind of three dimensional PDF that I'm hoping to see in the future. And hopefully HTML will no longer be heard it here first. The PDF. It's still going to be here in ten, '10 years, guys.
OK, so, Patti, thoughts on what you think we're going to be talking about in 10 years? Well, I think that we're still going to be talking about this big disconnect between what librarians spend their money on and what readers want, because we also found in our research that librarians don't value videos and interactive graphs. And yet that's what readers want. And so I think we're going to see more of that.
Personally, what I hope we see more of is I hope that blockchain technology, as applied to some of these issues that we're facing in tech, in scholarly publishing, will solve some of these issues. If we can apply blockchain technology to data, then perhaps researchers will be more willing to share their data if we can apply it to version control.
And then perhaps this issue of the version of record will no longer be keeping research static instead of moving it beyond what it is, is that the data that it's already outdated by the time it's published and hopefully blockchain technology can deal with that as well. So I'm hoping that. In 10 years from now, I'm going to be retired, so I won't be replaced.
I hope I'll ask two of years more so. So who knows what we'll be talking about? It won't be me talking about it. Well, great. Thank you so much. I think that the themes of speaking to the lay audience and also speaking to the machine readable audience is really important in thinking of the future here, distilling those research artifacts into their most granular version so that there can be metadata connections between those elements.
Focusing on creating that metadata ecosystem I think will be huge as we move forward and continuing the conversation, seeing the research outputs as outputs from people that are trying to further their career, I think will be also really important things to keep in mind as we look forward and thinking of the audience. Overall, user feedback, sheet maps, user groups speaking directly to those end users will be really important.
But Thank you so much to this panel. It has been wonderful talking with you all this morning, afternoon, et cetera. I believe David might have some housekeeping before we close up, but just Thank you so much to our wonderful women panelists today. And Thank you to Hannah, Michelle, Shauna, Patrick Harris is a great discussion for everybody attending. Please take the time to respond to the webinar survey that you'll receive by email that does help us feedback.
My feedback does help us continually improve the webinar program. On July RA21. There will be an open access seminar. So please check out all the educational opportunities available on the SSP website. We are now concluded. Enjoy the rest of your day. The
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