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New Directions: Consolidation, Competition, and Cooperation
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New Directions: Consolidation, Competition, and Cooperation
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Check check.
Yeah, I needed it. Like, you know, I needed to decompress after that intense experience. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. You know, and like, you know, it's like, this is the core. So, you know, I'm still like. Hi, Susan. Yeah no. Check, check.
One two. One two. Check all right. I have no organizational memory, so someone asked me something. That's great. You just be like, Yeah, I'll be like, Yeah, I meant to log in and see Susan and just confirm that he just said that he was not yet logged in. Well, that was two minutes ago.
Well, hopefully he'll be all right. Thanks we can hear you. Good Thanks. Good Thanks for letting me know.
Oh, OK. I'm just live in Boston. So they are. I'll try not to get in too much trouble without John here. You all decide how to? So we decided how we're going to present. Well, I'll just advance and advance our own the slides. That should be fine. Did he want to do an intro or anything?
I Susan. What kind of playing it by ear. Oh, John. Yeah so I'm just contingency planning. Yeah do you do. I know I'm advancing slides, but I wasn't sure how else I could help. So it's janaina. Janaina janaina.
Yeah, I mean, I looked she told me to call it Jane the first year, and I got used to that. And then she told me a couple of weeks ago to change it had to be imprinted. Yeah, the John's there. OK Oh, he is there. OK, John. Thank you. He said he was happy to introduce, but technically, let's see if he set up to do that.
And if not, then. Yeah OK. Thank you. Sorry and we'll do in person questions. Obviously there's some point to them but he'll advantage. So yes. I can hear the room. Suzanne, I'm wondering if maybe that's fine. So then I'm just an extra.
Yeah, I'll just use it. OK Yeah. I don't know. Can I do the job as well as you? Oh, stop! Oh, my God, you're so much closer to this. So, Jana, Ina says she is doing it. Pros Oh, that's kind of her. OK that's great.
They've been sorted out. Yeah so. OK you're good. That's perfect. I'm here if you need me. Thanks I don't remember what I was supposed to say. I think your security doesn't.
Have it all written down because I have all the stuff I want to throw in from this morning, and I'm like, I have to stay disciplined through it, like weaving it. It'll be interesting. It makes it more engaging. There it is. More time for discussion. I'm looking forward to this.
Yeah and who has the, like questions? Like John was going to start with questions for us in case people are slow. I'll have some ready. Yeah why don't we just ask, like my first question? Well, the first one was like, what is a consultant to you? And then from there, we go. OK OK.
Segment:1 Consolidation, Competition, and Cooperation.
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Oh, I got to go bigger. I have a microphone. I need to use it. Hi, everyone. So it's 3:00. We have some virtual speakers here today who will be introducing us.
But it's my job to ask everyone to sit. So we can get the session started. And then I think, Giannina, are you going to be doing the introductions for everyone? Yes OK, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to your session on consolidation, competition and cooperation.
As we all know, the publishing landscape is constantly evolving, driven by forces such as technological advancements, market shifts, and the growing need for collaboration today, we will be exploring how consolidation, competition, and partnerships are reshaping scholarly communication. I'm a doctor, a postdoc, information science at the University of Illinois, and I'll be filling in for John, who is sick today, to share this dynamic panel.
We have an excellent line up of speakers, each of whom I would let to introduce themselves, and they bring diverse and expert perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that come with these changes today, you will hear from a publishing consultant, a senior commercial publisher, a society innovator, and myself a researcher about the cycle and barriers of a partnership.
A bold new coalition built on purpose, above profit, and the consolidation happening in publishing technology and its impact on competition today. The panel will address problems in common that scholarly communication stakeholders face, and would be better solved through partnerships, and the barriers to consolidating these partnerships do change, such as power imbalance, conflicts of interest, and competition.
Each speaker will introduce herself and present for about 6 to 8 minutes, after which we will open the floor for a 25 minute or so Q&A session. I encourage you to engage with their ideas and prepare your questions as we move through the discussion. John will monitor the Zoom chat and for those of you in the room, there are microphones you should feel free to approach after the presentation. Now, without further ado, let's begin.
And Laura, the floor is yours. Great Thank you. I'm back. So, Hi, I'm Laura Ricci, Sr. Consultant at Clark and Esposito. In my job, I get to work with organizations of all sizes large, small, independent society, commercial publishers.
So we get a very in-depth and also a very broad view of what's going on in the industry. So I'm always really grateful for opportunities like this to say a little bit about what we're seeing. And today I'm going to focus by talking a little bit about consolidation, because this is the kind of thing that everybody can kind of feel. But I want to start and frame the discussion by sharing a little bit of data and kind of putting some framing around it.
So first, this is Connie's analysis from our recent industry trends report. It shows the number of articles published each year by business model according to dimensions. And we've done some analysis on this to kind of winnow it down to specifically journal article content. So there's some trends we're all very familiar with, right. There's an increase in the overall number of articles published each year.
It's driven by the increase in gold away articles and hybrid articles and subscription articles. Other business models have stayed largely static. Right and that makes intuitive sense, right? There have been more mandates and with gold away there, the number of articles published has a direct correlation with revenues earned. And that's not the case for other business models.
So where gold away is the primary business model, there is an incentive to get bigger in terms of Article volume. My colleague David Crotty published an analysis in the Scholarly Kitchen showing the proportion in the Web of Science corpus of the top 5% 10% and 20% of publishers by Article volume. Publishing does have a long tail. We all know of publishers that have one or two journals, but this is the fat head.
And what you can see is that the share of this fat head has increased steadily, and there have been different phases over the last 25 years. So in the early 2000, there was a little bit of increase in consolidation because of the big deal. It became harder to sell independent journals, and so publishing publishers of 1 or 2 journals were joining up with larger organizations. Then things were relatively flat for a while.
And in 2013, we saw our first oa mandates, things like the Holdren memo ukri. And then you can see another slight uptick in consolidation. And then 2018 was plan s, and you can see a big uptick. And that also coincides with the rise of transformative agreements. So in short, in 2000 the top 5% of publishers were about 40% of the Web of Science corpus. By 2022, that proportion was 60% And now we as an industry, we comport with the pareto principle.
80% of the articles in this corpus are published by 20% of the publishers. So that wasn't always the case, as you can see. So all of this consolidation that we're feeling is, in fact, real. And again, I mentioned transformative agreements. They are a big reason for this. This data shows the share as well of articles published under transformative agreements.
And you can see how much of it is taken up by 5 large publishers Elsevier, Springer, nature, TNF, Wiley, sage. The reasons for this are many. First, these deals are very complex. Libraries have limited time, and so to make the most of their time, they tend to focus on the large publishers. These are the publishers where they start for a publisher.
They're also very labor intensive as well. So if you don't have the staffing and the people and the data infrastructure, then it's harder for you to strike these deals too. And lastly, it doesn't make much sense to spend time on a deal where you are talking about one journal and there's maybe one or two articles published per year. At that point, you may as well just pay the APC. But if you're talking about a deal with hundreds of journals, with hundreds of papers published, it makes a lot more sense.
I do have to mention, of course, that despite the clear effects that transformative effect agreements are having, this is still a very pluralistic market. So a lot of the coverage is concentrated in countries where, for example, in Sweden, Finland, the UK, where a lot of the deals are being struck by large national licensing consortia. Elsewhere so, for example, in the US down here, there's a lot more Federated approach to journal negotiations.
So publishers are striking deals in these places, but they tend to be more one at a time with consortia and so on. So not with sort of this big, bigger customer with higher coverage. So the result is that there is a mix of business models out there. This isn't caused by rtas, of course, but it's visible in the coverage under rtas and therefore the prevailing business models from region to region.
And this is really high level. I'm trying to go quick, so I want to swing back to talking more generally about open access. And that theme of incentivizing greater article publication. One way to increase publication volume and maintain market share is to pursue a portfolio strategy. So this is a great diagram published in learned publishing. A while back that I love.
I think it's a really clear depiction of the nature portfolio strategy. So the idea is that articles submitted higher up the pyramid say to nature that don't get accepted to that higher up journal, that the most prestigious journal can be transferred somewhere else in the portfolio, and find a publication home with that publisher. Think about the effect of that on other portfolios. So it used to be that if you were an author with a what you thought was a high quality paper, if you got rejected from nature, you would then take it to another high prestige journal, you would take it to another disciplinary flagship and so on.
In this scenario, if you're presented with an option where you can publish very quickly and you can still have a nature branded publication, you may take that option and that it may be that paper never goes to another publisher. So that creates a lot more competition for submissions because it's that first submission that counts. There are examples of ways that publishers can do this without a fully owned portfolio. We have seen societies partner with each other for co-owned transfer portfolio journals that they both share in.
We have seen high prestigious journals agree to transfer papers between each other, but the portfolio incentive structure is much stronger than this generally. And so it's something for societies that don't have as many journals to think very hard about. And lastly, I'll touch on this very quickly because of that importance of the first submission.
Lots of effort is going into creating a good author experience and author marketing and so on. So there's one more type of consolidation to mention, and that is the ownership of these tools. We're seeing tighter integrations between both upstream and downstream in the research workflow. And there's also, you know, in some cases for public societies that are partnering with publishers, for example, a little bit of lock in.
So we're seeing more societies who are partnering with publishers and need to move to their publishers preferred submission system, for example. The reason being that's where the publisher has built in all of these complicated capabilities to manage tos and things like that. On the other hand, I will say it is better than a fax machine, so not all of these things are bad.
This has been really 1,000 foot view. I was given six minutes so I covered a lot with it. My my big takeaway here though, is that obviously the competitive landscape is shifting. Also very importantly, consolidation is not foreordained, right? All of this is happening as the result of incentives. And something I will just leave here before, which I hope prompts some discussion in the next section is our industry has a lot of consolidation, but a lot of that consolidation is happening through partnerships.
So I'm glad that cooperation is also a theme of this panel, but I will, in the interest of time, turn it over to my fellow panelists, and I hope we talk more about this. Thank you. Thank you. Laura loves Meredith. Are you ready?
Sorry Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with you today. Just a very brief overview of me. I'm Meredith Masri, and I'm the senior vice president for editorial development at Taylor Francis. This is a role that I started just at the beginning of this month. So I'll give you a very whirlwind tour of how I ended up here.
I came into research publishing from research. So I'm trained as a neuroscientist, and I started my career as a content handling editor at Cell press. And then I moved to Nature Neuroscience. At what was then nature publishing group, a few months before we merged with Springer. And then I spent about the last 9 plus years at Springer Nature working in various aspects of their journal portfolio.
And so now at Taylor Francis, I'm doing a strategic role for their journal portfolio. OK I'm going to talk a bit about the issue of consolidation, cooperation and competition from a larger publisher. OK so our purpose is to foster human progress through knowledge. And so we see that as having three main aims that we focus on at Taylor Francis. So that would be supporting researchers.
You know, giving them the journals that they need with high integrity and good visibility for their work. And share, you know, so that they can get their work out there in the scientific community and further human progress or foster progress, validating the research. And, you know, the last couple of years in particular, have been really important in terms of the research integrity space.
And so really, we're thinking a lot about how we can invest and improve our processes around making sure that the scientific literature is valid and trustworthy. And then, of course, connecting the community. So really sparking those ideas for further progress by bringing people together. And so we think a lot about how to build capacity in these key areas that are aligned with our purpose.
And that would be along the main themes of creating trusted journal portfolios, improving our processes along the lines of, what's been touched on already today? Better author experience, better experience. Also, for the researchers that engage with us as editors and reviewers, strengthening the research integrity and expanding visibility and access to content. OK, so this is just a whirlwind and kind of very overview tour of how Taylor Francis has developed.
So if you see on the left hand side, we are an old publisher. So we started in 1798 technically with one journal, and we grew to what we are today. But I think that anyone who's worked for a publisher that's been around for quite a long time knows that there's benefits and challenges to having a long legacy. And, you know, so on one hand, you know, you have a lot of experience with traditional academic publishing.
But as we're all talking about, you know, today, the research landscape is changing. The research publishing landscape is changing. And it can be really hard for research for organizations with huge and long legacies to adapt to that. So what we try to do is we try to join forces, but we do it in a very selective way. And so over the last several years, and I put on here that in 2004 we merged with informa.
There there are partner company. But over the past, let's say less than a decade, we've been really focused on bringing in expertise that historically we didn't have as a traditional research publisher. And in particular, like, can we find people that have a like purpose to us? But a very different startup mentality way of thinking, a lot of innovation where we can really bring kind of two sides of the same or two sides of the coin together and strengthen each other.
So with that, and we started working on open research with the acquisition of dove press in 2017. This would be right after around the when those mandates were coming out. And, you know, every publisher is thinking about how do we start offering open access options with 2020? Faculty of 1,000 joined us, bringing an innovative platform that was something that was unlike anything that we had in house.
And then in last year, it was the future science group joined us. And again, it's thinking about how do we connect communities on digital platforms. That was something that was very interesting to us about what they were doing. And finally this year with peer j, which is another open research publisher that is very interested in making the process better, making it faster, making it more efficient, making it more cost effective for authors outside of pure joining forces, we have partnerships that we explore.
These are just a couple of quick case studies that I'm not going to go into with huge depth, but we're always looking for interesting experiments to try. So we have verified that is a partnership with the Gates Foundation. It aligns with the mission of the Gates Foundation to have research that they fund available to the community as quickly as possible. So they want everything to be up on a preprint server.
What we wanted to do here, that was a little bit different than some of the preprint servers that were out there, was to have rigorous checks before things go up online. So really kind of feeding into that whole aspect of the research integrity and what we could do there. And then we're also partnering with researchgate to explore journal homes. We know a lot of researchers are on researchgate, coming back to kind of meeting your community where you are.
We've been exploring how we can provide greater access to where researchers are and where they're engaging with content. And then just say, I think we all feel a lot of pressure. Being at a big publisher does not make that any easier. I can tell you that from lived experience. And so, you know, we work really hard to make our business successful. So we can invest in our mission. And so, you know, we really try to support good ideas.
So that's particularly with this focus that we have on, you know, pairing up with startups and giving their ideas longevity and more reach, investing back in research. So, you know, working on expanding and improving our discounts and waivers program, the open access space, pairing up with society partners and doing some capacity building projects when we have the opportunity and then trying to be better citizens, we think a lot about sustainability and how we can improve our processes for a world that needs us all to be more sensitive.
And, you know, we're really working a lot on reducing our global footprint, particularly around our print space, but actually everything as a business, hopefully by 2023. I think that's it. It's a whirlwind tour. Thanks for your attention. Looking forward to the discussion.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah rouhi. I'm the director of Open science at aip publishing. I joined six months ago coming from floss. So quite, quite a spectrum of experiences to share today, but I'm really going to be focusing mostly on sharing a bit more information about the purpose led publishing coalition.
We are a coalition of three physical science funders iop publishing apps and aip. The goal was to commute to communicate shared values that all three nonprofit publishers have, and hopefully to create efficiencies and scale to help optimize us for the future as our industry continues to change rapidly by facilitating some scale amongst the three of us. So the reality is, as we've been looking at data across all three publishers, the threats to our business, many of which we've talked about today, are really not from the other physics publishers, but from the kind of consolidation we've been seeing largely from commercial publishers.
We do not have the resources and the footprint that many of those other publishers do. We have less flexibility around failure in terms of piloting things that don't work out, and we don't have as much resource when acute challenges kind of creep up, we've got to be a little bit more nimble, a little bit more flexible. And we figured that working together to enable that kind of collaboration was going to be more successful than competing amongst ourselves.
So one of the things that motivated this was very much our overlapping communities. All three publishers are engaging largely with the same physical sciences community. And in some of the research we've done, we're looking at results from our 2023 aip brand study. The question that was asked for. This is to please think about not for profit publishers versus commercial publishers in the physical sciences, and then from the following list, articulate the top three things a nonprofit could do to distinguish itself.
And these were four things that all of us do. And consider to be of, of top importance at our organizations. But of course, seeing it validated by our communities was really important. So of course, the highest possible peer review standards. Never jeopardizing research integrity for financial gain, publishing only sound science that genuinely adds to the base of scientific knowledge and existing for the benefit of science and those communities, not shareholders.
As you can imagine, given all the conversations we had today at the round tables in the morning sessions, the first three things very much are in tension with a lot of the pressures that we're seeing around volume based publishing revenue tied to article volume, et cetera so that continues to be kind of a tension that we're experiencing. But the commitments we've made are clear. We're going to invest 100% of our funds back into science.
We're only going to publish content that genuinely adds to scientific knowledge. I think you could argue there's a lot of work to do there to figure out how to do that in a way that makes sense. We're going to ensure our terms are reasonable in terms of the cost of our services and the cost of our partnerships, and try to be as transparent around those things as possible. We're going to put research integrity ahead of our profit. And when we make mistakes, we are going to be public about setting them right.
So we're never going to relinquish our not for profit status. And the shareholders that we care about our science and no one else. So how are we actually collaborating? And many of you come from society backgrounds. You know that if you're small, you have certain challenges, and if you're larger, you have different kinds of challenges. So my experience of purpose led publishing or PLP so far since I've joined has been wow, you're really trying to get sort of three battleships to do synchronized swimming together, which is really a challenge in a lot of different ways.
So a lot of this effort has been. Starting small and figuring out where are the places where we feel comfortable collaborating, where are the places where there's a clear competition component that we're still trying to navigate, and where are the pieces where our missions are completely aligned. And so collaboration makes sense. So these are four areas that we are absolutely working on stakeholder outreach and engagement, obviously bringing efficiency and scale to peer review and research integrity, and then exploring ways to further enable artificial intelligence in peer review.
So there should be announcements coming later in the year, next year, beginning of the year around some of these efforts. We announced the coalition back in February, but we've been mostly with our heads down actually doing the work. So we hope to report more publicly on what we've been doing in the coming months. So you can go to our website purpose led publishing.org. And with that, I will happy to take questions at the end.
Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to share my screen. Can you see my screen? Yes yes. Thank you for confirming. So Hi, everyone. Again, I'm NeNe.
I will be giving a talk on building partnerships in bridge through training programs in higher education. What I have done and what I would like to do more through collaborations. So I'm a postdoc as a postdoc here at the University of Illinois. I conduct research on peer review, training and public participation in the peer review process and also in science communication and public engagement.
Science in health science and I have been translating my research into many different activities, so I teach a scholar communication. I mentor students, I have two students working on peer review projects, and I also recently I was invited to do to do administrative work. And in this position I have been assisting my department with a visiting exchange program. So basically what I'm doing is translating my research in training in all of these different work that I do here.
So the first partnership that I would like to share with you today is the peer review workshop series. Last year, the School of Information science partnered with the main library, and I spoke to them to create and develop a peer review workshop workshop series for the University. And they felt very happy because it was the first peer review training that we have in the library. And the goal of this peer review workshop series was informing the campus stakeholders about many types of peer review models and the role of reviewers and editors and authors during the review process.
Another goal was to build the interest in scholarly communication, and also interest about the peer review process, and another goal was supporting students initiatives in scholarly publishing. What it means. It means that I was giving the workshops at the main library for campus stakeholders, and then I was repeating some of these workshops for the editorial board of the daily noisy students, undergraduate research journals and the all-Star awards is all composed by undergraduate students, including the editor themselves.
They are undergraduate students. So we developed this and the University supporting this also to support their interest in scholarly publishing, it's really beautiful to see their interest in scholarly publishing. And another partnership that I have been involved on is a partnership between the global education and training at the Illinois international and the School of Information science this year, the School of Information science has partnered with the global education and training to host some data science scholars from Kazakhstan, and the bolashak program is a program is hosted by the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education.
It's a nine month program designed and developed and managed by global education and training, and some objectives of this program is enhancing academic and research skills, facilitating collaborative research projects, promoting cultural exchange, and most importantly, is training the pedagogical skills of these scholars. So basically what I'm doing, as you can see here in this photo, we have a high school welcome event to these scholars from Kazakhstan.
And I'm assisting my department with this partnership by helping to pair up researchers from Kazakhstan with researchers from the School of Information science. And we also I have been supporting with fine seats available for them where they can auditing courses. And they can also observe, for example, how a data science courses has been taught here in the US. And I also have been supporting this partnership by helping or organizing workshops and talks about research and publishing and teaching based on the needs.
And on the interests of these scholars from Kazakhstan. Another way that I involved with this partnership is that I'm helping to research techniques for teaching known natives of English, English of the English language. So we basically when we organize these workshops, we try to consider aspects about how it would look like to transfer knowledge for those who speaks in another language besides English.
So what I would like to do more to collaborations. So regarding the peer reviewed workshops, I would like to see more partnerships between academia and industry, because when I went and my students, we collect data about peer reviewed training, we see sometimes that many of the students, they would like to have someone to talk about their peer review experience and have the knowledge assessed by someone like an instructor and many online peer review trainings.
They don't offer these options of having someone to talk about or to get a feedback about their peer review reports that they are writing, for example. And also regarding higher education and collaborations, we all know that research is very competitive and knowledge is power, and I would like to see more collaborations addressing soft to power through knowledge diplomacy. It means that we have a lot of competitiveness, dominance and self-interest in research and in publishing.
And I would like to see more two way partnerships in education, in research to address, for example, problems that we have and issues that we have, for example, about open access, how we can build more global teams to address some questions and problems that we have to solve regarding publishing and research, for example, and also based on research on internationalization of higher education. When we are talking about international collaborations, we are talking in international relations among countries.
So when we build partnerships that we could have values like cooperation, partnerships, exchange, we can cooperate to have a more peaceful world. And so my goal is, is to create these partnerships to help to support one of the goals of the sustainable, sustainable development goals, that is, to ensure that all learners, they acquire the skills and knowledge that they need to develop themselves in the worlds, but also how we can promote a culture of peace and non-violence and appreciation of cultural diversity through collaborations and partnerships.
And I would like to invite you to finalize my talk, like thinking about this song of John Lennon in imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say, I'm a dreamer, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you will join us and the world will be as one. And Thank you so much for listening to my talk. Thank you.
All right. Well, Thank you so much, Jane. We're sorry you're not here in person. And, John, for organizing us. We we miss him today as well. We're going to sort of kick off with some questions for each other, but we're hoping that that will just facilitate a conversation with all of you. So as and when the questions come up, please come up to the podium or make sure you have a microphone so our colleagues online can hear.
And online folks will keep an eye out for your questions as well. So the first question to my co-panelists, when you're thinking about where the industry is with our respective hats on, what does consolidation, competition or cooperation any of those three things mean to you all? And then certainly to the audience, be curious what those things mean for you.
I can start, though. I can't start because my mic is on. OK, you can hear me, but I don't know how to work mix. OK, so I touched on this a lot of the trends that I was looking that you can see in the data, you'll notice that I mentioned in several cases, these are times when there was consolidation because publishers started to work with larger commercial, larger commercial publishers.
So one of the things that's unique about our industry is that a lot of the consolidation is happening because of Partnerships. Smaller publishers will partner with larger publishers. So that's different than an acquisition, right? So a lot of the, you know, different organizations are publishing more. It's because they're working with a lot more societies. So something that we think about a lot at Clark and Esposito and what I do every day is, you know, partnerships also are based on incentives.
They have to work for everybody. They are not permanent. So one of the reasons for consolidation lately is because it's hard, as I said, for societies to have access to large transformative agreements by themselves. And so if because of more mandates, more pressure to publish a way. Tos are one way to do that.
But I think the other thing to think about is that partnerships, again, it's not locked in. It does require cooperation in those cases. So if you are a society, the thing I would encourage you to do is think about making sure the partnerships you have work for you, making sure that the business model of a transformative agreement works for you. You know, it isn't eroding your licensing revenue, that it's not sort of taking all of your direct subscriptions and your relationships with customers and putting them in a big package.
There are lots of different ways of looking at this. And then also, you know, as you if you are a society in a commercial partner, publisher, partnership, thinking about how you can maintain what you do have and the value that you have as a society to your community, and thinking ahead to not just your current agreement, but your next agreement. What kinds of things can you do to sort of protect your journal, its editorial integrity and the kinds of things that make your journal strong?
So in this industry, I think there's a lot of both going on. And I think that's actually something that's kind of unique about us too. OK Oh it works. I should have prepared, but I like being off the cuff. So I think I'll talk actually a little bit about competition and then maybe get and end on a note of cooperation. And I think, you know, I come from first from a perspective of having worked in this field for companies that have a lot of resources, which is a privileged position, no doubt, but it doesn't make you immune from competition.
And I think everybody in this room will have really felt it, regardless of where you live or work or live, you know, competition in recent years and having been in this field for a while, I think that probably the last five years have been like nothing I've ever seen. And, you know, first there was the real, like, change in publishing behavior that COVID triggered. And then all of a sudden, we saw these huge surges in content and growth.
And, you know, when you start seeing your competitors growing around you, that makes you very worried that you are not keeping up. And then, you know, what wasn't on Laura's charts was, well, you know, some of the Borno publishers and, you know, for some of the legacy publishing houses, you think a lot about disruption, right? Like you have this, you know, you feel that you are very much prone to disruption.
And it looked like for the last few years, like you were strongly being disrupted. You know, what we all now know is that some of the things that were used to fuel these really eye popping levels of growth kind of opened the door for some of the research integrity problems that we're seeing now, and I feel that we're in a bit of a correction phase, right? We want growth. Everybody in the room wants growth to be a healthy organization.
It needs to be sustainable growth. And so I think, you know, for me, like there's just been a lot of really intense dynamics around competition in the field that I think everybody has really felt over the last couple of years. But coming back to the point about, you know, I felt watching it and that, you know, we were losing a little bit of that service to the community. And, you know, we talked earlier this morning about the pressures on researchers and, you know, you know, just even keeping up with it.
And I think really as publishers being very responsible about the content we publish, yes, we want sustainable growth, but we want growth in content that people want to read and use and not losing, you know, not losing our mission and our purpose. Because I think everybody that goes into research, publishing feels that mission and purpose in their bones. Right and so that's where I really think that the cooperation comes in.
You know, the research community is really served by a healthy ecosystem of publishers. We could do that by. Yes healthy competition, good cooperation, surfacing good ideas and always keeping the researcher front and center. Janina, did you want to add anything? Yes, perhaps.
I, I really like to think about, for example, health competitions. But I think to have to have really healthy competitions, we need to consolidate a partnership. We need to discuss the goal of this partnership and what is this aspect. What do we expect of this partnership from both sides. And then we can have competition in the sense that, for example, I have seen corporations in my experience in two ways.
For example, regarding the peer review training. I have the opportunity to train undergraduate students here. But for example, they are cooperating with me in my research by helping me to understand if the Materials that we have created to train them, if they are good and appropriate to them. So I see my research with them as a cooperation. I'm training them and they also cooperate with me to be a better instructor.
And also I have seen cooperations. I have a research project on how we should communicate marijuana research to the public, and I have seen in Brazil some partnerships between patients and the universities to conduct research on marijuana treatment. And I really appreciate the way that they set expectations before we start to conduct research and how they cooperate to improve. For example, the CBD oil, that's a medication for children.
Who needs this medication with marijuana. So I think to have this good cooperation, healthy competition, we need to set up expectations and understand how we can benefit each other from these partnerships and collaborate with each other to reach a goal. Yes, this is my perspective. Thank you. I think with respect to cooperation, one of the things that aip is trying to do, and something we try to do at plos as well, was sort of rethink our mental maps around who our partners are within the industry.
Right? so I mean, when I started in this industry, mailing print journals around was very strange thing looking back on it. You know, publishers were publishers and, you know, the other stakeholders, whether they were researchers or funders or libraries were like over there. And we sort of stayed in our lanes. And increasingly, with all the change that we're experiencing now, that's really a luxury.
And it doesn't generate the skills or the innovation that we need to see to kind of weather this, this current phase of development. So, you know, partner purpose led publishing is three publishers. But a very sort of key component of our work is engaging with stakeholders outside of publishing, whether that's researchers, whether that's funders, whether that's institutions.
We recognize that, you know, it's a long game. And, you know, if we're going to be around for a while, we need to have firm roots in all those communities. And those communities are partners for cooperation as well. So the mental map needs to shift to start thinking of ourselves as players within a broader ecosystem where we actively work with those stakeholders instead of sort of thinking of them as over there.
Other questions co-panelists what do we have here? Well, first, Yeah, I ask the question to the room? Are any of you thinking about cooperation or consolidation in a different way, or seeing any of these as challenges to what your organizations are doing. Can you can you just grab the microphone? Thank you.
Thank you. Is it on? Yeah good. Hi, everyone. Jennifer Gibson with dryad. You guys, Thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. I'm coming to this from the perspective of both an open infrastructure provider and also the executive director of a 501 C3, a US based non-profit organization.
We we are very, very sensitive to the fact that the costs that we incur as an organization are costs that we then try to recapture from the academic enterprise. And as open infrastructure providers, our ambition is to lower costs and to lower the costs of research communication broadly. So I really appreciate the conversation, and I wonder if others are also thinking about how we can share across administrative of functions.
So in this position for the last three years, I'm really struck at how much money we spend on finance, administration, accounting, making sure that we're behaving responsibly from a legal perspective. I'm wondering if we all need separate executive directors, because while we're fabulous, this talent is a shared talent. It's something that's portable to different organizations. So that's what you've got me thinking of.
And I wonder if others see the same thing. Yeah all right. Hi, I'm John Silbert. I'm with Delta, I think. All right. I'll ask the awful questions now. So in thinking about consolidation and cooperation and partnerships, we're looking at two very different type of organizations.
We've got Taylor Francis. We've got ape ape not for profit. So if we take Taylor Francis side BJ Taylor Francis. And you're at Springer. Wolters kluwer, Elsevier. They're all, you know, ones looking to go public. Two public companies. Three public companies. What kind of pressure does that put on you when you think about, you know, the shareholders that are deciding sort of where the investment is and how the company is going to perform versus IP partnering with not for profits in response to the market.
And how are you going to be able to address this issue of what we just talked about, open infrastructure, because you even showed a map of, you know, greater open infrastructure. How do each of you address that given there's different pressures going on? One is shareholder pressure, one is market pressure. And what are you thinking about when it comes to building open infrastructure. And more, more, more, more cooperation in the industry?
Thanks sure. Yeah, I think each company is different that I've worked at. Right so I'm going to speak kind of in broad brushstrokes. I will say, you know, that I've spent a lot of time managing publishing teams, and one thing that you do is to make sure that the people who are interfacing with the journals and the researchers are not feeling that pressure from shareholders. Right and you try to create cultures internally where the goal is really focused on the mission and the purpose.
So that, you know, those teams are really not thinking about the bottom line. And I think you would I think sometimes that actually creates interesting internal cultures. You know, I've had things where I've been told by our executive team, you know, your team doesn't have a lot of commercial sensibility. And it's like, well, good. You know, I mean, good and bad, right?
I mean, we do need to be a healthy organization. I think a lot of, you know, really being able to deliver for the shareholders holders comes from actually doing what you do well and doing and being able to scale it and bringing in the right talent. I've never been in a place like I've been, you know, everywhere I've been.
There's always been a lot of real focus on utilizing resources carefully. You know, I think that we, you know, we have a view of the other side of the equation being a little bit easier to work for. But I don't know. That's naive perhaps. I think it's maybe the grass is always a little greener on the other side.
But anyway, I guess, you know, I'm babbling a little bit, but I think from my perspective, what I said at the end of the last thing is really true. I think that we need both to go around like, I think I would be hypocritical to sit up there and say, sit up here and say, well, I don't think companies should make profits because then why would I have a, you know, 401 401(k and invest in the stock market. Right we need a healthy business environment to survive.
We also need a healthy, non-profit environment to survive so that we can, you know, align sometimes our money with our really with our mission. So I think that there's a place for both of them. I think we both have unique pressures. But from what I've tried to do is that we really try to not have those pressures trickle down to every level of the organization, and we try to deal with it by, you know, being really as resource agile as we can possibly be and improving process.
So I'm going to take a different I think I understand your question. So I can always clarify if you. Yeah go ahead. Clarify I mean it's I mean it's a simple question that maybe it's not a simple question. It's the question is designed around the notion that the pressures for profit companies to partner are very different than for non-for-profit.
Right but you still have the same issue of trying to figure out partnerships. So what are your challenges versus. OK Thank you. I appreciate that. So I'm going to steal a line from a talk I gave last week. So forgive me. Those of you who are at the silver chair meeting, we sort of kicked off the conversation amongst a similar group of folks with a, perhaps a controversial statement, which is, you know, as much as we're all feeling pressure, we've talked about AI today.
We're talking about market consolidation. We're talking about the peer review crisis and article economies and, you know, impacts on revenue. Like we still live in a deeply stable industry. I mean, to Michelle's point, at the beginning of the day, we are still taking pictures of PDFS and sending them around, right? Like fundamentally, while we are while the pressure is real, I don't think it's acute in the way it is in other knowledge dissemination context.
And so this is something in talking with AP CEO that hadn't really occurred to me was, on the one hand, the risks of that are stifled innovation, right? in the context of our organizations. But the flip side of that, and I again, this kind of was like a wow moment for me is it was actually a lot of opportunity that exists when we have the kind of stability we have. And so coming from, you know, a small to midsize nonprofit which has real revenue pressures with respect to particularly the fact that we fund, you know, the work that our society does.
And that's not really negotiable. There's sort of two approaches we've taken to cooperation. One is this external partnership with two other like minded mission aligned societies, or I guess, three. So I'll say there's three approaches. So there's that stakeholder, there's this mental map adjustment that we're making around our partners aren't just other publishers, but there are other stakeholders that are values aligned.
And that goes a really long way when you're asking a library to pay more money every year, right? That goes a long way when you're trying to anticipate a funder mandate and the impact it's going to have on your business. But the third piece, which I think is underemphasized and really important, is certainly at aip, we are using the stability of the period that we're in to really, really double down on building teams that can execute in this emerging environment.
Right there's a tendency to be very hierarchical in our industry, to be very top down. You know, the boss makes the decisions. The rest of us, you know, hit the thing on the assembly line when it comes through. And simply like, just realistically, that is not a way any of us can work anymore. It doesn't it doesn't matter what kinds of organizations we're at.
And so engaging in practices that are enabling teams to be nimble, to experiment, to fail in a, in a safe, productive way, to disagree openly. A lot of these things can feel fluffy, but they're actually really important. When you do have a really acute moment, then where you have to make changes really quickly. And so I think cooperation really is three pronged. It's that, you know, like minded organizations that are the same like other publishers.
There's that mental map shift amongst who we partner with. But then there's also this understanding that if you've got this period of relative calm, are you investing in especially, you know, our primary resource is going to be our people. And and not, you know, massive reserves to invest in various things. So I think that would be our approach to what cooperation looks like.
It's just interesting that it's very similar. Right that last one. Right I mean, that's where we are really spending a lot of time is like, how do we make our teams more agile? How do we make our processes more agile? And that, you know, that a lot of investment goes into people and systems? Yeah, I just it's like I've never used a mic before.
I just want to add to that, too. I think, you know, the other thing is there is also an in-between, right? There are the societies that work with large commercial publishers. And something that's really important to keep in mind is that we have seen really successful partnerships. We have seen published societies that now have more access to things like research, integrity tools.
We have. They have much more streamlined workflows. They have financial stability, which is very important to their mission. So that is something that I think is, you know, it. It's important to keep in mind that consolidation is not inherently negative. And again, it's not foreordained. But you do want to think about where the incentives are taking us, because there does become a point when if these partnerships are not viable, if that balance between, you know, being able to sustain a society publisher and keep them financially whole and healthy, that turns into where the problem is, where now the balance between partners is not equal.
So that more than consolidation is the thing to look for. And I'm, you know, having worked with a lot of commercial publishers, we know that's something that they're aware of, we know also that the smaller publishers and the societies working with those larger partners are mindful of this. So, you know, again, it's not necessarily that there it it's not that necessarily that it basically both of these things have to coexist for things to work.
Hey it's working. Yep Tim Lloyd from live links again. So I run a really small business and it's been 10 years and we've done a lot of collaboration. And when you're a small organization, you really have to collaborate to achieve things. And there's sort of three consistent models I've seen work.
There's the model which involves commercial publishers, where it needs to be really clear that there is a valuable commercial reason for getting involved. So examples like that would be Seamless Access or get full text research where there's clear parts of. In those cases, infrastructure where it makes no sense for everyone to try and do themselves. And so there's a commercial advantage to being involved and everyone wins.
There are community initiatives like the switchboard or the open access book usage data trust, where there's open infrastructure that's needed. And, you know, that tends to be less attractive to commercial organizations and much more involved with collaborative and community organizations and can equally be advantageous. There are much more tactical projects where you essentially just approach organizations and say, let's experiment.
It's short term. It might be three months, it might be six months. The amount of effort involved on both sides is relatively few. You walk away with what you've learned, and that can be a very effective way just to start working with organizations and done a lot of that. The thread that runs through it all is culture, and I have approached a lot of organizations, many of whom in this room, about trying to collaborate in innovative stuff, and I get turned down much more often than I get success.
And the biggest single reason is culture. So the ones that do this most effectively, the organizations that have a culture that supports their staff, getting involved in things that will not pay off next week or next month or the next three months, but are learnings that are invaluable and might pay off in 6 to 12 months or 18 to 20 4 or 36 months. And I think we do a lot of brow beating as an industry.
Why aren't we more innovative? Well, you could all start being more innervated by ensuring that you give your teams time to start doing innovative things and looking for people to collaborate with. You know, your team may not have all the skills, but there'll be other teams and other organizations that do so. You know, we have it within our grasp as a community to do this. Relatively few of us actually do it.
Hi Christina from one and I just a big thumbs up Tim Thank you. You teed up what I wanted to say perfectly. And I think that's exactly the point. Is building a culture of cooperation and collaboration. You know, one is a nonprofit collaborative. But, you know, we operate out of we operate at a small scale. And I think in nonprofit land, we don't often do those things that lead to a culture of we're not used to, you know, mergers and acquisitions and all of that.
So it's not part of our mental map. So what can we do at our organizations to build that muscle, to do the reps of being brave enough to have the blue sky conversation? You know, encouraging people. And because we don't have, like Sarah, you mentioned, we don't necessarily have the bandwidth to like throw spaghetti at the wall and say, well, I got this huge sandbox and well, there went $1 million.
We don't have that luxury. So can you talk a bit about how you find the capacity to, like, build that culture and walk that line between we really want to build a culture of collaboration and partnership and experimentation in a relatively safe space when we don't have, you know, massive sandboxes to play in. So one of the things that I've tried to, you know, before I came to ape, it was very clear.
Open science meant open access, right. We're going to double down on open access. And that's what open science means. And one of the things I sort of proposed to the organization was we need to rethink that definition. That's a very narrow definition. And as we've been going through the work of defining what that's going to mean for ape. One of the things I really stressed with leadership is whatever we end up deciding, open science is going to be one of the key prongs of our strategy has got to be building a quote unquote, open science culture within the organization, right?
And if you think about it, our industry doesn't really love I mean, we talk about how difficult it is to get open science traction with our communities, but even internally with how we work, we're not necessarily very good at these things, right? Projects are not necessarily collaborative and transparent, open about how they're going, open about who's involved, how they work. What was the what was the result of that project or pilot?
So the muscle of building teams that instinctually act like this and hiring people for whom that is their primary mode of working, I think it has to start at recruitment. It has to start at the top of the organization. I mean, Alex Vance came to ape making the pitch to the board that this was going to be the kind of innovation she wanted to push. So social innovation within the organization as opposed to product innovation, service innovation processes, things like that.
Right so we're going to get the people optimized to do the kinds of work and experimentation we need, because these other forms of innovation may not have been working for us. So I think that's a big part, and that's kind of boring. But in some ways, you know, it's the reps of the training, the expectations set. The moment that you interview reiterated every time you work, cross functionally reiterated through your managers.
Right it's a discipline that you work on and you build in terms of walking the line with that kind of experimentation, we've had to be very strategic around which areas of experimentation we invest in, you know, ambitious enough that if they're successful, they move the needle. So we don't want this incremental change for its own sake, but recognizing epic failures, you know, that we can't play in that space either.
So, so very much taking an agile approach to how you think about experimentation whilst trying to build teams that are instinctively agile in their thinking. And working. So it's very much a two pronged piece. And coming into it four years after the work has started, I was just sharing with our reverse roundtable. It's very surprising when you have peer to peer accountability around these modes of open, open culture within the organization.
So, Tim, I'm really glad you flagged that because we could stand to all do I think better there? Are we on time? OK we should check with Giannina, too. Janina, did you want to dive in on anything? I don't think so. Thank you. Yeah so we are on time.
So I don't know if you should end the session. Susan letty. Yes sounds good. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much to our panelists. And Giannina and John. Thank you. We're going to have a quick break like we often do here, just to turn over and get ready for the next session.
So don't go far. We'll start again in a few minutes. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Check check.
Yeah, I needed it. Like, you know, I needed to decompress after that intense experience. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. You know, and like, you know, it's like, this is the core. So, you know, I'm still like. Hi, Susan. Yeah no. Check, check.
One two. One two. Check all right. I have no organizational memory, so someone asked me something. That's great. You just be like, Yeah, I'll be like, Yeah, I meant to log in and see Susan and just confirm that he just said that he was not yet logged in. Well, that was two minutes ago.
Well, hopefully he'll be all right. Thanks we can hear you. Good Thanks. Good Thanks for letting me know.
Oh, OK. I'm just live in Boston. So they are. I'll try not to get in too much trouble without John here. You all decide how to? So we decided how we're going to present. Well, I'll just advance and advance our own the slides. That should be fine. Did he want to do an intro or anything?
I Susan. What kind of playing it by ear. Oh, John. Yeah so I'm just contingency planning. Yeah do you do. I know I'm advancing slides, but I wasn't sure how else I could help. So it's janaina. Janaina janaina.
Yeah, I mean, I looked she told me to call it Jane the first year, and I got used to that. And then she told me a couple of weeks ago to change it had to be imprinted. Yeah, the John's there. OK Oh, he is there. OK, John. Thank you. He said he was happy to introduce, but technically, let's see if he set up to do that.
And if not, then. Yeah OK. Thank you. Sorry and we'll do in person questions. Obviously there's some point to them but he'll advantage. So yes. I can hear the room. Suzanne, I'm wondering if maybe that's fine. So then I'm just an extra.
Yeah, I'll just use it. OK Yeah. I don't know. Can I do the job as well as you? Oh, stop! Oh, my God, you're so much closer to this. So, Jana, Ina says she is doing it. Pros Oh, that's kind of her. OK that's great.
They've been sorted out. Yeah so. OK you're good. That's perfect. I'm here if you need me. Thanks I don't remember what I was supposed to say. I think your security doesn't.
Have it all written down because I have all the stuff I want to throw in from this morning, and I'm like, I have to stay disciplined through it, like weaving it. It'll be interesting. It makes it more engaging. There it is. More time for discussion. I'm looking forward to this.
Yeah and who has the, like questions? Like John was going to start with questions for us in case people are slow. I'll have some ready. Yeah why don't we just ask, like my first question? Well, the first one was like, what is a consultant to you? And then from there, we go. OK OK.
Segment:1 Consolidation, Competition, and Cooperation.
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Oh, I got to go bigger. I have a microphone. I need to use it. Hi, everyone. So it's 3:00. We have some virtual speakers here today who will be introducing us.
But it's my job to ask everyone to sit. So we can get the session started. And then I think, Giannina, are you going to be doing the introductions for everyone? Yes OK, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to your session on consolidation, competition and cooperation.
As we all know, the publishing landscape is constantly evolving, driven by forces such as technological advancements, market shifts, and the growing need for collaboration today, we will be exploring how consolidation, competition, and partnerships are reshaping scholarly communication. I'm a doctor, a postdoc, information science at the University of Illinois, and I'll be filling in for John, who is sick today, to share this dynamic panel.
We have an excellent line up of speakers, each of whom I would let to introduce themselves, and they bring diverse and expert perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that come with these changes today, you will hear from a publishing consultant, a senior commercial publisher, a society innovator, and myself a researcher about the cycle and barriers of a partnership.
A bold new coalition built on purpose, above profit, and the consolidation happening in publishing technology and its impact on competition today. The panel will address problems in common that scholarly communication stakeholders face, and would be better solved through partnerships, and the barriers to consolidating these partnerships do change, such as power imbalance, conflicts of interest, and competition.
Each speaker will introduce herself and present for about 6 to 8 minutes, after which we will open the floor for a 25 minute or so Q&A session. I encourage you to engage with their ideas and prepare your questions as we move through the discussion. John will monitor the Zoom chat and for those of you in the room, there are microphones you should feel free to approach after the presentation. Now, without further ado, let's begin.
And Laura, the floor is yours. Great Thank you. I'm back. So, Hi, I'm Laura Ricci, Sr. Consultant at Clark and Esposito. In my job, I get to work with organizations of all sizes large, small, independent society, commercial publishers.
So we get a very in-depth and also a very broad view of what's going on in the industry. So I'm always really grateful for opportunities like this to say a little bit about what we're seeing. And today I'm going to focus by talking a little bit about consolidation, because this is the kind of thing that everybody can kind of feel. But I want to start and frame the discussion by sharing a little bit of data and kind of putting some framing around it.
So first, this is Connie's analysis from our recent industry trends report. It shows the number of articles published each year by business model according to dimensions. And we've done some analysis on this to kind of winnow it down to specifically journal article content. So there's some trends we're all very familiar with, right. There's an increase in the overall number of articles published each year.
It's driven by the increase in gold away articles and hybrid articles and subscription articles. Other business models have stayed largely static. Right and that makes intuitive sense, right? There have been more mandates and with gold away there, the number of articles published has a direct correlation with revenues earned. And that's not the case for other business models.
So where gold away is the primary business model, there is an incentive to get bigger in terms of Article volume. My colleague David Crotty published an analysis in the Scholarly Kitchen showing the proportion in the Web of Science corpus of the top 5% 10% and 20% of publishers by Article volume. Publishing does have a long tail. We all know of publishers that have one or two journals, but this is the fat head.
And what you can see is that the share of this fat head has increased steadily, and there have been different phases over the last 25 years. So in the early 2000, there was a little bit of increase in consolidation because of the big deal. It became harder to sell independent journals, and so publishing publishers of 1 or 2 journals were joining up with larger organizations. Then things were relatively flat for a while.
And in 2013, we saw our first oa mandates, things like the Holdren memo ukri. And then you can see another slight uptick in consolidation. And then 2018 was plan s, and you can see a big uptick. And that also coincides with the rise of transformative agreements. So in short, in 2000 the top 5% of publishers were about 40% of the Web of Science corpus. By 2022, that proportion was 60% And now we as an industry, we comport with the pareto principle.
80% of the articles in this corpus are published by 20% of the publishers. So that wasn't always the case, as you can see. So all of this consolidation that we're feeling is, in fact, real. And again, I mentioned transformative agreements. They are a big reason for this. This data shows the share as well of articles published under transformative agreements.
And you can see how much of it is taken up by 5 large publishers Elsevier, Springer, nature, TNF, Wiley, sage. The reasons for this are many. First, these deals are very complex. Libraries have limited time, and so to make the most of their time, they tend to focus on the large publishers. These are the publishers where they start for a publisher.
They're also very labor intensive as well. So if you don't have the staffing and the people and the data infrastructure, then it's harder for you to strike these deals too. And lastly, it doesn't make much sense to spend time on a deal where you are talking about one journal and there's maybe one or two articles published per year. At that point, you may as well just pay the APC. But if you're talking about a deal with hundreds of journals, with hundreds of papers published, it makes a lot more sense.
I do have to mention, of course, that despite the clear effects that transformative effect agreements are having, this is still a very pluralistic market. So a lot of the coverage is concentrated in countries where, for example, in Sweden, Finland, the UK, where a lot of the deals are being struck by large national licensing consortia. Elsewhere so, for example, in the US down here, there's a lot more Federated approach to journal negotiations.
So publishers are striking deals in these places, but they tend to be more one at a time with consortia and so on. So not with sort of this big, bigger customer with higher coverage. So the result is that there is a mix of business models out there. This isn't caused by rtas, of course, but it's visible in the coverage under rtas and therefore the prevailing business models from region to region.
And this is really high level. I'm trying to go quick, so I want to swing back to talking more generally about open access. And that theme of incentivizing greater article publication. One way to increase publication volume and maintain market share is to pursue a portfolio strategy. So this is a great diagram published in learned publishing. A while back that I love.
I think it's a really clear depiction of the nature portfolio strategy. So the idea is that articles submitted higher up the pyramid say to nature that don't get accepted to that higher up journal, that the most prestigious journal can be transferred somewhere else in the portfolio, and find a publication home with that publisher. Think about the effect of that on other portfolios. So it used to be that if you were an author with a what you thought was a high quality paper, if you got rejected from nature, you would then take it to another high prestige journal, you would take it to another disciplinary flagship and so on.
In this scenario, if you're presented with an option where you can publish very quickly and you can still have a nature branded publication, you may take that option and that it may be that paper never goes to another publisher. So that creates a lot more competition for submissions because it's that first submission that counts. There are examples of ways that publishers can do this without a fully owned portfolio. We have seen societies partner with each other for co-owned transfer portfolio journals that they both share in.
We have seen high prestigious journals agree to transfer papers between each other, but the portfolio incentive structure is much stronger than this generally. And so it's something for societies that don't have as many journals to think very hard about. And lastly, I'll touch on this very quickly because of that importance of the first submission.
Lots of effort is going into creating a good author experience and author marketing and so on. So there's one more type of consolidation to mention, and that is the ownership of these tools. We're seeing tighter integrations between both upstream and downstream in the research workflow. And there's also, you know, in some cases for public societies that are partnering with publishers, for example, a little bit of lock in.
So we're seeing more societies who are partnering with publishers and need to move to their publishers preferred submission system, for example. The reason being that's where the publisher has built in all of these complicated capabilities to manage tos and things like that. On the other hand, I will say it is better than a fax machine, so not all of these things are bad.
This has been really 1,000 foot view. I was given six minutes so I covered a lot with it. My my big takeaway here though, is that obviously the competitive landscape is shifting. Also very importantly, consolidation is not foreordained, right? All of this is happening as the result of incentives. And something I will just leave here before, which I hope prompts some discussion in the next section is our industry has a lot of consolidation, but a lot of that consolidation is happening through partnerships.
So I'm glad that cooperation is also a theme of this panel, but I will, in the interest of time, turn it over to my fellow panelists, and I hope we talk more about this. Thank you. Thank you. Laura loves Meredith. Are you ready?
Sorry Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with you today. Just a very brief overview of me. I'm Meredith Masri, and I'm the senior vice president for editorial development at Taylor Francis. This is a role that I started just at the beginning of this month. So I'll give you a very whirlwind tour of how I ended up here.
I came into research publishing from research. So I'm trained as a neuroscientist, and I started my career as a content handling editor at Cell press. And then I moved to Nature Neuroscience. At what was then nature publishing group, a few months before we merged with Springer. And then I spent about the last 9 plus years at Springer Nature working in various aspects of their journal portfolio.
And so now at Taylor Francis, I'm doing a strategic role for their journal portfolio. OK I'm going to talk a bit about the issue of consolidation, cooperation and competition from a larger publisher. OK so our purpose is to foster human progress through knowledge. And so we see that as having three main aims that we focus on at Taylor Francis. So that would be supporting researchers.
You know, giving them the journals that they need with high integrity and good visibility for their work. And share, you know, so that they can get their work out there in the scientific community and further human progress or foster progress, validating the research. And, you know, the last couple of years in particular, have been really important in terms of the research integrity space.
And so really, we're thinking a lot about how we can invest and improve our processes around making sure that the scientific literature is valid and trustworthy. And then, of course, connecting the community. So really sparking those ideas for further progress by bringing people together. And so we think a lot about how to build capacity in these key areas that are aligned with our purpose.
And that would be along the main themes of creating trusted journal portfolios, improving our processes along the lines of, what's been touched on already today? Better author experience, better experience. Also, for the researchers that engage with us as editors and reviewers, strengthening the research integrity and expanding visibility and access to content. OK, so this is just a whirlwind and kind of very overview tour of how Taylor Francis has developed.
So if you see on the left hand side, we are an old publisher. So we started in 1798 technically with one journal, and we grew to what we are today. But I think that anyone who's worked for a publisher that's been around for quite a long time knows that there's benefits and challenges to having a long legacy. And, you know, so on one hand, you know, you have a lot of experience with traditional academic publishing.
But as we're all talking about, you know, today, the research landscape is changing. The research publishing landscape is changing. And it can be really hard for research for organizations with huge and long legacies to adapt to that. So what we try to do is we try to join forces, but we do it in a very selective way. And so over the last several years, and I put on here that in 2004 we merged with informa.
There there are partner company. But over the past, let's say less than a decade, we've been really focused on bringing in expertise that historically we didn't have as a traditional research publisher. And in particular, like, can we find people that have a like purpose to us? But a very different startup mentality way of thinking, a lot of innovation where we can really bring kind of two sides of the same or two sides of the coin together and strengthen each other.
So with that, and we started working on open research with the acquisition of dove press in 2017. This would be right after around the when those mandates were coming out. And, you know, every publisher is thinking about how do we start offering open access options with 2020? Faculty of 1,000 joined us, bringing an innovative platform that was something that was unlike anything that we had in house.
And then in last year, it was the future science group joined us. And again, it's thinking about how do we connect communities on digital platforms. That was something that was very interesting to us about what they were doing. And finally this year with peer j, which is another open research publisher that is very interested in making the process better, making it faster, making it more efficient, making it more cost effective for authors outside of pure joining forces, we have partnerships that we explore.
These are just a couple of quick case studies that I'm not going to go into with huge depth, but we're always looking for interesting experiments to try. So we have verified that is a partnership with the Gates Foundation. It aligns with the mission of the Gates Foundation to have research that they fund available to the community as quickly as possible. So they want everything to be up on a preprint server.
What we wanted to do here, that was a little bit different than some of the preprint servers that were out there, was to have rigorous checks before things go up online. So really kind of feeding into that whole aspect of the research integrity and what we could do there. And then we're also partnering with researchgate to explore journal homes. We know a lot of researchers are on researchgate, coming back to kind of meeting your community where you are.
We've been exploring how we can provide greater access to where researchers are and where they're engaging with content. And then just say, I think we all feel a lot of pressure. Being at a big publisher does not make that any easier. I can tell you that from lived experience. And so, you know, we work really hard to make our business successful. So we can invest in our mission. And so, you know, we really try to support good ideas.
So that's particularly with this focus that we have on, you know, pairing up with startups and giving their ideas longevity and more reach, investing back in research. So, you know, working on expanding and improving our discounts and waivers program, the open access space, pairing up with society partners and doing some capacity building projects when we have the opportunity and then trying to be better citizens, we think a lot about sustainability and how we can improve our processes for a world that needs us all to be more sensitive.
And, you know, we're really working a lot on reducing our global footprint, particularly around our print space, but actually everything as a business, hopefully by 2023. I think that's it. It's a whirlwind tour. Thanks for your attention. Looking forward to the discussion.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah rouhi. I'm the director of Open science at aip publishing. I joined six months ago coming from floss. So quite, quite a spectrum of experiences to share today, but I'm really going to be focusing mostly on sharing a bit more information about the purpose led publishing coalition.
We are a coalition of three physical science funders iop publishing apps and aip. The goal was to commute to communicate shared values that all three nonprofit publishers have, and hopefully to create efficiencies and scale to help optimize us for the future as our industry continues to change rapidly by facilitating some scale amongst the three of us. So the reality is, as we've been looking at data across all three publishers, the threats to our business, many of which we've talked about today, are really not from the other physics publishers, but from the kind of consolidation we've been seeing largely from commercial publishers.
We do not have the resources and the footprint that many of those other publishers do. We have less flexibility around failure in terms of piloting things that don't work out, and we don't have as much resource when acute challenges kind of creep up, we've got to be a little bit more nimble, a little bit more flexible. And we figured that working together to enable that kind of collaboration was going to be more successful than competing amongst ourselves.
So one of the things that motivated this was very much our overlapping communities. All three publishers are engaging largely with the same physical sciences community. And in some of the research we've done, we're looking at results from our 2023 aip brand study. The question that was asked for. This is to please think about not for profit publishers versus commercial publishers in the physical sciences, and then from the following list, articulate the top three things a nonprofit could do to distinguish itself.
And these were four things that all of us do. And consider to be of, of top importance at our organizations. But of course, seeing it validated by our communities was really important. So of course, the highest possible peer review standards. Never jeopardizing research integrity for financial gain, publishing only sound science that genuinely adds to the base of scientific knowledge and existing for the benefit of science and those communities, not shareholders.
As you can imagine, given all the conversations we had today at the round tables in the morning sessions, the first three things very much are in tension with a lot of the pressures that we're seeing around volume based publishing revenue tied to article volume, et cetera so that continues to be kind of a tension that we're experiencing. But the commitments we've made are clear. We're going to invest 100% of our funds back into science.
We're only going to publish content that genuinely adds to scientific knowledge. I think you could argue there's a lot of work to do there to figure out how to do that in a way that makes sense. We're going to ensure our terms are reasonable in terms of the cost of our services and the cost of our partnerships, and try to be as transparent around those things as possible. We're going to put research integrity ahead of our profit. And when we make mistakes, we are going to be public about setting them right.
So we're never going to relinquish our not for profit status. And the shareholders that we care about our science and no one else. So how are we actually collaborating? And many of you come from society backgrounds. You know that if you're small, you have certain challenges, and if you're larger, you have different kinds of challenges. So my experience of purpose led publishing or PLP so far since I've joined has been wow, you're really trying to get sort of three battleships to do synchronized swimming together, which is really a challenge in a lot of different ways.
So a lot of this effort has been. Starting small and figuring out where are the places where we feel comfortable collaborating, where are the places where there's a clear competition component that we're still trying to navigate, and where are the pieces where our missions are completely aligned. And so collaboration makes sense. So these are four areas that we are absolutely working on stakeholder outreach and engagement, obviously bringing efficiency and scale to peer review and research integrity, and then exploring ways to further enable artificial intelligence in peer review.
So there should be announcements coming later in the year, next year, beginning of the year around some of these efforts. We announced the coalition back in February, but we've been mostly with our heads down actually doing the work. So we hope to report more publicly on what we've been doing in the coming months. So you can go to our website purpose led publishing.org. And with that, I will happy to take questions at the end.
Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to share my screen. Can you see my screen? Yes yes. Thank you for confirming. So Hi, everyone. Again, I'm NeNe.
I will be giving a talk on building partnerships in bridge through training programs in higher education. What I have done and what I would like to do more through collaborations. So I'm a postdoc as a postdoc here at the University of Illinois. I conduct research on peer review, training and public participation in the peer review process and also in science communication and public engagement.
Science in health science and I have been translating my research into many different activities, so I teach a scholar communication. I mentor students, I have two students working on peer review projects, and I also recently I was invited to do to do administrative work. And in this position I have been assisting my department with a visiting exchange program. So basically what I'm doing is translating my research in training in all of these different work that I do here.
So the first partnership that I would like to share with you today is the peer review workshop series. Last year, the School of Information science partnered with the main library, and I spoke to them to create and develop a peer review workshop workshop series for the University. And they felt very happy because it was the first peer review training that we have in the library. And the goal of this peer review workshop series was informing the campus stakeholders about many types of peer review models and the role of reviewers and editors and authors during the review process.
Another goal was to build the interest in scholarly communication, and also interest about the peer review process, and another goal was supporting students initiatives in scholarly publishing. What it means. It means that I was giving the workshops at the main library for campus stakeholders, and then I was repeating some of these workshops for the editorial board of the daily noisy students, undergraduate research journals and the all-Star awards is all composed by undergraduate students, including the editor themselves.
They are undergraduate students. So we developed this and the University supporting this also to support their interest in scholarly publishing, it's really beautiful to see their interest in scholarly publishing. And another partnership that I have been involved on is a partnership between the global education and training at the Illinois international and the School of Information science this year, the School of Information science has partnered with the global education and training to host some data science scholars from Kazakhstan, and the bolashak program is a program is hosted by the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education.
It's a nine month program designed and developed and managed by global education and training, and some objectives of this program is enhancing academic and research skills, facilitating collaborative research projects, promoting cultural exchange, and most importantly, is training the pedagogical skills of these scholars. So basically what I'm doing, as you can see here in this photo, we have a high school welcome event to these scholars from Kazakhstan.
And I'm assisting my department with this partnership by helping to pair up researchers from Kazakhstan with researchers from the School of Information science. And we also I have been supporting with fine seats available for them where they can auditing courses. And they can also observe, for example, how a data science courses has been taught here in the US. And I also have been supporting this partnership by helping or organizing workshops and talks about research and publishing and teaching based on the needs.
And on the interests of these scholars from Kazakhstan. Another way that I involved with this partnership is that I'm helping to research techniques for teaching known natives of English, English of the English language. So we basically when we organize these workshops, we try to consider aspects about how it would look like to transfer knowledge for those who speaks in another language besides English.
So what I would like to do more to collaborations. So regarding the peer reviewed workshops, I would like to see more partnerships between academia and industry, because when I went and my students, we collect data about peer reviewed training, we see sometimes that many of the students, they would like to have someone to talk about their peer review experience and have the knowledge assessed by someone like an instructor and many online peer review trainings.
They don't offer these options of having someone to talk about or to get a feedback about their peer review reports that they are writing, for example. And also regarding higher education and collaborations, we all know that research is very competitive and knowledge is power, and I would like to see more collaborations addressing soft to power through knowledge diplomacy. It means that we have a lot of competitiveness, dominance and self-interest in research and in publishing.
And I would like to see more two way partnerships in education, in research to address, for example, problems that we have and issues that we have, for example, about open access, how we can build more global teams to address some questions and problems that we have to solve regarding publishing and research, for example, and also based on research on internationalization of higher education. When we are talking about international collaborations, we are talking in international relations among countries.
So when we build partnerships that we could have values like cooperation, partnerships, exchange, we can cooperate to have a more peaceful world. And so my goal is, is to create these partnerships to help to support one of the goals of the sustainable, sustainable development goals, that is, to ensure that all learners, they acquire the skills and knowledge that they need to develop themselves in the worlds, but also how we can promote a culture of peace and non-violence and appreciation of cultural diversity through collaborations and partnerships.
And I would like to invite you to finalize my talk, like thinking about this song of John Lennon in imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say, I'm a dreamer, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you will join us and the world will be as one. And Thank you so much for listening to my talk. Thank you.
All right. Well, Thank you so much, Jane. We're sorry you're not here in person. And, John, for organizing us. We we miss him today as well. We're going to sort of kick off with some questions for each other, but we're hoping that that will just facilitate a conversation with all of you. So as and when the questions come up, please come up to the podium or make sure you have a microphone so our colleagues online can hear.
And online folks will keep an eye out for your questions as well. So the first question to my co-panelists, when you're thinking about where the industry is with our respective hats on, what does consolidation, competition or cooperation any of those three things mean to you all? And then certainly to the audience, be curious what those things mean for you.
I can start, though. I can't start because my mic is on. OK, you can hear me, but I don't know how to work mix. OK, so I touched on this a lot of the trends that I was looking that you can see in the data, you'll notice that I mentioned in several cases, these are times when there was consolidation because publishers started to work with larger commercial, larger commercial publishers.
So one of the things that's unique about our industry is that a lot of the consolidation is happening because of Partnerships. Smaller publishers will partner with larger publishers. So that's different than an acquisition, right? So a lot of the, you know, different organizations are publishing more. It's because they're working with a lot more societies. So something that we think about a lot at Clark and Esposito and what I do every day is, you know, partnerships also are based on incentives.
They have to work for everybody. They are not permanent. So one of the reasons for consolidation lately is because it's hard, as I said, for societies to have access to large transformative agreements by themselves. And so if because of more mandates, more pressure to publish a way. Tos are one way to do that.
But I think the other thing to think about is that partnerships, again, it's not locked in. It does require cooperation in those cases. So if you are a society, the thing I would encourage you to do is think about making sure the partnerships you have work for you, making sure that the business model of a transformative agreement works for you. You know, it isn't eroding your licensing revenue, that it's not sort of taking all of your direct subscriptions and your relationships with customers and putting them in a big package.
There are lots of different ways of looking at this. And then also, you know, as you if you are a society in a commercial partner, publisher, partnership, thinking about how you can maintain what you do have and the value that you have as a society to your community, and thinking ahead to not just your current agreement, but your next agreement. What kinds of things can you do to sort of protect your journal, its editorial integrity and the kinds of things that make your journal strong?
So in this industry, I think there's a lot of both going on. And I think that's actually something that's kind of unique about us too. OK Oh it works. I should have prepared, but I like being off the cuff. So I think I'll talk actually a little bit about competition and then maybe get and end on a note of cooperation. And I think, you know, I come from first from a perspective of having worked in this field for companies that have a lot of resources, which is a privileged position, no doubt, but it doesn't make you immune from competition.
And I think everybody in this room will have really felt it, regardless of where you live or work or live, you know, competition in recent years and having been in this field for a while, I think that probably the last five years have been like nothing I've ever seen. And, you know, first there was the real, like, change in publishing behavior that COVID triggered. And then all of a sudden, we saw these huge surges in content and growth.
And, you know, when you start seeing your competitors growing around you, that makes you very worried that you are not keeping up. And then, you know, what wasn't on Laura's charts was, well, you know, some of the Borno publishers and, you know, for some of the legacy publishing houses, you think a lot about disruption, right? Like you have this, you know, you feel that you are very much prone to disruption.
And it looked like for the last few years, like you were strongly being disrupted. You know, what we all now know is that some of the things that were used to fuel these really eye popping levels of growth kind of opened the door for some of the research integrity problems that we're seeing now, and I feel that we're in a bit of a correction phase, right? We want growth. Everybody in the room wants growth to be a healthy organization.
It needs to be sustainable growth. And so I think, you know, for me, like there's just been a lot of really intense dynamics around competition in the field that I think everybody has really felt over the last couple of years. But coming back to the point about, you know, I felt watching it and that, you know, we were losing a little bit of that service to the community. And, you know, we talked earlier this morning about the pressures on researchers and, you know, you know, just even keeping up with it.
And I think really as publishers being very responsible about the content we publish, yes, we want sustainable growth, but we want growth in content that people want to read and use and not losing, you know, not losing our mission and our purpose. Because I think everybody that goes into research, publishing feels that mission and purpose in their bones. Right and so that's where I really think that the cooperation comes in.
You know, the research community is really served by a healthy ecosystem of publishers. We could do that by. Yes healthy competition, good cooperation, surfacing good ideas and always keeping the researcher front and center. Janina, did you want to add anything? Yes, perhaps.
I, I really like to think about, for example, health competitions. But I think to have to have really healthy competitions, we need to consolidate a partnership. We need to discuss the goal of this partnership and what is this aspect. What do we expect of this partnership from both sides. And then we can have competition in the sense that, for example, I have seen corporations in my experience in two ways.
For example, regarding the peer review training. I have the opportunity to train undergraduate students here. But for example, they are cooperating with me in my research by helping me to understand if the Materials that we have created to train them, if they are good and appropriate to them. So I see my research with them as a cooperation. I'm training them and they also cooperate with me to be a better instructor.
And also I have seen cooperations. I have a research project on how we should communicate marijuana research to the public, and I have seen in Brazil some partnerships between patients and the universities to conduct research on marijuana treatment. And I really appreciate the way that they set expectations before we start to conduct research and how they cooperate to improve. For example, the CBD oil, that's a medication for children.
Who needs this medication with marijuana. So I think to have this good cooperation, healthy competition, we need to set up expectations and understand how we can benefit each other from these partnerships and collaborate with each other to reach a goal. Yes, this is my perspective. Thank you. I think with respect to cooperation, one of the things that aip is trying to do, and something we try to do at plos as well, was sort of rethink our mental maps around who our partners are within the industry.
Right? so I mean, when I started in this industry, mailing print journals around was very strange thing looking back on it. You know, publishers were publishers and, you know, the other stakeholders, whether they were researchers or funders or libraries were like over there. And we sort of stayed in our lanes. And increasingly, with all the change that we're experiencing now, that's really a luxury.
And it doesn't generate the skills or the innovation that we need to see to kind of weather this, this current phase of development. So, you know, partner purpose led publishing is three publishers. But a very sort of key component of our work is engaging with stakeholders outside of publishing, whether that's researchers, whether that's funders, whether that's institutions.
We recognize that, you know, it's a long game. And, you know, if we're going to be around for a while, we need to have firm roots in all those communities. And those communities are partners for cooperation as well. So the mental map needs to shift to start thinking of ourselves as players within a broader ecosystem where we actively work with those stakeholders instead of sort of thinking of them as over there.
Other questions co-panelists what do we have here? Well, first, Yeah, I ask the question to the room? Are any of you thinking about cooperation or consolidation in a different way, or seeing any of these as challenges to what your organizations are doing. Can you can you just grab the microphone? Thank you.
Thank you. Is it on? Yeah good. Hi, everyone. Jennifer Gibson with dryad. You guys, Thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. I'm coming to this from the perspective of both an open infrastructure provider and also the executive director of a 501 C3, a US based non-profit organization.
We we are very, very sensitive to the fact that the costs that we incur as an organization are costs that we then try to recapture from the academic enterprise. And as open infrastructure providers, our ambition is to lower costs and to lower the costs of research communication broadly. So I really appreciate the conversation, and I wonder if others are also thinking about how we can share across administrative of functions.
So in this position for the last three years, I'm really struck at how much money we spend on finance, administration, accounting, making sure that we're behaving responsibly from a legal perspective. I'm wondering if we all need separate executive directors, because while we're fabulous, this talent is a shared talent. It's something that's portable to different organizations. So that's what you've got me thinking of.
And I wonder if others see the same thing. Yeah all right. Hi, I'm John Silbert. I'm with Delta, I think. All right. I'll ask the awful questions now. So in thinking about consolidation and cooperation and partnerships, we're looking at two very different type of organizations.
We've got Taylor Francis. We've got ape ape not for profit. So if we take Taylor Francis side BJ Taylor Francis. And you're at Springer. Wolters kluwer, Elsevier. They're all, you know, ones looking to go public. Two public companies. Three public companies. What kind of pressure does that put on you when you think about, you know, the shareholders that are deciding sort of where the investment is and how the company is going to perform versus IP partnering with not for profits in response to the market.
And how are you going to be able to address this issue of what we just talked about, open infrastructure, because you even showed a map of, you know, greater open infrastructure. How do each of you address that given there's different pressures going on? One is shareholder pressure, one is market pressure. And what are you thinking about when it comes to building open infrastructure. And more, more, more, more cooperation in the industry?
Thanks sure. Yeah, I think each company is different that I've worked at. Right so I'm going to speak kind of in broad brushstrokes. I will say, you know, that I've spent a lot of time managing publishing teams, and one thing that you do is to make sure that the people who are interfacing with the journals and the researchers are not feeling that pressure from shareholders. Right and you try to create cultures internally where the goal is really focused on the mission and the purpose.
So that, you know, those teams are really not thinking about the bottom line. And I think you would I think sometimes that actually creates interesting internal cultures. You know, I've had things where I've been told by our executive team, you know, your team doesn't have a lot of commercial sensibility. And it's like, well, good. You know, I mean, good and bad, right?
I mean, we do need to be a healthy organization. I think a lot of, you know, really being able to deliver for the shareholders holders comes from actually doing what you do well and doing and being able to scale it and bringing in the right talent. I've never been in a place like I've been, you know, everywhere I've been.
There's always been a lot of real focus on utilizing resources carefully. You know, I think that we, you know, we have a view of the other side of the equation being a little bit easier to work for. But I don't know. That's naive perhaps. I think it's maybe the grass is always a little greener on the other side.
But anyway, I guess, you know, I'm babbling a little bit, but I think from my perspective, what I said at the end of the last thing is really true. I think that we need both to go around like, I think I would be hypocritical to sit up there and say, sit up here and say, well, I don't think companies should make profits because then why would I have a, you know, 401 401(k and invest in the stock market. Right we need a healthy business environment to survive.
We also need a healthy, non-profit environment to survive so that we can, you know, align sometimes our money with our really with our mission. So I think that there's a place for both of them. I think we both have unique pressures. But from what I've tried to do is that we really try to not have those pressures trickle down to every level of the organization, and we try to deal with it by, you know, being really as resource agile as we can possibly be and improving process.
So I'm going to take a different I think I understand your question. So I can always clarify if you. Yeah go ahead. Clarify I mean it's I mean it's a simple question that maybe it's not a simple question. It's the question is designed around the notion that the pressures for profit companies to partner are very different than for non-for-profit.
Right but you still have the same issue of trying to figure out partnerships. So what are your challenges versus. OK Thank you. I appreciate that. So I'm going to steal a line from a talk I gave last week. So forgive me. Those of you who are at the silver chair meeting, we sort of kicked off the conversation amongst a similar group of folks with a, perhaps a controversial statement, which is, you know, as much as we're all feeling pressure, we've talked about AI today.
We're talking about market consolidation. We're talking about the peer review crisis and article economies and, you know, impacts on revenue. Like we still live in a deeply stable industry. I mean, to Michelle's point, at the beginning of the day, we are still taking pictures of PDFS and sending them around, right? Like fundamentally, while we are while the pressure is real, I don't think it's acute in the way it is in other knowledge dissemination context.
And so this is something in talking with AP CEO that hadn't really occurred to me was, on the one hand, the risks of that are stifled innovation, right? in the context of our organizations. But the flip side of that, and I again, this kind of was like a wow moment for me is it was actually a lot of opportunity that exists when we have the kind of stability we have. And so coming from, you know, a small to midsize nonprofit which has real revenue pressures with respect to particularly the fact that we fund, you know, the work that our society does.
And that's not really negotiable. There's sort of two approaches we've taken to cooperation. One is this external partnership with two other like minded mission aligned societies, or I guess, three. So I'll say there's three approaches. So there's that stakeholder, there's this mental map adjustment that we're making around our partners aren't just other publishers, but there are other stakeholders that are values aligned.
And that goes a really long way when you're asking a library to pay more money every year, right? That goes a long way when you're trying to anticipate a funder mandate and the impact it's going to have on your business. But the third piece, which I think is underemphasized and really important, is certainly at aip, we are using the stability of the period that we're in to really, really double down on building teams that can execute in this emerging environment.
Right there's a tendency to be very hierarchical in our industry, to be very top down. You know, the boss makes the decisions. The rest of us, you know, hit the thing on the assembly line when it comes through. And simply like, just realistically, that is not a way any of us can work anymore. It doesn't it doesn't matter what kinds of organizations we're at.
And so engaging in practices that are enabling teams to be nimble, to experiment, to fail in a, in a safe, productive way, to disagree openly. A lot of these things can feel fluffy, but they're actually really important. When you do have a really acute moment, then where you have to make changes really quickly. And so I think cooperation really is three pronged. It's that, you know, like minded organizations that are the same like other publishers.
There's that mental map shift amongst who we partner with. But then there's also this understanding that if you've got this period of relative calm, are you investing in especially, you know, our primary resource is going to be our people. And and not, you know, massive reserves to invest in various things. So I think that would be our approach to what cooperation looks like.
It's just interesting that it's very similar. Right that last one. Right I mean, that's where we are really spending a lot of time is like, how do we make our teams more agile? How do we make our processes more agile? And that, you know, that a lot of investment goes into people and systems? Yeah, I just it's like I've never used a mic before.
I just want to add to that, too. I think, you know, the other thing is there is also an in-between, right? There are the societies that work with large commercial publishers. And something that's really important to keep in mind is that we have seen really successful partnerships. We have seen published societies that now have more access to things like research, integrity tools.
We have. They have much more streamlined workflows. They have financial stability, which is very important to their mission. So that is something that I think is, you know, it. It's important to keep in mind that consolidation is not inherently negative. And again, it's not foreordained. But you do want to think about where the incentives are taking us, because there does become a point when if these partnerships are not viable, if that balance between, you know, being able to sustain a society publisher and keep them financially whole and healthy, that turns into where the problem is, where now the balance between partners is not equal.
So that more than consolidation is the thing to look for. And I'm, you know, having worked with a lot of commercial publishers, we know that's something that they're aware of, we know also that the smaller publishers and the societies working with those larger partners are mindful of this. So, you know, again, it's not necessarily that there it it's not that necessarily that it basically both of these things have to coexist for things to work.
Hey it's working. Yep Tim Lloyd from live links again. So I run a really small business and it's been 10 years and we've done a lot of collaboration. And when you're a small organization, you really have to collaborate to achieve things. And there's sort of three consistent models I've seen work.
There's the model which involves commercial publishers, where it needs to be really clear that there is a valuable commercial reason for getting involved. So examples like that would be Seamless Access or get full text research where there's clear parts of. In those cases, infrastructure where it makes no sense for everyone to try and do themselves. And so there's a commercial advantage to being involved and everyone wins.
There are community initiatives like the switchboard or the open access book usage data trust, where there's open infrastructure that's needed. And, you know, that tends to be less attractive to commercial organizations and much more involved with collaborative and community organizations and can equally be advantageous. There are much more tactical projects where you essentially just approach organizations and say, let's experiment.
It's short term. It might be three months, it might be six months. The amount of effort involved on both sides is relatively few. You walk away with what you've learned, and that can be a very effective way just to start working with organizations and done a lot of that. The thread that runs through it all is culture, and I have approached a lot of organizations, many of whom in this room, about trying to collaborate in innovative stuff, and I get turned down much more often than I get success.
And the biggest single reason is culture. So the ones that do this most effectively, the organizations that have a culture that supports their staff, getting involved in things that will not pay off next week or next month or the next three months, but are learnings that are invaluable and might pay off in 6 to 12 months or 18 to 20 4 or 36 months. And I think we do a lot of brow beating as an industry.
Why aren't we more innovative? Well, you could all start being more innervated by ensuring that you give your teams time to start doing innovative things and looking for people to collaborate with. You know, your team may not have all the skills, but there'll be other teams and other organizations that do so. You know, we have it within our grasp as a community to do this. Relatively few of us actually do it.
Hi Christina from one and I just a big thumbs up Tim Thank you. You teed up what I wanted to say perfectly. And I think that's exactly the point. Is building a culture of cooperation and collaboration. You know, one is a nonprofit collaborative. But, you know, we operate out of we operate at a small scale. And I think in nonprofit land, we don't often do those things that lead to a culture of we're not used to, you know, mergers and acquisitions and all of that.
So it's not part of our mental map. So what can we do at our organizations to build that muscle, to do the reps of being brave enough to have the blue sky conversation? You know, encouraging people. And because we don't have, like Sarah, you mentioned, we don't necessarily have the bandwidth to like throw spaghetti at the wall and say, well, I got this huge sandbox and well, there went $1 million.
We don't have that luxury. So can you talk a bit about how you find the capacity to, like, build that culture and walk that line between we really want to build a culture of collaboration and partnership and experimentation in a relatively safe space when we don't have, you know, massive sandboxes to play in. So one of the things that I've tried to, you know, before I came to ape, it was very clear.
Open science meant open access, right. We're going to double down on open access. And that's what open science means. And one of the things I sort of proposed to the organization was we need to rethink that definition. That's a very narrow definition. And as we've been going through the work of defining what that's going to mean for ape. One of the things I really stressed with leadership is whatever we end up deciding, open science is going to be one of the key prongs of our strategy has got to be building a quote unquote, open science culture within the organization, right?
And if you think about it, our industry doesn't really love I mean, we talk about how difficult it is to get open science traction with our communities, but even internally with how we work, we're not necessarily very good at these things, right? Projects are not necessarily collaborative and transparent, open about how they're going, open about who's involved, how they work. What was the what was the result of that project or pilot?
So the muscle of building teams that instinctually act like this and hiring people for whom that is their primary mode of working, I think it has to start at recruitment. It has to start at the top of the organization. I mean, Alex Vance came to ape making the pitch to the board that this was going to be the kind of innovation she wanted to push. So social innovation within the organization as opposed to product innovation, service innovation processes, things like that.
Right so we're going to get the people optimized to do the kinds of work and experimentation we need, because these other forms of innovation may not have been working for us. So I think that's a big part, and that's kind of boring. But in some ways, you know, it's the reps of the training, the expectations set. The moment that you interview reiterated every time you work, cross functionally reiterated through your managers.
Right it's a discipline that you work on and you build in terms of walking the line with that kind of experimentation, we've had to be very strategic around which areas of experimentation we invest in, you know, ambitious enough that if they're successful, they move the needle. So we don't want this incremental change for its own sake, but recognizing epic failures, you know, that we can't play in that space either.
So, so very much taking an agile approach to how you think about experimentation whilst trying to build teams that are instinctively agile in their thinking. And working. So it's very much a two pronged piece. And coming into it four years after the work has started, I was just sharing with our reverse roundtable. It's very surprising when you have peer to peer accountability around these modes of open, open culture within the organization.
So, Tim, I'm really glad you flagged that because we could stand to all do I think better there? Are we on time? OK we should check with Giannina, too. Janina, did you want to dive in on anything? I don't think so. Thank you. Yeah so we are on time.
So I don't know if you should end the session. Susan letty. Yes sounds good. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much to our panelists. And Giannina and John. Thank you. We're going to have a quick break like we often do here, just to turn over and get ready for the next session.
So don't go far. We'll start again in a few minutes. Thank you.
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