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New Paradigms in the Shift to Publishing-as-a-Service
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New Paradigms in the Shift to Publishing-as-a-Service
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Segment:0 .
Hello and welcome to today's panel discussion on new paradigms and the shift to publishing as a service. This panel is particularly timely as we navigate the evolving landscape of scholarly publishing, where traditional models are being reimagined. As we learned in the last keynote speech, to adapt to digital innovations and to changing user expectations.
I am Annie Goering, publishing editor at RTI press, and I will be the moderator for this panel. My co-chair, Jenny Herbert, the associate publisher of researcher engagement at aip, is our online moderator. We are privileged to have with us today. Three fantastic panelists who bring a wealth of knowledge and diverse perspectives to this important conversation. First, I would like to introduce Julie Nash.
Julie is the VP of sales and partnership development for publishing solutions at Wiley, where she focuses on driving new business growth and shaping strategy for publishing services and software solutions. Julie is also the co-chair of SSPS career development committee. So we're very happy to have Julie. Next, we have Gwen Logan.
Gwen will be joining us online today. Gwen is the director of customer insights at aip publishing. She has spent more than two decades conducting insights initiatives across a variety of sectors. She has particular expertise in primary research around brand and communications development, foresight and product innovation. Lastly, I'm delighted to introduce Corinne Goodman. Corinne joined the publishing team at Virginia Tech in April 2017, and has been overseeing Virginia Tech publishing since June 2023.
She has a background in information science, digital humanities, and commercial e-textbook publishing. Curran works with faculty and students to create digital publications using a variety of tools and platforms. Please join me in welcoming our esteemed panelists Julie, Gwen, and Karen. I'm confident that their insights and expertise will provide us with a deeper understanding of the new paradigms and the shift to publishing as a service, and they will inspire us to think critically and creatively about the future of scholarly publishing.
So thank you very much. And we'll get started with Julie. Hello, everybody. So I'm going to just log back into my computer here. So I have my notes. Just a second. Great it's good to see everybody today and shout out to our folks that are joining us remotely as well, particularly our Cary, North Carolina office.
I think they had a question earlier. So I know there's a live group there. So happy to see everybody. So thank you so much for the introduction. So I just am going to focus today my talk on publishing as a service and thinking about authors as customers. So that's something that obviously was brought up a little bit in what Michelle has already said today, a nice sort of setup into what we're going to talk about.
And in this, I'm going to take us on a history lesson to where kind of we've been certainly within my career and kind of where I see us is where we are today. And then the challenges that we may have kind of going forward in the questions, certainly we need to solve. So this may or may not look familiar to many of you in the, in the audience here today.
So I'm going to date myself and tell a little bit of a story about when I started in academic publishing. So I started back when there was no scholar one, there was no editorial manager. There were lots and lots and lots of file folders, and every single manuscript was submitted. It came into us via FedEx package, a UPS package. It came in via the mail. If there was a holiday, a mail holiday, it was a journal office holiday.
It was the greatest day ever. We were able to catch up everything had literal date stamps that we put on it. Our primary source of communication to authors and to reviewers was a fax machine. So I've circled a couple of things here on this slide to sort of highlight what our key communication tools back in this day were, and really how we communicated with authors and how the role played with authors.
There you'll see a lovely little desktop computer there it was back in the glory days of not taking work home with you. So there was no laptop. We worked off of a desktop. Everything was caged on a standalone database within our office. If we wanted to solicit reviewers or send any sort of confirmation to authors, it went out via our happy little fax machine there, and then the file folders at the end and the filing cabinets were our primary mechanism to sort of track and hold on to manuscripts.
We needed a whole person, a whole full time person in our office just to do our filing and just to do a lot of the faxing. So we are a long ways away from that. But that was only for my career 20 to 25 years ago. So in history as it goes, and the older that I get, that does not seem very long ago. We've certainly made a lot of progress from that. And so when I take us really to kind of where I see us today and we've made some jumps in that space.
So I would say for, for the journals that I worked on, and at this day when it was at Duke, we moved on to an online peer review system in 2005. And that was an epiphany that absolutely opened the doors for much more efficiency. Happier authors 110% Happier staff. Happier societies publishers, much less money being spent in all of this process. So it felt like the absolute bliss of work.
We were able to sort of do things from home on travel. There's still a bit more, you know, bit of balance going on there, maybe creeped in a little bit more than other times. But we were saving so much time in the editorial processing, we didn't have to manage an additional person and authors were happier. It felt like the best place to be. Fast forward us to today.
So today we're functioning in sort of a similar way as we were maybe back in those glory days. Those laptops have gotten maybe a little bit smaller. There's a dog there on the lap of certainly we can work from sofas and all the rest of that. But as things have gotten faster, expectations of users' expectations of authors have also ramped up fast in what we would think of in sort of a tracking system process now was no longer fast enough.
So if we take us to this cartoon was from 2015. So in 2015, we certainly would have had about me personally 10 years or so using an online tracking system, 10 years or so in sort of this new referred to bliss state. And already we're starting to see sort of an increase and certainly would have started before 2015 of concerns about delay, concerns about efficiency, concerns about processing, concerns about journals, and many of the things also that Michelle referenced to certainly have been around and in the ecosystem for, for quite a bit.
And at the same time as we're moving toward the end of, you know, 2017, 2018, we're starting to see a real rise in difference of business models. And the shift is not just happening to how we do our jobs anymore or how we communicate with the authors. The shift is happening to give authors more power in the process.
Certainly, we can see from this cartoon there was an interest in more control, interest of more ownership of that research. And with the advent in the rise of open access, the decline of subscription model, we're really starting to put authors in the place of being our customers, not just sort of the folks on the other side of the mail package that comes in that we're dividing up, but really a key stakeholder in the process.
So we've started to think certainly within software development, within how we're doing services, of really servicing this group of people, absence of what publisher or what group they're coming to us from. So in that, I want to just kind of frame a little bit about what I see. We see as today's researcher challenges and things that are being thought about at the same time as publishing is coming into play and publishing concerns.
So economic uncertainty. Certainly funding how things are funded, how research is funded, how any of the publishing. Payments the apcs are being paid for is certainly something that's going through researchers minds. Research integrity. We also often think of that as a Gotcha moment for researchers. But if you flip that on the other side, really researchers don't want to be caught in that either.
So they're concerned and looking at ways internally in their offices to be able to screen for potential integrity issues. Certainly when they're working with big groups of authors, graduate students, there's elements in there that lots of people contributing and really having that quality control on their side. And also working with publications where the. The research integrity and the screening processes are high, that the validity of the publication is sound, desperate, desperate systems.
So when I say this, I'm sure everybody in this room will understand what I'm talking about. We have a lot of standalone systems, whether that's the peer review system, whether it's the platform, whether it's preprints that don't talk to each other. So we have production systems that sit-in the middle there. Sometimes some groups are using screening tools that even take you further outside of the workflow process and then have to come back in.
And so there's a lot of sort of frustration with users of all kinds on how to navigate that and what we as publishers or we as societies are doing to help our authors navigate through that bandwidth. I don't think there's anybody in this room that says that, gosh, you know, today I have so much extra time as opposed to that moment that I had back in 2005 thinking, gosh, this is like, I'm going to take up golf.
I don't know what else to do. There's so much time left. We are not at that moment. Researchers aren't either, so everybody is trying to make the most of the limited amount of time that they have. And the longer that some of our processes take, the more complicated they are, the more difficult that is for researchers and authors.
So I'm going to talk a little bit here about what authors tell us and how we know these things. So really what we're hearing from authors that are either coming to us directly through our UI, UX research teams or that we're talking to through customers like organizations that you all work for that really, these are some of the key things they're looking for. Efficiency things take too long. Things are too slow.
They need things to go faster. Communication and communication isn't just good email practice, but also if I'm going to submit to your journal, how do I know what your open access policies are? How do I know if I have a discount? Is there a transformative agreement. I don't find out about that until fairly far along into the process for a lot of journals. Customer service.
We've often said that honestly, this is a publishing. This is a customer service job that has to do with publishing. And we've really felt that way for quite, quite a long time. I come from services, organization, services, background, and that's something that we really stick to. But really our customer base, our authors are pushing us on that. How can they get results from us in a faster way, simpler submission processes?
This is certainly our submission softwares that we use. A lot of them were built back in that early 2024, 25 or Yeah, 22,004 2005 sorry dates where, you know, now they've been added on to they may have been redesigned a little bit, but a lot of the functionality hasn't changed greatly over time. So really our authors are telling us we need something that looks like it's been built in the Modern age and then finally protecting publication credibility.
So this goes back to that research integrity piece where really we understand that that's something on our end and on the journal's end that we need to look for. But also the authors are very concerned about that process as well. So I want to talk a little bit about how we're adapting to meet author expectations. So and when I say we, I'm talking on this screen specifically across the industry.
And I'll reference a number of different examples, I will kind of in the next slide, go more specifically into things at Wiley that we're doing, as that is my overall frame of reference for a lot of the work that I'm doing here. So when we think about author experience, some of the things that industry wide that we're looking at is revamping the submission systems. We see this coming from the ACEs with chronos hub.
We see this from highwire, we see it with mircea of just really rethinking what that submission process looks like. And that might not reframe the entire peer review process, but really thinking about a separate platform to address this author experience piece. The author now being our customer, we want to build loyalty. And I have that as the bottom of the list there.
So customer satisfaction equals customer loyalty. You see that at Starbucks. You see that at your local grocery store. And I think that we're really moving in a way that is a journal piece, too. So really, if the submission process is easy, if the system is very clean and intuitive, that is a super helpful process to be able to achieve that goal. The user friendly interface, modern design, I referenced those previously and then rethinking workflow and author requirements.
We're hearing from a lot of various editorial offices that we work with that they're starting to rethink these processes that may have been built by editor and editors. Six, six, 10, 1012 editors ago that really thought that all of these kinds of hoops for authors to jump through were important. And a lot of organizations are spending consulting time, are doing it in-house to rethink what that looks like.
And looking over into the research integrity piece, authors and just general customers are looking for improving and really creating robust AI driven misconduct detection as well as verification systems. And we think about this in sort of paper mill detection. And we think about this in various systems that are being built to look for AI generated manuscripts. All of this still requires, and I think Michelle referenced to a person to actually read it doesn't mean that we're being taken over by AI to determine what's real and what's not.
Very much like the authenticate system days past to look for plagiarism, but tools in this space that are built into workflow and then the, the, you know, multiple systems, all system is a special flower. It does its own thing is really not sort of what we're seeing overall in the ecosystem. And I think a lot of different organizations are looking at this. How do we build true end to end systems that talk from this point of even creation in the conferences space, the whole way through to the publication and content dissemination space?
And how can we tie those things together? And a lot of groups. Highwire, as I mentioned earlier, Wiley, are thinking about various ways to do that, that differently. And then also really looking at creating sort of a universal UI, UX process or design in through all of this and then bandwidth researchers time, it needs to be reduced in the amount of time that they spend in these systems.
And what a lot of the organizations looking at this is, how can we use AI for good? How can we use AI to do metadata extraction from manuscripts to avoid having to rekey everything in? How can we do institutional matching? How can we use AI to generate better screening mechanisms so that we can easily screen manuscripts and get flags for potential problems? And then really looking at ways to create additional services for authors, thinking about what do authors need?
How can they be more successful? Are they the same tools as they were back in 2000? Or are they different things that are needed and really sort of spending time looking at that? So I promised a case study. So I'm going to talk just briefly about what Wiley partner solutions is looking at in our ecosystem. So as I'll just talk briefly about what Wiley partner solutions is.
We're a collection of many previously independently owned organizations that have come together and are offering solutions across this entire space. I'm not going to stand here and promise that today, all of those systems look exactly the same in the UI. Ux is consistent, but this is a goal and something that we're really, truly thinking about. So I'm going to focus specifically on the services as well as the research exchange piece.
So what we're really thinking is with research exchange, it is a modular, interoperable system that has a standalone submission component to it, a screening component to it, as well as the full review component. And the idea behind this is, is that we're really trying to redesign the experience for the author, and that in and of itself, can then build off of other systems, and that we're able to use those all together, or one piece or another piece to service organizations.
The little connectors there are indicating pieces that are connected connect products. So our connect is a single sign on. And we're thinking in terms of that single sign on not just being unique to the individual components, but stretching the whole ecosystem. So if you think about something that's a user in preprints, a user in peer review, a user in platform, it would connect both information, experience content across all of those pieces to be able to better service the author as a hub of information, and also better service the organizations as being able to consolidate that information and then insights.
So the little eyeball looking thing there is our reporting. So we're not thinking of reporting as a standalone has to happen just over in the experience platform just happens in peer review. But how can we think about that collectively across an organization's portfolio to better understand trends that are happening and then so that is this is the point of where I say we're today.
We're a little moving into the future here. There are some pieces on this that are still in development, but we're really trying to rethink how we're managing and organizing around authors. But I want to challenge us, just for a second, to think about what we would think a teenager in our world, what are they going to need out of from us? So where we talked at the beginning about what was 25 years ago, what about 10 years from now?
And I don't know how many of you have a teenager in your bubble, whether it's in your house, you have a niece or nephew. You see them at the Starbucks. But think about how they work. Think about how they consume information. What pace do they work at? What tools do they use, and what technologies are they used to? And I would challenge that. Those are things that we still have, even if we get to the state of having joined up systems that are reimagined.
We're going to hit a point. Very quickly that we're going to need to reimagine again, because that generation of teenagers, now, I have two of them, don't look at things the same way we do. They're fast. They want things done quickly. They want an answer quickly. And a lot of the systems that we have set up in peer review now are not going to, to, to be tolerated, I would say, by this generation.
So, so these folks are our next Gen researchers and customers and authors that we'll need to think about in the not too distant future. So thank you. Gwen Logan is next. Gwen you're online. Yes Hi. Good almost.
Lunchtime, everyone. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you for having me join from afar. I'm really happy to be here with you today. And I wanted to give you a quick heads up about what we'll be talking about. The topic of my talk today is really an introduction to Audience Insights.
It's to give you a sense of what this means, why to do it, and sort of initial directions for putting your toe in the water if you haven't done this before, or if you're just starting to get more deeply involved in customer insights in your organization. So it's not a primer. There's no way I could cover market research in 15 minutes, but it's certainly enough material, I think, to for things for you to think about and ways to get started.
So Thanks for having me today. I'm happy to Bookshare and talk with you about this. So why am I showing these iconic optical illusions? I think that it's about perspective. If you think about the image on the left. Do you see the vase or do you see the faces? If you look at the image on the right. Do you see the generational person who's younger in generation or older in generation?
What do you see? And if you think about our customers or your audiences, which could be multiple and many depending on your exact field. What we really need to do is understand the perspective of that audience, or that customer, or our groups of audiences and customers, so that we can not project what we think their perspective is. But we can truly understand how they think, what their needs are and the solutions, offerings, products and services that we can deliver to them in a way that resonates so that we can connect with them, ultimately creating a win-win situation where we're serving and empowering those audiences and also creating sustainability for our organization.
And so how do we do this? How do we get the perspective? It's through insight work, of course. And what is an insight? The dictionary tells us it's just a deep understanding of a person or thing. And how do we get there? We must be. If you are an insights professional, if you're someone who wants to embark in this kind of work, you need to be curious.
That's probably the number one requirement. You need to think about who, how, what, when and why. Why do folks do what they do? How do we support them in getting them what they need? I wanted to give you a quick snapshot of experience, and there's a point to this. I'm currently and grateful to be doing insights at aip publishing. I'm very driven by our mission driven purpose, and that means a lot to me.
And pushing, helping to push science forward and supporting our scientific community. But before coming to aip, I've conducted insights work in a variety of organizations within the Walt Disney Company American Honda, Comcast, a global advertising and communications firm called R&R partners, even academic research early in my career, and I've done this work outside of those companies for so many different types of services and products, not to mention, you know, Cirque shows and batteries and, you know, anti youth bullying and legal aid.
The reason why I bring this up is not to be braggadocious or say, look where I've been or, you know, kind of say, well, why are you in publishing? But it's really this there's a point to this slide, which is when you think about all the work that I've done or I think about it over the course of the years, it really comes down to one thing. And I think that it was alluded to in the prior presentation. We really just need to meet the audience where they are.
We want to connect with their hearts, connect with their minds. We want to be resonant to them, that enables us to engage with them, ultimately empowering them. And that builds longer lasting relationships with us. And we do this through market research. So there's multiple facets to market research. There's primary research which is collecting information yourself as a principal investigator.
More from a social sciences lens. Their secondary research, which is leveraging existing information in the market, and there's behavioral and data analytics. A lot of attention has been focused on behavioral and data analytics recently with the rise of these tools and machine learning. And of course AI is everywhere. And that's everything has their it has its place.
These are all pieces of the customer experience or Audience Insight that you can leverage. For me, I spent time in all these places, but where I've spent most time and where I find a lot of value is in primary research. So that's mostly what I'm going to focus my talk on today. So as narrowing this, this presentation kind of narrows in, starting to think big picture and narrowing down into specifics on how to use and where.
So as a researcher, as someone who wants to engage in insights oriented work, your primary job is to be curious, to want to understand you. Consult your thought partner to your stakeholders and within your organization, you need to understand what the informational needs are and how those can be served. And to get that back into the organization.
When you have the insights, you conduct the research you provide, the insight you tell, the data driven story. You bring those insights to life through data driven narratives. You humanize the customers and the audience so that they are people and not just facts on a page. You really need to bring them to life to tell their story. And then you workshop the material into the organization as much as you can through workshops, team meetings, just presentations.
However, publishing it on your private space, however you can get the information into the organization is really important. And then you are the advocate, right? You've heard that term voice of the customer. You're really the advocate to make sure when you're in conversations or decisions are being met, that you are providing that voice, that data driven voice, not your opinion, but the data driven voice of what you're learning from your Audience Insights ultimately helping to inform decisions within the organization.
And our job is to guide, not prescribe. If you've done this work before, we want to give the data. We want to give the insights. We can give informed opinions, but we would never tell somebody what to do. We're there to provide that voice. And as an input into whatever it is that's being developed. When you're also considering using customer insights or Audience Insights, that is one piece of information, but there's a lot of other information that goes round and round and intersects with other types of information in the organization you're working for.
There's also the institutional knowledge folks have been working at their business or in the industry for so many years. That certainly is part of the conversation. With any choices are being made and decisions and strategies are being developed and tactics even. And what are the business goals? So it's sort of a triangulation here of what do we know? What do we believe about the business?
What are we trying to accomplish. All these things work in tandem to help you figure out how to move forward with all these pieces of information, and as an insights professional, you have to think top down and bottom up. You have to think strategically. What am I after and why? Why am I? What kinds of questions.
Am I trying to answer? What decisions will this inform? And you think? And then you have to think bottom up. Tactically speaking, how will I accomplish this? Which questions will I ask? And this happens at all phases of the research process, from the design to when you're doing the analysis sort of trailing up and down.
What questions. Am I trying to answer and how am I answering these? And how am I going to bring this forward through to your reporting, which is generally the output, your report development and your advocacy within the organization. So you're constantly spanning the what am I doing? How am I doing it? What does it mean?
And back up and down the line. And doing this will help your work have more applicability within your organization. And remember to bring your hypotheses and your questions and leave your biases and those of your colleagues at the door when you're conducting market research. It's OK to have hypotheses. It's OK to think about what you think might be happening in a sector that's informed insights work that's informed decision making.
But when you're crafting the tools and you're analyzing the data and reporting back, that has to be unbiased, right? We know that it's just a reminder to keep this in mind. So that you're delivering valid information and insights that can be used in a way that is not tainted in a particular way. So it can be leveraged to its fullest extent and applicability.
And then just one other key note contextualize your insights. If you're dabbling in this area or doing work, remember that who you're talking to and how you're talking to them, and the number and how you got to them really matters, right? So if you're doing a handful of interviews with people close to your organization, a convenience sample, that's OK. I might not recommend that often, but as long as you contextualize your findings in that context.
That's OK. That's drastically different than getting a market wide list and say. And doing a random sample of four to 200 to 2000 people and saying you're representing the marketplace and it's statistically valid. So just always sort of remembering to share the context of your insights so that we can understand how they can be best applied.
So getting started if you're starting to embark on a research project first, well, it's not really first, but you must think of your business objective. What decisions are you trying to affect? What actions will this inform? So whichever stakeholder you're working from or broadly speaking for the organization, what is the point of you doing this work in the first place? Make it applicable.
And then based on that what is your research objective. What's the information we need? What hypotheses do we have? What questions do we need to ask? These things should work together. They should roll along in all parts of your research together. And then how will you tackle this? Which method will you choose in primary research or secondary? Or it could be behavioral, but generally speaking this will depend on your goals, right?
Is our question big? Is it audience wide? Is it specific? Do we have a question we need to make a small decision on? What are we trying to accomplish will determine our methodology and approach. How much time do we have? If I have two days versus six months, that will radically affect the kind of approach that I'm going to take to this, this kind of work and what are my resources?
Do I have staff that I can tap into online within my organization to tap into expertise that they might be able to work with me on? Or do I have budget where I can hire an outside consultant to help me get this work done? These these are things that always come into play when you're conducting market research in the private sector. And so jumping in a little more tactically starting obviously secondary research is valuable.
Secondary research tends to be less applicable to your organization. Lesson specific questions. But literature scans are always important in social sciences in general. And without regard here. To market research, you can do all sorts of things. Armchair research. You can go to competitors websites to understand how their position in the market, and you might even find some internal research sitting on a shelf somewhere that you can leverage that you might already have answers to.
Primary research is the key to getting the information, the specific information you need, specific to your questions and your organization. There are all sorts of methods. I've used all of these in my career, but where we tend to rely most because it's probably the most effective and most feasible, are in-depth interviewing focus groups and surveys. It's not to say that other I've used all of these and they're all valuable, but those are the ones we tend to swim in the most often, so it's good to get adept at those techniques.
We another thing that is really valuable if you can do it, is creating a community of your customers or clients. So that you can have an ongoing dialogue at a convenience, and the sample would matter who you're talking to. But you can do that in a way that is very time and financially useful to you. If you can develop a community of feedback of for feedback from folks with through an ongoing dialogue process. OK, so a few places you might want to start with market research is brand.
Who are we? How do we stick out, you know, in the marketplace? Why do customers want to engage with us versus somewhere else? And how much are we resonating? What is our loyalty? Brand can be studied in a variety of ways. There's basic KPIs tracking like awareness and familiarity, familiarity, affinity, intent, advocacy, actual engagement. Tracking this over time is super helpful for you to understand how your sticking up or laying low in the market, and then values some deep exploration into how what you're representing and your vision and what you stand for align with your customers or your potential customers in the market.
What values do you share? How do we connect and really set ourselves up to resonate in a way that will help us build long term, lasting relationships, to be a place that they want to be essentially, and who they want to work with. Communication is another ripe area for market research. It's basically how do we resonate more effectively in the places where author researchers or your customers already are?
There's all sorts of different communications research you can do, from communications concept development to message tracking effectiveness to a B testing on actual messages to see what's most effective. And it goes on and on. But in the end, we're trying to understand what kinds of messages resonate in the right places. Through which channels for your audience? Customer experience is another great place to do primary research, so anytime there's an interaction with your customer or audience, be it customer service, interaction, online or on phone, even, or they've submitted an article to you or you've been rejected or accepted, these are great opportunities to do a quick check in to understand basic satisfaction.
How did that experience go? Did it increase their affinity? Are they more likely to engage with you again? Do they, did they have a bad experience and they're not coming back. So this works both ways positive and negative. It's a way to track just kind of see where you are track find red flags. And if you need to kind of go in and figure out what's going on in a particular area, it lets you need to do that.
And on the other side, if things are going really well in a particular area where we're interacting, then great. We need to give ourselves a Pat on the back. We need to keep that going and focus our energy and effort in a positive place as well. Just a couple more topical research is really important. This really help you, helps you inform the decision, strategy and tactics of your stakeholder teams.
It could be, you know, the editorial team, your product innovations team, your communications and marketing team could even be the executive suite when they're trying to develop strategies for the organization. But really, what you're doing is helping a team answer their specific set of questions in a way that can really, in a targeted way, help to inform the choices that they are making. And then finally, there's two more product innovation, a really important place to gather customer or consumer feedback.
You have to develop something that people want, right? The if you build it, they will come model is gone. That doesn't work. So product innovation insights can happen at any phase of the product development process. It can be on existing products and services to understand what's working there and what tweaks need to be made. It can be at the beginning of a concept development to help inform where a product should go or service.
It can be as an iterative process as you're moving through development of a particular product and service. And you want to get feedback to make tweaks along the way so that you can make something that people actually want and need. And then finally, this is audience. To me, this is the core. And if I were starting anywhere, unless I had a huge need, this is where I would start.
Keep your customer front and center, your customer and consumer, your target, and the people just outside of you, or even beyond that you want to acquire and have a relationship with. What do they need? Who are they? What? what's going well for them? What are their challenges? How can we support them?
What are their needs? If I had to start anywhere, this is where I would start. The customer should be at the center of, of, or at least considered when you're making choices about your services, products, offerings and vision everything that you are doing in the organization. I would try to keep them focused in your mind, and there's lots of different ways to go about this. I'm going to keep it short, but needs assessment is really a good place to start.
You can even run various types of segmentations, but a good place to start. This is my final content slide. So low hanging fruit. If you haven't done a lot of market research and you want to get started, or you're just starting for the first time, observation, interviews and simple surveys are really a way, a good way to go. Just leverage your social science skills that you've learned in wherever you might have picked them up along the way.
Go observe people at conferences. Take pull some people aside to have interviews with them in a guided and framed way. Write some simple surveys that you think are unbiased. Just get your toe in the water and get started. There are survey tools available in the market. Survey monkey is relatively inexpensive and not too sophisticated, but is usable. Alchemer is a more sophisticated survey tool that you can purchase and have a subscription to Qualtrics is out there.
It's kind of cool, but it's more sophisticated, and you can reach people through emailing your internal list to, you know, give them research invitations to invite them to participate in various forums that you might be hosting. There's market wide list of people you can purchase. You can do pop UPS on your website. You can host conferences either in person or video at conferences.
You can host forums at conferences, either in person. You can also do it online. You can leverage social listening tools. I'm not going to get into the positives and negatives of social media mining, but there are some cautions there. If you go into that category, there are industry wide research resources. From a market research standpoint, market research is actually a really big industry as well.
So there's quirks in Green Book, especially quirks. These are the industry standards in terms of associations. They have events, forums, training seminars. The University of Georgia actually, I think created the first in market research, and they have an online Institute where you can take courses at Cornell University or Cornell University has online courses. Coursera has courses.
And then there's Reva research and values and attitudes, which is a hands on training, coaching actually location where you can go to learn how to do effective moderating for qualitative work. And I've been there. I think it's really great. I've gotten trained there. And then you can also hire consultants. And I think that this is a OK, I do it frequently depending on what I'm trying to do and the time I have.
But you can look at individual contributors sometimes they're just social scientists who are really good at math and really good at research, and they're really good to work with. They'll tend to charge you as much money. There's boutique market research firms, both within publishing and exterior to publishing. And then there's the very large market research firms and everywhere in between.
What I recommend, because I've worked with a variety of contributors over many years, is just really interviewing and vetting these folks, especially if you haven't worked with them before. What's their expertise in conducting research? What's their expertise in your industry? How are they going to collaborate with you? Because you really need to be hands onto get the research that you need, not their view of your research and how much are they going to charge you.
So these are all things to consider when you're getting started. And I think that's it. We're doing discussion later. So thank you for having me. I look forward to talking with you after. Awesome well, Thank you all for having me. And Thank you for including me on this panel.
So I'm Corinne, I work at Virginia Tech. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're seeing, kind of boots on the ground at the University from researchers and authors on our campus. So a little bit about Virginia Tech. It's a large University, but it's a small community. And I emphasize that because I can't go anywhere without people running into me and asking questions. Literally even Kroger, somebody, an author or working with or a researcher on campus will be like, Oh, hey, How's it going?
So that's kind of a lot of where my perspective is coming from is actually a lot more anecdotal chats. So a little bit about Virginia Tech publishing. We're a small open access based publisher in the library. We publish books, textbooks, journals, and some more experimental digital scholarship projects. But we're also in a library, and librarians are traditionally providing a service. So part of that service is how we work with our authors.
We work really closely with authors, and because we're on campus, because people find me everywhere I go, they're able to ask a lot more questions. And I think this is especially beneficial for first time authors, for junior faculty, for even some of our student authors, and also helpful for those more experimental projects where people are a little unsure of how that's going to go, what that process might look like. But again, we're in a library, so we also offer service.
And these are for people who are working with us to author or with other publishers. Any of you guys here? So we offer a lot of consultations. And what I see, probably the three most common areas of consultations are where to publish. We have a junior faculty, somebody who's thinking about their promotion and tenure process. I have to publish.
Where do I even begin? How do I do that? How do I go about finding who's the best publisher for my research area? So we chat a lot about, OK, we'll think about where your colleagues are publishing. Think about where that research is coming from. So that's number probably one of the number one questions. Another area is Book proposals.
A lot of people looking for feedback on their book proposals, especially coming out of the humanities and social sciences. How can they improve it? How can they reach that audience that they're trying to reach? And then thinking about after they're working with a publisher, sometimes we get people coming to us looking, asking for us to kind of review their contracts and agreements with them.
What are they? What are they? What are they signing off on? Right who is what most typically a copyright. But what are they agreeing to with this publication agreement and kind of walking through that step by step, we also offer workshops. So what we're seeing the most is a request for those book proposal workshops.
People really want to publish. So they're trying to figure out how do I propose my project, the best possible way to get it published. We're actually having a book proposal workshop on Thursday of this week, so it's going to be a big one where people are learning a little bit more about that book proposal process.
We also offer services or workshops on tools. I'll talk a little bit about some of the tools that we offer in a bit, but thinking about how can you use existing tools to help improve your research and writing process? We're currently looking at we haven't done this yet, but we're looking at offering workshops on indexing since so many authors on campus are doing a lot of their own indexing, how can we better teach them how to do that.
So that they're a little less frightened, frightened by that process? And then finally, and I think this kind of comes out pulling from our first two speakers here, a lot more about the process. People don't know what that process is. They come to us and I'm sure many of you experience this too. Here's my manuscript. So is it going to be ready in about a week?
So we're trying to teach a little bit more about what that process actually looks like and why it does take as long as it takes. We are at a University. We do offer a lot of student opportunities. So I just want to touch on those really quick. So thinking about public we have student publications. So how do for journals and some student book projects.
So giving those students that opportunity to publish early on in their career and see what that process might look like. We also offer internships and jobs for students who are interested in careers in publishing. And since we're a smaller publisher, it gives them an opportunity to touch on multiple areas of the publishing process. And then finally, we'll do some guest lectures and classes.
Again, these might be on specific tools. They might be on more general publishing processes. I did one last week. That was about how I got to where I'm at. So people are interested in publishing as a career. Sometimes they're a little bit more about open access versus not or where to publish different topics there. So people again, they're trying to catch the students early on in their careers before they go off into those more promotion and tenure based positions.
And then I mentioned tools earlier. So these are some of the tools that we offer. So thinking about kind of that DIY publishing, some people have stuff. They just want to get it up there online. So we offer domains. This is a space for any faculty or student on campus to create a website and share their research or whatever they're doing through that website.
We also offer overleaf. This is a latex based tool that allows people to use templates like for journal articles or conference posters, stuff like that they're able to pull that in for. And then finally, pressbooks, this is primarily what we use for a lot of our open educational resources and some of our book projects, but we have used it. We have offered accounts to faculty on campus who are looking to self-publish for whatever reason.
And then I know we touched on this apcs a little bit. So there is also something that the library does to help cover books conventions. So we have a general book subvention fund. This does not have to be for open access publications that people can request support for, for things like indexing, image rights, permissions, stuff like that. But then we also have Tomas.
So this is out of the tone, a five year pilot program that wrapped up last summer towards an open monograph ecosystem. And we offer funds to publishers to make that book open access. So kind of providing those funds up front, we only offer about 2 or three of those a year, but that is a service that we're providing because, again, a need that we're seeing researchers want is if they want to make that work, open access, who pays for it?
Open access isn't free. Somebody has to pay for that work. So just a couple of concluding thoughts. Just in general, we're seeing a lot more people wanting to understand this process. I think people assume, hey, it's going online. That should be pretty easy, right? It's not. So how do we help them understand that process?
How do we help them start them early on to think about that stuff? Going back to the what do you see teenagers doing? So teenagers are also the students in the classes at University. So how are they going to grow into those researchers. And how do we catch them early on? But I'm happy to chat a little bit more as we move into discussion.
Thank you so much. That was a fantastic panel. Now we have time for some questions. Is there anything coming in online today? No not yet. OK I can actually kick us off. All right.
Go ahead if that's OK. Sarah who just who just stepped out. Sarah posted a question just to the chat on Zoom, and I actually think it's a really interesting one to Pose to everyone, both online and in the room. A topic near and dear to my heart, which is user and customer research. And so when we think about that shift from publishing as product to product, as service or publishing as service, how many folks are actively, regularly talking to customers, conducting research, competitive research, user testing, anything in that domain just show of hands.
OK pretty good. So about I'd say 30% to 40% in the room. And I'm trying to see if there's any show of hands online I don't see. OK Yeah. And then we do. We did have one question actually come in from Anne stone online.
So I read that one while I'm here. So for the panel or the audience Anne is asking regarding next generation researchers. Now, is anyone creating or currently using a chat bot for their submission system that is AI based Fed by author guidelines? Examples of good peer review reports. Support for non-native English speakers, or multi-language support.
Anyone have anything to contribute on that? Thank you. Oh well, half an hour later. Yeah so I can kind of kick off on that. We're not there yet. I'd be really interested to hear if there's any other groups in the audience that are closer to that sort of chat bot, but it's definitely something that we're looking to develop.
Not so much from the perspective of creating content, but doing sort of more guided help with review guided help with moving manuscripts through the process. Guided help with reviewers, both sort of on the author side of things as well as the editorial side of things. And one thing I can say also to not automated, not AI yet, but we've built into sort of our screening tool, a lot of people there's a research integrity component to that 100% but there's also a QC component to that that allows author guidelines to be sort of included in that and creating sort of more automated checklists.
So baby steps not quite to what the question described, but but closer. Hi Thank you so much. Sophie rice Mary Ann Lieber, Inc publishers. Thank you for the great presentation. Julie, you mentioned in your discussion that I'm remembering what you said correctly. Authors it takes a little while for them to know if their institutions actually are providing transformative agreements or other resources for them as academics.
Can you explain what tools or other improvements that you have explored, perhaps, that have helped authors find these resources? Sure and I'll definitely open to the room with other groups that are doing sort of similar work in the research exchange product. We have a component in the submission tool to integrate into wherever a publisher or organization keeps that data, whether it's CDC, whether it's another Oh, there we go.
Another sort of database component where that is. And then it can pull into a designed check to say, OK, author, we see you're coming in from this institution. You may be qualified for this transformative agreement and this a discount or a society discount because you're a member from a certain region, and that is all displayed prior to hitting that submission button.
So that information is provided upfront to organizations or to authors and organizations as well, to be able to better make decisions on what that price tag is going to look like on the other side. But I know other groups are doing similar things, so certainly open up. Hi, Heather Stevens from Delta ink. And just to what you were saying, Julie, we do a lot of projects where we look at publisher websites for from the authors standpoint, from the researcher standpoint, from the partners standpoint, you might think it's easy to find this stuff on your website.
It is not always easy to find yourself just so I just wanted to highlight that like think again if you're assuming it's easy to find. I have a question about books for Karen. And this kind of goes back a little bit to the keynote this morning. And the question about the glacial pace of how research works. And I come from the humanities, and I started out in the book world.
And one of the things that's really interesting to me are these new digital publishing projects. And there's amazing ideas out there and wonderful kind of enthusiasm. But do you guys find yourselves getting involved in how this will be seen towards tenure and promotion? Because I feel like if that piece of it doesn't happen, then people are creating magical, wonderful things and then tenure committees are gone.
So yes, that is probably the number one thing I think I've been talking about the glacial speed of academia. That's probably the number one reason why people aren't doing more of these, in my opinion. I know we did have a professor in history who had a project. I mean, it was NIH funded project. So those are already rare to get those grants as it is. We did peer review of all of the content on the project, editing everything like that, and he did get tenure based on that, which was fantastic.
But even to do that, he also had to provide extra case to his committee to say these are cases of other institutions doing tenure based on these projects. And as far as I know, he's the only one at Virginia Tech that has done that. So far. But it is really rare. So I think a lot of authors are leaning more into and I know.
So also full disclosure, my background is more in digital humanities. And then I kind of came over to publishing. So I did work with these folks a lot for years before I transitioned into this role. And I think I've talked to a lot of people who are like, well, I'm going to do my 10 year book, I'm going to get tenure, and then maybe I'll do that digital project for if I go for a promotion.
So I think that's probably more so what we're seeing is like if they're feeling bold, they're like, well, I'll get tenure first and then I'll worry about that when I have when I'm already safe. So I do think that's a big part of what's holding people back from doing those more interactive digital projects. Hi, Matt giancola with American Geophysical Union. I think I have a question.
I was thinking about user experience and treating our, you know, people as customers and giving them a better experience is good. But I'm sort of thinking about a lot of the people, at least, that we interact with at Au don't want to be seen as a customer, right? They want to be seen as like an active, like leader in the system, and that the publishing ecosystem is there because they're there and it's, you know, to serve them.
And I'm just wondering how to Square that. How do you engage with your authors and reviewers and editors in a way that gives them a good experience, but also doesn't make them feel like they're being monetized? I'll try to stop. You know, I just wanted to Thank before I started to speak. I mean, it's a really good question because it is a balance there of especially, you know, when you're talking about organizations or commercial publishers that are, you know, there's a financial piece to all of this as well.
And how do you engage sort of all of those groups. But I think that really I think anybody in any of those, whether any of those groups, still want the process to be easy. They want us to respect their time in a lot of ways. And I think that sort of plays into the idea of making some of these processes faster. It's not necessarily all for incentive, as far as, you know, saving money like it might have been back in 2000.
I think if things get faster now, we're not having sort of that same overhead of, of savings. But I do think that kind of connecting those authors and making that process smoother will also sort of by turn, also sort of help those leaders and help them grow and help them be able to find other uses for their time within the organization. That's not just spent on the publishing process. So that was a little bit of a roundabout answer, but it's a really good, really good question.
And I think something to think about as this, you know, space sort of continues to, to grow and sort of thinking in that customer minded sense. I, I was trying to raise my hand virtually, but I couldn't find it just to, just to follow on. I think a lot of it comes through tone. Right so there's internal jargony words that we may use within our businesses, but we would, you know, it's not to be duplicitous, but we wouldn't necessarily address customers as a transaction.
Right? we address them as people as who they are. Right so it's about their point of view and resonance, and that's why you want to do the insights work and meet their needs. So that you are hitting the right tone. You do know what they need, and you're serving up things that empower them. And if you strike that balance, even if there are truly our customers, that's more of a jargony word that we might use internally.
But we, you know, we would want to communicate in a way that is authentic and is really focused on them as people and what they need as scientists or whomever your audience may be. Yes Hi. Yeah, I'm Tim Lloyd from live links. We do a fair amount of usage analytics, processing, and one of the aspects of, I think moving to a service model where you're focusing more on the author is demonstrating what was the value at the end of the day, how did we demonstrate the impact of publishing with us?
And one of the frustrations I find a lot with sort of back end processing usage analytics is that we don't use a lot of the really valuable metadata that we create during editorial workflows to help us demonstrate that. So things like subject taxonomies that could provide more insights into what people are using, or funder IDs that can demonstrate how funders link through to the value they got from their funding or author IDs.
So I'm just interested in any comments you have about how, at the back end, you then demonstrate the value of the service you were providing. Thanks should I start on that one so I can kick off. So I think as far as to your point of that sort of back end system, and I mentioned a little bit we're looking at ways to link those things up. So where we're sort of connecting the various systems that we have to have sort of one kind of data pool for, for our customers.
So there is kind of a consistency across all of the various tools in the process. And I think that and going back to some of the pieces that was talked about in the ability to sort of market research. We do a lot of surveys, so we do a lot of surveys at various points of the process, whether that's at submission, whether it's at the end state of the decision process to be able to sort of benchmark kind of where our, you know, customer authors, internally speaking, will sort of see the process and see what they've gained from that.
And then we're also looking at ways to sort of better use that information that's collected, whether it's through sort of a customer data platform or better leverage the information that we have to be able to drive more information out to our users. So well performed. OK well, Thank you very much, everybody. We've had a great discussion.
And I think we can continue this discussion over lunch. So it's in the.
Segment:0 .
Hello and welcome to today's panel discussion on new paradigms and the shift to publishing as a service. This panel is particularly timely as we navigate the evolving landscape of scholarly publishing, where traditional models are being reimagined. As we learned in the last keynote speech, to adapt to digital innovations and to changing user expectations.
I am Annie Goering, publishing editor at RTI press, and I will be the moderator for this panel. My co-chair, Jenny Herbert, the associate publisher of researcher engagement at aip, is our online moderator. We are privileged to have with us today. Three fantastic panelists who bring a wealth of knowledge and diverse perspectives to this important conversation. First, I would like to introduce Julie Nash.
Julie is the VP of sales and partnership development for publishing solutions at Wiley, where she focuses on driving new business growth and shaping strategy for publishing services and software solutions. Julie is also the co-chair of SSPS career development committee. So we're very happy to have Julie. Next, we have Gwen Logan.
Gwen will be joining us online today. Gwen is the director of customer insights at aip publishing. She has spent more than two decades conducting insights initiatives across a variety of sectors. She has particular expertise in primary research around brand and communications development, foresight and product innovation. Lastly, I'm delighted to introduce Corinne Goodman. Corinne joined the publishing team at Virginia Tech in April 2017, and has been overseeing Virginia Tech publishing since June 2023.
She has a background in information science, digital humanities, and commercial e-textbook publishing. Curran works with faculty and students to create digital publications using a variety of tools and platforms. Please join me in welcoming our esteemed panelists Julie, Gwen, and Karen. I'm confident that their insights and expertise will provide us with a deeper understanding of the new paradigms and the shift to publishing as a service, and they will inspire us to think critically and creatively about the future of scholarly publishing.
So thank you very much. And we'll get started with Julie. Hello, everybody. So I'm going to just log back into my computer here. So I have my notes. Just a second. Great it's good to see everybody today and shout out to our folks that are joining us remotely as well, particularly our Cary, North Carolina office.
I think they had a question earlier. So I know there's a live group there. So happy to see everybody. So thank you so much for the introduction. So I just am going to focus today my talk on publishing as a service and thinking about authors as customers. So that's something that obviously was brought up a little bit in what Michelle has already said today, a nice sort of setup into what we're going to talk about.
And in this, I'm going to take us on a history lesson to where kind of we've been certainly within my career and kind of where I see us is where we are today. And then the challenges that we may have kind of going forward in the questions, certainly we need to solve. So this may or may not look familiar to many of you in the, in the audience here today.
So I'm going to date myself and tell a little bit of a story about when I started in academic publishing. So I started back when there was no scholar one, there was no editorial manager. There were lots and lots and lots of file folders, and every single manuscript was submitted. It came into us via FedEx package, a UPS package. It came in via the mail. If there was a holiday, a mail holiday, it was a journal office holiday.
It was the greatest day ever. We were able to catch up everything had literal date stamps that we put on it. Our primary source of communication to authors and to reviewers was a fax machine. So I've circled a couple of things here on this slide to sort of highlight what our key communication tools back in this day were, and really how we communicated with authors and how the role played with authors.
There you'll see a lovely little desktop computer there it was back in the glory days of not taking work home with you. So there was no laptop. We worked off of a desktop. Everything was caged on a standalone database within our office. If we wanted to solicit reviewers or send any sort of confirmation to authors, it went out via our happy little fax machine there, and then the file folders at the end and the filing cabinets were our primary mechanism to sort of track and hold on to manuscripts.
We needed a whole person, a whole full time person in our office just to do our filing and just to do a lot of the faxing. So we are a long ways away from that. But that was only for my career 20 to 25 years ago. So in history as it goes, and the older that I get, that does not seem very long ago. We've certainly made a lot of progress from that. And so when I take us really to kind of where I see us today and we've made some jumps in that space.
So I would say for, for the journals that I worked on, and at this day when it was at Duke, we moved on to an online peer review system in 2005. And that was an epiphany that absolutely opened the doors for much more efficiency. Happier authors 110% Happier staff. Happier societies publishers, much less money being spent in all of this process. So it felt like the absolute bliss of work.
We were able to sort of do things from home on travel. There's still a bit more, you know, bit of balance going on there, maybe creeped in a little bit more than other times. But we were saving so much time in the editorial processing, we didn't have to manage an additional person and authors were happier. It felt like the best place to be. Fast forward us to today.
So today we're functioning in sort of a similar way as we were maybe back in those glory days. Those laptops have gotten maybe a little bit smaller. There's a dog there on the lap of certainly we can work from sofas and all the rest of that. But as things have gotten faster, expectations of users' expectations of authors have also ramped up fast in what we would think of in sort of a tracking system process now was no longer fast enough.
So if we take us to this cartoon was from 2015. So in 2015, we certainly would have had about me personally 10 years or so using an online tracking system, 10 years or so in sort of this new referred to bliss state. And already we're starting to see sort of an increase and certainly would have started before 2015 of concerns about delay, concerns about efficiency, concerns about processing, concerns about journals, and many of the things also that Michelle referenced to certainly have been around and in the ecosystem for, for quite a bit.
And at the same time as we're moving toward the end of, you know, 2017, 2018, we're starting to see a real rise in difference of business models. And the shift is not just happening to how we do our jobs anymore or how we communicate with the authors. The shift is happening to give authors more power in the process.
Certainly, we can see from this cartoon there was an interest in more control, interest of more ownership of that research. And with the advent in the rise of open access, the decline of subscription model, we're really starting to put authors in the place of being our customers, not just sort of the folks on the other side of the mail package that comes in that we're dividing up, but really a key stakeholder in the process.
So we've started to think certainly within software development, within how we're doing services, of really servicing this group of people, absence of what publisher or what group they're coming to us from. So in that, I want to just kind of frame a little bit about what I see. We see as today's researcher challenges and things that are being thought about at the same time as publishing is coming into play and publishing concerns.
So economic uncertainty. Certainly funding how things are funded, how research is funded, how any of the publishing. Payments the apcs are being paid for is certainly something that's going through researchers minds. Research integrity. We also often think of that as a Gotcha moment for researchers. But if you flip that on the other side, really researchers don't want to be caught in that either.
So they're concerned and looking at ways internally in their offices to be able to screen for potential integrity issues. Certainly when they're working with big groups of authors, graduate students, there's elements in there that lots of people contributing and really having that quality control on their side. And also working with publications where the. The research integrity and the screening processes are high, that the validity of the publication is sound, desperate, desperate systems.
So when I say this, I'm sure everybody in this room will understand what I'm talking about. We have a lot of standalone systems, whether that's the peer review system, whether it's the platform, whether it's preprints that don't talk to each other. So we have production systems that sit-in the middle there. Sometimes some groups are using screening tools that even take you further outside of the workflow process and then have to come back in.
And so there's a lot of sort of frustration with users of all kinds on how to navigate that and what we as publishers or we as societies are doing to help our authors navigate through that bandwidth. I don't think there's anybody in this room that says that, gosh, you know, today I have so much extra time as opposed to that moment that I had back in 2005 thinking, gosh, this is like, I'm going to take up golf.
I don't know what else to do. There's so much time left. We are not at that moment. Researchers aren't either, so everybody is trying to make the most of the limited amount of time that they have. And the longer that some of our processes take, the more complicated they are, the more difficult that is for researchers and authors.
So I'm going to talk a little bit here about what authors tell us and how we know these things. So really what we're hearing from authors that are either coming to us directly through our UI, UX research teams or that we're talking to through customers like organizations that you all work for that really, these are some of the key things they're looking for. Efficiency things take too long. Things are too slow.
They need things to go faster. Communication and communication isn't just good email practice, but also if I'm going to submit to your journal, how do I know what your open access policies are? How do I know if I have a discount? Is there a transformative agreement. I don't find out about that until fairly far along into the process for a lot of journals. Customer service.
We've often said that honestly, this is a publishing. This is a customer service job that has to do with publishing. And we've really felt that way for quite, quite a long time. I come from services, organization, services, background, and that's something that we really stick to. But really our customer base, our authors are pushing us on that. How can they get results from us in a faster way, simpler submission processes?
This is certainly our submission softwares that we use. A lot of them were built back in that early 2024, 25 or Yeah, 22,004 2005 sorry dates where, you know, now they've been added on to they may have been redesigned a little bit, but a lot of the functionality hasn't changed greatly over time. So really our authors are telling us we need something that looks like it's been built in the Modern age and then finally protecting publication credibility.
So this goes back to that research integrity piece where really we understand that that's something on our end and on the journal's end that we need to look for. But also the authors are very concerned about that process as well. So I want to talk a little bit about how we're adapting to meet author expectations. So and when I say we, I'm talking on this screen specifically across the industry.
And I'll reference a number of different examples, I will kind of in the next slide, go more specifically into things at Wiley that we're doing, as that is my overall frame of reference for a lot of the work that I'm doing here. So when we think about author experience, some of the things that industry wide that we're looking at is revamping the submission systems. We see this coming from the ACEs with chronos hub.
We see this from highwire, we see it with mircea of just really rethinking what that submission process looks like. And that might not reframe the entire peer review process, but really thinking about a separate platform to address this author experience piece. The author now being our customer, we want to build loyalty. And I have that as the bottom of the list there.
So customer satisfaction equals customer loyalty. You see that at Starbucks. You see that at your local grocery store. And I think that we're really moving in a way that is a journal piece, too. So really, if the submission process is easy, if the system is very clean and intuitive, that is a super helpful process to be able to achieve that goal. The user friendly interface, modern design, I referenced those previously and then rethinking workflow and author requirements.
We're hearing from a lot of various editorial offices that we work with that they're starting to rethink these processes that may have been built by editor and editors. Six, six, 10, 1012 editors ago that really thought that all of these kinds of hoops for authors to jump through were important. And a lot of organizations are spending consulting time, are doing it in-house to rethink what that looks like.
And looking over into the research integrity piece, authors and just general customers are looking for improving and really creating robust AI driven misconduct detection as well as verification systems. And we think about this in sort of paper mill detection. And we think about this in various systems that are being built to look for AI generated manuscripts. All of this still requires, and I think Michelle referenced to a person to actually read it doesn't mean that we're being taken over by AI to determine what's real and what's not.
Very much like the authenticate system days past to look for plagiarism, but tools in this space that are built into workflow and then the, the, you know, multiple systems, all system is a special flower. It does its own thing is really not sort of what we're seeing overall in the ecosystem. And I think a lot of different organizations are looking at this. How do we build true end to end systems that talk from this point of even creation in the conferences space, the whole way through to the publication and content dissemination space?
And how can we tie those things together? And a lot of groups. Highwire, as I mentioned earlier, Wiley, are thinking about various ways to do that, that differently. And then also really looking at creating sort of a universal UI, UX process or design in through all of this and then bandwidth researchers time, it needs to be reduced in the amount of time that they spend in these systems.
And what a lot of the organizations looking at this is, how can we use AI for good? How can we use AI to do metadata extraction from manuscripts to avoid having to rekey everything in? How can we do institutional matching? How can we use AI to generate better screening mechanisms so that we can easily screen manuscripts and get flags for potential problems? And then really looking at ways to create additional services for authors, thinking about what do authors need?
How can they be more successful? Are they the same tools as they were back in 2000? Or are they different things that are needed and really sort of spending time looking at that? So I promised a case study. So I'm going to talk just briefly about what Wiley partner solutions is looking at in our ecosystem. So as I'll just talk briefly about what Wiley partner solutions is.
We're a collection of many previously independently owned organizations that have come together and are offering solutions across this entire space. I'm not going to stand here and promise that today, all of those systems look exactly the same in the UI. Ux is consistent, but this is a goal and something that we're really, truly thinking about. So I'm going to focus specifically on the services as well as the research exchange piece.
So what we're really thinking is with research exchange, it is a modular, interoperable system that has a standalone submission component to it, a screening component to it, as well as the full review component. And the idea behind this is, is that we're really trying to redesign the experience for the author, and that in and of itself, can then build off of other systems, and that we're able to use those all together, or one piece or another piece to service organizations.
The little connectors there are indicating pieces that are connected connect products. So our connect is a single sign on. And we're thinking in terms of that single sign on not just being unique to the individual components, but stretching the whole ecosystem. So if you think about something that's a user in preprints, a user in peer review, a user in platform, it would connect both information, experience content across all of those pieces to be able to better service the author as a hub of information, and also better service the organizations as being able to consolidate that information and then insights.
So the little eyeball looking thing there is our reporting. So we're not thinking of reporting as a standalone has to happen just over in the experience platform just happens in peer review. But how can we think about that collectively across an organization's portfolio to better understand trends that are happening and then so that is this is the point of where I say we're today.
We're a little moving into the future here. There are some pieces on this that are still in development, but we're really trying to rethink how we're managing and organizing around authors. But I want to challenge us, just for a second, to think about what we would think a teenager in our world, what are they going to need out of from us? So where we talked at the beginning about what was 25 years ago, what about 10 years from now?
And I don't know how many of you have a teenager in your bubble, whether it's in your house, you have a niece or nephew. You see them at the Starbucks. But think about how they work. Think about how they consume information. What pace do they work at? What tools do they use, and what technologies are they used to? And I would challenge that. Those are things that we still have, even if we get to the state of having joined up systems that are reimagined.
We're going to hit a point. Very quickly that we're going to need to reimagine again, because that generation of teenagers, now, I have two of them, don't look at things the same way we do. They're fast. They want things done quickly. They want an answer quickly. And a lot of the systems that we have set up in peer review now are not going to, to, to be tolerated, I would say, by this generation.
So, so these folks are our next Gen researchers and customers and authors that we'll need to think about in the not too distant future. So thank you. Gwen Logan is next. Gwen you're online. Yes Hi. Good almost.
Lunchtime, everyone. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you for having me join from afar. I'm really happy to be here with you today. And I wanted to give you a quick heads up about what we'll be talking about. The topic of my talk today is really an introduction to Audience Insights.
It's to give you a sense of what this means, why to do it, and sort of initial directions for putting your toe in the water if you haven't done this before, or if you're just starting to get more deeply involved in customer insights in your organization. So it's not a primer. There's no way I could cover market research in 15 minutes, but it's certainly enough material, I think, to for things for you to think about and ways to get started.
So Thanks for having me today. I'm happy to Bookshare and talk with you about this. So why am I showing these iconic optical illusions? I think that it's about perspective. If you think about the image on the left. Do you see the vase or do you see the faces? If you look at the image on the right. Do you see the generational person who's younger in generation or older in generation?
What do you see? And if you think about our customers or your audiences, which could be multiple and many depending on your exact field. What we really need to do is understand the perspective of that audience, or that customer, or our groups of audiences and customers, so that we can not project what we think their perspective is. But we can truly understand how they think, what their needs are and the solutions, offerings, products and services that we can deliver to them in a way that resonates so that we can connect with them, ultimately creating a win-win situation where we're serving and empowering those audiences and also creating sustainability for our organization.
And so how do we do this? How do we get the perspective? It's through insight work, of course. And what is an insight? The dictionary tells us it's just a deep understanding of a person or thing. And how do we get there? We must be. If you are an insights professional, if you're someone who wants to embark in this kind of work, you need to be curious.
That's probably the number one requirement. You need to think about who, how, what, when and why. Why do folks do what they do? How do we support them in getting them what they need? I wanted to give you a quick snapshot of experience, and there's a point to this. I'm currently and grateful to be doing insights at aip publishing. I'm very driven by our mission driven purpose, and that means a lot to me.
And pushing, helping to push science forward and supporting our scientific community. But before coming to aip, I've conducted insights work in a variety of organizations within the Walt Disney Company American Honda, Comcast, a global advertising and communications firm called R&R partners, even academic research early in my career, and I've done this work outside of those companies for so many different types of services and products, not to mention, you know, Cirque shows and batteries and, you know, anti youth bullying and legal aid.
The reason why I bring this up is not to be braggadocious or say, look where I've been or, you know, kind of say, well, why are you in publishing? But it's really this there's a point to this slide, which is when you think about all the work that I've done or I think about it over the course of the years, it really comes down to one thing. And I think that it was alluded to in the prior presentation. We really just need to meet the audience where they are.
We want to connect with their hearts, connect with their minds. We want to be resonant to them, that enables us to engage with them, ultimately empowering them. And that builds longer lasting relationships with us. And we do this through market research. So there's multiple facets to market research. There's primary research which is collecting information yourself as a principal investigator.
More from a social sciences lens. Their secondary research, which is leveraging existing information in the market, and there's behavioral and data analytics. A lot of attention has been focused on behavioral and data analytics recently with the rise of these tools and machine learning. And of course AI is everywhere. And that's everything has their it has its place.
These are all pieces of the customer experience or Audience Insight that you can leverage. For me, I spent time in all these places, but where I've spent most time and where I find a lot of value is in primary research. So that's mostly what I'm going to focus my talk on today. So as narrowing this, this presentation kind of narrows in, starting to think big picture and narrowing down into specifics on how to use and where.
So as a researcher, as someone who wants to engage in insights oriented work, your primary job is to be curious, to want to understand you. Consult your thought partner to your stakeholders and within your organization, you need to understand what the informational needs are and how those can be served. And to get that back into the organization.
When you have the insights, you conduct the research you provide, the insight you tell, the data driven story. You bring those insights to life through data driven narratives. You humanize the customers and the audience so that they are people and not just facts on a page. You really need to bring them to life to tell their story. And then you workshop the material into the organization as much as you can through workshops, team meetings, just presentations.
However, publishing it on your private space, however you can get the information into the organization is really important. And then you are the advocate, right? You've heard that term voice of the customer. You're really the advocate to make sure when you're in conversations or decisions are being met, that you are providing that voice, that data driven voice, not your opinion, but the data driven voice of what you're learning from your Audience Insights ultimately helping to inform decisions within the organization.
And our job is to guide, not prescribe. If you've done this work before, we want to give the data. We want to give the insights. We can give informed opinions, but we would never tell somebody what to do. We're there to provide that voice. And as an input into whatever it is that's being developed. When you're also considering using customer insights or Audience Insights, that is one piece of information, but there's a lot of other information that goes round and round and intersects with other types of information in the organization you're working for.
There's also the institutional knowledge folks have been working at their business or in the industry for so many years. That certainly is part of the conversation. With any choices are being made and decisions and strategies are being developed and tactics even. And what are the business goals? So it's sort of a triangulation here of what do we know? What do we believe about the business?
What are we trying to accomplish. All these things work in tandem to help you figure out how to move forward with all these pieces of information, and as an insights professional, you have to think top down and bottom up. You have to think strategically. What am I after and why? Why am I? What kinds of questions.
Am I trying to answer? What decisions will this inform? And you think? And then you have to think bottom up. Tactically speaking, how will I accomplish this? Which questions will I ask? And this happens at all phases of the research process, from the design to when you're doing the analysis sort of trailing up and down.
What questions. Am I trying to answer and how am I answering these? And how am I going to bring this forward through to your reporting, which is generally the output, your report development and your advocacy within the organization. So you're constantly spanning the what am I doing? How am I doing it? What does it mean?
And back up and down the line. And doing this will help your work have more applicability within your organization. And remember to bring your hypotheses and your questions and leave your biases and those of your colleagues at the door when you're conducting market research. It's OK to have hypotheses. It's OK to think about what you think might be happening in a sector that's informed insights work that's informed decision making.
But when you're crafting the tools and you're analyzing the data and reporting back, that has to be unbiased, right? We know that it's just a reminder to keep this in mind. So that you're delivering valid information and insights that can be used in a way that is not tainted in a particular way. So it can be leveraged to its fullest extent and applicability.
And then just one other key note contextualize your insights. If you're dabbling in this area or doing work, remember that who you're talking to and how you're talking to them, and the number and how you got to them really matters, right? So if you're doing a handful of interviews with people close to your organization, a convenience sample, that's OK. I might not recommend that often, but as long as you contextualize your findings in that context.
That's OK. That's drastically different than getting a market wide list and say. And doing a random sample of four to 200 to 2000 people and saying you're representing the marketplace and it's statistically valid. So just always sort of remembering to share the context of your insights so that we can understand how they can be best applied.
So getting started if you're starting to embark on a research project first, well, it's not really first, but you must think of your business objective. What decisions are you trying to affect? What actions will this inform? So whichever stakeholder you're working from or broadly speaking for the organization, what is the point of you doing this work in the first place? Make it applicable.
And then based on that what is your research objective. What's the information we need? What hypotheses do we have? What questions do we need to ask? These things should work together. They should roll along in all parts of your research together. And then how will you tackle this? Which method will you choose in primary research or secondary? Or it could be behavioral, but generally speaking this will depend on your goals, right?
Is our question big? Is it audience wide? Is it specific? Do we have a question we need to make a small decision on? What are we trying to accomplish will determine our methodology and approach. How much time do we have? If I have two days versus six months, that will radically affect the kind of approach that I'm going to take to this, this kind of work and what are my resources?
Do I have staff that I can tap into online within my organization to tap into expertise that they might be able to work with me on? Or do I have budget where I can hire an outside consultant to help me get this work done? These these are things that always come into play when you're conducting market research in the private sector. And so jumping in a little more tactically starting obviously secondary research is valuable.
Secondary research tends to be less applicable to your organization. Lesson specific questions. But literature scans are always important in social sciences in general. And without regard here. To market research, you can do all sorts of things. Armchair research. You can go to competitors websites to understand how their position in the market, and you might even find some internal research sitting on a shelf somewhere that you can leverage that you might already have answers to.
Primary research is the key to getting the information, the specific information you need, specific to your questions and your organization. There are all sorts of methods. I've used all of these in my career, but where we tend to rely most because it's probably the most effective and most feasible, are in-depth interviewing focus groups and surveys. It's not to say that other I've used all of these and they're all valuable, but those are the ones we tend to swim in the most often, so it's good to get adept at those techniques.
We another thing that is really valuable if you can do it, is creating a community of your customers or clients. So that you can have an ongoing dialogue at a convenience, and the sample would matter who you're talking to. But you can do that in a way that is very time and financially useful to you. If you can develop a community of feedback of for feedback from folks with through an ongoing dialogue process. OK, so a few places you might want to start with market research is brand.
Who are we? How do we stick out, you know, in the marketplace? Why do customers want to engage with us versus somewhere else? And how much are we resonating? What is our loyalty? Brand can be studied in a variety of ways. There's basic KPIs tracking like awareness and familiarity, familiarity, affinity, intent, advocacy, actual engagement. Tracking this over time is super helpful for you to understand how your sticking up or laying low in the market, and then values some deep exploration into how what you're representing and your vision and what you stand for align with your customers or your potential customers in the market.
What values do you share? How do we connect and really set ourselves up to resonate in a way that will help us build long term, lasting relationships, to be a place that they want to be essentially, and who they want to work with. Communication is another ripe area for market research. It's basically how do we resonate more effectively in the places where author researchers or your customers already are?
There's all sorts of different communications research you can do, from communications concept development to message tracking effectiveness to a B testing on actual messages to see what's most effective. And it goes on and on. But in the end, we're trying to understand what kinds of messages resonate in the right places. Through which channels for your audience? Customer experience is another great place to do primary research, so anytime there's an interaction with your customer or audience, be it customer service, interaction, online or on phone, even, or they've submitted an article to you or you've been rejected or accepted, these are great opportunities to do a quick check in to understand basic satisfaction.
How did that experience go? Did it increase their affinity? Are they more likely to engage with you again? Do they, did they have a bad experience and they're not coming back. So this works both ways positive and negative. It's a way to track just kind of see where you are track find red flags. And if you need to kind of go in and figure out what's going on in a particular area, it lets you need to do that.
And on the other side, if things are going really well in a particular area where we're interacting, then great. We need to give ourselves a Pat on the back. We need to keep that going and focus our energy and effort in a positive place as well. Just a couple more topical research is really important. This really help you, helps you inform the decision, strategy and tactics of your stakeholder teams.
It could be, you know, the editorial team, your product innovations team, your communications and marketing team could even be the executive suite when they're trying to develop strategies for the organization. But really, what you're doing is helping a team answer their specific set of questions in a way that can really, in a targeted way, help to inform the choices that they are making. And then finally, there's two more product innovation, a really important place to gather customer or consumer feedback.
You have to develop something that people want, right? The if you build it, they will come model is gone. That doesn't work. So product innovation insights can happen at any phase of the product development process. It can be on existing products and services to understand what's working there and what tweaks need to be made. It can be at the beginning of a concept development to help inform where a product should go or service.
It can be as an iterative process as you're moving through development of a particular product and service. And you want to get feedback to make tweaks along the way so that you can make something that people actually want and need. And then finally, this is audience. To me, this is the core. And if I were starting anywhere, unless I had a huge need, this is where I would start.
Keep your customer front and center, your customer and consumer, your target, and the people just outside of you, or even beyond that you want to acquire and have a relationship with. What do they need? Who are they? What? what's going well for them? What are their challenges? How can we support them?
What are their needs? If I had to start anywhere, this is where I would start. The customer should be at the center of, of, or at least considered when you're making choices about your services, products, offerings and vision everything that you are doing in the organization. I would try to keep them focused in your mind, and there's lots of different ways to go about this. I'm going to keep it short, but needs assessment is really a good place to start.
You can even run various types of segmentations, but a good place to start. This is my final content slide. So low hanging fruit. If you haven't done a lot of market research and you want to get started, or you're just starting for the first time, observation, interviews and simple surveys are really a way, a good way to go. Just leverage your social science skills that you've learned in wherever you might have picked them up along the way.
Go observe people at conferences. Take pull some people aside to have interviews with them in a guided and framed way. Write some simple surveys that you think are unbiased. Just get your toe in the water and get started. There are survey tools available in the market. Survey monkey is relatively inexpensive and not too sophisticated, but is usable. Alchemer is a more sophisticated survey tool that you can purchase and have a subscription to Qualtrics is out there.
It's kind of cool, but it's more sophisticated, and you can reach people through emailing your internal list to, you know, give them research invitations to invite them to participate in various forums that you might be hosting. There's market wide list of people you can purchase. You can do pop UPS on your website. You can host conferences either in person or video at conferences.
You can host forums at conferences, either in person. You can also do it online. You can leverage social listening tools. I'm not going to get into the positives and negatives of social media mining, but there are some cautions there. If you go into that category, there are industry wide research resources. From a market research standpoint, market research is actually a really big industry as well.
So there's quirks in Green Book, especially quirks. These are the industry standards in terms of associations. They have events, forums, training seminars. The University of Georgia actually, I think created the first in market research, and they have an online Institute where you can take courses at Cornell University or Cornell University has online courses. Coursera has courses.
And then there's Reva research and values and attitudes, which is a hands on training, coaching actually location where you can go to learn how to do effective moderating for qualitative work. And I've been there. I think it's really great. I've gotten trained there. And then you can also hire consultants. And I think that this is a OK, I do it frequently depending on what I'm trying to do and the time I have.
But you can look at individual contributors sometimes they're just social scientists who are really good at math and really good at research, and they're really good to work with. They'll tend to charge you as much money. There's boutique market research firms, both within publishing and exterior to publishing. And then there's the very large market research firms and everywhere in between.
What I recommend, because I've worked with a variety of contributors over many years, is just really interviewing and vetting these folks, especially if you haven't worked with them before. What's their expertise in conducting research? What's their expertise in your industry? How are they going to collaborate with you? Because you really need to be hands onto get the research that you need, not their view of your research and how much are they going to charge you.
So these are all things to consider when you're getting started. And I think that's it. We're doing discussion later. So thank you for having me. I look forward to talking with you after. Awesome well, Thank you all for having me. And Thank you for including me on this panel.
So I'm Corinne, I work at Virginia Tech. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're seeing, kind of boots on the ground at the University from researchers and authors on our campus. So a little bit about Virginia Tech. It's a large University, but it's a small community. And I emphasize that because I can't go anywhere without people running into me and asking questions. Literally even Kroger, somebody, an author or working with or a researcher on campus will be like, Oh, hey, How's it going?
So that's kind of a lot of where my perspective is coming from is actually a lot more anecdotal chats. So a little bit about Virginia Tech publishing. We're a small open access based publisher in the library. We publish books, textbooks, journals, and some more experimental digital scholarship projects. But we're also in a library, and librarians are traditionally providing a service. So part of that service is how we work with our authors.
We work really closely with authors, and because we're on campus, because people find me everywhere I go, they're able to ask a lot more questions. And I think this is especially beneficial for first time authors, for junior faculty, for even some of our student authors, and also helpful for those more experimental projects where people are a little unsure of how that's going to go, what that process might look like. But again, we're in a library, so we also offer service.
And these are for people who are working with us to author or with other publishers. Any of you guys here? So we offer a lot of consultations. And what I see, probably the three most common areas of consultations are where to publish. We have a junior faculty, somebody who's thinking about their promotion and tenure process. I have to publish.
Where do I even begin? How do I do that? How do I go about finding who's the best publisher for my research area? So we chat a lot about, OK, we'll think about where your colleagues are publishing. Think about where that research is coming from. So that's number probably one of the number one questions. Another area is Book proposals.
A lot of people looking for feedback on their book proposals, especially coming out of the humanities and social sciences. How can they improve it? How can they reach that audience that they're trying to reach? And then thinking about after they're working with a publisher, sometimes we get people coming to us looking, asking for us to kind of review their contracts and agreements with them.
What are they? What are they? What are they signing off on? Right who is what most typically a copyright. But what are they agreeing to with this publication agreement and kind of walking through that step by step, we also offer workshops. So what we're seeing the most is a request for those book proposal workshops.
People really want to publish. So they're trying to figure out how do I propose my project, the best possible way to get it published. We're actually having a book proposal workshop on Thursday of this week, so it's going to be a big one where people are learning a little bit more about that book proposal process.
We also offer services or workshops on tools. I'll talk a little bit about some of the tools that we offer in a bit, but thinking about how can you use existing tools to help improve your research and writing process? We're currently looking at we haven't done this yet, but we're looking at offering workshops on indexing since so many authors on campus are doing a lot of their own indexing, how can we better teach them how to do that.
So that they're a little less frightened, frightened by that process? And then finally, and I think this kind of comes out pulling from our first two speakers here, a lot more about the process. People don't know what that process is. They come to us and I'm sure many of you experience this too. Here's my manuscript. So is it going to be ready in about a week?
So we're trying to teach a little bit more about what that process actually looks like and why it does take as long as it takes. We are at a University. We do offer a lot of student opportunities. So I just want to touch on those really quick. So thinking about public we have student publications. So how do for journals and some student book projects.
So giving those students that opportunity to publish early on in their career and see what that process might look like. We also offer internships and jobs for students who are interested in careers in publishing. And since we're a smaller publisher, it gives them an opportunity to touch on multiple areas of the publishing process. And then finally, we'll do some guest lectures and classes.
Again, these might be on specific tools. They might be on more general publishing processes. I did one last week. That was about how I got to where I'm at. So people are interested in publishing as a career. Sometimes they're a little bit more about open access versus not or where to publish different topics there. So people again, they're trying to catch the students early on in their careers before they go off into those more promotion and tenure based positions.
And then I mentioned tools earlier. So these are some of the tools that we offer. So thinking about kind of that DIY publishing, some people have stuff. They just want to get it up there online. So we offer domains. This is a space for any faculty or student on campus to create a website and share their research or whatever they're doing through that website.
We also offer overleaf. This is a latex based tool that allows people to use templates like for journal articles or conference posters, stuff like that they're able to pull that in for. And then finally, pressbooks, this is primarily what we use for a lot of our open educational resources and some of our book projects, but we have used it. We have offered accounts to faculty on campus who are looking to self-publish for whatever reason.
And then I know we touched on this apcs a little bit. So there is also something that the library does to help cover books conventions. So we have a general book subvention fund. This does not have to be for open access publications that people can request support for, for things like indexing, image rights, permissions, stuff like that. But then we also have Tomas.
So this is out of the tone, a five year pilot program that wrapped up last summer towards an open monograph ecosystem. And we offer funds to publishers to make that book open access. So kind of providing those funds up front, we only offer about 2 or three of those a year, but that is a service that we're providing because, again, a need that we're seeing researchers want is if they want to make that work, open access, who pays for it?
Open access isn't free. Somebody has to pay for that work. So just a couple of concluding thoughts. Just in general, we're seeing a lot more people wanting to understand this process. I think people assume, hey, it's going online. That should be pretty easy, right? It's not. So how do we help them understand that process?
How do we help them start them early on to think about that stuff? Going back to the what do you see teenagers doing? So teenagers are also the students in the classes at University. So how are they going to grow into those researchers. And how do we catch them early on? But I'm happy to chat a little bit more as we move into discussion.
Thank you so much. That was a fantastic panel. Now we have time for some questions. Is there anything coming in online today? No not yet. OK I can actually kick us off. All right.
Go ahead if that's OK. Sarah who just who just stepped out. Sarah posted a question just to the chat on Zoom, and I actually think it's a really interesting one to Pose to everyone, both online and in the room. A topic near and dear to my heart, which is user and customer research. And so when we think about that shift from publishing as product to product, as service or publishing as service, how many folks are actively, regularly talking to customers, conducting research, competitive research, user testing, anything in that domain just show of hands.
OK pretty good. So about I'd say 30% to 40% in the room. And I'm trying to see if there's any show of hands online I don't see. OK Yeah. And then we do. We did have one question actually come in from Anne stone online.
So I read that one while I'm here. So for the panel or the audience Anne is asking regarding next generation researchers. Now, is anyone creating or currently using a chat bot for their submission system that is AI based Fed by author guidelines? Examples of good peer review reports. Support for non-native English speakers, or multi-language support.
Anyone have anything to contribute on that? Thank you. Oh well, half an hour later. Yeah so I can kind of kick off on that. We're not there yet. I'd be really interested to hear if there's any other groups in the audience that are closer to that sort of chat bot, but it's definitely something that we're looking to develop.
Not so much from the perspective of creating content, but doing sort of more guided help with review guided help with moving manuscripts through the process. Guided help with reviewers, both sort of on the author side of things as well as the editorial side of things. And one thing I can say also to not automated, not AI yet, but we've built into sort of our screening tool, a lot of people there's a research integrity component to that 100% but there's also a QC component to that that allows author guidelines to be sort of included in that and creating sort of more automated checklists.
So baby steps not quite to what the question described, but but closer. Hi Thank you so much. Sophie rice Mary Ann Lieber, Inc publishers. Thank you for the great presentation. Julie, you mentioned in your discussion that I'm remembering what you said correctly. Authors it takes a little while for them to know if their institutions actually are providing transformative agreements or other resources for them as academics.
Can you explain what tools or other improvements that you have explored, perhaps, that have helped authors find these resources? Sure and I'll definitely open to the room with other groups that are doing sort of similar work in the research exchange product. We have a component in the submission tool to integrate into wherever a publisher or organization keeps that data, whether it's CDC, whether it's another Oh, there we go.
Another sort of database component where that is. And then it can pull into a designed check to say, OK, author, we see you're coming in from this institution. You may be qualified for this transformative agreement and this a discount or a society discount because you're a member from a certain region, and that is all displayed prior to hitting that submission button.
So that information is provided upfront to organizations or to authors and organizations as well, to be able to better make decisions on what that price tag is going to look like on the other side. But I know other groups are doing similar things, so certainly open up. Hi, Heather Stevens from Delta ink. And just to what you were saying, Julie, we do a lot of projects where we look at publisher websites for from the authors standpoint, from the researcher standpoint, from the partners standpoint, you might think it's easy to find this stuff on your website.
It is not always easy to find yourself just so I just wanted to highlight that like think again if you're assuming it's easy to find. I have a question about books for Karen. And this kind of goes back a little bit to the keynote this morning. And the question about the glacial pace of how research works. And I come from the humanities, and I started out in the book world.
And one of the things that's really interesting to me are these new digital publishing projects. And there's amazing ideas out there and wonderful kind of enthusiasm. But do you guys find yourselves getting involved in how this will be seen towards tenure and promotion? Because I feel like if that piece of it doesn't happen, then people are creating magical, wonderful things and then tenure committees are gone.
So yes, that is probably the number one thing I think I've been talking about the glacial speed of academia. That's probably the number one reason why people aren't doing more of these, in my opinion. I know we did have a professor in history who had a project. I mean, it was NIH funded project. So those are already rare to get those grants as it is. We did peer review of all of the content on the project, editing everything like that, and he did get tenure based on that, which was fantastic.
But even to do that, he also had to provide extra case to his committee to say these are cases of other institutions doing tenure based on these projects. And as far as I know, he's the only one at Virginia Tech that has done that. So far. But it is really rare. So I think a lot of authors are leaning more into and I know.
So also full disclosure, my background is more in digital humanities. And then I kind of came over to publishing. So I did work with these folks a lot for years before I transitioned into this role. And I think I've talked to a lot of people who are like, well, I'm going to do my 10 year book, I'm going to get tenure, and then maybe I'll do that digital project for if I go for a promotion.
So I think that's probably more so what we're seeing is like if they're feeling bold, they're like, well, I'll get tenure first and then I'll worry about that when I have when I'm already safe. So I do think that's a big part of what's holding people back from doing those more interactive digital projects. Hi, Matt giancola with American Geophysical Union. I think I have a question.
I was thinking about user experience and treating our, you know, people as customers and giving them a better experience is good. But I'm sort of thinking about a lot of the people, at least, that we interact with at Au don't want to be seen as a customer, right? They want to be seen as like an active, like leader in the system, and that the publishing ecosystem is there because they're there and it's, you know, to serve them.
And I'm just wondering how to Square that. How do you engage with your authors and reviewers and editors in a way that gives them a good experience, but also doesn't make them feel like they're being monetized? I'll try to stop. You know, I just wanted to Thank before I started to speak. I mean, it's a really good question because it is a balance there of especially, you know, when you're talking about organizations or commercial publishers that are, you know, there's a financial piece to all of this as well.
And how do you engage sort of all of those groups. But I think that really I think anybody in any of those, whether any of those groups, still want the process to be easy. They want us to respect their time in a lot of ways. And I think that sort of plays into the idea of making some of these processes faster. It's not necessarily all for incentive, as far as, you know, saving money like it might have been back in 2000.
I think if things get faster now, we're not having sort of that same overhead of, of savings. But I do think that kind of connecting those authors and making that process smoother will also sort of by turn, also sort of help those leaders and help them grow and help them be able to find other uses for their time within the organization. That's not just spent on the publishing process. So that was a little bit of a roundabout answer, but it's a really good, really good question.
And I think something to think about as this, you know, space sort of continues to, to grow and sort of thinking in that customer minded sense. I, I was trying to raise my hand virtually, but I couldn't find it just to, just to follow on. I think a lot of it comes through tone. Right so there's internal jargony words that we may use within our businesses, but we would, you know, it's not to be duplicitous, but we wouldn't necessarily address customers as a transaction.
Right? we address them as people as who they are. Right so it's about their point of view and resonance, and that's why you want to do the insights work and meet their needs. So that you are hitting the right tone. You do know what they need, and you're serving up things that empower them. And if you strike that balance, even if there are truly our customers, that's more of a jargony word that we might use internally.
But we, you know, we would want to communicate in a way that is authentic and is really focused on them as people and what they need as scientists or whomever your audience may be. Yes Hi. Yeah, I'm Tim Lloyd from live links. We do a fair amount of usage analytics, processing, and one of the aspects of, I think moving to a service model where you're focusing more on the author is demonstrating what was the value at the end of the day, how did we demonstrate the impact of publishing with us?
And one of the frustrations I find a lot with sort of back end processing usage analytics is that we don't use a lot of the really valuable metadata that we create during editorial workflows to help us demonstrate that. So things like subject taxonomies that could provide more insights into what people are using, or funder IDs that can demonstrate how funders link through to the value they got from their funding or author IDs.
So I'm just interested in any comments you have about how, at the back end, you then demonstrate the value of the service you were providing. Thanks should I start on that one so I can kick off. So I think as far as to your point of that sort of back end system, and I mentioned a little bit we're looking at ways to link those things up. So where we're sort of connecting the various systems that we have to have sort of one kind of data pool for, for our customers.
So there is kind of a consistency across all of the various tools in the process. And I think that and going back to some of the pieces that was talked about in the ability to sort of market research. We do a lot of surveys, so we do a lot of surveys at various points of the process, whether that's at submission, whether it's at the end state of the decision process to be able to sort of benchmark kind of where our, you know, customer authors, internally speaking, will sort of see the process and see what they've gained from that.
And then we're also looking at ways to sort of better use that information that's collected, whether it's through sort of a customer data platform or better leverage the information that we have to be able to drive more information out to our users. So well performed. OK well, Thank you very much, everybody. We've had a great discussion.
And I think we can continue this discussion over lunch. So it's in the.
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