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Platform Strategies 2025: Welcome to the Jungle
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Platform Strategies 2025: Welcome to the Jungle
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Segment:0 .
JOSH DAHL: Well, first of all, thank you all. I know coming back from lunch, sitting down to sit through a session again can sometimes be a challenge. Fortunately, I've got two researchers here that are going to share some of their insights about scholarly publishing with you all. We're going to this is conversational. So definitely put questions into the app. We're going to have some time for Q&A at the end. So as you're thinking of questions to get raw perspectives, maybe spicy perspectives, put them in the app, be ready for questions.
JOSH DAHL: So first of all, I want to thank Donny and Irene for spending time out of their busy researcher lives to come here and talk with everyone. I know this is probably not one of the top things they had on their list, but we really appreciate them sharing some time coming here, giving us their perspectives. We're going to cover a number of different topics around balancing the welcome to the jungle, the researchers experience working with scholarly publishers.
JOSH DAHL: So first of all, quick introductions. I'm Josh Dahl, I'm SVP of product at Silverchair. To my left, I've got Dr. Irene Newton. She is a professor of biology at Indiana University Bloomington. She's also an editor on a number of journals. And Donny Persaud, he is a postdoc-- excuse me.
IRENE NEWTON: PhD candidate.
JOSH DAHL: Sorry, yeah PhD candidate at Cornell University. So we've got two different perspectives from people that have been in the research space. So first of all, if you could, just give a quick intro of like, what do you do and how do you work with scholarly publishers currently? What's your--
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah, so I am a faculty member in a department. I run a large research group. I publish, so I see scientific publishing on that side of things. I've also served as a reviewer for many journals. I am an editor in chief for an ASM Journal, and I've been on the editorial board of many other scientific journals, so have a lot of experience in this space from the academic side.
DONNY PERSAUD: Sorry, the research overview as well as the publishing overview.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. Research and publishing overview. Yeah, just tell them what you do.
DONNY PERSAUD: So I'm in the department of science and technology studies at Cornell University, and I look at how Elon Musk's Starlink satellite constellation is changing the future of astronomy, the future of outer space, the future of internet connectivity, and how existing environmental laws all interact with this. So my publishing experience is, well, kind of as a late stage PhD candidate, geared mainly towards helping me get a job. So I've mainly been targeting open access journals because I just want as many eyeballs as possible on my work.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah, that's a great segue, Donny. I was going to ask a little bit about-- you've recently had some publications. I think you just recently were published in July as well.
DONNY PERSAUD: Yeah, In ACM Compass Journal, the computing for the social science society, sustainability, social science, something like that. I don't remember the exact acronym because they're ACM acronyms can get really long at times.
JOSH DAHL: What was some of your motivation for journal selection? Why did you pick that journal? What was some of the thinking going into that?
DONNY PERSAUD: I picked this conference proceeding in particular because there was the option to make your work open access. And honestly, it was just the thematic fit for my work with that particular publication. And yeah, in addition to it, being open access, just allowing more people to be able to see my work, particularly at this moment, was invaluable, honestly.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah and I know when we talked earlier, you mentioned just the cost aspect of it. The OA fees to get published and select that route had some impact on budgets, and some strings had to be pulled to make that happen.
DONNY PERSAUD: A little bit. Yeah so I didn't anticipate that the open access fee would be about-- it was only $700. But as a PhD candidate who doesn't have their own funding source, I had my advisor bailed me out before her NSF grant got canceled. And she was the one who generously paid the open access fee for me. That being said, this was just particularly this one publication.
DONNY PERSAUD: There were other open access journals. I have a paper that I've just submitted to Engaging STS, or Engaging Science Technology in Society, and I haven't been asked about any open access fees as of yet. So we'll see.
JOSH DAHL: We'll see. Yeah. And Irene, one of the things about the choice. You're an editor for a society that publishes journals. You have some views on society versus commercial publishers and-- yeah, Talk about that a little bit.
IRENE NEWTON: I guess as an academic, we think a lot about these APC charges, the subscription charges, all this money flowing from our grants or our startup funds to publishers, and what that money is actually used for. And to be frank, societies provide a major service to us. Societies are the core of science. And so I very much prefer to publish in society journals where I can see that money is going back to the community. It's going to support trainees, to support mentoring, to support networking, our conferences, et cetera.
IRENE NEWTON: So it is my preference to publish in society journals when I can. Some of these open access fees are really unsustainable, upwards of 14k for some journals, which is ridiculous. And at that point, I hate to be like a negative Nancy, but given the current climate and changes to indirect cost return for us scientists, on the farthest extreme, we will just dump everything on the web. At that point, there's nothing we can do if you don't have the funding to actually publish.
IRENE NEWTON: So I think-- not to say that publishers don't provide a service, which they do. It's peer review is important. And getting those articles as you're saying, eyeballs on these articles, having them publicized and having people actually look at your work is important, having that platform for it. But if we just don't have the money, then we just don't have the money.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. And you mentioned just dumping on the web and talk a little bit about preprinting, views on preprints and--
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah. So as a matter of course, my research group always just cosubmits. Whenever we submit an article for publication application to a particular journal, we always submit to bioRxiv. So it will be up on bioRxiv ahead of time, accruing citations, accruing eyeballs, as you mentioned, and having a bigger impact. And then, of course, that those citations are aggregated by Google Scholar subsequently.
IRENE NEWTON: So it just all feeds into the same metric. And then you can have a bigger impact of your work. And arXiv and bioRxiv are products. The NIH and NSF have recognized them as such. And we've even had conversations in our department recently because of the change in funding landscape, that we're going to have to consider these as serious products for our junior faculty going up for promotion.
JOSH DAHL: Donny any view on preprints? Did you deposit papers on preprints?
DONNY PERSAUD: In the social sciences, not particularly much. It seems to be more of a natural sciences endeavor. So I don't really have much experience with the preprint.
JOSH DAHL: Yes, not a lot of options for you to pursue that route.
DONNY PERSAUD: Not particularly. Yeah.
JOSH DAHL: Have either of you had POAJ I think we talked earlier about POAJ and that model. I think maybe Irene, you mentioned that. It's like a more idealistic model.
IRENE NEWTON: I think that there are lots of innovators in this space. eLife has innovated a lot. POAJ was a new publisher or a new journal on the scene for a while with this idea that you could publish anything that was sound. It didn't have to be scientifically amazing, but anything that was technically sound. And they're are large volume publisher. I think it just becomes difficult to wrangle so many publications and determine-- yeah, at some point it just strains the peer review system.
IRENE NEWTON: People are exhausted and they just don't have any more to give for free in this service role. So I was always taught, when I submit one paper, I'm expecting three people to read it. I should accept three reviews. So kind of balance things out that way. But I don't think that everyone is doing their job. [LAUGHTER]
JOSH DAHL: A slight imbalance, possibly. Yeah. I'm going to switch gears a little bit just to-- we've talked a lot about AI. We've probably mentioned it about 375 times in the first day and a half. It'll probably be another 375 times. As researchers, I'm sure you're using AI tools. Do you use AI for d on the manuscript preparation side, helping get language correct?
JOSH DAHL: What's your use? And Irene, you mentioned talking with students as well about this.
DONNY PERSAUD: My AI use is presently non-existent. I don't use any AI for my data analysis because I'm reading through legal documents and other reports and things like that, and I actually like to get in there and make my own interpretations. I experimented once with putting I guess, a data corpus into-- For those familiar with ATLAS.ti, they're OpenAI analysis tool-- just to see what kind of themes it would spit out.
DONNY PERSAUD: After I had gone through everything myself. And it was kind of interesting, there were one or two things that I hadn't really thought about that could potentially inform work later on. But generally I tended to stray away from them. But I've used them more as a-- I've used AI more as a pedagogical tool, I'd say. I give it the assignment prompt that I have for my class, and I bring the essay into the class.
DONNY PERSAUD: Usually it's a first year writing seminar, so it's geared around writing and writing for college level. And we'll go through the essay collectively and be like, OK, what does it do well? What does it not do well? Where does it pass all of the thesis argumentative evidence checklists that I've got for my students, that kind of deal. So that's generally been the experience with AI. I tend to avoid it just because you learn by writing.
JOSH DAHL: I think that's something you said as well, Irene.
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah, I echo that. I think that writing clarifies your thinking. Writing helps you actually develop your ideas. And so it's a super important thing for students to learn. And so I will try and get my students to write themselves. And we do use it pedagogically as well. I mean, you probably have heard of the anecdote of AI telling people to put glue on their pizza to keep the cheese on. There are lots of ways that it scrapes the internet for things that are jokes, and it doesn't understand humor.
IRENE NEWTON: So it will give you these kinds of nonsensical or fake citations, for example, in science as well. So I try to give them a sense of the pitfalls of it and why we don't use it. It can be interesting to use it to ask, like, hey, I'm interested in writing a review article on Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Can you tell me what are the top particular topics that have been published recently?
IRENE NEWTON: And it might give you a summary, and it might give you a place to start for that. But you could never really use it to write something for you or believe everything that it says when it writes for you. That said, as an editor on the editorial side of things, I've definitely noticed that the manuscripts that we are getting from Asia no longer have grammatical problems or typographical errors as they used to. So it is very clear that it's been being used heavily for non-native English speakers, which you could say is a plus, as long as somebody has actually read through it to make sure that it's what the authors think they are trying to convey.
JOSH DAHL: Not written by AI, but actually just used to smooth out the language.
IRENE NEWTON: Correct.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. And you mentioned as an editor, speaking of AI for screening, that really you're hoping to see more adoption of screening at scale to help really with that early view on whether papers should move on to the editors and peer review.
IRENE NEWTON: I mean, there's a lot of things that we check for initially when papers come in that I think could be easily adapted to have an AI screener. And especially if you're dealing with a large volume journal, then that would be something that I think could be useful, because also people are just exhausted. You don't want to have to be dealing with sending it back because the accession numbers aren't available, sending it back because they don't have the right formatting. Those things, I think, could just very easily be done by an AI.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. And I think there's obviously a lot of work going on in that space. But Donny from your view as an author, what sort of transparency would you expect from a publisher. What do you want them to tell you about how they came to maybe a decision to desk reject or--
DONNY PERSAUD: Yeah. Well, this is an interesting topic because this appears to be kind of dubious, depending on the discipline that you're in. But generally more in the social sciences, you usually get a reason for the rejection of your paper from a journal, whether that's, it doesn't fit with the aims and scope of the journal or there's something else with the manuscript that doesn't necessarily jive with what the journal is about.
DONNY PERSAUD: But apparently for the larger journals, in particular, the marquee ones, there's no rationale given. And if AI were to be implemented, I mean, I would love to see an element of transparency where it's like, OK, what are the decisions or the decision trees that went into this particular outcome. And there to be, I guess, an unboxing of the black box of AI. But I don't know. It doesn't necessarily seem to echo current human practices.
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah, I think that editors of journals, especially non-academic editors, are trying to look for things that are quote, "high impact." And I think this is notoriously difficult to predict. You cannot tell me, if I gave you all a list of papers, which ones are going to receive most citations in the next 10 years. It's just impossible even for people in the actual field. So having transparency as to how those decisions are made is wonderful for us who are the clientele that these journals are actually serving.
IRENE NEWTON: And if you start implementing AI in that process, then clear transparency as to how it's being used that way would also be useful.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. Let's pivot to peer review, because, again, that's a heavily reliant on researchers spending time to help look at papers in their field. You're obviously on the front lines for finding peer reviewers. What are some of the barriers that you see to participating as a peer reviewer?
IRENE NEWTON: I mean, besides, just like the enormous amount of time and commitment it takes to do it, I think that it's hard to find peer reviewers on the editorial side of things. It's hard to find people who will respond even to the email to say like, no, I can't do it. Oftentimes, you have to chase and chase and chase them. And it would be lovely if there was some AI tool that could take all of our reviewer pool and tell me exactly who might be available and if their expertise exactly matched the paper that I'm currently handling, and that they would be real people not just AIs out there.
IRENE NEWTON: And that would be one way to innovate in that space. That would be useful as an editor. As a peer reviewer myself, sometimes I'll get a paper that seems very much in my wheelhouse, and I I'll click on the link to accept it and it'll take me, what, to a fricking survey. Oh, and you haven't filled out your profile. Let's take some time to fill out your profile. Are you kidding me?
IRENE NEWTON: I'm sitting here doing you a freaking service, and I have to click through all of these links to be able to actually do it. So then I just end up closing the page. I have no time for this. And then I'll just ignore those emails. So I'm contributing to the problem in finding peer reviewers. But I also think that it's obnoxious.
IRENE NEWTON: There are barriers to peer review, when it's a free service that people are doing for you. So try to limit-- limiting those barriers as much as possible is a good thing in my opinion.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. And Donny, we know you have no time for peer review. This is not an area you're spending time doing.
DONNY PERSAUD: The year of the PhD, I'm applying for jobs full time instead of finishing my dissertation.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. No time. Any invites you got would get--
IRENE NEWTON: I also encourage Donny to not accept any invites. As soon as you get your PhD, you are flooded with invitations to peer reviews. I was like, hide, hide as long as you can.
DONNY PERSAUD: Fly under the radar. [LAUGHTER]
JOSH DAHL: Irene made this comment that I wrote down from an earlier conversation just around timelines, we hear that's a big sticking point. You said, it takes less time to gestate a child than to publish, which really stuck out to me when we had our conversation.
IRENE NEWTON: It is 100% true. And if you doubt me, you can find my blog post about this, when I actively ranted about my horrible experience publishing in one of the PLOS family journals, where I was pregnant when I submitted, and then I had my child before the paper was accepted. So yeah, it definitely takes a long time. And that process is exacerbated by editors who again, a lot of them aren't being paid.
IRENE NEWTON: This is just a free-- the service they're doing to a publisher or a society. And so the motivation there to try to keep the ball going and to actually do their job and step in and make sure the manuscript progresses in a timely way through the process isn't there.
JOSH DAHL: Donny, your most recent publication, what was that time for publication. Do you remember?
DONNY PERSAUD: Yeah. I submitted my manuscript back at the end of January, and then the proceedings were released in July, and I got the peer reviewer comment back in late March early April, I want to say. And then they resubmit was at the end of April, start of May.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah, half a year plus.
DONNY PERSAUD: Half a year more or less. And I mean, that's a better timeline than other papers that I've been working on. Yeah, there's one that's been like six years in the making. That's finally in review.
JOSH DAHL: Well, we're going to go to audience questions momentarily. So think about your questions if you have some. Just wanted to ask you both a magic wand question. If you could change one thing, and again, blue sky, if you could change one thing about the publishing process, what would it be?
IRENE NEWTON: I think from the author experience. We are shopping our paper around to venues that we think are relevant, where the community that will read it is appropriate. But every one of those different journals may have different formatting requirements, different little bits that you have to fill in online. It really obnoxious, tedious things for you to have to do. And then the reviews that you may have gotten from another journal will not transfer sometimes to this other publishing house.
IRENE NEWTON: Now, for some journals, this is the case that they can transfer within, but it's not uniform. So ideally, there would be like, a common application like we have for colleges, but it would be for publication and you would just have everything in there and then be able to very seamlessly move your articles from one place to another. And it's just not been-- even though publishers will say that they are format neutral, that is some bs, because eventually they will ask you to fill in all their little bits and they have specific requirements definitely for their journal.
IRENE NEWTON: So just having some uniformity I think would make things much easier on the author side.
JOSH DAHL: Donny, what about you? Any magic wand moments things in your early publishing career?
DONNY PERSAUD: Ooh. I guess as somebody who is on the job market actively now, a lot of tenure track positions, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, will ask for a individual authored publication that you have out. And sometimes it can be a bit prohibitive, like, with the open access fee that I wasn't able to pay and my advisor had to step in. I was fortunate enough to have somebody who was capable of doing that.
DONNY PERSAUD: But other students who are in a similar position may not necessarily be as-- may not have the ability to pay any fees that are associated with publications, particularly if they're pursuing open access formats. So some kind of support for junior scholars or late stage candidates for maybe like their first solo publication or something to that effect, because it's becoming an increasingly seen job requirement for potential tenure track hires.
IRENE NEWTON: Sounds like the social sciences need their version of arXiv.
DONNY PERSAUD: Yeah, we definitely do.
JOSH DAHL: Well, thank you all for sure, for my part of this. But I wanted to open it up. I don't know if there are any questions in the app, I don't see Stephanie anymore.
STEPHANIE: I'm here. I'm here. We do have a couple questions in the app. Anyone have a burning question first? Otherwise--
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. Feel free to stand up, raise your hand, ask a question, or we can go to the app questions as well.
STEPHANIE: We can dive into one of these first. Have you ever been asked or as editor asked authors to provide alt text for figures or table summaries for complex tables?
IRENE NEWTON: So this is something that's often required when you submit. So you have the table figures and legends and text that goes along with that as part of the submission for sure. I'm not sure if I'm really getting at the question though. I don't know if there's something else there.
STEPHANIE: Do you provide alt text with images when you submit works as well?
IRENE NEWTON: So I don't think alt text for your figures, but you'll have the figure legend and then running smaller description of it, if that makes sense.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. Other questions. Oh, there we go. Right here, Steph.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you. When you're choosing a journal, do you pay any attention to the fact that it might be a family of journals and that there might be the ability to transfer within that family? Does that matter to you, negatively or positively?
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah. So at ASM we like to say, keep it in the family. And yeah, if I'm publishing a microbiology research in ASM, we'll try and go for the top tier journal, and then it'll come down to whatever the specific journal is within the publisher. But if someone is shooting for-- sometimes someone in my lab will be so ambitious and they're like, I'm going to publish it in nature, I'm like, OK, go ahead and try.
IRENE NEWTON: It'll be like three years before you see that. But they'll like they'll go to publish in Nature and then it'll be rejected and then they'll have to reformat it and they're like, oh, Nature be like, oh, why don't you publish in Nature Communications. I'm like, I might as well put it in PLOS One. So just put it somewhere else. Then they'll have to reformat it and put it in another place. It's just a big hassle.
IRENE NEWTON: So yeah, there are those family of journals for certain groups of publishers that I think we pay attention to. But for other ones, I'm not-- yeah, I don't want to pay $14,000 for the Nature or PLOS One One.
JOSH DAHL: Good answer. Other questions.
STEPHANIE: Let's see. Oh, here's a question that just came in the app. What APC cost is OK, scale or range?
IRENE NEWTON: Zero. Can I get a zero? Or like $1? I don't know. I would ask-- I would flip it and say like, what service do you think you're providing that is worth that cost? Given that we can just publish our stuff on bioRxiv. What service are you providing that is worth that cost?
IRENE NEWTON: And what do you think is, I would say fair, to both scientists who are having a hard time securing funding and the American taxpayer who is supporting the research? So ideally, it would be something reasonable like, I don't know, several hundred versus several thousands. When it becomes the price of a student's summer fellowship, that's crazy.
IRENE NEWTON: When it becomes the decision to fund a postdoctoral scholar in my lab or publish, that's insane. So just keep it in context of all the other expenses that we have as researchers.
STEPHANIE: You're going to have a lot of friends at the reception later tonight. [LAUGHTER] All right, another question. What is the biggest challenge you face on the publishing platform when you search for research content? What is the one change you would like to see?
IRENE NEWTON: So do you use publishing platforms to search for research content?
DONNY PERSAUD: Ooh. Generally I use the-- I would say I use the ACM Digital Library the most over any other platform, just because it's actually pretty easy to navigate through, at least in my experience. Although they do have-- for any ACM folks here, I guess article indicators or the subject indicators that were used were a little new to me because I had never published an ACM journal before up until recently, so that was the only weird quirk.
DONNY PERSAUD: But aside from that, I feel it's more or less through one of the library services and the databases that get provided to me there, so Scopus and things like that.
IRENE NEWTON: Yeah, like, yeah, database searches or keyword searches that get propagated and sent to your email, aggregators from PubMed or from Google Scholar. I think a lot of the time I get the current research read by my trainees and then at journal club is brought up or on our Slack is brought up. I don't go to a specific journal-- I think it is kind of silly in this day, to be honest, that people would get a actual volume and read through it.
IRENE NEWTON: I don't think anybody does that anymore. So really it's based on subject matter and aggregators.
STEPHANIE: Anyone want to raise their hand before I go to another app one.
JOSH DAHL: There's-- Teo had a question up here earlier.
TEO: I'm not going to argue about the difference between posting and publishing, because for me that's a long conversation. Yeah, too much though. No, I had a very open question here. And it's like, what will make publishing easier or more rewarding for you, because we discussed the cost is-- but that doesn't really reward you. So what will make publishing more rewarding for you?
IRENE NEWTON: I think getting an article published is still rewarding. We still celebrate as a lab when someone has it a publication. I think the process is just arduous and can be really frustrating, not just-- there are things obviously involving the platforms sure, and how ridiculous some of the submissions are and how the formats and whatever. But ultimately, it comes down to just the ways that peer reviewers interact with you as an author or not or with the editor.
IRENE NEWTON: And especially as a junior faculty member starting out, feeling like people don't know your name, so they don't trust anything that you say. And they want you to go through a million hoops to be able to actually get something published. So I think that part can be frustrating, but that's nothing that y'all can do. That's, like, the way the scientific community works. But just making-- I think ultimately, I've always felt like editors need to understand how serious their job is.
IRENE NEWTON: They need to take responsibility for what they're doing and step in and adjudicate when there are differences amongst the reviews. And one example that we didn't get to talk about I don't know if anyone is familiar with Frontiers, the horrific predatory journal family, but spicy. So they have a peer review process that's absolutely insane, where basically it never ends. So there's like, you may think, oh, if only I could talk to my peer reviewers, and I could convince them that I'm right.
IRENE NEWTON: But in this process, if you serve as a peer reviewer for Frontiers. You just have a constant back and forth with the authors, and if the editor is not doing their job, they never step in to make a decision. And then you're just left like, I would like to be off this email chain please, can I not be involved anymore? Yeah, so I think it's just a difficult thing to handle peer review.
IRENE NEWTON: And I would say-- I understand there's a difference between posting something on bioRxiv and publishing it, but post-pub peer review is like the ideal. The ideal that somebody would be able to come along and put some comments on your papers that people would actually build on it in that way, is the ideal, and it just hasn't materialized because people don't for lots of different reasons we can discuss.
DONNY PERSAUD: The idea of iterative commenting on articles would actually be really cool to see it just in terms of how live discussion would be able to take place, rather than just being a particular moment in time that the article was released. That would be fascinating. Yeah, I mean, in terms of publishing, I mean, I think it's a great accomplishment to get a piece of your work out there.
DONNY PERSAUD: And honestly, it's just anything that can be done to help make it more accessible, particularly at this stage, just because of the fact that citation counts are generally something that is considered when they're weighing new faculty hires. It's like, oh, we'll go with this person because their work is already proven to be like a little influential versus the other person who hasn't necessarily gained as much traction.
DONNY PERSAUD: But that could be due to the fact that behind a paywall or they weren't able to afford to put their piece out.
JOSH DAHL: I'm getting the wrap up saying. Donny, Irene, thank you both so much. Appreciate you sharing the time with us.
IRENE NEWTON: Thank you for having us. Yeah.
JOSH DAHL: Yeah. Round of applause. [APPLAUSE]