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Platform Strategies 2025: Does the Mission Matter?
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Platform Strategies 2025: Does the Mission Matter?
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, we're coming. And I actually haven't seen Mia yet. Mia, there you go. Perfect.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Where do you want us to sit?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: One, two, three.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: OK, cool.
JAY BRODSKY: Where are you sitting.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Here. I'll sit here because then you can't see me from [INAUDIBLE]. And then Mia--
MIA RICCI: Hi.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good morning. All right, good morning.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Oh, hi.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good morning. [LAUGHS] You too. Haven't seen you this morning.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Sorry.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, welcome. So my name is Emily Delquié. I'm the Chief Product and Customer Success Officer for Silverchair. I'm very happy to moderate this wonderful panel today. I'm joined by three wonderful panelists. Great to see you this morning-- not too wet. That's good. Ah, OK.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good. I'm getting the sign that I need to have the microphone like this. So actually a note for all of you, the volume is tough. It's a big room. So we do need to hold our mics really close, awkwardly close.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Really close.
MIA RICCI: How close? This close?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Yeah, this is good.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: "Spit on your microphone" close. [EMILIE CHUCKLES]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So we've designed a conversation between our panelists this morning. And we really want to actually build on some of the points that Natalie made earlier in her keynote, to really talk about the trade-off between decisions that we all need to make between balancing mission with technology in a world where it's a fast-changing world. And there's all sorts of pressures internally and externally in DC, and really trying to balance how we as organizations can stay steady but continue to innovate, but stay true to ourselves as well.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So we've also designed this session to be quite interactive. So I will be asking questions for you all throughout the panel. So in order to participate and give your answers, I'm asking you to use the app. In the session itself, there is a Mentimeter link that will give you access. So you can comment in the app and also just participate and give us your insights.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So that's for the housekeeping. Should we go with a quick round of introductions? So quickly, can you please introduce yourselves and then just an overview of your organizations in one sentence, the mission for your organization? And then we'll get going into some of the tougher questions. All right, Casper.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Hi. I'm Casper Grathwohl. I am the President of Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press. It's where we do a lot of our language data and services activity. And OUP as a mission-based institution-- I know we've got a mission statement somewhere, but I'm sure it's very similar to all the rest of you, which is about disseminating scholarship and participating in the scholarly research experience.
MIA RICCI: Hi, everyone. My name is Mia Ricci. I am the Director of Publication Operations at the American Geophysical Union. I oversee 24 scientific journals and our preprint server. The AGU mission is to promote the discovery of Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity, so easy-peasy. I'm going to pass it over to you.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, good enough. Thanks, Mia. Hi, everyone. I'm Jay Brodsky. I'm the Chief Information Officer for AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that sounds our mission is to advance science and engineering and innovation-- but for us, throughout the world, even though that first word is American and again, for the benefit of humanity so--
MIA RICCI: Always. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. So can you share with us one way technology has recently challenged or enhanced your mission? We're starting easy, really.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, OK. I can start with that. So it seems like low-hanging fruit, but I'll just pick on artificial intelligence. And in one very specific way, there's a bunch of people at the White House who think that artificial intelligence is going to do all the work of scientists. And so that's why we can, and I kid you not, cut $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health budget because we don't need to spend the money on scientists because we've got AI.
JAY BRODSKY: And so yes, that had an impact on us. We've spent the last year waging a battle about that on Capitol Hill. We've seemed to have had some success in that regard. But sure, there's a technology that has cropped up in all of our worlds that is directly affecting us and our scientific partners.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Mia.
MIA RICCI: I have so many challenges, so I don't know, just one?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We have 45 minutes.
MIA RICCI: Fine. Jay already picked AI. So he took it out of my mouth. So let's do something that no one ever talked about before, which is open access or open science. What? Shocking. It's very close to our mission at AGU. We want science to be accessible to everyone. And by that, we mean everyone.
MIA RICCI: And there's obviously, equity issues around various open access models. And people have been experimenting. So I think, this is something that we have not gotten perfectly. And our mission has been challenged by it. There's financial investment and capital and technology resources to making open science infrastructure work for everyone.
MIA RICCI: And it has not. So this is something that we're working very closely with our publishing partner. Also we have a large commercial publishing partner. And we're a nonprofit society. So I don't know if you want to pick whatever. There's all kinds of challenges, but it has not been a boring, past few decades. And I think we'll get into that a little bit more today.
MIA RICCI: Oh, yes.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And, Casper.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, like you said, there are so many things. But I would point to discoverability. And discovery is a really interesting area right now where it's a challenge, where we're seeing a lot of this new agentic world is starting to change discovery patterns and things like this. And we're just scrambling to react to it. At the same time, there are some discovery tools that are really powerful and interesting.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And we're just learning how to harness those. And so it feels really exciting, as you said. And it's not boring at all. I think, we vacillate between feeling like, oh my God, in two years, we're going to be obsolete-- to, wait, we've cracked the future. And this is going to make us even more potent and our mission even easier to achieve. And so that kind of whiplash is really hard to manage in a business on a daily basis.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: But it is what's fascinating when a paradigm shift happens like this.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Yeah, it's fun. So let's go to you all for just a quick detour. If you want to go into the app, like I said, in the description of the session, there is a question for you all. So before I tee up the next question for the attendees, I'm sending it over to you. So you're going to see a link for Mentimeter. The question is, what's your biggest mission technology tension?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Is it cost barrier, speed of change? You guys are good. It's for them. It's for the audience-- cost barriers, speed of change, member stakeholders expectations, technical expertise gap. So we'll give you a minute to vote. I'm going to tee up the next question for the panelist. And then my friend Stephanie there will help me with the results because I don't know that I can see them.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We're good? All right, everybody finding-- are we getting some votes in? Cool. I'll come back for the results. Let's talk about the how and the why. This is getting fun. Jay, I'm going to you. So we've talked about-- so the how is the technology. The mission is the why.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Can you share a specific example where the cost or complexity of the how nearly derailed your why?
JAY BRODSKY: Just like Mia said, there's so many examples. The biggest challenge that I'm dealing with right now, I think, it was exemplified in one of those charts that we'll put up on the screen. So Wiley, and Elsevier, and Springer Nature spending all this money on capital investment on R&D. A lot of our other software partners are doing the same, which is great. And we're excited to see the innovations that can come from that, but we can't pay for that.
JAY BRODSKY: We have a very different cost model, and we're playing a different game. We can't go to the public market and ask for debt. We can't go to a private credit shop and ask for debt. We can't sell part of our company to a PE firm or get more money from a venture partner. And the challenge that we are facing right now is a bunch of our vendors are coming to us and saying, hey, we've been investing all this exciting dollars in AI, and we'd like you to pay for it.
JAY BRODSKY: And I say, well, that's wonderful if those AI investments were delivering me anything today, but they're just not. And the track that I am on, we're seeing cost increases from our technology stack. That means we're going to have to lay off three people every single year if we keep going at this rate. Because we refuse to pass the costs along to our partners. Our mission is to advance science.
JAY BRODSKY: We are not going to go to our university partners and say, hey, we know you guys are having a hard year, but we still need more money-- or go to folks in disciplines that don't have a ton of funding or to our mathematicians or our linguistics or into the social sciences and say, we're upping our APCs. We're not going to tell our minority serving institutions, our HBCUs, that we don't care about your research because you guys can't afford to pay us to be in our journals.
JAY BRODSKY: And so that's a place where we're really stuck in the middle. We're trying to achieve our mission. We're trying to deliver for the scientific enterprise. But we're in a disconnect, I feel like, with some of our technology partners.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, yeah, go ahead.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I mean, related to that, it is interesting these rising costs because it's something that, I think, Natalie said in the intro where our market that we serve isn't very fast-moving in terms of change. And so they're not pushing us for the needs of a lot of what we see coming and how things are shifting. And so the R&D and the innovation work that you're doing isn't funding itself as it goes through right now.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: You've got these double costs. And a lot of times what happens is, we lean on those big four or five players in our market who are the market leaders around-- they do our R&D for us, really. And the challenge is that during a time of radical change rather than incremental change, they start playing their cards really close to their chest. So we're not learning as much from them because they're trying to get competitive advantage as there's a big market shift with each other.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so they're not interested as much right now in the whole market succeeding and rising. And so ultimately, we're not getting those insights. And so we have to do a little bit more of it ourselves. But how do we pay for it? And I think, that's where collaboration comes in. That's where participation in some of these things, where we have to find new ways to learn because just like digital literacy, there's AI literacy that's happening right now where you have to have first-hand experience in some of these things in order to be able to make good decisions about what's going to happen.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: None of us are going to go alone. We're not going to innovate. And we're probably-- or most of us are not of the size where we expect to have an individual solution. But to make decisions about what to participate in, you have to have some of that first-hand knowledge. And right now, these costs are really hard for us to manage because we're not yet seeing the benefit of a lot of what we feel like we have a lot of pressure to be understanding and investigating and partaking in.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Thank you. Going back to the poll results.
STEPHANIE: Great. [INAUDIBLE] The cost barriers is definitely the highest tension followed by speed of change, member stakeholder expectations, and technical expertise.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So cost barrier for the win, and speed of change was number 2. Let's go to some complex-- all right. So what's interesting about this panel is we definitely have a variety of organizations that are represented. And some of you or one of you-- so, Jay, you're self-published, still independent. Mia, AGU, you have a publishing partner.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And then Oxford, obviously you have a large organization and also a lot of independence. Mia, I'm going to go to you with questions around the trade-offs of the part of having a publishing partner. Given, again, the trade-off of your mission of the publishing partners' ecosystem, where are the benefits? What do you gain by being in the partnership?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And what are some of the things you have to compromise on?
MIA RICCI: That is a very hard question to answer. But I have notes because Emily already told me she's going to ask about it. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Total improv.
MIA RICCI: Yes, exactly. Well, we have a great publishing partner. And we are very close to them. We're very collaborative. I'm recognizing that we are a large society, that not every society nor a partner with a commercial entity have that kind of attention that we get. It's pretty funny that Jay mentioned about cost being prohibitive and adapting to all this technological advancement that we have.
MIA RICCI: And I feel the same way. I never feel like broker as a society, which is funny because AGU is huge. But with what, Casper, you were saying about a lot of the large publisher leading the way in terms of playing around with this technology and discovery and all of that, I do feel that that's one of the benefits that we have. But with that comes its challenges.
MIA RICCI: So a lot of it is about transparency, I think. And it is a competitive market. So they are not just divulging all of their trade secrets to us, even though as a publishing partner, they're still developing what pricing is like and watching the market out there. And in the meantime, I'm feeling the pressure from our members. This is the first time I'm mentioning members, but not going to be the last time I mentioned members.
MIA RICCI: As a society, I'm extremely member-focused. And there's not only a disconnect between us, the society and the commercial publishing partner to deal with, but there's also the disconnect between members and those entities and members between us. That's the publishers. So I think, this is something that I'm trying to navigate. I'll put in one example of a challenge that we went through recently, and we had to overcome.
MIA RICCI: And this was-- when was it, last year, when a lot of the big publishing companies signed their first AI licensing agreement with the big companies. That was a hot mess a little bit. Authors were not happy. I think, if you were a society that was in part of those deals, we didn't know our content was in it, what was in the agreement.
MIA RICCI: And I think, this is new to a lot of the commercial publishers as well. A lot of the partners were involved in this big group with the big giant tech company that's still not disclosed in terms of the name. We had a lot of our members who went to us. And our members are our loud and vocal grounding group. So this made us go back to our publishing partner. And we created a framework, actually, that we set into an agreement around transparency, around governance of license agreements, around communication.
MIA RICCI: And I'll just mention a few of the items. For example, in this agreement with our publishing partner, we agree that they will not accept the agreement from corporations or foundation with fossil fuels as a primary business focus. Don't even get started with us, like, nope. Two, let's see. What's the other one? We will not accept any of our content to be included in a license agreement where the licenses are opaque or insufficiently transparent.
MIA RICCI: So we're not accepting confidential licenses anymore, you know, licensee. And yeah, so I think, these are things that we're working together. And you have to create all of these agreements from the start. But the transparency aspect, I think, is a big challenge.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, that's really interesting. And it's a lot of extra work around this. I mean, you take that licensing example where when those big deals started to become available to now, there's also been just a really rapid shift in what's appropriate, what's acceptable, who you can work with, what the uses are. Not only because we're understanding how it's working a little bit better, but also we're getting acclimated to this idea.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so the comfort level is changing. So we've been also to set a lot of ground rules and guardrails. But we're finding that we're adjusting them so often, they're needing constant revision and review that it feels like it's really live and moving. And meanwhile, we're very aware that there's a window here. And we're not sure how long that window is going to be open or what that window turns into. But this pure licensing idea, a lot of it is backlist.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so what happened? How are we making sure we're taking advantage, not leaving money on the table, but also not making some decisions that back us into the corner in the next round of what happens. And it's really tricky.
MIA RICCI: It is really tricky. And I would just add for me, what makes me sleep better at night is that I feel the chaos. I feel the pressure as the publisher. But my members and authors and editors aren't throwing pitchforks at us. They aren't screaming about this. So I'm trying not to be swept up in the chaos. Their focus right now is still doing research, getting their research funded, keeping their funding and just having reviewers that will give them good reviews.
MIA RICCI: The basic concepts or the key value of publishing is not changing. I want all the tools. I want all these things. But this is not what they're screaming about.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thank you, Mia. This is a really grounding point. And yeah, thank you for making it. It's a very strong reminder for all of us. So, Jay, in contrast, you are self-published. And I think, the question is similar but just from a slightly different angle, is what have you been able to maintain, thanks to your independence? And what do you feel you would have to compromise if you were a part of a larger organization?
JAY BRODSKY: So, I mean, it is interesting. And Mia and I used to work together. So I'm well aware of how feisty the members are at AGU. And so I don't have to deal with that in either way. The fact that we're self-published, the way our members relate to us make my life a little different. But for us, it's not cheap to do what we're doing. But at least, I have control. I don't have to wait for my partners to go in a certain direction.
JAY BRODSKY: I don't have to get mad at them when they do go in a certain direction. It's my fault. It's always my fault. But, Jay-- no, whatever. At least, it's my fault. So for us in certain research integrity directions, we have things that we care about, that we've gotten burned in the past or that we have particular concerns about. And so we can go find a partner who does a certain thing in that domain and tackle that issue.
JAY BRODSKY: And there's other places where we say, you know what, we don't have the money to spend on it this year. And that's OK. But that balance is a challenging one, like we were saying before. But at the very least, I'm running my own manuscript submission system. And I've got to do the development of it. Like our colleague at Emerald was saying, it's not something that I love doing, but I think, I like it better than having to wait for somebody else and follow their path.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And I'm going to ask a question to the audience. And I promise, we won't tell. But just a quick show of hands, has anybody here been in a situation where you had to compromise on some of your mission goals because you have a bigger publishing partnership? Thank you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: One brave soul.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: One brave soul. [LAUGHTER] We won't tell. Thank you. For the second half of the panel, we'll be talking about AI and going a little bit deeper into the AI trade-offs. It's a good place to pause and see if we have any questions from the audience that is not AI-related yet. Everybody's like, I don't know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: I just want to talk about AI.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Jay just crossed his legs. And all of a sudden, I got sock envy.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, I'm sorry. I went with the socks just for you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Yeah, no, I know. It works.
JAY BRODSKY: You didn't see.
MIA RICCI: I didn't get the memo. What is this?
JAY BRODSKY: I'm sorry. We didn't plan this on the Zoom because the camera view was on with our faces.
MIA RICCI: Jay did say that everything is his fault. So I think, this is his fault. That's right.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Perfect. Was that a raised hand? Nope, all right. Do we have any questions or in the app?
STEPHANIE: Not yet.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, going into AI then. You've been warned. This question is for all of you. So there's lots of new technology going on now. But these technologies need layers of trust. And really, I want to encourage the conversation on technology of course, but really on missions. So as we think about those layers of trust, so to be able to succeed, what trust mechanisms are you putting in your respective organizations around all the AI tools?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, we'll start with you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Well, I think, I'll-- I mean, as we said, this is a really live issue. And we have a trust and integrity program that we're looking at that tries to identify all the ways in which we can build more confidence in our validation. I think, that's one of the things that as a publisher, it's one of our core competencies that I do think has the longest legs in this new era. And so we're looking at everything around how we use AI tools in peer review, which is a really live topic and everybody's talking about, to how we're harnessing some of these language models in order to look at and validate and then have humans in the loop respond so that that combo there creates a kind of trust and integrity when we have experts who are partnering with these efficiency tools.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, that's how you show the partnerships how transparent you are with where the scholarly or expert judgment is being used and where you're using those tools so that people can decide for themselves what they think of the balance. I think, that's really been important for us and how we're doing it. I don't know if that your question effectively, but maybe you two have better, more direct responses.
JAY BRODSKY: I was thinking about it in a different way, so not so much about the biases in the tool and how we're using it and making sure that the outputs are something that a human would do, which I totally buy into. But for us, one of the challenges with regard to the mission is we want to make sure that good quality, peer-reviewed science is in the marketplace. That when people are trying to figure out something going on that has a scientific element, they are getting good information.
JAY BRODSKY: And so in terms of that element of trust, the part that has me concerned is if you go to your favorite chatbot today and you ask about Tylenol in autism, where's the answer going to come from? And so on the one hand, we want to protect our content. We want to make sure it's really controlled, and it's not leaking out there through whatever Sci-Hub stole from us years ago that got built into the training materials.
JAY BRODSKY: But I also want to make sure that my content, which I know is good, which I know has gone through whatever processes we've set up, that that's the information that's rising to the top of the answers. And that isn't possible right now. That's not quite been solved. And it reminds me a lot. So my career started in the newspaper business. And way back then, there was a company who started taking our content and redistributing it to people.
JAY BRODSKY: And we got upset about it. And we thought, well, as an industry, let's build a giant wall around the newspaper's content. But that company was like, no, no, no, it's all going to be fine because you guys have such a great brand. And the way our algorithm works here, we'll show it to you. When people ask a question, the answers are always going to come from you.
JAY BRODSKY: You're going to appear at the top of our answer list, and it's all going to be well and good. And that was true for a little bit, until they started selling more advertising. And the answer list got suppressed on the page. And then they started picking off verticals that people were really interested in. And suddenly, finance information, they were delivering directly.
JAY BRODSKY: And movie showtimes, they were delivering directly. And information about local businesses, they were delivering directly and et cetera. And so we finally got to the point where we realized, wait a minute, maybe they really weren't all that interested in not being evil. They have a different goal than we do. We are competitors.
JAY BRODSKY: They're very nice individually. Every single person you meet with there is really great. But their big goal is to serve their shareholders. And that's not the same as our goal. And so that, I feel like, is the world I'm in right now. Again, I cannot believe the pendulum is swinging back. Or I'm in this endless cycle. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out, is how to deliver on the mission of getting good scientific information to the public and making sure that the work we've put into it is being valued by the people who are distributing it.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Well, and look, I agree with what you're saying. But there's a counter side to that as well where I think about that search and how certain verticals were picked off. And one of them that I was very involved with was the language vertical. If you're looking up a word and you put in a search word where it thought maybe you were looking for a definition or you didn't know how it was spelled or something, now one box would come up.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And that was like, oh, our market's going to be gone. But we worked really closely with Google. And that data comes from us. And when we worked hard with them-- we meaning, we set up certain criteria or certain rules around how they could show it, what the integrity would look like. It might not be the quality level that we offer when we do it, but there was a certain baseline there that we made sure we maintained.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And one of the trade-offs we got mission-wise was we reached so many more people with a baseline of data that we found to be acceptable and effective with our content. And I'm not saying that that Pollyanna version of it might not work in this. And there are a lot of pitfalls where it's not going to work like that. But I do think there are examples of how, if we don't undervalue the content that we have and what versions of record and things like that, how valuable they can be, I think we can have more influence sometimes than we think we would simply by the fact that these are giants.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And we're tiny in comparison. So trying to find those opportunities to have a broader effect through indirect means, I think, is one of the opportunities that is a present in this new world.
MIA RICCI: I think, I'll take it a different direction for a minute. I mean, the sandbox stuff, all the tools and all that, I agree with you. Transparency, getting more trusted, your own content out there, it remains a priority. And I want to take you more on the view of somebody who is not playing heavily with this tool, who does not have the money to implement and integrate a ton of third-party tools into our day-to-day operations.
MIA RICCI: We have 21,000 submissions a year. And I know for the Wiley, the Elsevier, the Springer, those are nothing. But for us, it feels massive. So with AI, in terms of the trust, it's just like any other thing. It's beefing up our operation from end to end in terms of integrity and policy. And I think a lot of the organizations, societies, particularly started with policy.
MIA RICCI: Like building trust, you need to have the policy. A year and a half ago, none of us had AI policies in our peer review and our authorship. Now we do. But you know what else that we also know? Authors don't read our policy websites. [LAUGHTER] Reviewers don't read the review instructions. So this means training.
MIA RICCI: This means communication. And this means messaging. It is also training my staff who is already overburdened. And another thing I'll mention, I think, we mentioned implicit bias-- AI bias. This is a serious issue. Yes, we could build tools to try to detect those biases. And maybe the tools would get better.
MIA RICCI: It's incredibly difficult right now. I don't even think it's even possible. But how would my editor even know if this potentially AI-generated content is biased if they can't identify what bias is? So back to inclusion DEI principles, training your editors on implicit bias in scholarly publishing. These are things that we know must be done that is good, and we need to be doing.
MIA RICCI: So I think, it's just-- we could continue doing business as usual with some of this stuff. So I don't know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Absolutely. So, Mia, let me take your list a little bit further. You listed a whole lot of really big initiatives there. And you only have so many resources. I mean, it's true for everyone. How do you prioritize?
MIA RICCI: With great difficulty. Well, whatever's cheapest get done first because, you know-- I don't know. Again, I think, as a society, we look to our members. They are as well-- I said, loud and vocal. But Jay said, feisty. So they're a little feisty. But we have the governance within our organization. We have the AGU council, the AGU board, the publications committee.
MIA RICCI: We are super tight with our editors-in-chief, and we engage them on all of this. And they help us. Again, like I said before, they're not aware of all of these nightmares around AI that I have or all this potential and excitement of things I want to do with AI. That's not the life they live. They live in the research.
MIA RICCI: They live in saving the climate. That's literally what they're doing, the planet. But I talk to them like, here are the things, what will make your lives better, what will make your lives the most difficult. And we do this quarterly with them. And we figure out a strategy together, and yeah.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Let's go to the audience a little bit-- same thing. There is a Mentimeter. Excellent.
STEPHANIE: We already have the results in for the second one as well.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Oh, that's awesome.
STEPHANIE: Yep. Second question, what's one word that describes your organization's current AI strategy? The most common one is cautious. And then continuing that theme, there were also a lot of votes for conservative, restrictive, but also evolving, curious, and adoption.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Thank you for doing the homework ahead of time. A+, everyone, great job. All right, the same thing. Let's pause here before we go into a different set of questions. Any questions from the audience? That's a real stretch, or is this a real question?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right. Go for it, Dustin. He faked me earlier. I was like, are you--
AUDIENCE: So sorry in advance, Casper, but this is for you. Should publishers license raw tokens to AI companies? And if yes, who are the most benign buyers? And if yes, what are the provisions that you should absolutely insist on? Again, I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thanks, Dustin.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I'm incentivized to say no to the first one because then none of the follow-ons in the trail go.
JAY BRODSKY: Yeah, I think you're right.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: So for the sake of this argument, I'll say yes, you should. I can't remember what the middle one was. The last one was criteria.
MIA RICCI: Who're the most benign?
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Who are the most benign? I don't think there are any benign players out there. And I think that one of the challenges that I find internally, I see us, which is about a little bit of our human bias and judgment, is we try to grade evil from least evil to worst evil. But what we're not paying attention to is the actual spectrum is good and evil. And you're in this section right here, trying to differentiate who you'll work with.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And it's just like, you know what, work with them or don't work with them. So my thought is maybe that's not the right question, that middle one. And then criteria, I think, the important thing is around, well, one understanding what the use case really is and what that means. I mean, I think that these companies are going to try to be as broad as possible with the rights that they grab.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Where is the worthwhile time to struggle with them when you're doing the negotiation because you only have a certain patience for that period, I think, is around really tightening that use case, making sure that you understand if it's about inputs or outputs. If it's both, you understand what the solutions are around things like summarization or how things would be attributed. That things can't be attributed without you being in a position where you have some voice in that.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And the last thing I would say is, I think, it's really important to have escalation processes in there. There's so much right now that we just don't really understand. And these players who come to us don't understand either. And so how this is going to play out, it's really hard. And even if an escalation process doesn't have a lot of teeth in it, it's hard to really enforce certain things. If certain conditions happen in the marketplace, if you get certain feedback from your constituents or things like this that are problems, there has to be a good faith commitment to paying attention to that and addressing it with you on some level even if as I said, it's really hard.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: That's a soft clause in an agreement. Any big AI hyperscaler who would not put that clause in, I think, you'd have to ask like, well, what does that mean about how they want to be viewing the breadth and the way in which they can use your content without your input? So that would be my quick response. I got a clap from--
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Jay or Mia, do you want to take it as well?
JAY BRODSKY: Yeah. I mean I'll try. I mean, for us, it's hard. We're still trying to figure out the answer to that, partially because what we're seeing is some of these players really are only interested if you are really deep in a topic or really wide. And we're neither. I mean, we've got six journals. One of them is really old.
JAY BRODSKY: And sure, you could go deep into our history. But what somebody discovered in 1913, it doesn't really matter anymore. I mean, in many cases, it's been built upon. And the science has evolved and all of that. But it's not going to drive some great solution or some great innovation. And there's other stuff that's in our journals that we're frankly embarrassed by, that we don't want to see the light of day, that we're willing to talk about those things and that history, but it's not something that needs to be surfaced.
JAY BRODSKY: And so that part, for us, is challenging. Then the other side of it is we've got a whole bunch of players, and that was on one of the slides earlier, who think they don't need to do any licensing because we've got a website. And they can just come and scrape whatever they want-- and so trying to figure out how we're going to build sites that perform for the users, the humans who come.
JAY BRODSKY: And we sell advertising against our pages. And we try and do other things to direct those folks to other programs we're doing or introduce them to other goals we've got or encourage them to become a member or all of those sorts of things. Well, if it's a bot, you know the bot doesn't care. And so trying to figure out, how do we scale our systems to support this traffic from a bunch of players who think that they deserve to suck it from my site?
JAY BRODSKY: There's no real good answer there yet either.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. I see another hand. Yes, Anne.
AUDIENCE: Hi. So just building on that, I'm really curious what you all think about Cloudflare and pay-per-crawl and toll booths and things like that, in general. I'm just curious if you think they fit in, where, how, favor, not in favor, don't know.
JAY BRODSKY: I mean, I implied talking about that before, but it's really hard for us. Our mission is to get our scientific content to the world. That's what we're trying to do. We're publishers, but we are mostly focused on making sure that good-quality science is in the world. So blocking it seems like the wrong goal. But at the same time, I can't afford to have 75% of my traffic be from bots who are not allowing me to deliver these other potential revenue opportunities to our viewer.
JAY BRODSKY: So yeah, I don't have an answer yet. But it's a great question.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, you're right though, that not to take a position on one of the polls is where we've set it. I mean, we're not saying no. We're also really cautious. But you're right. I mean, it's fascinating how quickly traffic from these bots is coming in. And you can't treat that traffic as simply like, oh, that's just junk traffic.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: In total, I mean, there is a lot of junk traffic in it, but that's not. And so how are you selectively making these decisions about who comes in and what automated ways get to crawl and under what T&Cs? I think, it's a really good question right now. I think, it's still early days in the technology and their responses, particularly because also the conditions around them haven't settled.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so my advice is to be piloting some of these things. And look, you don't have to. You can take things back, which is nice. You know what I mean? You don't have to do something. You can expose a certain piece of your data. You can expose it for a certain period of time. Then you can look at what happens. And so don't feel like you have to do all or nothing with what your IP is at this point because it's not necessary for you to understand.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And any company tells you that you have to, that's not really true.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So my last question, we're going to get into something really concrete. And I will ask you to make commitments in front of 100 plus of your closest friends. Before I ask the last questions, are there any burning questions from the audience you want to-- Allison.
AUDIENCE: I don't know about brilliant, but I'm curious as to what your experience has been around the expectation of speed. So when these deals have come-- and these offers have come from technology companies. They're just used to moving at a rate of speed that is exponentially faster than the rate of speed that scholarly publishing and scientific societies move at. So it's been things like, here's the deal.
AUDIENCE: We want to know in a week, or we want to know in a month. And you may be embedded in a university bureaucracy, or you have members to account to. And I'm just wondering what your experiences have been with that. And if you've adjusted to that speed or how you're thinking of whether you will. Or do you think you'll speed up? Do you think you'll ask them to slow down?
MIA RICCI: Thank you.
JAY BRODSKY: Do you want to talk about the AGU council? It's a good question.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: It was a good question.
MIA RICCI: So is this speed with peer review and just publishing everything or experimenting generally, or getting--
AUDIENCE: This is actually when the LLM generative AI companies come and offer-- you know, want to license your copy.
MIA RICCI: For us, we're moving extremely cautiously. Our community is not, I would say, the fastest adopter or publicly fastest adopter of this. They're not comfortable yet, I think. They're using AI in other ways. We know they're using it for research preparations, for manuscript, for writing. But in terms of licensing, I think, there's too much concerns unknown about attributions and recognitions for their work.
MIA RICCI: So for us, yes, we went to the AGU council. And we went to the board. And we engaged with our communities. And they told us it's like, it's OK not to rush into it. And you know what, good news because we don't got money to go super hard.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I agree with that. I also think, though, it's an opportunity where we need to be going back to our constituencies, who are very slow adopters of these things and really trying to bring them along on a journey of becoming faster adopters, and what the criteria are and how you can create evaluation metrics that help people make decisions more quickly. Because look, I mean, on some of this, whether we license to them or not, often actually in a practical sense isn't making that much of a difference.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: These places have our content. They can get it. There's versions of it. They're not maybe always the perfect version of record, which is one of the things we have. But we're fooling ourselves if we think that saying no to these things means that's the no-risk option. And then the risk option is saying yes, just different types of risk.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Saying no is actually, I would say, just as risky-- in some scenarios, a little bit more risky than figuring out a way to say yes. Because at least with yes, you get some accountability. You get some commitment of some sort, even if we have to trust them. It's better than the fact that they don't have it. I'm not saying that we should jump into these things. And I think, the caution is really important.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: But I think it's an opportunity to educate our constituencies around a different way of having to move in this new world because we are no longer in-- our ecosystem now is touching much more closely some of these faster moving ones that we can't really continue to operate at the pace we did before, or we actually won't really be the gatekeepers and survivors of what happens next. So that's how I approach licensing.
MIA RICCI: No, I agree. And not all the AI stuff is about licensing. It's about this. We haven't touched on so many things about it. And I don't want to leave this panel sounding like, I'm like, boo, hate AI. Mia's like, yeah, hate her. No. I'm super stoked about a lot of the things. We haven't talked about the potential and accessibility and really, discoverability.
MIA RICCI: And these are things that we could look into together. And I wish that this has moved further along than some of the other stuff, like translation and dataviz, all kinds of tools that really serve people. And so there's all kinds of, I think, other things that we could explore out there. And I hope that our industry will come forward. And yeah, that's is.
JAY BRODSKY: I think, that is really true. And I think, the biggest take away I would love to leave you all with is, I think, what I said back at the beginning-- which is, we're playing a different game. So, sure, they want to move fast? That's great. That's because that's what their world is, and they've got goals that they've got to hit by the end of the month.
JAY BRODSKY: We're 175 years old. Our goal is to stick around for another 175 years. They are not thinking that way, and it's OK. It is totally OK. But we need to know what it is we are trying to accomplish. What is our mission? How can this technology allow us to fulfill our mission? And we'll work with them where we need to. And we'll use the parts of their tools that benefit us.
JAY BRODSKY: And don't get pushed around.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Jay, you're practically a startup compared to us. And so-- [LAUGHTER] I just had to get that in. Sorry, I didn't even have a followup comment. No, but--
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, you have 30 seconds.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I do. I think, one of the things to keep in mind is, what is our core competency in terms of what is the core value that we bring to the market? I think, we are moving more towards becoming pure IP businesses. And I think that the more we can develop the tools and value around an IP business, the more runway we have to be able to continue to innovate. And, I think, a validation as a key concept of what we do is critical to how we survive.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Can you imagine how fun the prep calls were? Mia, I can see you're on it.
MIA RICCI: I know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Go ahead.
MIA RICCI: Was that the last question? Or are we out of time?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We are out of time.
MIA RICCI: Can I just say one thing?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: You can.
MIA RICCI: I'm just like, I want to leave here making sure I mention this part, this awesome event called platform strategies. And we talked a lot about technology platform. But I think, one of the questions that we-- when we were prepping, we talked about policy and advocacy. What our industry and what you started at the beginning of this discussion is that science is under attack, and science funding is under attack.
MIA RICCI: So yes, there's AI. There's all platform technology that we should be exploring. But I am looking at platform in a different lens. We are a platform for our scientists and for our researchers. And I think, this is really exciting. We should be thinking about how we could support them. And I haven't seen the large publishers do a lot of advocacy. And I'm not shocked.
MIA RICCI: But I see a lot of the societies really inspiring and doing some of this work. And I want to mention some of the things that we're doing at AGU. And again, this is thinking of platform a different way and meeting the moment and responding to what's happening. Some of you might have heard about what happened to the Sixth National Climate Assessment report. That was the authors and staff were dismissed by the administration about a year into the process.
MIA RICCI: And this is the first time that we're not doing that anymore. So AGU and AMS, the American Meteorological Society, have decided to put together a special collection. It's not a replacement for it, but it is a special collection for those authors, to continue giving them a platform and for the public to be able to evaluate scientific research, how climate change is affecting us. I want to leave you with that, so you have-- there's other ways to think of these different lenses or platforms, and our role as publishers, as infrastructure providers, as technologists in meeting the moment.
MIA RICCI: So I'm off my soapbox. I'm done.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thank you so much for making these points. Casper, Mia, Jay, you were engaged the whole time for an open forum like this one. Thank you for sharing your experience, how you've been approaching the issue. It's not easy, but I think, you've given us all some good thoughts to take away from for the rest of the day. So please, join me in thanking our panelists. [APPLAUSE] And with that, I think, we're heading for a break for 15--
STEPHANIE: We'll be back here at 11 o'clock.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Back at 11:00. Enjoy the break. Thank you all.
Segment:0 .
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, we're coming. And I actually haven't seen Mia yet. Mia, there you go. Perfect.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Where do you want us to sit?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: One, two, three.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: OK, cool.
JAY BRODSKY: Where are you sitting.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Here. I'll sit here because then you can't see me from [INAUDIBLE]. And then Mia--
MIA RICCI: Hi.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good morning. All right, good morning.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Oh, hi.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good morning. [LAUGHS] You too. Haven't seen you this morning.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Sorry.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, welcome. So my name is Emily Delquié. I'm the Chief Product and Customer Success Officer for Silverchair. I'm very happy to moderate this wonderful panel today. I'm joined by three wonderful panelists. Great to see you this morning-- not too wet. That's good. Ah, OK.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Good. I'm getting the sign that I need to have the microphone like this. So actually a note for all of you, the volume is tough. It's a big room. So we do need to hold our mics really close, awkwardly close.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Really close.
MIA RICCI: How close? This close?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Yeah, this is good.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: "Spit on your microphone" close. [EMILIE CHUCKLES]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So we've designed a conversation between our panelists this morning. And we really want to actually build on some of the points that Natalie made earlier in her keynote, to really talk about the trade-off between decisions that we all need to make between balancing mission with technology in a world where it's a fast-changing world. And there's all sorts of pressures internally and externally in DC, and really trying to balance how we as organizations can stay steady but continue to innovate, but stay true to ourselves as well.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So we've also designed this session to be quite interactive. So I will be asking questions for you all throughout the panel. So in order to participate and give your answers, I'm asking you to use the app. In the session itself, there is a Mentimeter link that will give you access. So you can comment in the app and also just participate and give us your insights.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So that's for the housekeeping. Should we go with a quick round of introductions? So quickly, can you please introduce yourselves and then just an overview of your organizations in one sentence, the mission for your organization? And then we'll get going into some of the tougher questions. All right, Casper.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Hi. I'm Casper Grathwohl. I am the President of Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press. It's where we do a lot of our language data and services activity. And OUP as a mission-based institution-- I know we've got a mission statement somewhere, but I'm sure it's very similar to all the rest of you, which is about disseminating scholarship and participating in the scholarly research experience.
MIA RICCI: Hi, everyone. My name is Mia Ricci. I am the Director of Publication Operations at the American Geophysical Union. I oversee 24 scientific journals and our preprint server. The AGU mission is to promote the discovery of Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity, so easy-peasy. I'm going to pass it over to you.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, good enough. Thanks, Mia. Hi, everyone. I'm Jay Brodsky. I'm the Chief Information Officer for AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that sounds our mission is to advance science and engineering and innovation-- but for us, throughout the world, even though that first word is American and again, for the benefit of humanity so--
MIA RICCI: Always. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. So can you share with us one way technology has recently challenged or enhanced your mission? We're starting easy, really.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, OK. I can start with that. So it seems like low-hanging fruit, but I'll just pick on artificial intelligence. And in one very specific way, there's a bunch of people at the White House who think that artificial intelligence is going to do all the work of scientists. And so that's why we can, and I kid you not, cut $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health budget because we don't need to spend the money on scientists because we've got AI.
JAY BRODSKY: And so yes, that had an impact on us. We've spent the last year waging a battle about that on Capitol Hill. We've seemed to have had some success in that regard. But sure, there's a technology that has cropped up in all of our worlds that is directly affecting us and our scientific partners.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Mia.
MIA RICCI: I have so many challenges, so I don't know, just one?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We have 45 minutes.
MIA RICCI: Fine. Jay already picked AI. So he took it out of my mouth. So let's do something that no one ever talked about before, which is open access or open science. What? Shocking. It's very close to our mission at AGU. We want science to be accessible to everyone. And by that, we mean everyone.
MIA RICCI: And there's obviously, equity issues around various open access models. And people have been experimenting. So I think, this is something that we have not gotten perfectly. And our mission has been challenged by it. There's financial investment and capital and technology resources to making open science infrastructure work for everyone.
MIA RICCI: And it has not. So this is something that we're working very closely with our publishing partner. Also we have a large commercial publishing partner. And we're a nonprofit society. So I don't know if you want to pick whatever. There's all kinds of challenges, but it has not been a boring, past few decades. And I think we'll get into that a little bit more today.
MIA RICCI: Oh, yes.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And, Casper.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, like you said, there are so many things. But I would point to discoverability. And discovery is a really interesting area right now where it's a challenge, where we're seeing a lot of this new agentic world is starting to change discovery patterns and things like this. And we're just scrambling to react to it. At the same time, there are some discovery tools that are really powerful and interesting.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And we're just learning how to harness those. And so it feels really exciting, as you said. And it's not boring at all. I think, we vacillate between feeling like, oh my God, in two years, we're going to be obsolete-- to, wait, we've cracked the future. And this is going to make us even more potent and our mission even easier to achieve. And so that kind of whiplash is really hard to manage in a business on a daily basis.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: But it is what's fascinating when a paradigm shift happens like this.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Yeah, it's fun. So let's go to you all for just a quick detour. If you want to go into the app, like I said, in the description of the session, there is a question for you all. So before I tee up the next question for the attendees, I'm sending it over to you. So you're going to see a link for Mentimeter. The question is, what's your biggest mission technology tension?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Is it cost barrier, speed of change? You guys are good. It's for them. It's for the audience-- cost barriers, speed of change, member stakeholders expectations, technical expertise gap. So we'll give you a minute to vote. I'm going to tee up the next question for the panelist. And then my friend Stephanie there will help me with the results because I don't know that I can see them.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We're good? All right, everybody finding-- are we getting some votes in? Cool. I'll come back for the results. Let's talk about the how and the why. This is getting fun. Jay, I'm going to you. So we've talked about-- so the how is the technology. The mission is the why.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Can you share a specific example where the cost or complexity of the how nearly derailed your why?
JAY BRODSKY: Just like Mia said, there's so many examples. The biggest challenge that I'm dealing with right now, I think, it was exemplified in one of those charts that we'll put up on the screen. So Wiley, and Elsevier, and Springer Nature spending all this money on capital investment on R&D. A lot of our other software partners are doing the same, which is great. And we're excited to see the innovations that can come from that, but we can't pay for that.
JAY BRODSKY: We have a very different cost model, and we're playing a different game. We can't go to the public market and ask for debt. We can't go to a private credit shop and ask for debt. We can't sell part of our company to a PE firm or get more money from a venture partner. And the challenge that we are facing right now is a bunch of our vendors are coming to us and saying, hey, we've been investing all this exciting dollars in AI, and we'd like you to pay for it.
JAY BRODSKY: And I say, well, that's wonderful if those AI investments were delivering me anything today, but they're just not. And the track that I am on, we're seeing cost increases from our technology stack. That means we're going to have to lay off three people every single year if we keep going at this rate. Because we refuse to pass the costs along to our partners. Our mission is to advance science.
JAY BRODSKY: We are not going to go to our university partners and say, hey, we know you guys are having a hard year, but we still need more money-- or go to folks in disciplines that don't have a ton of funding or to our mathematicians or our linguistics or into the social sciences and say, we're upping our APCs. We're not going to tell our minority serving institutions, our HBCUs, that we don't care about your research because you guys can't afford to pay us to be in our journals.
JAY BRODSKY: And so that's a place where we're really stuck in the middle. We're trying to achieve our mission. We're trying to deliver for the scientific enterprise. But we're in a disconnect, I feel like, with some of our technology partners.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, yeah, go ahead.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I mean, related to that, it is interesting these rising costs because it's something that, I think, Natalie said in the intro where our market that we serve isn't very fast-moving in terms of change. And so they're not pushing us for the needs of a lot of what we see coming and how things are shifting. And so the R&D and the innovation work that you're doing isn't funding itself as it goes through right now.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: You've got these double costs. And a lot of times what happens is, we lean on those big four or five players in our market who are the market leaders around-- they do our R&D for us, really. And the challenge is that during a time of radical change rather than incremental change, they start playing their cards really close to their chest. So we're not learning as much from them because they're trying to get competitive advantage as there's a big market shift with each other.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so they're not interested as much right now in the whole market succeeding and rising. And so ultimately, we're not getting those insights. And so we have to do a little bit more of it ourselves. But how do we pay for it? And I think, that's where collaboration comes in. That's where participation in some of these things, where we have to find new ways to learn because just like digital literacy, there's AI literacy that's happening right now where you have to have first-hand experience in some of these things in order to be able to make good decisions about what's going to happen.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: None of us are going to go alone. We're not going to innovate. And we're probably-- or most of us are not of the size where we expect to have an individual solution. But to make decisions about what to participate in, you have to have some of that first-hand knowledge. And right now, these costs are really hard for us to manage because we're not yet seeing the benefit of a lot of what we feel like we have a lot of pressure to be understanding and investigating and partaking in.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Thank you. Going back to the poll results.
STEPHANIE: Great. [INAUDIBLE] The cost barriers is definitely the highest tension followed by speed of change, member stakeholder expectations, and technical expertise.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So cost barrier for the win, and speed of change was number 2. Let's go to some complex-- all right. So what's interesting about this panel is we definitely have a variety of organizations that are represented. And some of you or one of you-- so, Jay, you're self-published, still independent. Mia, AGU, you have a publishing partner.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And then Oxford, obviously you have a large organization and also a lot of independence. Mia, I'm going to go to you with questions around the trade-offs of the part of having a publishing partner. Given, again, the trade-off of your mission of the publishing partners' ecosystem, where are the benefits? What do you gain by being in the partnership?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And what are some of the things you have to compromise on?
MIA RICCI: That is a very hard question to answer. But I have notes because Emily already told me she's going to ask about it. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Total improv.
MIA RICCI: Yes, exactly. Well, we have a great publishing partner. And we are very close to them. We're very collaborative. I'm recognizing that we are a large society, that not every society nor a partner with a commercial entity have that kind of attention that we get. It's pretty funny that Jay mentioned about cost being prohibitive and adapting to all this technological advancement that we have.
MIA RICCI: And I feel the same way. I never feel like broker as a society, which is funny because AGU is huge. But with what, Casper, you were saying about a lot of the large publisher leading the way in terms of playing around with this technology and discovery and all of that, I do feel that that's one of the benefits that we have. But with that comes its challenges.
MIA RICCI: So a lot of it is about transparency, I think. And it is a competitive market. So they are not just divulging all of their trade secrets to us, even though as a publishing partner, they're still developing what pricing is like and watching the market out there. And in the meantime, I'm feeling the pressure from our members. This is the first time I'm mentioning members, but not going to be the last time I mentioned members.
MIA RICCI: As a society, I'm extremely member-focused. And there's not only a disconnect between us, the society and the commercial publishing partner to deal with, but there's also the disconnect between members and those entities and members between us. That's the publishers. So I think, this is something that I'm trying to navigate. I'll put in one example of a challenge that we went through recently, and we had to overcome.
MIA RICCI: And this was-- when was it, last year, when a lot of the big publishing companies signed their first AI licensing agreement with the big companies. That was a hot mess a little bit. Authors were not happy. I think, if you were a society that was in part of those deals, we didn't know our content was in it, what was in the agreement.
MIA RICCI: And I think, this is new to a lot of the commercial publishers as well. A lot of the partners were involved in this big group with the big giant tech company that's still not disclosed in terms of the name. We had a lot of our members who went to us. And our members are our loud and vocal grounding group. So this made us go back to our publishing partner. And we created a framework, actually, that we set into an agreement around transparency, around governance of license agreements, around communication.
MIA RICCI: And I'll just mention a few of the items. For example, in this agreement with our publishing partner, we agree that they will not accept the agreement from corporations or foundation with fossil fuels as a primary business focus. Don't even get started with us, like, nope. Two, let's see. What's the other one? We will not accept any of our content to be included in a license agreement where the licenses are opaque or insufficiently transparent.
MIA RICCI: So we're not accepting confidential licenses anymore, you know, licensee. And yeah, so I think, these are things that we're working together. And you have to create all of these agreements from the start. But the transparency aspect, I think, is a big challenge.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, that's really interesting. And it's a lot of extra work around this. I mean, you take that licensing example where when those big deals started to become available to now, there's also been just a really rapid shift in what's appropriate, what's acceptable, who you can work with, what the uses are. Not only because we're understanding how it's working a little bit better, but also we're getting acclimated to this idea.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so the comfort level is changing. So we've been also to set a lot of ground rules and guardrails. But we're finding that we're adjusting them so often, they're needing constant revision and review that it feels like it's really live and moving. And meanwhile, we're very aware that there's a window here. And we're not sure how long that window is going to be open or what that window turns into. But this pure licensing idea, a lot of it is backlist.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so what happened? How are we making sure we're taking advantage, not leaving money on the table, but also not making some decisions that back us into the corner in the next round of what happens. And it's really tricky.
MIA RICCI: It is really tricky. And I would just add for me, what makes me sleep better at night is that I feel the chaos. I feel the pressure as the publisher. But my members and authors and editors aren't throwing pitchforks at us. They aren't screaming about this. So I'm trying not to be swept up in the chaos. Their focus right now is still doing research, getting their research funded, keeping their funding and just having reviewers that will give them good reviews.
MIA RICCI: The basic concepts or the key value of publishing is not changing. I want all the tools. I want all these things. But this is not what they're screaming about.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thank you, Mia. This is a really grounding point. And yeah, thank you for making it. It's a very strong reminder for all of us. So, Jay, in contrast, you are self-published. And I think, the question is similar but just from a slightly different angle, is what have you been able to maintain, thanks to your independence? And what do you feel you would have to compromise if you were a part of a larger organization?
JAY BRODSKY: So, I mean, it is interesting. And Mia and I used to work together. So I'm well aware of how feisty the members are at AGU. And so I don't have to deal with that in either way. The fact that we're self-published, the way our members relate to us make my life a little different. But for us, it's not cheap to do what we're doing. But at least, I have control. I don't have to wait for my partners to go in a certain direction.
JAY BRODSKY: I don't have to get mad at them when they do go in a certain direction. It's my fault. It's always my fault. But, Jay-- no, whatever. At least, it's my fault. So for us in certain research integrity directions, we have things that we care about, that we've gotten burned in the past or that we have particular concerns about. And so we can go find a partner who does a certain thing in that domain and tackle that issue.
JAY BRODSKY: And there's other places where we say, you know what, we don't have the money to spend on it this year. And that's OK. But that balance is a challenging one, like we were saying before. But at the very least, I'm running my own manuscript submission system. And I've got to do the development of it. Like our colleague at Emerald was saying, it's not something that I love doing, but I think, I like it better than having to wait for somebody else and follow their path.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: And I'm going to ask a question to the audience. And I promise, we won't tell. But just a quick show of hands, has anybody here been in a situation where you had to compromise on some of your mission goals because you have a bigger publishing partnership? Thank you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: One brave soul.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: One brave soul. [LAUGHTER] We won't tell. Thank you. For the second half of the panel, we'll be talking about AI and going a little bit deeper into the AI trade-offs. It's a good place to pause and see if we have any questions from the audience that is not AI-related yet. Everybody's like, I don't know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: I just want to talk about AI.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Jay just crossed his legs. And all of a sudden, I got sock envy.
JAY BRODSKY: Oh, I'm sorry. I went with the socks just for you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Yeah, no, I know. It works.
JAY BRODSKY: You didn't see.
MIA RICCI: I didn't get the memo. What is this?
JAY BRODSKY: I'm sorry. We didn't plan this on the Zoom because the camera view was on with our faces.
MIA RICCI: Jay did say that everything is his fault. So I think, this is his fault. That's right.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Perfect. Was that a raised hand? Nope, all right. Do we have any questions or in the app?
STEPHANIE: Not yet.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right, going into AI then. You've been warned. This question is for all of you. So there's lots of new technology going on now. But these technologies need layers of trust. And really, I want to encourage the conversation on technology of course, but really on missions. So as we think about those layers of trust, so to be able to succeed, what trust mechanisms are you putting in your respective organizations around all the AI tools?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, we'll start with you.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Well, I think, I'll-- I mean, as we said, this is a really live issue. And we have a trust and integrity program that we're looking at that tries to identify all the ways in which we can build more confidence in our validation. I think, that's one of the things that as a publisher, it's one of our core competencies that I do think has the longest legs in this new era. And so we're looking at everything around how we use AI tools in peer review, which is a really live topic and everybody's talking about, to how we're harnessing some of these language models in order to look at and validate and then have humans in the loop respond so that that combo there creates a kind of trust and integrity when we have experts who are partnering with these efficiency tools.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, that's how you show the partnerships how transparent you are with where the scholarly or expert judgment is being used and where you're using those tools so that people can decide for themselves what they think of the balance. I think, that's really been important for us and how we're doing it. I don't know if that your question effectively, but maybe you two have better, more direct responses.
JAY BRODSKY: I was thinking about it in a different way, so not so much about the biases in the tool and how we're using it and making sure that the outputs are something that a human would do, which I totally buy into. But for us, one of the challenges with regard to the mission is we want to make sure that good quality, peer-reviewed science is in the marketplace. That when people are trying to figure out something going on that has a scientific element, they are getting good information.
JAY BRODSKY: And so in terms of that element of trust, the part that has me concerned is if you go to your favorite chatbot today and you ask about Tylenol in autism, where's the answer going to come from? And so on the one hand, we want to protect our content. We want to make sure it's really controlled, and it's not leaking out there through whatever Sci-Hub stole from us years ago that got built into the training materials.
JAY BRODSKY: But I also want to make sure that my content, which I know is good, which I know has gone through whatever processes we've set up, that that's the information that's rising to the top of the answers. And that isn't possible right now. That's not quite been solved. And it reminds me a lot. So my career started in the newspaper business. And way back then, there was a company who started taking our content and redistributing it to people.
JAY BRODSKY: And we got upset about it. And we thought, well, as an industry, let's build a giant wall around the newspaper's content. But that company was like, no, no, no, it's all going to be fine because you guys have such a great brand. And the way our algorithm works here, we'll show it to you. When people ask a question, the answers are always going to come from you.
JAY BRODSKY: You're going to appear at the top of our answer list, and it's all going to be well and good. And that was true for a little bit, until they started selling more advertising. And the answer list got suppressed on the page. And then they started picking off verticals that people were really interested in. And suddenly, finance information, they were delivering directly.
JAY BRODSKY: And movie showtimes, they were delivering directly. And information about local businesses, they were delivering directly and et cetera. And so we finally got to the point where we realized, wait a minute, maybe they really weren't all that interested in not being evil. They have a different goal than we do. We are competitors.
JAY BRODSKY: They're very nice individually. Every single person you meet with there is really great. But their big goal is to serve their shareholders. And that's not the same as our goal. And so that, I feel like, is the world I'm in right now. Again, I cannot believe the pendulum is swinging back. Or I'm in this endless cycle. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out, is how to deliver on the mission of getting good scientific information to the public and making sure that the work we've put into it is being valued by the people who are distributing it.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Well, and look, I agree with what you're saying. But there's a counter side to that as well where I think about that search and how certain verticals were picked off. And one of them that I was very involved with was the language vertical. If you're looking up a word and you put in a search word where it thought maybe you were looking for a definition or you didn't know how it was spelled or something, now one box would come up.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And that was like, oh, our market's going to be gone. But we worked really closely with Google. And that data comes from us. And when we worked hard with them-- we meaning, we set up certain criteria or certain rules around how they could show it, what the integrity would look like. It might not be the quality level that we offer when we do it, but there was a certain baseline there that we made sure we maintained.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And one of the trade-offs we got mission-wise was we reached so many more people with a baseline of data that we found to be acceptable and effective with our content. And I'm not saying that that Pollyanna version of it might not work in this. And there are a lot of pitfalls where it's not going to work like that. But I do think there are examples of how, if we don't undervalue the content that we have and what versions of record and things like that, how valuable they can be, I think we can have more influence sometimes than we think we would simply by the fact that these are giants.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And we're tiny in comparison. So trying to find those opportunities to have a broader effect through indirect means, I think, is one of the opportunities that is a present in this new world.
MIA RICCI: I think, I'll take it a different direction for a minute. I mean, the sandbox stuff, all the tools and all that, I agree with you. Transparency, getting more trusted, your own content out there, it remains a priority. And I want to take you more on the view of somebody who is not playing heavily with this tool, who does not have the money to implement and integrate a ton of third-party tools into our day-to-day operations.
MIA RICCI: We have 21,000 submissions a year. And I know for the Wiley, the Elsevier, the Springer, those are nothing. But for us, it feels massive. So with AI, in terms of the trust, it's just like any other thing. It's beefing up our operation from end to end in terms of integrity and policy. And I think a lot of the organizations, societies, particularly started with policy.
MIA RICCI: Like building trust, you need to have the policy. A year and a half ago, none of us had AI policies in our peer review and our authorship. Now we do. But you know what else that we also know? Authors don't read our policy websites. [LAUGHTER] Reviewers don't read the review instructions. So this means training.
MIA RICCI: This means communication. And this means messaging. It is also training my staff who is already overburdened. And another thing I'll mention, I think, we mentioned implicit bias-- AI bias. This is a serious issue. Yes, we could build tools to try to detect those biases. And maybe the tools would get better.
MIA RICCI: It's incredibly difficult right now. I don't even think it's even possible. But how would my editor even know if this potentially AI-generated content is biased if they can't identify what bias is? So back to inclusion DEI principles, training your editors on implicit bias in scholarly publishing. These are things that we know must be done that is good, and we need to be doing.
MIA RICCI: So I think, it's just-- we could continue doing business as usual with some of this stuff. So I don't know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Absolutely. So, Mia, let me take your list a little bit further. You listed a whole lot of really big initiatives there. And you only have so many resources. I mean, it's true for everyone. How do you prioritize?
MIA RICCI: With great difficulty. Well, whatever's cheapest get done first because, you know-- I don't know. Again, I think, as a society, we look to our members. They are as well-- I said, loud and vocal. But Jay said, feisty. So they're a little feisty. But we have the governance within our organization. We have the AGU council, the AGU board, the publications committee.
MIA RICCI: We are super tight with our editors-in-chief, and we engage them on all of this. And they help us. Again, like I said before, they're not aware of all of these nightmares around AI that I have or all this potential and excitement of things I want to do with AI. That's not the life they live. They live in the research.
MIA RICCI: They live in saving the climate. That's literally what they're doing, the planet. But I talk to them like, here are the things, what will make your lives better, what will make your lives the most difficult. And we do this quarterly with them. And we figure out a strategy together, and yeah.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Let's go to the audience a little bit-- same thing. There is a Mentimeter. Excellent.
STEPHANIE: We already have the results in for the second one as well.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Oh, that's awesome.
STEPHANIE: Yep. Second question, what's one word that describes your organization's current AI strategy? The most common one is cautious. And then continuing that theme, there were also a lot of votes for conservative, restrictive, but also evolving, curious, and adoption.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. Thank you for doing the homework ahead of time. A+, everyone, great job. All right, the same thing. Let's pause here before we go into a different set of questions. Any questions from the audience? That's a real stretch, or is this a real question?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: All right. Go for it, Dustin. He faked me earlier. I was like, are you--
AUDIENCE: So sorry in advance, Casper, but this is for you. Should publishers license raw tokens to AI companies? And if yes, who are the most benign buyers? And if yes, what are the provisions that you should absolutely insist on? Again, I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thanks, Dustin.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I'm incentivized to say no to the first one because then none of the follow-ons in the trail go.
JAY BRODSKY: Yeah, I think you're right.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: So for the sake of this argument, I'll say yes, you should. I can't remember what the middle one was. The last one was criteria.
MIA RICCI: Who're the most benign?
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Who are the most benign? I don't think there are any benign players out there. And I think that one of the challenges that I find internally, I see us, which is about a little bit of our human bias and judgment, is we try to grade evil from least evil to worst evil. But what we're not paying attention to is the actual spectrum is good and evil. And you're in this section right here, trying to differentiate who you'll work with.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And it's just like, you know what, work with them or don't work with them. So my thought is maybe that's not the right question, that middle one. And then criteria, I think, the important thing is around, well, one understanding what the use case really is and what that means. I mean, I think that these companies are going to try to be as broad as possible with the rights that they grab.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Where is the worthwhile time to struggle with them when you're doing the negotiation because you only have a certain patience for that period, I think, is around really tightening that use case, making sure that you understand if it's about inputs or outputs. If it's both, you understand what the solutions are around things like summarization or how things would be attributed. That things can't be attributed without you being in a position where you have some voice in that.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And the last thing I would say is, I think, it's really important to have escalation processes in there. There's so much right now that we just don't really understand. And these players who come to us don't understand either. And so how this is going to play out, it's really hard. And even if an escalation process doesn't have a lot of teeth in it, it's hard to really enforce certain things. If certain conditions happen in the marketplace, if you get certain feedback from your constituents or things like this that are problems, there has to be a good faith commitment to paying attention to that and addressing it with you on some level even if as I said, it's really hard.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: That's a soft clause in an agreement. Any big AI hyperscaler who would not put that clause in, I think, you'd have to ask like, well, what does that mean about how they want to be viewing the breadth and the way in which they can use your content without your input? So that would be my quick response. I got a clap from--
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Jay or Mia, do you want to take it as well?
JAY BRODSKY: Yeah. I mean I'll try. I mean, for us, it's hard. We're still trying to figure out the answer to that, partially because what we're seeing is some of these players really are only interested if you are really deep in a topic or really wide. And we're neither. I mean, we've got six journals. One of them is really old.
JAY BRODSKY: And sure, you could go deep into our history. But what somebody discovered in 1913, it doesn't really matter anymore. I mean, in many cases, it's been built upon. And the science has evolved and all of that. But it's not going to drive some great solution or some great innovation. And there's other stuff that's in our journals that we're frankly embarrassed by, that we don't want to see the light of day, that we're willing to talk about those things and that history, but it's not something that needs to be surfaced.
JAY BRODSKY: And so that part, for us, is challenging. Then the other side of it is we've got a whole bunch of players, and that was on one of the slides earlier, who think they don't need to do any licensing because we've got a website. And they can just come and scrape whatever they want-- and so trying to figure out how we're going to build sites that perform for the users, the humans who come.
JAY BRODSKY: And we sell advertising against our pages. And we try and do other things to direct those folks to other programs we're doing or introduce them to other goals we've got or encourage them to become a member or all of those sorts of things. Well, if it's a bot, you know the bot doesn't care. And so trying to figure out, how do we scale our systems to support this traffic from a bunch of players who think that they deserve to suck it from my site?
JAY BRODSKY: There's no real good answer there yet either.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Excellent. I see another hand. Yes, Anne.
AUDIENCE: Hi. So just building on that, I'm really curious what you all think about Cloudflare and pay-per-crawl and toll booths and things like that, in general. I'm just curious if you think they fit in, where, how, favor, not in favor, don't know.
JAY BRODSKY: I mean, I implied talking about that before, but it's really hard for us. Our mission is to get our scientific content to the world. That's what we're trying to do. We're publishers, but we are mostly focused on making sure that good-quality science is in the world. So blocking it seems like the wrong goal. But at the same time, I can't afford to have 75% of my traffic be from bots who are not allowing me to deliver these other potential revenue opportunities to our viewer.
JAY BRODSKY: So yeah, I don't have an answer yet. But it's a great question.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I think, you're right though, that not to take a position on one of the polls is where we've set it. I mean, we're not saying no. We're also really cautious. But you're right. I mean, it's fascinating how quickly traffic from these bots is coming in. And you can't treat that traffic as simply like, oh, that's just junk traffic.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: In total, I mean, there is a lot of junk traffic in it, but that's not. And so how are you selectively making these decisions about who comes in and what automated ways get to crawl and under what T&Cs? I think, it's a really good question right now. I think, it's still early days in the technology and their responses, particularly because also the conditions around them haven't settled.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And so my advice is to be piloting some of these things. And look, you don't have to. You can take things back, which is nice. You know what I mean? You don't have to do something. You can expose a certain piece of your data. You can expose it for a certain period of time. Then you can look at what happens. And so don't feel like you have to do all or nothing with what your IP is at this point because it's not necessary for you to understand.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: And any company tells you that you have to, that's not really true.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: So my last question, we're going to get into something really concrete. And I will ask you to make commitments in front of 100 plus of your closest friends. Before I ask the last questions, are there any burning questions from the audience you want to-- Allison.
AUDIENCE: I don't know about brilliant, but I'm curious as to what your experience has been around the expectation of speed. So when these deals have come-- and these offers have come from technology companies. They're just used to moving at a rate of speed that is exponentially faster than the rate of speed that scholarly publishing and scientific societies move at. So it's been things like, here's the deal.
AUDIENCE: We want to know in a week, or we want to know in a month. And you may be embedded in a university bureaucracy, or you have members to account to. And I'm just wondering what your experiences have been with that. And if you've adjusted to that speed or how you're thinking of whether you will. Or do you think you'll speed up? Do you think you'll ask them to slow down?
MIA RICCI: Thank you.
JAY BRODSKY: Do you want to talk about the AGU council? It's a good question.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: It was a good question.
MIA RICCI: So is this speed with peer review and just publishing everything or experimenting generally, or getting--
AUDIENCE: This is actually when the LLM generative AI companies come and offer-- you know, want to license your copy.
MIA RICCI: For us, we're moving extremely cautiously. Our community is not, I would say, the fastest adopter or publicly fastest adopter of this. They're not comfortable yet, I think. They're using AI in other ways. We know they're using it for research preparations, for manuscript, for writing. But in terms of licensing, I think, there's too much concerns unknown about attributions and recognitions for their work.
MIA RICCI: So for us, yes, we went to the AGU council. And we went to the board. And we engaged with our communities. And they told us it's like, it's OK not to rush into it. And you know what, good news because we don't got money to go super hard.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I agree with that. I also think, though, it's an opportunity where we need to be going back to our constituencies, who are very slow adopters of these things and really trying to bring them along on a journey of becoming faster adopters, and what the criteria are and how you can create evaluation metrics that help people make decisions more quickly. Because look, I mean, on some of this, whether we license to them or not, often actually in a practical sense isn't making that much of a difference.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: These places have our content. They can get it. There's versions of it. They're not maybe always the perfect version of record, which is one of the things we have. But we're fooling ourselves if we think that saying no to these things means that's the no-risk option. And then the risk option is saying yes, just different types of risk.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Saying no is actually, I would say, just as risky-- in some scenarios, a little bit more risky than figuring out a way to say yes. Because at least with yes, you get some accountability. You get some commitment of some sort, even if we have to trust them. It's better than the fact that they don't have it. I'm not saying that we should jump into these things. And I think, the caution is really important.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: But I think it's an opportunity to educate our constituencies around a different way of having to move in this new world because we are no longer in-- our ecosystem now is touching much more closely some of these faster moving ones that we can't really continue to operate at the pace we did before, or we actually won't really be the gatekeepers and survivors of what happens next. So that's how I approach licensing.
MIA RICCI: No, I agree. And not all the AI stuff is about licensing. It's about this. We haven't touched on so many things about it. And I don't want to leave this panel sounding like, I'm like, boo, hate AI. Mia's like, yeah, hate her. No. I'm super stoked about a lot of the things. We haven't talked about the potential and accessibility and really, discoverability.
MIA RICCI: And these are things that we could look into together. And I wish that this has moved further along than some of the other stuff, like translation and dataviz, all kinds of tools that really serve people. And so there's all kinds of, I think, other things that we could explore out there. And I hope that our industry will come forward. And yeah, that's is.
JAY BRODSKY: I think, that is really true. And I think, the biggest take away I would love to leave you all with is, I think, what I said back at the beginning-- which is, we're playing a different game. So, sure, they want to move fast? That's great. That's because that's what their world is, and they've got goals that they've got to hit by the end of the month.
JAY BRODSKY: We're 175 years old. Our goal is to stick around for another 175 years. They are not thinking that way, and it's OK. It is totally OK. But we need to know what it is we are trying to accomplish. What is our mission? How can this technology allow us to fulfill our mission? And we'll work with them where we need to. And we'll use the parts of their tools that benefit us.
JAY BRODSKY: And don't get pushed around.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: Jay, you're practically a startup compared to us. And so-- [LAUGHTER] I just had to get that in. Sorry, I didn't even have a followup comment. No, but--
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Casper, you have 30 seconds.
CASPER GRATHWOHL: I do. I think, one of the things to keep in mind is, what is our core competency in terms of what is the core value that we bring to the market? I think, we are moving more towards becoming pure IP businesses. And I think that the more we can develop the tools and value around an IP business, the more runway we have to be able to continue to innovate. And, I think, a validation as a key concept of what we do is critical to how we survive.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Can you imagine how fun the prep calls were? Mia, I can see you're on it.
MIA RICCI: I know.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Go ahead.
MIA RICCI: Was that the last question? Or are we out of time?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: We are out of time.
MIA RICCI: Can I just say one thing?
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: You can.
MIA RICCI: I'm just like, I want to leave here making sure I mention this part, this awesome event called platform strategies. And we talked a lot about technology platform. But I think, one of the questions that we-- when we were prepping, we talked about policy and advocacy. What our industry and what you started at the beginning of this discussion is that science is under attack, and science funding is under attack.
MIA RICCI: So yes, there's AI. There's all platform technology that we should be exploring. But I am looking at platform in a different lens. We are a platform for our scientists and for our researchers. And I think, this is really exciting. We should be thinking about how we could support them. And I haven't seen the large publishers do a lot of advocacy. And I'm not shocked.
MIA RICCI: But I see a lot of the societies really inspiring and doing some of this work. And I want to mention some of the things that we're doing at AGU. And again, this is thinking of platform a different way and meeting the moment and responding to what's happening. Some of you might have heard about what happened to the Sixth National Climate Assessment report. That was the authors and staff were dismissed by the administration about a year into the process.
MIA RICCI: And this is the first time that we're not doing that anymore. So AGU and AMS, the American Meteorological Society, have decided to put together a special collection. It's not a replacement for it, but it is a special collection for those authors, to continue giving them a platform and for the public to be able to evaluate scientific research, how climate change is affecting us. I want to leave you with that, so you have-- there's other ways to think of these different lenses or platforms, and our role as publishers, as infrastructure providers, as technologists in meeting the moment.
MIA RICCI: So I'm off my soapbox. I'm done.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Thank you so much for making these points. Casper, Mia, Jay, you were engaged the whole time for an open forum like this one. Thank you for sharing your experience, how you've been approaching the issue. It's not easy, but I think, you've given us all some good thoughts to take away from for the rest of the day. So please, join me in thanking our panelists. [APPLAUSE] And with that, I think, we're heading for a break for 15--
STEPHANIE: We'll be back here at 11 o'clock.
EMILIE DELQUIÉ: Back at 11:00. Enjoy the break. Thank you all.
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