Cadmore media player playing video Forging a Path Forward: How Three Non-Profit Aggregators are Working Together to Support the Future of the OA Monograph
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Forging a Path Forward: How Three Non-Profit Aggregators are Working Together to Support the Future of the OA Monograph
Description:
Forging a Path Forward: How Three Non-Profit Aggregators are Working Together to Support the Future of the OA Monograph
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/f3f0c681-6c52-4637-9b09-fb3c19ac700c/thumbnails/f3f0c681-6c52-4637-9b09-fb3c19ac700c.png
Duration:
T01H01M50S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/f3f0c681-6c52-4637-9b09-fb3c19ac700c
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/f3f0c681-6c52-4637-9b09-fb3c19ac700c/AM21 Session 4C - Forging a Path Forward.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=3fdhe0FeqHET7eJuQpk5tVxiQP3F20w0JlcUD5%2B12Oc%3D&st=2024-11-22T10%3A41%3A41Z&se=2024-11-22T12%3A46%3A41Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-02-02T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SUSAN DOERR: Just waiting a moment for everybody to come in, and we will say hello. OK. So shall we get started everybody? OK. Great. I want to say hello and welcome to forging a path forward.
SUSAN DOERR: How nonprofit aggregators are working together to support the future of the open access monograph. I'm Susan Doerr. I'm the associate director at the University of Minnesota Press and I'm the project leader on an open source publishing platform called Manifold Scholarship. I'm joined today by my colleague, Wendy Queen, the director of Project MUSE; Mike Furlough, the executive director, HathiTrust; and Niels Stern, the director of the OAPEN Foundation.
SUSAN DOERR: Just one bit of housekeeping which is, please ask the questions in the chat feature in the passable interface. And I'll do my best to get as many of those as we can during our session. Each of our panelists today is going to introduce themselves and make some opening remarks. And then we have questions. We're going to run this today as an open question and answer discussion on the topic of infrastructure.
SUSAN DOERR: Following that, we'll open up to your questions that you put into passable, and we will do our best to answer as many of those as we can. Our topic today is infrastructure, specifically infrastructure that supports the open access monograph book publishing, and the humanities in the social sciences and also book publishing more broadly. Much of the discussion about sustainability for open access publishing centers around supporting the book itself and how to publish books sustainably.
SUSAN DOERR: And infrastructure is often less discussed, but in some ways, it's almost just as, if not more important because it's how you bring the book to your readers. That's how we reach our students and our scholars and our general readers who want to learn from the materials that we bring to them. Today, the systems and the processes that we publishers use to distribute and manage our digital book publications for for sale publications, that infrastructure doesn't always translate and can't always be used for our open access publications, which means that we need to find new paths.
SUSAN DOERR: We need to work together and we need to create a sustainable system within the scholarly community so that we can continue to publish open access material. Things like getting our books into library catalogs become a lot more challenging when we work with open access publications than the traditional systems that we already have set up for our for sale publications. Aggregated usage reporting, alternative metrics, health metrics.
SUSAN DOERR: These are all things that when it comes to open access are very important. But we don't always have systems today in order to get what we expect and come to need in order to evaluate and determine success for some of these publications. How do we convey markers of quality and trust so that when readers come to our materials, they know that they can trust the material that they're reading today.
SUSAN DOERR: This is especially important in a time when misinformation is proliferating across the web. So let's turn now to our speakers. They'll each introduce themselves and have some opening remarks, and then we will move into the questions that we are prepared to discuss today. So Mike, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself first.
MIKE FURLOUGH: OK. Great. Thank you so much. And thanks to all of you for being here this afternoon. This is the first time I've been able to attend SSP in a very long time. I think more than 10 years and I'm sorry I can't do it in person, but that's-- I guess that's what got me here so easily this year. So I want to talk to you a little bit first about how do you trust what we do in order to set up the conversation about our relationship to open access monographs, to some of the issues we see there.
MIKE FURLOUGH: If you don't know us, I'll tell you that we're a collaborative program of academic libraries. Currently, we are supported by about 200 academic research libraries, mostly in North America but not exclusively. Our mission is to preserve and make accessible the cultural and scholarly record, and to do so in a way that supports a broad public good and public access to as much material as possible, but also providing some differential value for our members.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We're kind of rooted in the premise that libraries are preservation agents and need to control and own and direct means of preservation for future access. That's a part of that. Our collection, the one that we steward now contains about 17 and 1/2 million digitized volumes, and that equates to nine million titles. So obviously, some titles have multiple volumes.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We are primarily stewarding a retrospective collection. What you would likely find in the circulating stacks, a large academic research library because most of what we are stewarding has been sourced through mass digitization programs. We're not affiliated with Google, but Google has partnered with many of our member libraries over the past two decades. And it really has been two decades now, which is crazy and continues to work with many of them to digitize materials.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And most of that material does return in land at HathiTrust for preservation and access. So our collecting philosophy is largely a reflection of what our members deem worthy of digitization preservation. We're best known for developing this cooperative infrastructure to do a kind of collective collection management, and so we've been successful because we can rely on large scale.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And we can rely on large scale because we have a lot of homogeneity in the sourcing and a lot of homogeneity in the materials and a lot of homogeneity in the workflows. Scale is affordable to us just because we can control means fairly well. Open access monographs, when we have worked with them in the past several years, they present significant challenges to us because they do not come through the normal channels for us.
MIKE FURLOUGH: They are born digital publications that are deemed worthy of preservation and access, libraries make investments and generate or supporting their development. So we want to provide a community solution, but they're really quite different. And I'm starting to see I've going over time. So I'll just say this.
MIKE FURLOUGH: The biggest issue is that, obviously these materials are born digital versus digitized from print, which is what our legacy is based on. And so establishing workflows in pilot projects that we've pursued for open access monographs has kind of highlighted for us some specific challenges around the overall infrastructure and ecosystem for it. This specifically relates to formats, content flows, and metadata.
MIKE FURLOUGH: When we have worked with e-books from the publishers in the past, what we've noticed is that they often come to us in formats that are really good for presentation, but often not great for preservation. We often find ourselves working with publishers then to kind of translate their metadata specifications into metadata specifications that we rely upon for discovery and for access. Our current work right now is focused on a pilot to ingest and preserve e-pubs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: This is rooted in some previous work or some previous conversations around a program sponsored by NEH and Mellon for Open Humanities e-books. We're currently working with two university presses and their partner or their corresponding libraries to work on this workflow collection problem. Our hope is that that gives us some ways to begin to branch or scale that up. I'm going to stop there.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I've got a lot more to say about workflows and challenges as the conversation goes on today, but I'll leave it at that point for right now.
SUSAN DOERR: Neil, would you introduce yourself.
NIELS STERN: Yes. Thank you, Susan. And good afternoon or good evening, I should say. I'm based in Denmark. So a few hours ahead of you. So I will tell you a little bit about the OAPEN Foundation, which is a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, however we do work globally. Our mission is to increase this capability of open access books and also to build trust around open access books.
NIELS STERN: And we do this by operating free services. The first one is the OAPEN Library, which is where we host, distribute, and preserve open access books. Currently more than 16,000 books from several hundred publishers. All the books are peer reviewed and open access. And we've seen a really interesting increase in the usage over the last year, probably due to the pandemic.
NIELS STERN: But just in March, we reached one million downloads just in that month, and that tendency has really been seen also in April. And in fact, the US is the country using our books most and over the last year, we have seen three times the usage in February '21 compared to February '20. So it's really interesting to see how open access has, let's say come to the forefront during this pandemic.
NIELS STERN: We have our books based on the Dspace platform, so it's open source and it's easy to integrate for libraries through metadata feeds and harvesting using our API. So that's the OAPEN Library. Then the other second service is the directory of open access books which is indexing more than 40,000 open access books from over 500 publishers. We run the service together with the open edition.
NIELS STERN: And it was launched in 2012, so two years after the OAPEN Library. It also runs on Dspace, and we work closely also with knowledge bases like LCSE and [INAUDIBLE],, EBSCO, and also Google Scholar to increase the discoverability of our books. And all the metadata that we host are public domain at CCO. And yeah, so also and I will probably talk about this a bit more later on.
NIELS STERN: We are developing a certification service for peer review so that publishers can display their quality assurance processes at the book level, and this is something which is currently in beta and in development. The last service I will be just briefly mentioning is the open access books toolkit, which we launched in the autumn. It's a free information resource for book authors who want to publish open access, and it's developed as a information resource by a number of experts in the field.
NIELS STERN: We have an editorial advisory board, and this is a great resource for also libraries and others who are interested in open access books, I think. And then we are, I should mention also very much engaged in the OA books community, which I can recommend to anyone on this call to join. It's full of events and good discussions around the theme of open access books. And last but not least, we are engaged in a few US projects and we also work with the lyricists to help us being more active in the US, which we would very much like to.
NIELS STERN: So that was just my welcome note. Thanks.
SUSAN DOERR: And Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: Thanks, Susan. As Susan said, I'm the director of Project MUSE, which is a division of Johns Hopkins University Press. And for those not familiar, MUSE is an aggregator of humanities and social science research, and we currently host about 700 journals and over 70,000 books from more than 200 university presses and scholarly societies. We host thousands of open access books as well as OA journals.
WENDY QUEEN: And in 2018, we launched a million funded initiative to support monographs, named MUSE open. This past fall, we partnered with Central European University Press, CEUP to support their open access monographs model. And today we announced a Mellon funded initiative to investigate a subscribe to Open Model for our journals. We depend on infrastructure partnerships like the Directory of Open Access books, DAOB.
WENDY QUEEN: And we continue to experiment and seek additional partnerships to grow our OA program. And discussions like we're having here today are exactly what's vital to our community to keep this momentum for OA happening.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you, Wendy. Before we move in to the questions that I have for our panelists, I would like to take a moment to thank Kelley Squazzo with the Project MUSE team. Kelley was the organizer for this session. And she is also pasting some links to resources into the chat. So as people talk about things or ask questions, you may see some of the links appear in the chat.
SUSAN DOERR: So it's great if you would follow that. And thank you, Kelley, for all your hard work to bring us together today. So the first question I have is a really big question. And it's really, when we talk about infrastructure, what do we mean by this word? And maybe what do we mean specifically for this panel? How do you define infrastructure? And are there gaps or failures in the current models that need to be addressed?
SUSAN DOERR: And I'm going to turn to Wendy to answer that question. So Wendy, go ahead.
WENDY QUEEN: I laugh because I think about the question of what is infrastructure in the same way about 10 years ago we said, what is a platform? That was a big definition debate. So by infrastructure to support open access monographs, I define it as all the components necessary to support the creation, distribution, discoverability, accessibility, and preservation of the content. And I'm sure there are many other aspects others could add to that list.
WENDY QUEEN: A well-engineered infrastructure creates its strengths not by creating a mini-grid and doing everything on its own, but supporting a larger network of components and concentrating efforts to preserve resources and, in turn, have the redundancy, capacity and expertise of a larger system. And something that has stuck with me for years is I once heard somebody define infrastructure as if you turn it off, people will complain.
WENDY QUEEN: So if you ever ask yourself, what is infrastructure and ask yourself that question, it starts defining it for itself. So specifically at MUSE we support many aspects of this definition. But not all of them. And in order to have a more distributed and strong infrastructure, we depend on the partnerships like DOAB and [INAUDIBLE] to strengthen our grid.
WENDY QUEEN: And your last part of the question was, in terms of gaps, I really would suggest a landscape analysis, as there is not nearly enough collaboration to determine the ways to strengthen the infrastructure. So from my viewpoint we have mini-grid-- many mini-grids. And those mini-grids are somewhat at risk. So we need to figure out where those gaps are and make the appropriate connections that strengthen all of us.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll let somebody--
SUSAN DOERR: Yeah, I was going to ask Mike or Niels, would you like to add anything to Wendy's response?
MIKE FURLOUGH: I can say something. But Niels, do you want to go first?
NIELS STERN: No, please go. I can wait.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I think that definition of if you turn it off, people complain and that's infrastructure is a really interesting one. I think that's a good thumbnail. I do try to define it fairly broadly for us. In the sense for HathiTrust you'll think systems, the repository, the applications, the hardware, the data center, et cetera. But I think going to the point about gap analysis, I don't know that this is really the best way to go to that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But I often think about the open access monograph infrastructure ecosystem for that in comparison to what we created over a couple of decades to support distribution of print monographs through libraries to sales agents over the past few decades. And where does that exist? What are the analogs to that in the open access arena? So to get books into the chain of production and acquisition and access and preservation in libraries, we had a lot of different agents involved.
MIKE FURLOUGH: There were services that catalog books or publications, like Library of Congress or their partners in cooperative cataloging entities. Services that distribute records like [INAUDIBLE].. Obviously they still play a role in that. Obviously Library of Congress and cooperative cataloging are still important. But there's also a real-- I think there's a real challenge right now in terms of awareness.
MIKE FURLOUGH: That this system was really good at creating awareness of new materials. Baker and Taylor, Yankee, whoever, were able to say, hey you guys. A book now exists. Do you want it? Or based on previous things you told us, we know you want this book and here it is. And I don't sense a similar existing agent for that-- or role for that-- right now.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I think that that's problematic because, for me, it seems that many books then start to fall through a crack. That books may be distributed or a publisher can say this book is available as open access. But the question would be where? Where is it? Where do you go to find it? Is it findable through library catalogs? Well, it depends upon what services they are relying upon and trusting, et cetera and so forth.
MIKE FURLOUGH: So I think that that is, to me, thinking about gap analysis, I think awareness begins the process. I think preservation is a huge issue in this space. But awareness is-- the other end of the scale is really critical to get it into that change for its preservation.
NIELS STERN: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think maybe one could talk about interoperability in different forms. So there's technical, very pure technical interoperability. And the interoperability that Mike is talking about, which is also about bringing awareness. Quite interestingly, last week there was the position paper issued called "Investing in Open Access Book Infrastructure: A Call for Action." And I think this paper quite clearly shows that there is a lack of interoperability at different levels still.
NIELS STERN: Although throughout the last decade and more, a lot of infrastructures have emerged and many projects and initiatives have emerged that are really helpful. But still, there is some things that need to be connected still. And there is a great need to ensure funding for those open infrastructures to get connected.
NIELS STERN: And then we can really, I mean, make the most use of it and see things developing in the right direction. So yeah, I think interoperability for me, in terms of infrastructure, is key, of course. So that, for instance, our infrastructures, that we ensure that metadata is transmitted correctly into other library systems, and make sure these workflows are working seamlessly.
NIELS STERN: But still, there are quite a few things we still need to make sure also work.
SUSAN DOERR: And I'll just say from the publisher's perspective, these are all the challenges we face for the traditional projects that we're already publishing in EPUB in PDF format. But our authors come to us with really innovative ideas for digital publications that break the boundaries of what you might consider a traditional book. And that's yet another layer of needs and perhaps even infrastructures that we would need to attend to, to make them preservable-- to wrap them around the metadata for discovery-- when it's not even quite what we think of as a traditional publication.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you, guys. So let's move on to the next question, which is a very big one-- especially right now-- which is trust in quality. The idea of conveying markers of quality is so essential. Especially as a scholarly publisher or a university publishing materials. Our brand carries some weight that this can be trusted material.
SUSAN DOERR: But there's a lot of content being published by lots of different groups. And some of it is trustworthy and some of it is not. So how do we certify? And how do we convey that the material to readers is trustworthy? And how does each platform ensure that they're conveying that this is quality material. Niels, I'll have you start with that question.
SUSAN DOERR: Because I know this is something that you've worked on quite a lot.
NIELS STERN: Yeah, thank you. And thanks. It's what you would call a very good question. I think what we try to do is to use the infrastructure and to use the, let's say, the collection of what we have on these platforms to make quality assurance processes transparent. I mean, it's really at the heart of what we're doing. Because it's, as you say, it's so crucial that quality is ensured, and that what is being published-- what has undergone peer review-- that it is what we actually bring.
NIELS STERN: But of course, it's not that easy. And when we do enter agreements with publishers, of course we rely on what the publishers give us, in terms of the books that we host on the platform. And so we have no quality assurance process in that sense ourselves, of course, in terms of the content. But we screen the peer review process that the publisher provides.
NIELS STERN: And we make sure that this review process is displayed, public. And so that everyone can see what is to be expected. And then, of course, we also screen for open access licensing and it's scholarly books and so on. But what we now are trying to implement, as I previously mentioned shortly, is this certification service, which we will add to the Directory of Open Access Books.
NIELS STERN: And the certification services is quite simple in the sense that we're trying to give publishers an opportunity to show how they perform peer review in a rather simplistic way, in a standardized way. Which is, of course, not easy. I've been a scholarly book publisher for many years myself. So I know it's always-- it's more complex than that.
NIELS STERN: Or it's from one book to another, you can't really compare. But we're trying to, in a very simple way, make publishers answer to five questions. So what is being peer reviewed? Who is doing it? How is it being done? And when is it being done? And who's overseeing the process?
NIELS STERN: So based on these questions, you can sort of tick boxes. And that will give you the peer review type that you have applied to a certain number of books or old books. But you can have different peer review types. And then we add that information to the metadata of the book. And we also display it through a link-- a logo link on the book page. And so you can actually see what has happened with this book.
NIELS STERN: And this is I would say just the beginning to first step in the direction of more openness when it comes to the process of peer review. So we're not judging whether one is better than the other. We have discussed this intensively with the OASPA. The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association. But we're trying to bring light to the process. And we have also set up a scientific committee that will help us in discussing and giving guidance to the certification service which we expect will develop.
NIELS STERN: And it should be based on discussions, of course, within this committee. But also with the greater community, to have an open discussion around how to display peer review. I don't think we will reach an open peer review in the next few years. But I think more transparency can help also building trust around open access books so we can bust some of those myths around pro-quality related to open access.
NIELS STERN: So I think that that's at least our intention. So the first steps will be to bring more transparency. And hopefully publishers will embrace this. And, as I said, we are in a beta. And we are actually inviting publishers now to be part of this testing phase. So if there are any publishers out there, it would be great to have some US presses on board as well for this testing phase.
NIELS STERN: And then we hope to go live early next year.
SUSAN DOERR: Mike or Wendy, do you want to add any thoughts on to the topic of trust and quality?
MIKE FURLOUGH: Wendy, I have some thoughts. But I think they go in a different direction from Niels so if you want to go, please do.
WENDY QUEEN: OK. Maybe that'll makes sense. So in addition to the points Niels brought up about brand trust, peer review and openness, I'll add that I think an important component is to treat open access content like gated content in every respect with the noted exception of access methods. So that is the value of the infrastructure. Lots of uses, lots of different uses, leveraging the capabilities of gated content.
WENDY QUEEN: And when I mean that, I mean every aspect of what I define as downstream activities. The metadata support, the linking partners, all the things that are supporting preservation, discoverability and how we define infrastructure that, at least for MUSE, that we spent 25 years perfecting to make sure that all of those aspects are also applied to open access content so that it's treated at the same level.
WENDY QUEEN: And in some cases on MUSE, we've been more assertive with the open access content than the gated content because of not having to deal with legacy issues. About things born OA and born EPUB and all of those wonderful things that give us a little bit more flexibility. So I think that's my biggest takeaway here, is to make sure that the treatment of the content that is open access is equal if not more than the treatment of gated content.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll pass to Mike, with that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah, I think that's really critical. I believe that. But I think for HathiTrust, our orientation to this is a little bit different. We don't speak too much or think too much, honestly, about intellectual integrity of material. Because we are working with material that's been selected by libraries. And we're in a sense relying on their judgment of quality and value and assumptions thereof to be able to signal with that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I think for us, quality and integrity comes back to technical issues. And I think even though this would not ordinarily be related-- you wouldn't think this would relate necessarily be technical issues. I do think that how a work is presented-- the way that it is received, the formats, the various issues-- can really, significantly affect a user or readers perceptions of quality and value.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Think about how your response to a book that has really shoddy copy editing, for instance. Or you find multiple pages repeated or something like that. In the digital space for us, what we have found in our work in pilots around open access monographs is that we really don't like dealing with PDFs. PDFs is a great presentation format. It mimics a lot of print formatting to the user.
MIKE FURLOUGH: It's been great for the past 30 years to help us make this transition. Great for reading. Really bad for preservation, in our experience. And this is nothing against any of the publishers that produce PDFs. I use them all the time. But our experience is that when we try to bring them into our preservation environment, we will see a great variety of methods in which the material has been encoded.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We'll find a variety of differences in image quality embedding particular things-- whether it's images or fonts or what. And often we'll find that we can't feel very confident that the way that PDF will render now will render in the same way 25, 30 years from now. And so for us, I noted just a second ago Bill Kasdorf put in a plug for EPUB in the chat. I would expect him to.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But EPUB really holds a lot more promise for us as a preservation format and as a presentation format. Because we believe it can-- we can rely on that format. We can better validate that format. It has greater likelihood of transformation into other formats. And as Bill points out in the chat, it has a much greater value around accessibility.
MIKE FURLOUGH: There's a great deal more support for accessibility around EPUB. And so I would really want to see more production around that format in the future. Again, that's way out the side of most of the way you talk about quality and integrity in this space. But I think it's important to note on this piece, too.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you very much. Wendy, your comment about going through the same processes with your gated content as your open access content really resonates with me as a university press publisher, because our open access projects go through the exact same editorial process as our gated project. And there's really no difference until we get to how we choose to disseminate the material. So that's a really good point. Thank you for that.
SUSAN DOERR: So let's turn a little bit to both redundancies and gaps. What are the pros and cons of having redundancies, or having multiple platforms and a diverse open access distribution infrastructure that may be doing some of the same things, maybe doing very different things? But especially, how are you working together to ensure that-- are you working together may be the first question-- to ensure that there are ways that we can reduce those redundancies?
SUSAN DOERR: Because when we turn to the question of sustainability, if we're all doing the exact same work within our own little mini-communities, then we're doing this thing where we're expending the same resources on the same thing. So how do we work together to reduce redundancies, and what are the pros and cons of having some of those redundancies? And Mike, I'd like to turn to you with this question to begin.
SUSAN DOERR:
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah. Are we working together? Well, I'll come to that. I want to start with advantages. I think this is still an arena where there is a lot to learn and a lot of creativity to be brought forth in thinking through how we effectively manage this material and bring it to light and preserve it and make it accessible. So I think there's a real advantage of having a diversity of organizations involved in this.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And really, it's not-- I would say I don't feel like there's competition, either. I don't think that's a real issue among-- I don't feel that certainly among the power players. There are others who are not here and could be. I'd suggest that our missions from the three of us-- MUSE, OAPEN and HathiTrust-- our missions and orientations and relationships to users, libraries and publishers differ significantly.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We're each trying to bring different strategic value around OA content that aligns with other value we're trying to bring to those communities. In HathiTrust, I emphasize collections and scale and content. But I haven't talked about the way that we have used the scale of the collection to really begin tackling larger, much knottier kinds of challenges around collective collection management.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Both the legacy print materials, how those can be preserved, linking that to digital access, or text and data mining and infrastructures for that. And for us, we see those is really critical as part of what we do overall. And open access content belongs in those chains. So it's overall more of a piece there. I think, really, the only, of the three of us, it's really OAPEN that's the most primarily focused on open access books and monographs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I think the work they've been doing it's just obviously fantastic about that. Also, the fact that they're based in Europe says a lot about the history of open access in North America as well. Both its evolution, its resistance and slowness to take hold. There is a disadvantage in the space in that, honestly, there's complexity in the system for users.
MIKE FURLOUGH: They can't-- where do they go? I've already highlighted that. Is there an item of known record and recourse that you would refer to. But I think honestly the disadvantage is in sometimes just that we have so much going on that is really challenging for us to work together. I was thinking a little bit about this when Niels was talking about the various agencies and organizations that they're working with to ensure particular aspects around open access monographs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Makes perfect sense. And your mission is really focused solely, primarily around that. And so you're able to really help the community move forward in that. It's a piece of what we do, it's a piece of what MUSE does, it's a piece of what other organizations do. And so it becomes very challenging for me to think about-- to have mental space, even.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Much less staff time and energy to devote to a collaboration on open access monographs. That's not really where I want to be. I really think we need to be much more in dialogue with the other players and content aggregators in this space. But it is reality based on where we are right now. So I'll stop there and see if others disagree with me strenuously about that.
MIKE FURLOUGH:
NIELS STERN: Can I pick up on that?
MIKE FURLOUGH: Please.
NIELS STERN: I completely agree on the having time and resources to do what we would like to do. And I think on top of what you say, Mike, I think we also struggle with funding issues. So we are based on community funding, and fundraising is taking up a lot of time. But luckily we we're getting somewhere with that. And then we can start working with the community and do all the stuff that we would really like to do to progress it.
NIELS STERN: But I do think that we also succeed. So one example would be the work we do with Project MUSE. I think that's a good example which was already done before I joined OAPEN. And this has let us-- what we do is that we have an agreement, really, to have an efficient workflow of books from Project MUSE into DOAB. So into the Directory of Open Access Books.
NIELS STERN: And we build on that concept to make it what we would call a trusted platform. So for instance, when we look at a broader scale, global scale, we can use that concept also, for instance, in Latin America. So with SciELO Books, we have discussed how can they help us when we evaluate publishers in South America, for instance, to become part of DOAB. SciELO has a lot of knowledge, of course, about publishers in South America.
NIELS STERN: So they can be helpful to us. We can be helpful to them to make efficient workflows and make Latin American open access scholarly books more discoverable through DOAB. So I think we can learn from each other. We can find places where we can work together. And I don't see it as a problem that there are many actors. I think that helps innovation. Because you get-- I mean, the more people who are engaged, the more stuff comes up.
NIELS STERN: As long as we ensure interoperability-- because otherwise then we'll reinvent the wheel the whole time and we won't talk together. So we really need to ensure that these infrastructures, they are interconnected in efficient ways. And that's the challenge. And it takes time and resources.
WENDY QUEEN: So I'll add, going back to the question, Susan, where you said can we all afford to spend the same resources to accomplish the same thing. And I lived in that space for many years. As resources are sparse and we're all trying to support and build pieces of the infrastructure. And then I came to the conclusion that we're not there yet. And on what Mike said and what Niels said about we're still very much in that innovation space.
WENDY QUEEN: So if we put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and we're only going down one path, we're missing the opportunity to learn. And I think I'm keeping a tick of how many times so far the word scale has come up. And I don't think, if you think about what organization in the beginning of supporting OA content had the infrastructure, could handle the scale. But together, we're all carving or taking pieces-- sometimes redundant, sometimes not-- and figuring it out.
WENDY QUEEN: So I feel like we're going to have the resource question in the future. We're just not quite there yet. We have so much more room and time for experimentation. And also a very practical point is users have preferences on which platforms they use. And in some cases, for example, there may be redundant deposits across MUSE and JSTOR, for example. And probably the usage of that content very much depends on the preference of the user or where they were in their research in the beginning.
WENDY QUEEN: I think I can speak for all of the aggregators that have both gated and OA content, our goal is to the end user there's no difference to them. They're not even necessarily noticing at that moment in their research experience how this content is classified until they do something like hit an access control wall. So I think it's just not time yet to worry about redundancy.
WENDY QUEEN: And if I put my university press publisher hat on for just a moment, right now most of our publishers, many of our publishers, are really gathering those statistics from many different platforms to see what they can learn. So I would look at something like that. Because I spent a lot of time thinking about is analytics part of an infrastructure. And I ultimately landed on you could put it in the infrastructure category or you could consider it a utility.
WENDY QUEEN: But whatever you want to define it as, right now, I think that's what we're all should be focused on. The analytics around the usage. And then later, worry a bit more about the redundancies.
NIELS STERN: Could I just add one thing? Because I think as a university publisher, I would always go for maximum distribution. So I always worked with many distributors, many channels. And I think the same goes, really, for OA monographs. It's just, go use them.
SUSAN DOERR: And in our chat there's a comment that one of the big problems small, especially scholar-wide open access book publishers face is there are a daunting number of platforms to work with. And they want their books to be included in all of them. But there's a gap in infrastructure reaching all of them. Because they don't-- I assume that the implication is they don't have the resources to reach out and work with all of them.
SUSAN DOERR: So is there a tool or a place where that can happen? And they mentioned COPIM as one project that's trying to address that issue. Good resource for people.
NIELS STERN: We are actually part of the COPIM project. I was just about to mention this because I think that's a crucial service. Which was also crucial in, let's say, in the print book world, that you go through someone who can help you with the distribution of metadata. So that's definitely, yeah, a good project to find a solution for that.
SUSAN DOERR: And I'll also mention that on the topic of analytics and usage data, there is an e-book data trust project that is currently under way to look at is there a way to aggregate usage data from multiple sources into one resource. That's the idea of the data trust. So that if we're pushing usage data all in one direction, publishers and authors and universities-- I mean the whole, really, scholarly publishing community-- would have some more normalized reporting and access and benchmarks to measure things.
SUSAN DOERR: There have been a few questions about EPUB that have come up in the chat. And Mike, I know you addressed one already about EPUB versus PDF. But one question was are there developing facts on developing more EPUB support? Is that something that is still going forward, or has EPUB support dropped off some in EPUB development?
SUSAN DOERR: And I don't know if any of our panelists today feel comfortable addressing that question. But I'm going to pose it because it came up in the chat.
WENDY QUEEN: I can take us first. We are reimagining our monographs workflow to take more advantage of EPUB. So earlier I mentioned in some cases OA has more functionality on the MUSE platform than gated. And some of that echoes Mike's sentiments about PDFs. But part of when we were launching MUSEOpen, one of our objectives was to break free of that PDF format and support EPUB.
WENDY QUEEN: So born OA content is going on the platform on MUSE using EPUB. And now we have to think about what do we do with all of that legacy content so that legacy content doesn't have less functionality than the newer content. And that's an age old problem. Normalization of data will always be a welcomed pursuit, as it means we're growing and changing and experimenting and advancing.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: There's an interesting question in the chat about how do we recognize-- as a community, how do we recognize the best areas for innovation? And at some point, are there systems that have become de facto core infrastructure? Does anybody want to offer thoughts on that question?
WENDY QUEEN: Can you repeat it one more time, Susan? I'm sorry.
SUSAN DOERR: Sure. So how do we as a community recognize the best areas for innovation, is the opening part of the question. And then at some point, are there some systems that have become de facto core Infrastructure, simply by existing or getting a lot of use?
MIKE FURLOUGH: I can more easily answer that second question. Absolutely there are. There are. I mean, I think that's true for us. I think it's true for OAPEN and I think it's true for MUSE. I think it's true for a lot of platforms, in some respects. Recognizing opportunities for innovation at large across an entire space ecosystem. I'm really not an economist or capital or anything like that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But it's like you end up relying so heavily on the market to identify-- to find the places where there's a need. And start to create some solution around that need. I'm not suggesting that's the best approach. But I do know if you sat me down or sat any of us down right now and said, OK, what are the opportunities for areas to innovate? We could probably come up with a list.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But whether or not those would be the ones that a well-positioned, creative agent would be best positioned to be able to tackle, that's a good question. I just don't know. So I'll recede and say I shouldn't have said anything.
WENDY QUEEN: I'm fine with question number one. The first part of the question. And I'm going to answer it very simplistically and say we need to listen to our users. Because recently, I believe it was Karen [INAUDIBLE]---- and if it wasn't, it was another very incredibly smart person-- who said we have not achieved an optimal reading experience online for the monograph. And we've rested on, hey, people like to do discovery in the digital sense and they like to read in the print.
WENDY QUEEN: And we were all a little bit comfortable with that. Because reading experiences are hard. But we can tell by just our analytics that there's a need to keep investing in that part. And really creating more touch points with the users and understanding what they need there. We're not done yet. We're far from it, really. Because when you think about from the PDF to even some of the more flexibility and functionality we've gotten from having a more flexible format like EPUB.
WENDY QUEEN: You haven't seen a great deal of innovation there on how do we make this content more digestible, more appealing to those end users. So I'm going to say we need to reach out. We need to connect a little bit better and think about that reading experience a bit more.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Can I just add-- I would just say, I think that's a great point. Because it brings to mind for me something I've begun really recognizing the last year. As every class in the world ended up going to either online or hybrid last spring, the use of digital content increased. And people found themselves relying more heavily on digital than print than ever before. And we got many, many earfuls from readers and users about how poor our interface was in their respect.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And what it really boils down to is, you can't imagine use being strictly reading. Use of content involves a lot of different aspects and cognitive functions and physical functions that print makes very easy that digital does not. And that interoperable work set across all content platforms does not exist yet. Although there are organizations like Hypothesis that try to bring some pieces to that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: So listening to the users and looking for what they need is absolutely critical. So I love that.
NIELS STERN: Can I just add? Because I think that's absolutely true. And I think the stakeholders in the broad sense-- so for us it would be really engaging with the publishers, but also engaging with the libraries to understand how can we explore the richness of the data that we collect. So the direction of open access books is collecting a lot of data from a lot of books now. And we have still to discover what we can do with it, but in a community based way.
NIELS STERN: So I think that's the type of innovation we will see, will be based on the feedback we get. And aligning with the needs of stakeholders and users, of course. And even maybe someday we'll see that PDF can do something good. We think that we have a library full of PDF. So maybe-- well, we'll be very innovative, I hope.
SUSAN DOERR: I will say, having worked on our reading platform-- which is called Manifold-- the reading experience was where we began. Because we felt that that was the first thing that we needed to address in bringing readers to [INAUDIBLE] the material on our website. So the reader is the primary focus of that particular publishing tool. And we are partnered with the City University of New York. And they use it for their open educational resources.
SUSAN DOERR: They have several hundred up at this point. Some class created, some instructor led. And we get a lot of good feedback about the reading experience. But we also listen to the readers and what they want and need, and develop with their input in mind. So I hope that that's one place that is trying to address the needs of the reader online.
SUSAN DOERR: Another thought, there's a comment in here about how the ancient codex can't be the only model for the monograph in the future. And I'll just say, one way of thinking about publications on the web, we think of it in three layers. There's really that base of text, which does model the codex on the web in many ways, in terms of the content. But then there's the layer of the network.
SUSAN DOERR: Of the media that you can bring in. The links, the resources, the files that you can put into content when you're publishing open access on the web. And then that third layer is really the reader interaction. And it can be just readers, it can be readers with each other, it can be readers with the text, it could also be readers with the author. So you've got three different layers of publication, really, when you're publishing something open access on the web.
SUSAN DOERR: And I think that publishers really need to think of it in that framing. Because we control that first layer. That base layer text. And we probably control that second layer. But we really don't have any control-- except for the tools that we offer-- on the interaction.
NIELS STERN: Can I just mentioned that the COPIM project we mentioned earlier, there is a work package, actually, exploring also innovative publishing. And I think this is definitely something where we are very much at a very basic level. So there is a lot to explore. I've just spent a few years in a library. And actually, some of the colleagues there, they do gather a lot of information directly from the users.
NIELS STERN: From the students. Especially, perhaps, from the students in what do they need, really. So I think we should be really careful about listening to the feedback from them. And then try to see how we can develop concepts.
WENDY QUEEN: Can I add something to that? Part of launching our OA monographs program, we also too focused on the reading experience. But I realized when you're looking at the analytics-- and as my colleague Kelley Squazzo did a presentation in the pre-meeting-- when we did the COVID open free period and we watched usage happening in every country in Africa-- almost every country in the world.
WENDY QUEEN: That's the moment I realized what we've defined as users and what we've based our research on is really super predictable. It's those who traditionally have purchased a subscription or something like that. So when I say listening to the users, maybe I should have backed that up and think about defining the users very differently in an OA space.
WENDY QUEEN: And that, maybe, is how I should have answered that question. Because in a gated world, it's very tidy. You know who's coming through, you know who's there, you can reach out. But in a global world-- and in truly, in the spirit of open access-- do we really know who our users are in the same way we used to know-- or what MUSE used to know as their users-- in a gated world.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: Wendy, I'll bring up the question of maybe we don't know who our users are. But when we also bring in the issues of privacy, how much about our users can we learn? And we can ask them and they can perhaps give us information. But we'll always have a group that won't want to reveal themselves to us. And we should accept that. But I guess it's hard to meet their need if we don't know who they are and what they need.
WENDY QUEEN: Right. It's one area we're going to have to work on together. And that's where I think a lot of publishers that participated in MUSE are using those analytics during the COVID free period and trying to figure that out. And then on MUSE, we're looking for how is this different? How has things changed? And a lot of that was just simply scale of so many publishers being so agreeable about making their content open for a specific period of time.
WENDY QUEEN: But, yeah, I think there's-- and I think that's something collectively we should be doing and sharing and learning and growing. Because there is synergy and value in a similar vernacular that establishes in usability. So it doesn't serve the wider community, necessarily, for everyone to be doing something differently. There's a shared vernacular there, and something as a community that we define together.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you. I just want to point out there's some good links in the chat. So for attendees, definitely click through some of those. I think that they'll expand the conversation. We're coming up on the end of our session here. So I would just like to ask each of our panelists if there are any last points or key takeaways, or any resources that you want to share with attendees before we come to the end of our time. And I'll leave it to you all to decide who goes first.
SUSAN DOERR: But if you won't decide who goes first, I'm going to ask Mike to go first.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Thanks a lot.
SUSAN DOERR: You're unmuted.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah, I know. So I mean, that's a great question. And I think that I have I have learned a lot, myself, just from listening to my co-panelists here. And I really especially appreciate the comments about who are the users in the last few minutes. Because that is something in particular that I think we all really do need to be thinking about. The user community that we know versus the one that is potential is just significantly different here.
MIKE FURLOUGH: For me, I'm not sure this is really a takeaway, but it's a message I always want to deliver when I have the opportunity to speak to a mixed audience. Mixed audience means not just librarians. And that is that while librarians are historically and traditionally preservation agents, it's not exclusively our domain or responsibility. And there are ways in which the publishing community has historically supported and enabled preservation.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Like through the commitment to use acid free paper or participation in the cataloging program and so forth. So I think there are-- in the same way I was trying to draw some analogs with the print world for infrastructure, I hope that we can think about analogs in the digital world for preservation and publisher work with libraries in that space.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I'm not going to cite a particular idea. I just wanted to highlight that because I think it's something that is important to keep focused on.
WENDY QUEEN: I'm just going to give a shout out that we've just begun and that the need to keep experimenting and pivoting and sharing-- we're still in the early stages. And that there's a lot we still need to do there together. I'm still going to go back to my first answer and say I do think there's a little bit of landscape analysis that needs to be done. I do remember Cliff Lynch at CNI a few years ago asking the question about a lot of initiatives that were in play at that point, of how do they fit together.
WENDY QUEEN: And no one really being able to answer that. And I'm not sure, if he asked that same question today, there would be more of an answer.
NIELS STERN: Yeah I think I completely agree with these things. But I would add that I think engaging with the infrastructure-- so the way we engage with publishers, we engage with libraries-- is absolutely crucial for our infrastructure to develop in the right direction and to cater to the needs of publishers. So I would really encourage the publishers and other infrastructures as well to engage in innovation in this space.
NIELS STERN: And I hope we can help publishers increase their discoverability, we can help them be more transparent. And in this way, we can hopefully help the scholarly community.
SUSAN DOERR: Well, I'll just close with thank you to our panelists today. I think this was a great discussion. And we have collected the questions. We'll follow up with some if we didn't get to them. And thank you everybody in SSP for giving us the opportunity to have this conversation.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Thank you so much. And again, thanks to Kelley for organizing this.
SUSAN DOERR: Yes.
NIELS STERN: Thank you.
SUSAN DOERR: Very much so. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
WENDY QUEEN: Thanks, Susan, for moderating for us. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
MIKE FURLOUGH: Good night, Niels.
NIELS STERN: Have a good day. Bye.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Bye-bye.
Segment:0 .
SUSAN DOERR: Just waiting a moment for everybody to come in, and we will say hello. OK. So shall we get started everybody? OK. Great. I want to say hello and welcome to forging a path forward.
SUSAN DOERR: How nonprofit aggregators are working together to support the future of the open access monograph. I'm Susan Doerr. I'm the associate director at the University of Minnesota Press and I'm the project leader on an open source publishing platform called Manifold Scholarship. I'm joined today by my colleague, Wendy Queen, the director of Project MUSE; Mike Furlough, the executive director, HathiTrust; and Niels Stern, the director of the OAPEN Foundation.
SUSAN DOERR: Just one bit of housekeeping which is, please ask the questions in the chat feature in the passable interface. And I'll do my best to get as many of those as we can during our session. Each of our panelists today is going to introduce themselves and make some opening remarks. And then we have questions. We're going to run this today as an open question and answer discussion on the topic of infrastructure.
SUSAN DOERR: Following that, we'll open up to your questions that you put into passable, and we will do our best to answer as many of those as we can. Our topic today is infrastructure, specifically infrastructure that supports the open access monograph book publishing, and the humanities in the social sciences and also book publishing more broadly. Much of the discussion about sustainability for open access publishing centers around supporting the book itself and how to publish books sustainably.
SUSAN DOERR: And infrastructure is often less discussed, but in some ways, it's almost just as, if not more important because it's how you bring the book to your readers. That's how we reach our students and our scholars and our general readers who want to learn from the materials that we bring to them. Today, the systems and the processes that we publishers use to distribute and manage our digital book publications for for sale publications, that infrastructure doesn't always translate and can't always be used for our open access publications, which means that we need to find new paths.
SUSAN DOERR: We need to work together and we need to create a sustainable system within the scholarly community so that we can continue to publish open access material. Things like getting our books into library catalogs become a lot more challenging when we work with open access publications than the traditional systems that we already have set up for our for sale publications. Aggregated usage reporting, alternative metrics, health metrics.
SUSAN DOERR: These are all things that when it comes to open access are very important. But we don't always have systems today in order to get what we expect and come to need in order to evaluate and determine success for some of these publications. How do we convey markers of quality and trust so that when readers come to our materials, they know that they can trust the material that they're reading today.
SUSAN DOERR: This is especially important in a time when misinformation is proliferating across the web. So let's turn now to our speakers. They'll each introduce themselves and have some opening remarks, and then we will move into the questions that we are prepared to discuss today. So Mike, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself first.
MIKE FURLOUGH: OK. Great. Thank you so much. And thanks to all of you for being here this afternoon. This is the first time I've been able to attend SSP in a very long time. I think more than 10 years and I'm sorry I can't do it in person, but that's-- I guess that's what got me here so easily this year. So I want to talk to you a little bit first about how do you trust what we do in order to set up the conversation about our relationship to open access monographs, to some of the issues we see there.
MIKE FURLOUGH: If you don't know us, I'll tell you that we're a collaborative program of academic libraries. Currently, we are supported by about 200 academic research libraries, mostly in North America but not exclusively. Our mission is to preserve and make accessible the cultural and scholarly record, and to do so in a way that supports a broad public good and public access to as much material as possible, but also providing some differential value for our members.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We're kind of rooted in the premise that libraries are preservation agents and need to control and own and direct means of preservation for future access. That's a part of that. Our collection, the one that we steward now contains about 17 and 1/2 million digitized volumes, and that equates to nine million titles. So obviously, some titles have multiple volumes.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We are primarily stewarding a retrospective collection. What you would likely find in the circulating stacks, a large academic research library because most of what we are stewarding has been sourced through mass digitization programs. We're not affiliated with Google, but Google has partnered with many of our member libraries over the past two decades. And it really has been two decades now, which is crazy and continues to work with many of them to digitize materials.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And most of that material does return in land at HathiTrust for preservation and access. So our collecting philosophy is largely a reflection of what our members deem worthy of digitization preservation. We're best known for developing this cooperative infrastructure to do a kind of collective collection management, and so we've been successful because we can rely on large scale.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And we can rely on large scale because we have a lot of homogeneity in the sourcing and a lot of homogeneity in the materials and a lot of homogeneity in the workflows. Scale is affordable to us just because we can control means fairly well. Open access monographs, when we have worked with them in the past several years, they present significant challenges to us because they do not come through the normal channels for us.
MIKE FURLOUGH: They are born digital publications that are deemed worthy of preservation and access, libraries make investments and generate or supporting their development. So we want to provide a community solution, but they're really quite different. And I'm starting to see I've going over time. So I'll just say this.
MIKE FURLOUGH: The biggest issue is that, obviously these materials are born digital versus digitized from print, which is what our legacy is based on. And so establishing workflows in pilot projects that we've pursued for open access monographs has kind of highlighted for us some specific challenges around the overall infrastructure and ecosystem for it. This specifically relates to formats, content flows, and metadata.
MIKE FURLOUGH: When we have worked with e-books from the publishers in the past, what we've noticed is that they often come to us in formats that are really good for presentation, but often not great for preservation. We often find ourselves working with publishers then to kind of translate their metadata specifications into metadata specifications that we rely upon for discovery and for access. Our current work right now is focused on a pilot to ingest and preserve e-pubs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: This is rooted in some previous work or some previous conversations around a program sponsored by NEH and Mellon for Open Humanities e-books. We're currently working with two university presses and their partner or their corresponding libraries to work on this workflow collection problem. Our hope is that that gives us some ways to begin to branch or scale that up. I'm going to stop there.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I've got a lot more to say about workflows and challenges as the conversation goes on today, but I'll leave it at that point for right now.
SUSAN DOERR: Neil, would you introduce yourself.
NIELS STERN: Yes. Thank you, Susan. And good afternoon or good evening, I should say. I'm based in Denmark. So a few hours ahead of you. So I will tell you a little bit about the OAPEN Foundation, which is a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, however we do work globally. Our mission is to increase this capability of open access books and also to build trust around open access books.
NIELS STERN: And we do this by operating free services. The first one is the OAPEN Library, which is where we host, distribute, and preserve open access books. Currently more than 16,000 books from several hundred publishers. All the books are peer reviewed and open access. And we've seen a really interesting increase in the usage over the last year, probably due to the pandemic.
NIELS STERN: But just in March, we reached one million downloads just in that month, and that tendency has really been seen also in April. And in fact, the US is the country using our books most and over the last year, we have seen three times the usage in February '21 compared to February '20. So it's really interesting to see how open access has, let's say come to the forefront during this pandemic.
NIELS STERN: We have our books based on the Dspace platform, so it's open source and it's easy to integrate for libraries through metadata feeds and harvesting using our API. So that's the OAPEN Library. Then the other second service is the directory of open access books which is indexing more than 40,000 open access books from over 500 publishers. We run the service together with the open edition.
NIELS STERN: And it was launched in 2012, so two years after the OAPEN Library. It also runs on Dspace, and we work closely also with knowledge bases like LCSE and [INAUDIBLE],, EBSCO, and also Google Scholar to increase the discoverability of our books. And all the metadata that we host are public domain at CCO. And yeah, so also and I will probably talk about this a bit more later on.
NIELS STERN: We are developing a certification service for peer review so that publishers can display their quality assurance processes at the book level, and this is something which is currently in beta and in development. The last service I will be just briefly mentioning is the open access books toolkit, which we launched in the autumn. It's a free information resource for book authors who want to publish open access, and it's developed as a information resource by a number of experts in the field.
NIELS STERN: We have an editorial advisory board, and this is a great resource for also libraries and others who are interested in open access books, I think. And then we are, I should mention also very much engaged in the OA books community, which I can recommend to anyone on this call to join. It's full of events and good discussions around the theme of open access books. And last but not least, we are engaged in a few US projects and we also work with the lyricists to help us being more active in the US, which we would very much like to.
NIELS STERN: So that was just my welcome note. Thanks.
SUSAN DOERR: And Wendy.
WENDY QUEEN: Thanks, Susan. As Susan said, I'm the director of Project MUSE, which is a division of Johns Hopkins University Press. And for those not familiar, MUSE is an aggregator of humanities and social science research, and we currently host about 700 journals and over 70,000 books from more than 200 university presses and scholarly societies. We host thousands of open access books as well as OA journals.
WENDY QUEEN: And in 2018, we launched a million funded initiative to support monographs, named MUSE open. This past fall, we partnered with Central European University Press, CEUP to support their open access monographs model. And today we announced a Mellon funded initiative to investigate a subscribe to Open Model for our journals. We depend on infrastructure partnerships like the Directory of Open Access books, DAOB.
WENDY QUEEN: And we continue to experiment and seek additional partnerships to grow our OA program. And discussions like we're having here today are exactly what's vital to our community to keep this momentum for OA happening.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you, Wendy. Before we move in to the questions that I have for our panelists, I would like to take a moment to thank Kelley Squazzo with the Project MUSE team. Kelley was the organizer for this session. And she is also pasting some links to resources into the chat. So as people talk about things or ask questions, you may see some of the links appear in the chat.
SUSAN DOERR: So it's great if you would follow that. And thank you, Kelley, for all your hard work to bring us together today. So the first question I have is a really big question. And it's really, when we talk about infrastructure, what do we mean by this word? And maybe what do we mean specifically for this panel? How do you define infrastructure? And are there gaps or failures in the current models that need to be addressed?
SUSAN DOERR: And I'm going to turn to Wendy to answer that question. So Wendy, go ahead.
WENDY QUEEN: I laugh because I think about the question of what is infrastructure in the same way about 10 years ago we said, what is a platform? That was a big definition debate. So by infrastructure to support open access monographs, I define it as all the components necessary to support the creation, distribution, discoverability, accessibility, and preservation of the content. And I'm sure there are many other aspects others could add to that list.
WENDY QUEEN: A well-engineered infrastructure creates its strengths not by creating a mini-grid and doing everything on its own, but supporting a larger network of components and concentrating efforts to preserve resources and, in turn, have the redundancy, capacity and expertise of a larger system. And something that has stuck with me for years is I once heard somebody define infrastructure as if you turn it off, people will complain.
WENDY QUEEN: So if you ever ask yourself, what is infrastructure and ask yourself that question, it starts defining it for itself. So specifically at MUSE we support many aspects of this definition. But not all of them. And in order to have a more distributed and strong infrastructure, we depend on the partnerships like DOAB and [INAUDIBLE] to strengthen our grid.
WENDY QUEEN: And your last part of the question was, in terms of gaps, I really would suggest a landscape analysis, as there is not nearly enough collaboration to determine the ways to strengthen the infrastructure. So from my viewpoint we have mini-grid-- many mini-grids. And those mini-grids are somewhat at risk. So we need to figure out where those gaps are and make the appropriate connections that strengthen all of us.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll let somebody--
SUSAN DOERR: Yeah, I was going to ask Mike or Niels, would you like to add anything to Wendy's response?
MIKE FURLOUGH: I can say something. But Niels, do you want to go first?
NIELS STERN: No, please go. I can wait.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I think that definition of if you turn it off, people complain and that's infrastructure is a really interesting one. I think that's a good thumbnail. I do try to define it fairly broadly for us. In the sense for HathiTrust you'll think systems, the repository, the applications, the hardware, the data center, et cetera. But I think going to the point about gap analysis, I don't know that this is really the best way to go to that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But I often think about the open access monograph infrastructure ecosystem for that in comparison to what we created over a couple of decades to support distribution of print monographs through libraries to sales agents over the past few decades. And where does that exist? What are the analogs to that in the open access arena? So to get books into the chain of production and acquisition and access and preservation in libraries, we had a lot of different agents involved.
MIKE FURLOUGH: There were services that catalog books or publications, like Library of Congress or their partners in cooperative cataloging entities. Services that distribute records like [INAUDIBLE].. Obviously they still play a role in that. Obviously Library of Congress and cooperative cataloging are still important. But there's also a real-- I think there's a real challenge right now in terms of awareness.
MIKE FURLOUGH: That this system was really good at creating awareness of new materials. Baker and Taylor, Yankee, whoever, were able to say, hey you guys. A book now exists. Do you want it? Or based on previous things you told us, we know you want this book and here it is. And I don't sense a similar existing agent for that-- or role for that-- right now.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I think that that's problematic because, for me, it seems that many books then start to fall through a crack. That books may be distributed or a publisher can say this book is available as open access. But the question would be where? Where is it? Where do you go to find it? Is it findable through library catalogs? Well, it depends upon what services they are relying upon and trusting, et cetera and so forth.
MIKE FURLOUGH: So I think that that is, to me, thinking about gap analysis, I think awareness begins the process. I think preservation is a huge issue in this space. But awareness is-- the other end of the scale is really critical to get it into that change for its preservation.
NIELS STERN: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think maybe one could talk about interoperability in different forms. So there's technical, very pure technical interoperability. And the interoperability that Mike is talking about, which is also about bringing awareness. Quite interestingly, last week there was the position paper issued called "Investing in Open Access Book Infrastructure: A Call for Action." And I think this paper quite clearly shows that there is a lack of interoperability at different levels still.
NIELS STERN: Although throughout the last decade and more, a lot of infrastructures have emerged and many projects and initiatives have emerged that are really helpful. But still, there is some things that need to be connected still. And there is a great need to ensure funding for those open infrastructures to get connected.
NIELS STERN: And then we can really, I mean, make the most use of it and see things developing in the right direction. So yeah, I think interoperability for me, in terms of infrastructure, is key, of course. So that, for instance, our infrastructures, that we ensure that metadata is transmitted correctly into other library systems, and make sure these workflows are working seamlessly.
NIELS STERN: But still, there are quite a few things we still need to make sure also work.
SUSAN DOERR: And I'll just say from the publisher's perspective, these are all the challenges we face for the traditional projects that we're already publishing in EPUB in PDF format. But our authors come to us with really innovative ideas for digital publications that break the boundaries of what you might consider a traditional book. And that's yet another layer of needs and perhaps even infrastructures that we would need to attend to, to make them preservable-- to wrap them around the metadata for discovery-- when it's not even quite what we think of as a traditional publication.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you, guys. So let's move on to the next question, which is a very big one-- especially right now-- which is trust in quality. The idea of conveying markers of quality is so essential. Especially as a scholarly publisher or a university publishing materials. Our brand carries some weight that this can be trusted material.
SUSAN DOERR: But there's a lot of content being published by lots of different groups. And some of it is trustworthy and some of it is not. So how do we certify? And how do we convey that the material to readers is trustworthy? And how does each platform ensure that they're conveying that this is quality material. Niels, I'll have you start with that question.
SUSAN DOERR: Because I know this is something that you've worked on quite a lot.
NIELS STERN: Yeah, thank you. And thanks. It's what you would call a very good question. I think what we try to do is to use the infrastructure and to use the, let's say, the collection of what we have on these platforms to make quality assurance processes transparent. I mean, it's really at the heart of what we're doing. Because it's, as you say, it's so crucial that quality is ensured, and that what is being published-- what has undergone peer review-- that it is what we actually bring.
NIELS STERN: But of course, it's not that easy. And when we do enter agreements with publishers, of course we rely on what the publishers give us, in terms of the books that we host on the platform. And so we have no quality assurance process in that sense ourselves, of course, in terms of the content. But we screen the peer review process that the publisher provides.
NIELS STERN: And we make sure that this review process is displayed, public. And so that everyone can see what is to be expected. And then, of course, we also screen for open access licensing and it's scholarly books and so on. But what we now are trying to implement, as I previously mentioned shortly, is this certification service, which we will add to the Directory of Open Access Books.
NIELS STERN: And the certification services is quite simple in the sense that we're trying to give publishers an opportunity to show how they perform peer review in a rather simplistic way, in a standardized way. Which is, of course, not easy. I've been a scholarly book publisher for many years myself. So I know it's always-- it's more complex than that.
NIELS STERN: Or it's from one book to another, you can't really compare. But we're trying to, in a very simple way, make publishers answer to five questions. So what is being peer reviewed? Who is doing it? How is it being done? And when is it being done? And who's overseeing the process?
NIELS STERN: So based on these questions, you can sort of tick boxes. And that will give you the peer review type that you have applied to a certain number of books or old books. But you can have different peer review types. And then we add that information to the metadata of the book. And we also display it through a link-- a logo link on the book page. And so you can actually see what has happened with this book.
NIELS STERN: And this is I would say just the beginning to first step in the direction of more openness when it comes to the process of peer review. So we're not judging whether one is better than the other. We have discussed this intensively with the OASPA. The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association. But we're trying to bring light to the process. And we have also set up a scientific committee that will help us in discussing and giving guidance to the certification service which we expect will develop.
NIELS STERN: And it should be based on discussions, of course, within this committee. But also with the greater community, to have an open discussion around how to display peer review. I don't think we will reach an open peer review in the next few years. But I think more transparency can help also building trust around open access books so we can bust some of those myths around pro-quality related to open access.
NIELS STERN: So I think that that's at least our intention. So the first steps will be to bring more transparency. And hopefully publishers will embrace this. And, as I said, we are in a beta. And we are actually inviting publishers now to be part of this testing phase. So if there are any publishers out there, it would be great to have some US presses on board as well for this testing phase.
NIELS STERN: And then we hope to go live early next year.
SUSAN DOERR: Mike or Wendy, do you want to add any thoughts on to the topic of trust and quality?
MIKE FURLOUGH: Wendy, I have some thoughts. But I think they go in a different direction from Niels so if you want to go, please do.
WENDY QUEEN: OK. Maybe that'll makes sense. So in addition to the points Niels brought up about brand trust, peer review and openness, I'll add that I think an important component is to treat open access content like gated content in every respect with the noted exception of access methods. So that is the value of the infrastructure. Lots of uses, lots of different uses, leveraging the capabilities of gated content.
WENDY QUEEN: And when I mean that, I mean every aspect of what I define as downstream activities. The metadata support, the linking partners, all the things that are supporting preservation, discoverability and how we define infrastructure that, at least for MUSE, that we spent 25 years perfecting to make sure that all of those aspects are also applied to open access content so that it's treated at the same level.
WENDY QUEEN: And in some cases on MUSE, we've been more assertive with the open access content than the gated content because of not having to deal with legacy issues. About things born OA and born EPUB and all of those wonderful things that give us a little bit more flexibility. So I think that's my biggest takeaway here, is to make sure that the treatment of the content that is open access is equal if not more than the treatment of gated content.
WENDY QUEEN: And I'll pass to Mike, with that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah, I think that's really critical. I believe that. But I think for HathiTrust, our orientation to this is a little bit different. We don't speak too much or think too much, honestly, about intellectual integrity of material. Because we are working with material that's been selected by libraries. And we're in a sense relying on their judgment of quality and value and assumptions thereof to be able to signal with that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: I think for us, quality and integrity comes back to technical issues. And I think even though this would not ordinarily be related-- you wouldn't think this would relate necessarily be technical issues. I do think that how a work is presented-- the way that it is received, the formats, the various issues-- can really, significantly affect a user or readers perceptions of quality and value.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Think about how your response to a book that has really shoddy copy editing, for instance. Or you find multiple pages repeated or something like that. In the digital space for us, what we have found in our work in pilots around open access monographs is that we really don't like dealing with PDFs. PDFs is a great presentation format. It mimics a lot of print formatting to the user.
MIKE FURLOUGH: It's been great for the past 30 years to help us make this transition. Great for reading. Really bad for preservation, in our experience. And this is nothing against any of the publishers that produce PDFs. I use them all the time. But our experience is that when we try to bring them into our preservation environment, we will see a great variety of methods in which the material has been encoded.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We'll find a variety of differences in image quality embedding particular things-- whether it's images or fonts or what. And often we'll find that we can't feel very confident that the way that PDF will render now will render in the same way 25, 30 years from now. And so for us, I noted just a second ago Bill Kasdorf put in a plug for EPUB in the chat. I would expect him to.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But EPUB really holds a lot more promise for us as a preservation format and as a presentation format. Because we believe it can-- we can rely on that format. We can better validate that format. It has greater likelihood of transformation into other formats. And as Bill points out in the chat, it has a much greater value around accessibility.
MIKE FURLOUGH: There's a great deal more support for accessibility around EPUB. And so I would really want to see more production around that format in the future. Again, that's way out the side of most of the way you talk about quality and integrity in this space. But I think it's important to note on this piece, too.
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you very much. Wendy, your comment about going through the same processes with your gated content as your open access content really resonates with me as a university press publisher, because our open access projects go through the exact same editorial process as our gated project. And there's really no difference until we get to how we choose to disseminate the material. So that's a really good point. Thank you for that.
SUSAN DOERR: So let's turn a little bit to both redundancies and gaps. What are the pros and cons of having redundancies, or having multiple platforms and a diverse open access distribution infrastructure that may be doing some of the same things, maybe doing very different things? But especially, how are you working together to ensure that-- are you working together may be the first question-- to ensure that there are ways that we can reduce those redundancies?
SUSAN DOERR: Because when we turn to the question of sustainability, if we're all doing the exact same work within our own little mini-communities, then we're doing this thing where we're expending the same resources on the same thing. So how do we work together to reduce redundancies, and what are the pros and cons of having some of those redundancies? And Mike, I'd like to turn to you with this question to begin.
SUSAN DOERR:
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah. Are we working together? Well, I'll come to that. I want to start with advantages. I think this is still an arena where there is a lot to learn and a lot of creativity to be brought forth in thinking through how we effectively manage this material and bring it to light and preserve it and make it accessible. So I think there's a real advantage of having a diversity of organizations involved in this.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And really, it's not-- I would say I don't feel like there's competition, either. I don't think that's a real issue among-- I don't feel that certainly among the power players. There are others who are not here and could be. I'd suggest that our missions from the three of us-- MUSE, OAPEN and HathiTrust-- our missions and orientations and relationships to users, libraries and publishers differ significantly.
MIKE FURLOUGH: We're each trying to bring different strategic value around OA content that aligns with other value we're trying to bring to those communities. In HathiTrust, I emphasize collections and scale and content. But I haven't talked about the way that we have used the scale of the collection to really begin tackling larger, much knottier kinds of challenges around collective collection management.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Both the legacy print materials, how those can be preserved, linking that to digital access, or text and data mining and infrastructures for that. And for us, we see those is really critical as part of what we do overall. And open access content belongs in those chains. So it's overall more of a piece there. I think, really, the only, of the three of us, it's really OAPEN that's the most primarily focused on open access books and monographs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I think the work they've been doing it's just obviously fantastic about that. Also, the fact that they're based in Europe says a lot about the history of open access in North America as well. Both its evolution, its resistance and slowness to take hold. There is a disadvantage in the space in that, honestly, there's complexity in the system for users.
MIKE FURLOUGH: They can't-- where do they go? I've already highlighted that. Is there an item of known record and recourse that you would refer to. But I think honestly the disadvantage is in sometimes just that we have so much going on that is really challenging for us to work together. I was thinking a little bit about this when Niels was talking about the various agencies and organizations that they're working with to ensure particular aspects around open access monographs.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Makes perfect sense. And your mission is really focused solely, primarily around that. And so you're able to really help the community move forward in that. It's a piece of what we do, it's a piece of what MUSE does, it's a piece of what other organizations do. And so it becomes very challenging for me to think about-- to have mental space, even.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Much less staff time and energy to devote to a collaboration on open access monographs. That's not really where I want to be. I really think we need to be much more in dialogue with the other players and content aggregators in this space. But it is reality based on where we are right now. So I'll stop there and see if others disagree with me strenuously about that.
MIKE FURLOUGH:
NIELS STERN: Can I pick up on that?
MIKE FURLOUGH: Please.
NIELS STERN: I completely agree on the having time and resources to do what we would like to do. And I think on top of what you say, Mike, I think we also struggle with funding issues. So we are based on community funding, and fundraising is taking up a lot of time. But luckily we we're getting somewhere with that. And then we can start working with the community and do all the stuff that we would really like to do to progress it.
NIELS STERN: But I do think that we also succeed. So one example would be the work we do with Project MUSE. I think that's a good example which was already done before I joined OAPEN. And this has let us-- what we do is that we have an agreement, really, to have an efficient workflow of books from Project MUSE into DOAB. So into the Directory of Open Access Books.
NIELS STERN: And we build on that concept to make it what we would call a trusted platform. So for instance, when we look at a broader scale, global scale, we can use that concept also, for instance, in Latin America. So with SciELO Books, we have discussed how can they help us when we evaluate publishers in South America, for instance, to become part of DOAB. SciELO has a lot of knowledge, of course, about publishers in South America.
NIELS STERN: So they can be helpful to us. We can be helpful to them to make efficient workflows and make Latin American open access scholarly books more discoverable through DOAB. So I think we can learn from each other. We can find places where we can work together. And I don't see it as a problem that there are many actors. I think that helps innovation. Because you get-- I mean, the more people who are engaged, the more stuff comes up.
NIELS STERN: As long as we ensure interoperability-- because otherwise then we'll reinvent the wheel the whole time and we won't talk together. So we really need to ensure that these infrastructures, they are interconnected in efficient ways. And that's the challenge. And it takes time and resources.
WENDY QUEEN: So I'll add, going back to the question, Susan, where you said can we all afford to spend the same resources to accomplish the same thing. And I lived in that space for many years. As resources are sparse and we're all trying to support and build pieces of the infrastructure. And then I came to the conclusion that we're not there yet. And on what Mike said and what Niels said about we're still very much in that innovation space.
WENDY QUEEN: So if we put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and we're only going down one path, we're missing the opportunity to learn. And I think I'm keeping a tick of how many times so far the word scale has come up. And I don't think, if you think about what organization in the beginning of supporting OA content had the infrastructure, could handle the scale. But together, we're all carving or taking pieces-- sometimes redundant, sometimes not-- and figuring it out.
WENDY QUEEN: So I feel like we're going to have the resource question in the future. We're just not quite there yet. We have so much more room and time for experimentation. And also a very practical point is users have preferences on which platforms they use. And in some cases, for example, there may be redundant deposits across MUSE and JSTOR, for example. And probably the usage of that content very much depends on the preference of the user or where they were in their research in the beginning.
WENDY QUEEN: I think I can speak for all of the aggregators that have both gated and OA content, our goal is to the end user there's no difference to them. They're not even necessarily noticing at that moment in their research experience how this content is classified until they do something like hit an access control wall. So I think it's just not time yet to worry about redundancy.
WENDY QUEEN: And if I put my university press publisher hat on for just a moment, right now most of our publishers, many of our publishers, are really gathering those statistics from many different platforms to see what they can learn. So I would look at something like that. Because I spent a lot of time thinking about is analytics part of an infrastructure. And I ultimately landed on you could put it in the infrastructure category or you could consider it a utility.
WENDY QUEEN: But whatever you want to define it as, right now, I think that's what we're all should be focused on. The analytics around the usage. And then later, worry a bit more about the redundancies.
NIELS STERN: Could I just add one thing? Because I think as a university publisher, I would always go for maximum distribution. So I always worked with many distributors, many channels. And I think the same goes, really, for OA monographs. It's just, go use them.
SUSAN DOERR: And in our chat there's a comment that one of the big problems small, especially scholar-wide open access book publishers face is there are a daunting number of platforms to work with. And they want their books to be included in all of them. But there's a gap in infrastructure reaching all of them. Because they don't-- I assume that the implication is they don't have the resources to reach out and work with all of them.
SUSAN DOERR: So is there a tool or a place where that can happen? And they mentioned COPIM as one project that's trying to address that issue. Good resource for people.
NIELS STERN: We are actually part of the COPIM project. I was just about to mention this because I think that's a crucial service. Which was also crucial in, let's say, in the print book world, that you go through someone who can help you with the distribution of metadata. So that's definitely, yeah, a good project to find a solution for that.
SUSAN DOERR: And I'll also mention that on the topic of analytics and usage data, there is an e-book data trust project that is currently under way to look at is there a way to aggregate usage data from multiple sources into one resource. That's the idea of the data trust. So that if we're pushing usage data all in one direction, publishers and authors and universities-- I mean the whole, really, scholarly publishing community-- would have some more normalized reporting and access and benchmarks to measure things.
SUSAN DOERR: There have been a few questions about EPUB that have come up in the chat. And Mike, I know you addressed one already about EPUB versus PDF. But one question was are there developing facts on developing more EPUB support? Is that something that is still going forward, or has EPUB support dropped off some in EPUB development?
SUSAN DOERR: And I don't know if any of our panelists today feel comfortable addressing that question. But I'm going to pose it because it came up in the chat.
WENDY QUEEN: I can take us first. We are reimagining our monographs workflow to take more advantage of EPUB. So earlier I mentioned in some cases OA has more functionality on the MUSE platform than gated. And some of that echoes Mike's sentiments about PDFs. But part of when we were launching MUSEOpen, one of our objectives was to break free of that PDF format and support EPUB.
WENDY QUEEN: So born OA content is going on the platform on MUSE using EPUB. And now we have to think about what do we do with all of that legacy content so that legacy content doesn't have less functionality than the newer content. And that's an age old problem. Normalization of data will always be a welcomed pursuit, as it means we're growing and changing and experimenting and advancing.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: There's an interesting question in the chat about how do we recognize-- as a community, how do we recognize the best areas for innovation? And at some point, are there systems that have become de facto core infrastructure? Does anybody want to offer thoughts on that question?
WENDY QUEEN: Can you repeat it one more time, Susan? I'm sorry.
SUSAN DOERR: Sure. So how do we as a community recognize the best areas for innovation, is the opening part of the question. And then at some point, are there some systems that have become de facto core Infrastructure, simply by existing or getting a lot of use?
MIKE FURLOUGH: I can more easily answer that second question. Absolutely there are. There are. I mean, I think that's true for us. I think it's true for OAPEN and I think it's true for MUSE. I think it's true for a lot of platforms, in some respects. Recognizing opportunities for innovation at large across an entire space ecosystem. I'm really not an economist or capital or anything like that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But it's like you end up relying so heavily on the market to identify-- to find the places where there's a need. And start to create some solution around that need. I'm not suggesting that's the best approach. But I do know if you sat me down or sat any of us down right now and said, OK, what are the opportunities for areas to innovate? We could probably come up with a list.
MIKE FURLOUGH: But whether or not those would be the ones that a well-positioned, creative agent would be best positioned to be able to tackle, that's a good question. I just don't know. So I'll recede and say I shouldn't have said anything.
WENDY QUEEN: I'm fine with question number one. The first part of the question. And I'm going to answer it very simplistically and say we need to listen to our users. Because recently, I believe it was Karen [INAUDIBLE]---- and if it wasn't, it was another very incredibly smart person-- who said we have not achieved an optimal reading experience online for the monograph. And we've rested on, hey, people like to do discovery in the digital sense and they like to read in the print.
WENDY QUEEN: And we were all a little bit comfortable with that. Because reading experiences are hard. But we can tell by just our analytics that there's a need to keep investing in that part. And really creating more touch points with the users and understanding what they need there. We're not done yet. We're far from it, really. Because when you think about from the PDF to even some of the more flexibility and functionality we've gotten from having a more flexible format like EPUB.
WENDY QUEEN: You haven't seen a great deal of innovation there on how do we make this content more digestible, more appealing to those end users. So I'm going to say we need to reach out. We need to connect a little bit better and think about that reading experience a bit more.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Can I just add-- I would just say, I think that's a great point. Because it brings to mind for me something I've begun really recognizing the last year. As every class in the world ended up going to either online or hybrid last spring, the use of digital content increased. And people found themselves relying more heavily on digital than print than ever before. And we got many, many earfuls from readers and users about how poor our interface was in their respect.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And what it really boils down to is, you can't imagine use being strictly reading. Use of content involves a lot of different aspects and cognitive functions and physical functions that print makes very easy that digital does not. And that interoperable work set across all content platforms does not exist yet. Although there are organizations like Hypothesis that try to bring some pieces to that.
MIKE FURLOUGH: So listening to the users and looking for what they need is absolutely critical. So I love that.
NIELS STERN: Can I just add? Because I think that's absolutely true. And I think the stakeholders in the broad sense-- so for us it would be really engaging with the publishers, but also engaging with the libraries to understand how can we explore the richness of the data that we collect. So the direction of open access books is collecting a lot of data from a lot of books now. And we have still to discover what we can do with it, but in a community based way.
NIELS STERN: So I think that's the type of innovation we will see, will be based on the feedback we get. And aligning with the needs of stakeholders and users, of course. And even maybe someday we'll see that PDF can do something good. We think that we have a library full of PDF. So maybe-- well, we'll be very innovative, I hope.
SUSAN DOERR: I will say, having worked on our reading platform-- which is called Manifold-- the reading experience was where we began. Because we felt that that was the first thing that we needed to address in bringing readers to [INAUDIBLE] the material on our website. So the reader is the primary focus of that particular publishing tool. And we are partnered with the City University of New York. And they use it for their open educational resources.
SUSAN DOERR: They have several hundred up at this point. Some class created, some instructor led. And we get a lot of good feedback about the reading experience. But we also listen to the readers and what they want and need, and develop with their input in mind. So I hope that that's one place that is trying to address the needs of the reader online.
SUSAN DOERR: Another thought, there's a comment in here about how the ancient codex can't be the only model for the monograph in the future. And I'll just say, one way of thinking about publications on the web, we think of it in three layers. There's really that base of text, which does model the codex on the web in many ways, in terms of the content. But then there's the layer of the network.
SUSAN DOERR: Of the media that you can bring in. The links, the resources, the files that you can put into content when you're publishing open access on the web. And then that third layer is really the reader interaction. And it can be just readers, it can be readers with each other, it can be readers with the text, it could also be readers with the author. So you've got three different layers of publication, really, when you're publishing something open access on the web.
SUSAN DOERR: And I think that publishers really need to think of it in that framing. Because we control that first layer. That base layer text. And we probably control that second layer. But we really don't have any control-- except for the tools that we offer-- on the interaction.
NIELS STERN: Can I just mentioned that the COPIM project we mentioned earlier, there is a work package, actually, exploring also innovative publishing. And I think this is definitely something where we are very much at a very basic level. So there is a lot to explore. I've just spent a few years in a library. And actually, some of the colleagues there, they do gather a lot of information directly from the users.
NIELS STERN: From the students. Especially, perhaps, from the students in what do they need, really. So I think we should be really careful about listening to the feedback from them. And then try to see how we can develop concepts.
WENDY QUEEN: Can I add something to that? Part of launching our OA monographs program, we also too focused on the reading experience. But I realized when you're looking at the analytics-- and as my colleague Kelley Squazzo did a presentation in the pre-meeting-- when we did the COVID open free period and we watched usage happening in every country in Africa-- almost every country in the world.
WENDY QUEEN: That's the moment I realized what we've defined as users and what we've based our research on is really super predictable. It's those who traditionally have purchased a subscription or something like that. So when I say listening to the users, maybe I should have backed that up and think about defining the users very differently in an OA space.
WENDY QUEEN: And that, maybe, is how I should have answered that question. Because in a gated world, it's very tidy. You know who's coming through, you know who's there, you can reach out. But in a global world-- and in truly, in the spirit of open access-- do we really know who our users are in the same way we used to know-- or what MUSE used to know as their users-- in a gated world.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: Wendy, I'll bring up the question of maybe we don't know who our users are. But when we also bring in the issues of privacy, how much about our users can we learn? And we can ask them and they can perhaps give us information. But we'll always have a group that won't want to reveal themselves to us. And we should accept that. But I guess it's hard to meet their need if we don't know who they are and what they need.
WENDY QUEEN: Right. It's one area we're going to have to work on together. And that's where I think a lot of publishers that participated in MUSE are using those analytics during the COVID free period and trying to figure that out. And then on MUSE, we're looking for how is this different? How has things changed? And a lot of that was just simply scale of so many publishers being so agreeable about making their content open for a specific period of time.
WENDY QUEEN: But, yeah, I think there's-- and I think that's something collectively we should be doing and sharing and learning and growing. Because there is synergy and value in a similar vernacular that establishes in usability. So it doesn't serve the wider community, necessarily, for everyone to be doing something differently. There's a shared vernacular there, and something as a community that we define together.
WENDY QUEEN:
SUSAN DOERR: Thank you. I just want to point out there's some good links in the chat. So for attendees, definitely click through some of those. I think that they'll expand the conversation. We're coming up on the end of our session here. So I would just like to ask each of our panelists if there are any last points or key takeaways, or any resources that you want to share with attendees before we come to the end of our time. And I'll leave it to you all to decide who goes first.
SUSAN DOERR: But if you won't decide who goes first, I'm going to ask Mike to go first.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Thanks a lot.
SUSAN DOERR: You're unmuted.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Yeah, I know. So I mean, that's a great question. And I think that I have I have learned a lot, myself, just from listening to my co-panelists here. And I really especially appreciate the comments about who are the users in the last few minutes. Because that is something in particular that I think we all really do need to be thinking about. The user community that we know versus the one that is potential is just significantly different here.
MIKE FURLOUGH: For me, I'm not sure this is really a takeaway, but it's a message I always want to deliver when I have the opportunity to speak to a mixed audience. Mixed audience means not just librarians. And that is that while librarians are historically and traditionally preservation agents, it's not exclusively our domain or responsibility. And there are ways in which the publishing community has historically supported and enabled preservation.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Like through the commitment to use acid free paper or participation in the cataloging program and so forth. So I think there are-- in the same way I was trying to draw some analogs with the print world for infrastructure, I hope that we can think about analogs in the digital world for preservation and publisher work with libraries in that space.
MIKE FURLOUGH: And I'm not going to cite a particular idea. I just wanted to highlight that because I think it's something that is important to keep focused on.
WENDY QUEEN: I'm just going to give a shout out that we've just begun and that the need to keep experimenting and pivoting and sharing-- we're still in the early stages. And that there's a lot we still need to do there together. I'm still going to go back to my first answer and say I do think there's a little bit of landscape analysis that needs to be done. I do remember Cliff Lynch at CNI a few years ago asking the question about a lot of initiatives that were in play at that point, of how do they fit together.
WENDY QUEEN: And no one really being able to answer that. And I'm not sure, if he asked that same question today, there would be more of an answer.
NIELS STERN: Yeah I think I completely agree with these things. But I would add that I think engaging with the infrastructure-- so the way we engage with publishers, we engage with libraries-- is absolutely crucial for our infrastructure to develop in the right direction and to cater to the needs of publishers. So I would really encourage the publishers and other infrastructures as well to engage in innovation in this space.
NIELS STERN: And I hope we can help publishers increase their discoverability, we can help them be more transparent. And in this way, we can hopefully help the scholarly community.
SUSAN DOERR: Well, I'll just close with thank you to our panelists today. I think this was a great discussion. And we have collected the questions. We'll follow up with some if we didn't get to them. And thank you everybody in SSP for giving us the opportunity to have this conversation.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Thank you so much. And again, thanks to Kelley for organizing this.
SUSAN DOERR: Yes.
NIELS STERN: Thank you.
SUSAN DOERR: Very much so. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
WENDY QUEEN: Thanks, Susan, for moderating for us. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
MIKE FURLOUGH: Good night, Niels.
NIELS STERN: Have a good day. Bye.
MIKE FURLOUGH: Bye-bye.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode