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Moderated Discussion: Preserving Our Value(s): Scholarly Publishing in a Changing World
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Moderated Discussion: Preserving Our Value(s): Scholarly Publishing in a Changing World
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Segment:0 .
Good morning. Welcome to day two of SSP. Doesn't it seem like it's got to be day six already. That's SSP for you. We've got a great program for you today that will kick off with a panel that you'll hear about in just a second. But I just if you were here yesterday, some of the stuff you're going to hear me say again, and I did not write a song about it because that would be expected at this point.
But we would not be here without all of our sponsors. So when you see them, thank them. A lot of them have a ribbon on their badge, or you can go in the exhibit Hall and visit them. Some of you are playing the exhibitor bingo, so that should be really fun. I wish I had some time to do that, but I will try to get to as many booths as I can. As always, the program chairs Aaron.
Foley, Jessica. Slater, Greg. Feagin and all of the folks on the program committee who put this together for us today. It's a tremendous amount of work and remind you, if you have not yet downloaded the app, the SSP engage app. This is not like other conference apps where it's just going to disappear, or it's going to remember your username and password from three years ago, and you're to be like, I don't even think I went to that conference.
This is SSPs year round app. You will be able to benefit from it and communicate with folks on an ongoing basis. So do go ahead and download that. The Wi-Fi network, if you haven't found it yet, is Hilton meeting all smooshed together as one. And the password is capital I nteg r a 2025. That's integra 2025. And thank you to integra for sponsoring the Wi-Fi.
Please remember to silence your mobile devices, including Alexa. We don't want Alexa to start talking during this because she'll monopolize the conversation. I have not heard of any lost phones this morning, so we don't need to worry about that. If you need any assistance during the meeting, the registration desk will always be staffed during the meeting hours, not o'clock in the morning.
Don't go there then, but stop by and they will do everything they can to help you. All of the sessions will be recorded and available after the meeting and open to you. And without further ado, I would like to introduce and invite to the stage Jessica Slater. Jessica is research and data analyst at ars, and she's going to tell us about our panel. Thank you so much.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Jessie Slater and I'm one of the co-chairs of the SSP annual meeting program committee. I hope everyone was able to attend the excellent and thought provoking talk by David Schiffman yesterday on how lessons learned from Shark research, conservation and education can help advance scholarly communications and has a new found appreciation for our fishy friends.
But not so much that they're over at the aquarium today. Maybe save that for Saturday. I also hope you had a chance to catch up with old friends and make new connections at the networking reception last night. Most of all, I hope everyone got some good rest as we've got an action packed day today and thinking about this morning's plenary session, we wanted to spend time really focusing on the theme of the meeting reimagining the future of scholarly publishing at the intersection of value and values, at a time when the entire scholarly ecosystem is being put under the microscope.
We want to hear from leaders across our industry as they navigate new and old challenges like research integrity, business models, government mandates, AI and the role of disruptors. How can scholarly publishing stay true to its values in an increasingly chaotic landscape. We are delighted to have our very own Melanie dolecek moderating this discussion. Preserving our values scholarly publishing in a changing world.
Joining Melanie will be Anne Gabriel, Vice President for academic and research relations and global strategic networks at Elsevier. She has held a variety of positions at the forefront of scholarly communication, most recently as elsevier's publishing director for journals and computer science and engineering, as well as electronic product development roles for elsevier's online platforms.
Anne's current focus current work focuses on outreach and partnerships related to scientific impact, open science, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion. So we have Elizabeth m long, the Sheridan Dean of University libraries, archives, and museums at Johns Hopkins University. She oversees library services in the six Sheridan libraries, and coordinates library services provided by all the schools of the University.
The University library Directors Council, which she chairs. She also is responsible for the university's historic house museums, Homewood museum and evergreen museum and library. Prior to becoming a Dean at Johns Hopkins, she served as associate University librarian for information technology and digital scholarship at the University of Chicago Library since 2016, where she began her career in 1993. Nico funt is publisher and President of Oxford University Press, USA.
For now, he began his career at Oxford in 1987 as an editorial assistant in law and social science, before moving to New York University Press in 1990. At NYU Press, he was editor, then editor in chief before becoming director in 1996. He returned to Oxford in 2000 the role of academic publisher, and is responsible for the press's scholarly research and associate and reference publishing across the humanities, social sciences, science, law and medicine.
And in July he will become director of Yale University Press. And lastly, we have Doctor Sarah Tiegan, Senior Vice President and chief publishing officer for ACS publications at the American Chemical Society. She leads the development of ACS preeminent portfolio of 90 hybrid and open access journals, and oversees the award winning magazine chemical and Engineering News, manages the development of the ACS books program, and had strategic planning and relationship development in Asia.
She is the chair of the board of STM and serves on STMS research integrity governance board and the Coalition for Responsible sharing. On behalf of my co-chairs, Aaron Foley and Greg Fagin and the rest of our amazing AMPK volunteers, I am excited to welcome you to this morning's plenary, and I'm grateful to Melanie and her panelists for being here today. I'll turn it over to them now.
Thank you so much, Jesse, and thank you to Nico and Sarah and Elizabeth for joining me for this conversation. It feels like for the last several months, and yes, it's only been several months. It feels like years have been filled with chaos and uncertainty and frustration. And those feelings are prevalent across many industries, not just ours.
As rapid change and abrupt and constantly evolving policy decisions make it difficult to run a business day to day, much less really plan for the future. It does feel like the ground is shifting a bit beneath us, and some days it's hard not to feel like the fabric of what we're doing. As scholarly publishers, librarians and the folks that help support the industry are under attack. And many of us choose or chose and continue to stay in this industry because we feel like we're part of something meaningful and that we're doing something good for the world.
Integrity, ethics and values are the foundation of what scholarly discourse is built upon. I've invited these particular panelists to join me today to examine whether the values that underpin our work continue to benefit the society, to benefit society, and how scholarly publishing is, and already adapting, leading and continuing to deliver in this shifting landscape. So I'm going to start with Sarah. Sorry to put you in the hot seat there, but everyone will get their turn, I promise.
What core values or fundamental ideals are crucial to ensuring that trust and research, and the future of the scholarly record. What needs to change or not change to derive these values. Yeah, thanks for that. That, Melanie. I think that you said you said it right. Trust is one of the things that's really important to us trust, integrity and quality.
We are gatekeepers of the scholarly record. And that's not just we're going to let anything pass through, because today, more than ever, right. We're under this microscope about what it means to uphold the integrity of the scholarly literature. So I think our focus really has to be on integrity, integrity, integrity. We need to admit where we need to be better about this. And we have to work with our partners at institutions to be faster about how we deal with integrity issues.
I think that there's also another lesson for us about the values that we uphold, and it's really about explaining what research is and what it is not. From my perspective, I think we need to reframe the conversation that what we publish is truth. Yes is true, but it is true today, right. And it is not the ultimate truth. And I think that we have to remind people that what we know today is as good of information as we know at all, and that the record is self-correcting.
It builds on itself, and we have to be OK with discoveries that overturn dogmas, and we have to be able to explain that to people who matter to us. We have to be able to explain that to not just the general public. We heard from David, that our audience isn't quite the general public. That's too many people. But to policy makers, to people who are funding the research right that we benefit from.
So I really think that is really critical for us. I think at some level, we and our research communities that are of importance to us took for granted the funding by the US government. And so we have to really get our best communicators out there to talk about the importance of funding for science and scholarship, and of communicating that and preserving it and making sure that it's integrity. So I think that's where I'll stop for right now.
Wonderful Thank you so much, Elizabeth. You're coming at this from the library perspective. What would you have to add there. I think one of the things that I have seen is that also need to think a lot about trust and collaboration between all the partners that result in scholarly publishing. That is everyone from libraries to our scholars to our publishers. And I don't think we're always on the same page.
So I think you were talking about research integrity, for instance, and the disconnects that sometimes happen between how we should be reacting when something is called in question. Should there be a notice put on right away. And publishers sometimes want that, faculty sometimes want it, and the other doesn't want it. Faculty want it in the school doesn't want it. I mean, we haven't come together in approaching some of these things.
And I think the same has been true in the relationship sometimes between libraries who are purchasing materials and our publishers who are selling those materials to us. And I think we have wonderful partnerships that happen. But I think we also sometimes have a somewhat adversarial relationship. And I think that this may be a moment that is helping us all realize we are part of the same endeavor, and we need to figure out how to work together to convince our entire country how important what we're doing is.
And I think the last thing I would say is in relation to that importance of communicating the importance of research. I think we have to really think about how we get outside of our own values and think about the values that others have and what will speak to them, because I think often we're speaking to ourselves about how important research is, and we all are in agreement about how important research is, and I'm not sure we've found the language yet.
That really resonates. And I think that's another place where we need to come together and understand. How do we really promote what we're doing and explain its importance. Excellent point. Did you have anyone have anything to add. Thank you. I would just add that I think our incentive structures could be examined to align with some of these values and values around transparency and data sharing, and at the moment the incentive system reflects a construct of science that is decades old.
And as we transform and move into areas about public accountability, which I'll talk on later, I think that would go a long way to creating that alignment and also maybe even empathetic arrangements, not only between publishers and libraries, but between all of us and the public. So thank you, Anne. Yeah and I would just add, I think that one of the things that we all need to do, to the point about not speaking in an echo chamber, is figuring out how to actually translate the values that we all hold dear, that we all know exist and undergird everything we do.
But to do that in a way that speaks to people who are not members of learned societies, who are not University librarians, who are not publishers. And I think that since all of us are to some extent in the communications business, that should be something we should be able to do pretty effectively. And I think we've not done that very well at all. And I think that brings up to my next question, really is the mission of scholarly communication still aligned with what society at large actually values.
I mean, are we living in the past with past ideals as society has moved on. So, Nico, do you want to maybe address that. Yeah I mean, this is it's hard to address that without sounding a little highfalutin or even to challenge the premise of the question, but I think that there is a resignation that underlies some of the words that you just used old guard past still.
And I feel more energized about the work that we do now than I have in years, because I think that at Newsday, the newspaper, their slogan used to be true, justice, and the comics and I mean, two out of three, The comics is not necessarily our bailiwick, but I think that if the past, in this case, I think is a word that is used to focus on the things that we believe in at our very core, their core principles that under right, liberal democracy, that if you are engaged in the earnest pursuit of the truth, as it can be ascertained, and you find yourself up against actors that you perceive or are malevolent or doctrinaire or demagogic, my God, how can you not feel that as a moment to rally.
And so I feel that very, very strongly right now. So I think it goes back to this question of how we represent ourselves if we represent ourselves as a group of intellectual, pencil necked geeks who breathe rarefied air and who can't speak to people outside of the very specific PhD community that we reside in. Then we're not going to succeed. But, the work that we do.
I think, again, it is underneath efforts to cure diseases, to reduce misery, to reduce suffering, to drive Enlightenment. And I think the people that we view as our opposition don't necessarily disagree with that. And I'm sure they don't think they disagree with that. So I think we need to figure out how to communicate those values. And I think that there are people we were talking about this yesterday and I were talking about some whether it was our plenary speaker yesterday or somebody like Tom Nichols, people do a really good job at communicating these values.
So more a better job than many of us ourselves do. So Ann, right, I'm going to also challenge the premise of the question. And it gave me pause as I was thinking about it. That word still. Are we still aligned. And I think at a macro level we are. So if you look at values like advancing understanding and supporting evidence based decision making and that search for truth and even progress, most of the public is going to say, yes, we get behind this.
But to be a bit provocative, I would say, how close is that alignment. And I started thinking about it as train tracks, we might be all heading in the same direction, but occasionally things would veer off and what we need is closer alignment so that we're each one rail of those tracks heading in the same direction. And the current structure really did serve science. I mean, yes, it served public health.
Yes, it did that, but it was I don't almost expected and assumed and not very closely examined. So in the 50s, 88% of Americans felt they had trust in science. And then in 2022, Pew did a study that said just 57% of Americans had trust in science. That's still a majority, but it's a much narrower majority. And so you have to think what went wrong. And there's a real irony for me in the fact that just as I think our communities have woken up honestly to this concept of public accountability and what we can do to help institutions and researchers share their impact stories is the moment where trust is at an all time low.
So we're working flat out to tell those stories. One example I can give on the LCA side is we're working with universities to build something called the fourth generation University community. And it's this idea of using data and metrics to help universities tell their story, but also looking at things not only publications, but patents and startups and alumni stay rates and using their data in combination with publication data to tell this much more complex and personalized story of what is happening.
So for all of us, I think it's a race against time to answer that call for publishing public accountability and help our institutions and researchers and libraries tell that story. So you can tell I'm a little passionate about it. Can I add one additional point just quickly, which is something Sarah said, which was I think you referenced this idea of being flexible as being malleable.
And I think that that's where I think the trajectory of the COVID pandemic really hurt, really hurt, because that notion of when the facts change, so do my opinions, right, which should be fundamental. I think that was an opportunity for so many players to insist upon to request of science, a single fixed it's truth. And I think also the communications around that were without getting into too much detail, there were a lot of hard decisions to be made in a given moment with lives at stake.
And so I think that notion of impressing upon people, that it is not weakness to change your opinion in response to evidence that I think is such a crucial part of this. I think we have to be we have to be really open to that. I think that early in the pandemic, right, when a lot of us bring groceries, leave them in our garage for a couple of days and say, I don't is this virus there or is the virus aerosolized or whatever.
And then when we understood know that this is an aerosolized virus, we should have said we got that wrong. And that's OK. I think probably too we should have said something in the US about, hey, we should have sent our kids back to school earlier because we're going to deal with the fallout of children being left behind for a decade or more.
And I think that there's something really interesting that we don't. So that's the negative way to think about this. But the other way that I think about this is scholars are explorers. They are looking for things that no one has ever done or made or understood before. And there's something really romantic about that I like that think about playing that old like, mind game on Microsoft where you clicked a button and all of a sudden, the world opened up, the map opened up in front of you, right.
And like, there's something really cool about that can get people excited about science and research and saying, no, it's OK if I take a step back and go this way a little bit because there's just more possibilities open. And that gives me a lot of hope. And I think that that's a way that our teachers, our faculty should be talking about science to young people. It's not a set of facts. T-rexes have little arms and we're carnivores.
What do we know about how did we get to know that even. How did who were the people behind it. And I think we talk more about the people, not just the egg headed folks who speak in 15 syllable words, but how do you make it accessible to everyone. And maybe one of the questions is, there's a lot we need to do now, clearly, as we talk about communication. But there's also a long game, which is how are we getting this into our elementary schools, into our K through 12 because half of this country isn't going to college necessarily.
It's like talking to our students in universities is not the place we need to be doing this. It's how do we filter this down to something that everyone is growing up understanding and seeing. And I think that's an area where the way you're talking it's like Explorer that. Kids get excited about that. So I think there's a real how we translate to many, many different audiences is important.
But thinking about that long term, we need to reestablish and reimagine how this country thinks about science. Can I add one other little tiny point, which is just because I think it's such a good illustration of what you both just said, which is that when I've been talking on campuses to students about publishing and trying to get them interested in the industry, it's really conspicuous how if you go on certain campuses on the Northeast Corridor, DC to Boston, everybody knows what publishing is.
They have a relative who's published. They have an aunt who's an editor, an uncle who's an editor or what have you. And then you go to HBCUs or you go to JUCOs and nobody has any idea what publishing is. And it took me a long time to work out a simple way to communicate what we do. And the phrase I latched on to was this notion of benevolent capitalism.
Because to your point, the idea, this notion of being an interlocutor for what we do, what is fundamental to the American ethos, it's capitalism. Regardless of your own personal politics, there was a guy on the PBS NewsHour last night talking about how we shouldn't let people into this country, students into this country, if they are anti-American, if they're anti-capitalist. And my ears perked up because I thought, like, wait, anti-capitalist?
That's expanding things rather dramatically, but that's the country that we live in. And so if you can figure out ways in which to communicate our values that are cogent and appealing and attractive while still being true to those values, I think that's crucial. And I think that goes to exactly what I think you were saying, Elizabeth. So definitely, there's a lot of work packed into how you all responded to that question, which I think does bring me to my next question.
Elizabeth, you talked earlier about there being multiple stakeholders involved in our ecosystem, if you will. And so obviously, there is some level of working together that's going to be important to moving things forward. But what it really comes down to it I mean, who do we think are the guardian of this system, these values, these principles when it comes to things like research integrity and access to the research and equity.
I mean, whose responsibility is that in this ecosystem. Well, I think it's obviously a shared responsibility. And so one of the things that's been very much on my mind of late has been the role that libraries play in providing access to the materials that are used for research. So nowadays that especially is meaning things like data and data sets and not just in other words, the finished and published product, but also everything that went into it.
And how that moves forward. And I think that as we have been seeing many of those data sets disappearing, that calls into question who is responsible for that. And I think that we have I think, Sarah, you were the one who talked about having leaned on the government for FUNDING long time. We've leaned on people who've kind of gone in and said, oh, we have this data, we can keep it.
But if it's not within their mission, then it is very easy for that to disappear. So I think that just looking at one component of it, that is a place where I think it's important to think about, not who has the money, who has the wherewithal to do it right now, but who really has it within their mission to do this. And so I think the same could be said, obviously, publishing, looking at the importance of a structure that allows for some review of what is being done.
I mean, we're in a moment where we might be moving more towards self-publishing. It would appear as some of our government agencies seem to think might be a good idea. So again, what is it that we believe is a core value and way of evaluating the work that's done so that there is some review. But I'm also in the middle of conversations that are questioning the effectiveness of the current peer review process.
And so I think this is, again, where we all need to be collaborating, where universities and faculty are saying maybe there are problems with it, but we know we don't want to get rid of don't want to just throw it all away. So there's a lot of work that has to be done. And I think that has to be done with all of these players, with our faculty, with our publishers, with our libraries that are all part of this organization.
And ideally with our granting agencies as well, because they play an absolutely crucial role as well, because they have an ability to decide to fund or not fund certain types of research. And so they're a critical player that we need to learn how to speak with, even in a world in which they may be making decisions that aren't the ones that follow our current values. Great Nico.
Yeah I don't have much to add to that. I think I would just say that I'm not comfortable with publishers being the explicit guardian of these values, because I think that spawn upstream, as we might be doing in the current moment. I think that the power to safeguard those values ultimately lies with political leaders, with government, with religious leaders, with the Academy. I think that publishers are in this particular framing, and this is not meant to sound evasive or I'm ducking responsibility, but I think we are more mirrors than active agents.
I think that we. Yeah so that's all I have to say. You looked like you were going to say something. No, I agree, I had written down, my thoughts about that question. And I said, definitely, policymakers are guardians of this. And if you go back to the days of Vannevar Bush, I mean, there was a mission for the nation actually here in the US to forward the scientific enterprise.
And we're in a very, very tricky time right now. Everybody saw the executive order for gold standard science that came out on Friday relating to nuclear. And if you look at it on paper, it addresses things like reproducibility and even peer review is mentioned. And so again, these are all things that we're striving for as part of this entity. But how it's applied.
It's thoughtful application of that policy. And we need to make sure that it's not distorted. I think it's our role to then look at that policy, inform policymakers and say we can actually help advance these goals. Here's what we've been doing all along in terms of research integrity. Here are the investments that we have made. And we need to hope that this is taken seriously and that it's applied in a noble way, actually.
So that's what keeps me up at night from our executive session application, thoughtful applications of those sorts of policies. That can add to that. I mean, so you referenced back to the 50s, right. And like the incredible trust in science and how that has eroded. Well, why did we get to that place. And I think here when we talk about the integrity and who's responsible for our values and maintaining our values, I think we probably have to take a closer look, too.
I mean, we probably all have examples of journals with editorial boards who probably got a little clicky and didn't let in different ideas in science, or it kind of ended up being a bit of a friends and family kind of journal. And I suspect that some of that notion takes us to where we're getting today. We've got people now who don't feel like they can have any kind of voice in scholarship.
And I can't believe I'm saying this. I was talking with my husband about this. He's like, you're really going to get up there and say that you think that some of these crackpots deserve to have the same kind of voices as great scientists. The answer is no, but they have to have a shot. They have to feel like they can be welcomed to even submit something to our journal, that they're not going to get laughed out of the arena.
And then you put it through the rigors of peer review and you and there's got to be something positive about that. And we have to talk more about what peer review can do and what it doesn't do. And when does it work. When does it fall apart. And it is a very tricky time. But I think some self-examination from us too, about how we broaden the tent is not a bad thing.
Yeah you can be maybe reassured by the fact that the Nobel Prize laureate, James Hek'ma, agrees with you and has published on that fact that right that there is even while those guardians are I mean, they are great, great scientists or great economists that there is a potential strangling of creativity and that the next new idea that is different and that's the challenge is how do you differentiate that from the crackpot idea.
So we all know historically, so many great ideas have been seen as crackpots. But at the same time, there are real crackpots. And so that's the filtering that's so hard to figure out how to do. And where again, I think that there is so much indication that there's a need for us to rethink this process. And yet it seems to really be stalling in conversation because we haven't yet come up with what is the different way of doing this that keeps our values, keeps the integrity that we're looking for, but allows for new ideas, different ideas.
I think that's right. We have to respond to what we're hearing as well. And I think to the several points that were made here, I mean, we have to be flexible to in how we go forward. It's not necessarily about defending the way we've always done it, but being able to evolve as things change, as the world changes and perceptions change around us as well. As I mentioned at the outset, we've had a lot of disruption, a lot of rapid change, and that's coming from multiple different directions.
So I think one of the things that's hard for folks right now is it sort of feels like we're drinking from the fire hose, and it's hard to know what are the things that we need to pay the most attention to. So as you think about the disruption that we're experiencing as an industry, what do you feel like are the most critical things that we need to give our time and attention to addressing right now.
I'm going to start with you, Anne. And I thank you. We've already discussed, I think, the potential for misapplied policies for destruction. I had two answers, and the first one is that one that keeps me up at night. The second one, of course, is AI and big tech. And we haven't touched on that yet in the panel. But AI is a huge disruptor, a double edged sword with great potentials to advance and accelerate scientific discovery.
But also it can be a purveyor of misinformation at a grand scale. And in 2023, more than 10,000 articles were withdrawn by scientific publishers, compared to just 4,000 in the previous year. I can tell you at Elsevier that whole AI transformation, as well as paper Mills and other things, have called upon us to resource our efforts. Five years ago, we had six people working on research integrity issues.
Today we have more than 130, which gives you an idea of the scale of our investment to work on that. On the brighter side, we also have developers, for example, that are working to put AI layers in association with a lot of our product ScienceDirect, Scopus, clinical key AI. And this saves researchers tons of time. There's an ability with this to for example, look at our content and pull out model data and insert it into tables like that work that would have taken researchers weeks, if not months to do can be done in a second.
So this opens up an infinite horizon of possibility. And it also creates efficiencies within the research enterprise at a critical time when cuts are happening. So we can see that maybe there's a positive convergence of these two things. But on the other front I. But on the other hand, there's challenges to copyright. And so we can see that big tech people find value in our content.
Look no further than big tech who want to get their hands all over it and ingest it in into their models. And so we can see that there's a concerted effort with the dismissal of the copyright registrar last week, Shira Perlmutter, the dismissal of the librarian of Congress. These movements are coming our way. So there has to be a way that we can assert the value of our content and protect it in this context, because what will happen is if we lose it, it's ingested incorrectly.
And then simultaneously, if you get a lot of the self-published works that we're talking about or new content that is less, well, peer reviewed, you're going to have misinformation perpetuate itself the more these models ingest. So I'll pause there. But this is the biggest disruptor and I think we can look forward to it, both in positive but apprehensive ways.
Thank you. I'd add to that on the AI front, right. It's not just like the US where the demise of copyright. I think the reinterpretation that we're seeing of the EU AI Act to be much more in favor of the tech people, rather than the rights holders and the creatives, that it feels a bit like an arms race right now about who's going to own the most data to be able to exploit. exactly.
Yeah well, and that's being framed within under the umbrella of patriotism. So capitalism, patriotism, and those are hard forces for us to argue against because those are guiding principles of America. There's also a cognitive dissonance between some of the calls for ultimate openness and national competitiveness. So on one hand, it's like you show all your data, give us all your content, but from a different country aren't allowed in our doors because we don't want you part of this system.
And yet, it's all open to everyone else in the cloud so that I struggle to reconcile. Actually, I think that piece about nationalism is really important because I think what we could see here in the US is the flight of a lot of scholars to other parts of the world. That's interesting. It happened the other direction in the 20s and seconds, but it's a generational realignment, for sure.
But it also means that those scholars who go elsewhere are going to be subject to mandates and policy decisions of different kinds of governments. If we have a lot of Americans who go to Europe, what does that mean going to mean about our industry and a more sudden shift to open access, rather than the mixed economy that we've got today. If we've got a lot more people who go to China, what does that mean.
I mean, China clearly has national policy directives and clear ideas about where they want their R&D to go. What does that mean for the kinds of scholarship that we publish. And where is the content going to come from. So I think that there's interesting things to I think those are things that we can probably readily adapt to but they're going to be changes. They're going to be disruptive.
Yeah, definitely. And I think I cut you off Elizabeth. No no no no that's fine. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the strategy. So these are not entirely new. Like we didn't just hear about these disruptions. We've had a little time to live with them. What strategies are you employing to combat these threats and ensure that society acknowledges the value of the process of our content and the role that we play as publishers and librarians in this ecosystem.
Let's start with you, Elizabeth. Well, I mean, certainly we were just talking about open access. And I think that there is a real important role in being able to have transparency and openness around the data that underlies the research that is being done. Which is not to say there aren't a lot of challenges, I think, that you're raising about how we think about that. We have both the issue of that kind of national sense of R&D.
There's also all of the issues around HIPAA and all sorts of data that needs to be locked down for a variety of reasons. And so I think one of the things that we're doing, certainly at the library is helping people think about their data and manage their data and manage their data responsibly, because that's another really important part of research integrity is there's the research integrity that's intentional.
And the research integrity problems that just come from really not doing a thoughtful job of managing that data. And so certainly that's an area libraries have been very focused on. We do a lot of outreach to our faculty, to our students about how to think about their data and manage it and think about how you share it down the road. Thank you.
Nico yeah, I was just thinking. So Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar who worked in the Obama administration, he has this theory of surprising validators. And I don't want to sound overly fatalistic here in terms of the things that we're doing, the strategies we're employing. But we live right now in a performative culture. That is indisputable.
And what I'm constantly struck by is the instances in which people take a position only for the position that they've supported, espoused or advanced to suddenly backfire on them. There was a piece in the paper yesterday about a small community where there was a person who lived in that community who raised her your children there. She was a short order cook, held a couple of jobs, and she was being deported.
And so the entire town rallied. Everybody has shirts that say bring Carol back. But this is a town that voted 85% for the current administration and for those policies. And I think that this is not a phenomenon, I should make clear that is exclusive to the political right. So a lot of signatories to the BDS movement, the boycott, divest, sanction movement regarding Israel, we've had instances where we've had people who have been in positions of authority, scholars who are series editors or who are responsible for modules for online products, whose names appear on those signatures.
And we go to them and say can't actually restrict people who are going to contribute to this product based depending on whether or not they live in Israel or they're Israeli citizens. And then they say, oh, I would never do that. And then we say, well, but you've kind of advocated for that by signing this particular petition. So I think to that point about surprising validators, what's going to be the most effective thing is when the consequences of espousing or supporting certain positions become clear, because we're not surprising validators.
It's the echo chamber point that we are espousing certain things that are ostensibly in our self-interest. Elizabeth and I were talking yesterday about how nobody, at least I was making this point to you about how nobody cares about learned society executive. Nobody cares about publishers. Like people don't even know what learned societies are, for the most part.
But everybody knows what a librarian is. And even if it's mom and Apple pie, and even if librarianship and the figure of librarian has blurred somewhat, it's still a lot more powerful and prominent. And so I just think until people start to see, the most Brutalist way to phrase this. And people start dying or certain people start dying. It's going to be really hard to effectively combat some of the things that we're currently trying to combat in our own very rationalist, deliberate, thoughtful way.
And I was recently at a meeting at the University of Utah. It was the University industry demonstration partnership conference, and that was very interesting because they have a very dynamic vice provost of research, who in that moment was having weekly town halls with her faculty to try to talk about how to navigate the grant landscape and what had been withdrawn, what to save, what not to. But in parallel with this, UDP brought in a government affairs advisor and they gave a talk.
And what she said was exactly what you said, Nico. This is not even on the profile of most Americans, and by extension, it's not in the sights of their congresspersons, so they don't really see it. And the arcane idea of peer review is very quaint. And I know when I go home to Redding, Pennsylvania is where I'm from. And that is where the last Republican rally had right before the election.
It's very interesting to navigate that landscape there and see what people understand. But what they do know is that town has been devastated by opioids. There's huge amounts of chronic obesity. And so these are communities that are in distress and feel that somehow science has not served them right. And so of course, they're going to gravitate to maybe alternate theories, they feel that the conventional scientific process hasn't worked.
So somehow we have to bridge that gap. And I agree, people will wake up when it affects them. When they're rural hospital system disappears or closed down, or when the Medicaid funding goes dry. But I don't know that scholarly communication is going to be the best way to reach them, although we can work with their legislators and congresspeople to explain that if then consequences, if this happens, that's what will happen.
And so that is something also that we are actually trying to do. You spoke earlier about the brain drain, for example. So a lot of the data that publishers have can illustrate who's collaborating with whom, who's working on where. And we can say, if you have somebody working on artificial intelligence who's collaborating over here, they're going to go to this country and likely continue that work.
So I think we can do a lot of consequential modeling at one level. But then also that gentle community outreach to these communities in distress is important. This is a time for empathy, as you said, and for all stakeholders to come together. Is there anything to add. I think I'd echo what you just said, Anne. I mean, I also grew up in a tiny town that was decimated by NAFTA 30 years ago.
Have it have it found its footing. So I get the economic distress, I get the lack of doctors and all of that. But I posted on the socials last week about it was the New York Times article about the cool first application of CRISPR to cure a baby of what was going to be a fatal disease or a genetic mutation. And the thing that was most gratifying was a friend of mine said, wow, if that had just been done four years earlier, her daughter Lindsey, who died of leukemia would still be here, right.
And so when you can tie the personal stories back to what's going on, that's how we start winning this war. I agree. I think you're right in every sort of conversation that I've had with others, you about how do we sway and educate is it really comes down to the personal aspects of what is the individual level impact of the work that we're doing.
So, so while we're sort of feeling like we're playing defense a lot right now, I think some of the situation that we're in, the disruptions that we're facing do provide opportunities. We've talked a little bit about that in terms of meeting the public where they are and things like that, but what are some other opportunities that you could foresee coming mean, out of this period of disruption that we're experiencing right now.
Let's start with you. Well, I'd like to go back to what I've said earlier, which is I do think that times of crisis bring solidarity in many cases. And I think we have a real opportunity right now to collaborate in new ways to recognize that we have challenges in front of us. And that together we would do a better job, working against them.
And so to me, that's the greatest opportunity that is presenting itself right now. I'd like to go back to some of the talk we were having a moment ago about. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity there, but I'm going to admit that I feel like I really don't quite know how to think about it. And so one reason I say that is one of the challenges that I can see might be a real problem with AI in our work is the black box of it.
And if you think of what are our values. Well, one of the greatest values of scholarly publishing is citation. Is that ability to trace it back. And so I actually find myself in a position of not quite knowing whether the way we should be thinking about it. And I know there is work being done in this way, which is how do we help AI align better with our traditional values of being able to understand where it got its data, what was fed into it, et cetera or do I need to think differently and understand this is a completely different technology that works in a different way, and to not try to hold on to those values, that's in some ways the exciting challenge that I see right now in opportunity is that we have this new world.
And of opening up in front of us, and we have to learn how to grapple with it. And again, I think that's something that needs conversation. It needs all of our expertise to help us navigate and get to AI being used in the right way and in productive ways. Thank you. And if I can just jump in, I mean, one of the value propositions that we do have in deploying AI on databases like Scopus, which includes abstracts from most of the people in this room, is that when it's run across that corpus, you have a trusted result set.
And we at Elsevier, and I'm sure many of you also have adopted responsible AI principles to address that very important issue of the Black box so that people can understand that we're using certain types of vector searches that reduce hallucinations and then show those result sets. But with that said, it's not perfect and it's constantly evolving, and it is also not necessarily adopted by everyone in the entire world who might be using different AI systems with different result sets yet again.
And I think that's where the challenge lies. We can sit there with our trusted corpus, and that's just great. And hopefully scientists will use it. But we know that there's this great democratization opportunity to the democratization of science afforded by AI. But if it becomes corrupted, then it's not a good value proposition.
And God forbid, publishers are associated with that. So I think it's good to have that differential right now. And I think that is the possibility is very strong there that while you may have your trusted it's one that the reputation will be driven by others. And then that is something I think we have to really think seriously about, because it will again reflect back on how people trust science and research.
Yeah, great. See we're aligned. Yeah loving the sense of collaboration, Sarah. I think some opportunities for us is to think about what are the other voices that are going to get heard in science as we like, come away from whatever destruction we've got here, right. New voices will arise.
New ways of thinking are going to come to the fore. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but I do think that we are going to end up with different people, different voices, different kinds of research and scholarship. And to me, that just that's all opportunity. I mean, we have to figure out how do we react to that. But boy, that's exciting too. Like, I like a good challenge.
Nico maybe the last word on this. Nothing really to add, other than I think that we are all at the very early stages of being buried by an avalanche of slop. I think that we are like, I think I genuinely believe that we are just in the early stages of just being crushed by a bunch of AI garbage. See it early on. So for me, I think doubling down on your phrase, trusted results and being reliable narrators, that sounds earnest and idealistic, but I think it's also existential.
I mean, what else do we do. If we don't do that, what else do we do. Like, I don't know if we do something else. I don't want to do that. And I think that we can as a means of sustaining ourselves, as let's say the New York times has done by creating all these word games and ancillary things that don't really have anything to do with the news. But neither did the classified advertising.
Like, that was not a fourth estate thing. That was just a happenstance way to fund to fund the fourth estate. So I think if we do that, that's fine. But to me, the core enterprise, if the core enterprise is not something that we can constantly affirm, then it just seems to me like it's time to turn out the lights. On that note, yeah.
All right. We have a couple of minutes for some questions. So we have the microphones coming around, please. I'm going to take chair's prerogative and do the first one. So my question this is drawing on the advice we got last night from David Shipman in the keynote and saying that facts don't sway minds. It's narratives.
I said, how do we bring publishers into the narrative of research and discovery when we're doing outreach and communications. Anyone want to. I'll take a stab at that. So we at ACS do a lot of training right now of like, authors and potential peer reviewers about how do you be a good author and how do you be a good peer reviewer.
How do you be a good editor. Why we have an opportunity to say, how do you be a good science communicator. And that's not going to appeal to everyone, nor should it appeal to everyone, as we heard yesterday. But we've had skills. We know how to disseminate information. We're darn good at disseminating information. So let's use that mantle and help our communities get the word out.
We are a derivative of the research community so we can help promote them. That's great. And I'll just come back to my first comment about aligning incentives. So you can actually offer. We can show, for example, for authors, does their research appear in policy documents, and is the University going to reward them for that.
It's kind of looking at rewarding that bridge to connection to society. So if we can start to shape things that way. People always say, once you set up, an incentive, people will game the system. Well, I welcome the gaming here. If we can settle, incentives for better scientific communication, more policy outreach, that will be great. Great Another question.
We have a question over here. Please identify yourself and your organization. Yes thank you. Alec hrushevsky. As a CEO of profi, I often talk to founders and publishers who are our main clients. As a University professor, I use their results on a daily basis, so I think I'm well equipped to speak about interconnection between them.
You all mentioned multiple times stakeholders and multiple stakeholders and the importance of dialogue between them. Yet I don't see a single founder or a single grand officer sitting here in this panel. And University of Maryland is across the street, and there are no University representatives sitting here yesterday, we tried to organize a breakout session between funders and publishers.
That was a tremendous success with many insights, and it shows how much value, how much potency is in this communication, in the communication. So now comes the question, what do we need to do that. Next year, we will have a plenary session involving all the key stakeholders. Thank you. Can I just address that.
I wasn't necessarily a question, but you raised a very, very good point about grant officers and publishers working closely with funders. And this is a huge lift. And from moving from 0 to 1 is hard. But Elsevier recently collaborated with the National Science Foundation's TIP directorate, the technology innovation partnership directorate, to map their grant investments in 10 key technology areas in a publicly available map that shows where their investments are going.
By congressional district. So you can click on that map and everyone can see it. But getting to those conversations and the way that sausage was made was very, very difficult because it's not necessarily a natural alliance between publishers and grantees. But again, this was the NSF wanting to tell the story about that directorate. So if we can work with more agencies, more grants, officers, I think the better.
And I think all publishers, not just Elsevier, have a role to play here. And imagine if we could do it for everyone. Thanks I also would like to go back to something you said earlier about incentives and another. So actually grants grant agencies are a big incentive. They have a lot say over what is getting funded, what is not getting funded, but another part of the incentive structure is the promotion and tenure structure, and we haven't really talked a lot about that.
But I think that raising that is another player the faculty themselves and the different University, associate deans that are particularly focused on promotion and tenure. That's another voice that needs to be, I think, part of this. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think getting all of those voices together is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to see if this is the right time to maybe have the motivation to get those parties together, and having those conversations and seeing how we can work together, because I think there is a common goal in there somewhere for that group.
One last question. Of hand here on the front. So Matthew Salter from the mathematical association of America. But I'd just like to make a general point. And I think we've got a bigger problem than what was discussed upon the stage, because the first thing when Elizabeth mentioned the statistics about trust in science, the first thing that stuck out to me was in the 1950s, it was 85% That was at the time when the American economy was booming, when the Salk vaccine was being developed, when space technology was being developed and 2022 was just after a pandemic where you had a science being attacked from all sides and particularly by powerful people.
I think we've got now a population where who are used to having things their way. How used to having things personalized. There's been, as we a kind of decline in respect for authority, people's belief that what truth is their truth. And so we have this onward March, and I don't really want to say it's because of late stage capitalism, but we have this movement in society where there's generally less trust where people were promised or they thought they were promised a certain lifestyle if they followed a certain pathway.
And they just distrust everything. And we find ourselves in groups where if you are skeptical about COVID vaccine, you're also likely to think it was an inside job or we never landed on the moon. Or it used to be a time when groups could adopt parts of each other's agenda or believe parts of each other's thing. But now we seem to be so split into one way or the other.
And the question is, how can we solve that. The answer is probably we can't as publishers, but I think we have a much bigger problem with the way society is moving, and artificial intelligence is just making that more pronounced. I think Anne touched a little bit on this, but I just wanted to put that out there that I think that we should think about what we do as publishers, but it's not necessarily all because we've made sort of bad choices about editorial boards.
We've done things. We need to look at that all the time. Of course, we do. But I think there is a much, much bigger problem playing out. And I brought the tone down and everyone's feeling more depressed after that. But I think there is a much bigger problem that we have. I mean, I think that's true, but it's true and it's of general somebody, I forget who said this, but my feelings don't care about your facts.
That's the world we live in right now. And I would just come back to what my co-panelists said about persuasion. Persuasion is basically about language. It's about anecdote. It's about showing, not telling. It's about not using words that end in. It's about individuals and flesh and blood examples. And so I think that we just need to keep moving back to that core premise that how do you convince people.
How do you teach people who are good at convincing others to do that. How do you scale persuasion. How do you scale proselytizing on behalf of the values that we hold. And I mean, that's all I've got in terms of countering that trend, which is accurately described, it seems to me. Well, and I do think the other thing that has been shown is that switch has also been a switch from, kind of trusting in authority to trusting in peers.
That is what has grown over time has been that. And so there are new ways social media is much more trusted and listened to than many other things. We've talked a lot about. How do we communicate out. Well, maybe publishers need to be thinking about in universities as well, doing more of that translational work in those kinds of media, which I think we're not as comfortable with and used to.
But I think that that's the new channels might be a new way of getting to people. I couldn't agree more, really. I think you make an interesting point about social media and stuff, and I think taking a different direction too, because I think with social media, you've we all have the ability to say, I'm going to go sort with my own echo chamber and your own echo chamber.
And really like this gets back to Matthew's question, what do we do not as publishers but as citizens, get to know your neighbors, be involved in your community and honest to God, have conversations with people who don't have the same views as you. Because when you can meet people on a human level across the fence over a beer, you open up dialogues that we aren't having today. And I think that helps with this end stage capitalism piece.
OK, wonderful. We are out of time. I want to thank our panel today, really for your insights and for sharing your perspectives on this important topic. So thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.
Segment:0 .
Good morning. Welcome to day two of SSP. Doesn't it seem like it's got to be day six already. That's SSP for you. We've got a great program for you today that will kick off with a panel that you'll hear about in just a second. But I just if you were here yesterday, some of the stuff you're going to hear me say again, and I did not write a song about it because that would be expected at this point.
But we would not be here without all of our sponsors. So when you see them, thank them. A lot of them have a ribbon on their badge, or you can go in the exhibit Hall and visit them. Some of you are playing the exhibitor bingo, so that should be really fun. I wish I had some time to do that, but I will try to get to as many booths as I can. As always, the program chairs Aaron.
Foley, Jessica. Slater, Greg. Feagin and all of the folks on the program committee who put this together for us today. It's a tremendous amount of work and remind you, if you have not yet downloaded the app, the SSP engage app. This is not like other conference apps where it's just going to disappear, or it's going to remember your username and password from three years ago, and you're to be like, I don't even think I went to that conference.
This is SSPs year round app. You will be able to benefit from it and communicate with folks on an ongoing basis. So do go ahead and download that. The Wi-Fi network, if you haven't found it yet, is Hilton meeting all smooshed together as one. And the password is capital I nteg r a 2025. That's integra 2025. And thank you to integra for sponsoring the Wi-Fi.
Please remember to silence your mobile devices, including Alexa. We don't want Alexa to start talking during this because she'll monopolize the conversation. I have not heard of any lost phones this morning, so we don't need to worry about that. If you need any assistance during the meeting, the registration desk will always be staffed during the meeting hours, not o'clock in the morning.
Don't go there then, but stop by and they will do everything they can to help you. All of the sessions will be recorded and available after the meeting and open to you. And without further ado, I would like to introduce and invite to the stage Jessica Slater. Jessica is research and data analyst at ars, and she's going to tell us about our panel. Thank you so much.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Jessie Slater and I'm one of the co-chairs of the SSP annual meeting program committee. I hope everyone was able to attend the excellent and thought provoking talk by David Schiffman yesterday on how lessons learned from Shark research, conservation and education can help advance scholarly communications and has a new found appreciation for our fishy friends.
But not so much that they're over at the aquarium today. Maybe save that for Saturday. I also hope you had a chance to catch up with old friends and make new connections at the networking reception last night. Most of all, I hope everyone got some good rest as we've got an action packed day today and thinking about this morning's plenary session, we wanted to spend time really focusing on the theme of the meeting reimagining the future of scholarly publishing at the intersection of value and values, at a time when the entire scholarly ecosystem is being put under the microscope.
We want to hear from leaders across our industry as they navigate new and old challenges like research integrity, business models, government mandates, AI and the role of disruptors. How can scholarly publishing stay true to its values in an increasingly chaotic landscape. We are delighted to have our very own Melanie dolecek moderating this discussion. Preserving our values scholarly publishing in a changing world.
Joining Melanie will be Anne Gabriel, Vice President for academic and research relations and global strategic networks at Elsevier. She has held a variety of positions at the forefront of scholarly communication, most recently as elsevier's publishing director for journals and computer science and engineering, as well as electronic product development roles for elsevier's online platforms.
Anne's current focus current work focuses on outreach and partnerships related to scientific impact, open science, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion. So we have Elizabeth m long, the Sheridan Dean of University libraries, archives, and museums at Johns Hopkins University. She oversees library services in the six Sheridan libraries, and coordinates library services provided by all the schools of the University.
The University library Directors Council, which she chairs. She also is responsible for the university's historic house museums, Homewood museum and evergreen museum and library. Prior to becoming a Dean at Johns Hopkins, she served as associate University librarian for information technology and digital scholarship at the University of Chicago Library since 2016, where she began her career in 1993. Nico funt is publisher and President of Oxford University Press, USA.
For now, he began his career at Oxford in 1987 as an editorial assistant in law and social science, before moving to New York University Press in 1990. At NYU Press, he was editor, then editor in chief before becoming director in 1996. He returned to Oxford in 2000 the role of academic publisher, and is responsible for the press's scholarly research and associate and reference publishing across the humanities, social sciences, science, law and medicine.
And in July he will become director of Yale University Press. And lastly, we have Doctor Sarah Tiegan, Senior Vice President and chief publishing officer for ACS publications at the American Chemical Society. She leads the development of ACS preeminent portfolio of 90 hybrid and open access journals, and oversees the award winning magazine chemical and Engineering News, manages the development of the ACS books program, and had strategic planning and relationship development in Asia.
She is the chair of the board of STM and serves on STMS research integrity governance board and the Coalition for Responsible sharing. On behalf of my co-chairs, Aaron Foley and Greg Fagin and the rest of our amazing AMPK volunteers, I am excited to welcome you to this morning's plenary, and I'm grateful to Melanie and her panelists for being here today. I'll turn it over to them now.
Thank you so much, Jesse, and thank you to Nico and Sarah and Elizabeth for joining me for this conversation. It feels like for the last several months, and yes, it's only been several months. It feels like years have been filled with chaos and uncertainty and frustration. And those feelings are prevalent across many industries, not just ours.
As rapid change and abrupt and constantly evolving policy decisions make it difficult to run a business day to day, much less really plan for the future. It does feel like the ground is shifting a bit beneath us, and some days it's hard not to feel like the fabric of what we're doing. As scholarly publishers, librarians and the folks that help support the industry are under attack. And many of us choose or chose and continue to stay in this industry because we feel like we're part of something meaningful and that we're doing something good for the world.
Integrity, ethics and values are the foundation of what scholarly discourse is built upon. I've invited these particular panelists to join me today to examine whether the values that underpin our work continue to benefit the society, to benefit society, and how scholarly publishing is, and already adapting, leading and continuing to deliver in this shifting landscape. So I'm going to start with Sarah. Sorry to put you in the hot seat there, but everyone will get their turn, I promise.
What core values or fundamental ideals are crucial to ensuring that trust and research, and the future of the scholarly record. What needs to change or not change to derive these values. Yeah, thanks for that. That, Melanie. I think that you said you said it right. Trust is one of the things that's really important to us trust, integrity and quality.
We are gatekeepers of the scholarly record. And that's not just we're going to let anything pass through, because today, more than ever, right. We're under this microscope about what it means to uphold the integrity of the scholarly literature. So I think our focus really has to be on integrity, integrity, integrity. We need to admit where we need to be better about this. And we have to work with our partners at institutions to be faster about how we deal with integrity issues.
I think that there's also another lesson for us about the values that we uphold, and it's really about explaining what research is and what it is not. From my perspective, I think we need to reframe the conversation that what we publish is truth. Yes is true, but it is true today, right. And it is not the ultimate truth. And I think that we have to remind people that what we know today is as good of information as we know at all, and that the record is self-correcting.
It builds on itself, and we have to be OK with discoveries that overturn dogmas, and we have to be able to explain that to people who matter to us. We have to be able to explain that to not just the general public. We heard from David, that our audience isn't quite the general public. That's too many people. But to policy makers, to people who are funding the research right that we benefit from.
So I really think that is really critical for us. I think at some level, we and our research communities that are of importance to us took for granted the funding by the US government. And so we have to really get our best communicators out there to talk about the importance of funding for science and scholarship, and of communicating that and preserving it and making sure that it's integrity. So I think that's where I'll stop for right now.
Wonderful Thank you so much, Elizabeth. You're coming at this from the library perspective. What would you have to add there. I think one of the things that I have seen is that also need to think a lot about trust and collaboration between all the partners that result in scholarly publishing. That is everyone from libraries to our scholars to our publishers. And I don't think we're always on the same page.
So I think you were talking about research integrity, for instance, and the disconnects that sometimes happen between how we should be reacting when something is called in question. Should there be a notice put on right away. And publishers sometimes want that, faculty sometimes want it, and the other doesn't want it. Faculty want it in the school doesn't want it. I mean, we haven't come together in approaching some of these things.
And I think the same has been true in the relationship sometimes between libraries who are purchasing materials and our publishers who are selling those materials to us. And I think we have wonderful partnerships that happen. But I think we also sometimes have a somewhat adversarial relationship. And I think that this may be a moment that is helping us all realize we are part of the same endeavor, and we need to figure out how to work together to convince our entire country how important what we're doing is.
And I think the last thing I would say is in relation to that importance of communicating the importance of research. I think we have to really think about how we get outside of our own values and think about the values that others have and what will speak to them, because I think often we're speaking to ourselves about how important research is, and we all are in agreement about how important research is, and I'm not sure we've found the language yet.
That really resonates. And I think that's another place where we need to come together and understand. How do we really promote what we're doing and explain its importance. Excellent point. Did you have anyone have anything to add. Thank you. I would just add that I think our incentive structures could be examined to align with some of these values and values around transparency and data sharing, and at the moment the incentive system reflects a construct of science that is decades old.
And as we transform and move into areas about public accountability, which I'll talk on later, I think that would go a long way to creating that alignment and also maybe even empathetic arrangements, not only between publishers and libraries, but between all of us and the public. So thank you, Anne. Yeah and I would just add, I think that one of the things that we all need to do, to the point about not speaking in an echo chamber, is figuring out how to actually translate the values that we all hold dear, that we all know exist and undergird everything we do.
But to do that in a way that speaks to people who are not members of learned societies, who are not University librarians, who are not publishers. And I think that since all of us are to some extent in the communications business, that should be something we should be able to do pretty effectively. And I think we've not done that very well at all. And I think that brings up to my next question, really is the mission of scholarly communication still aligned with what society at large actually values.
I mean, are we living in the past with past ideals as society has moved on. So, Nico, do you want to maybe address that. Yeah I mean, this is it's hard to address that without sounding a little highfalutin or even to challenge the premise of the question, but I think that there is a resignation that underlies some of the words that you just used old guard past still.
And I feel more energized about the work that we do now than I have in years, because I think that at Newsday, the newspaper, their slogan used to be true, justice, and the comics and I mean, two out of three, The comics is not necessarily our bailiwick, but I think that if the past, in this case, I think is a word that is used to focus on the things that we believe in at our very core, their core principles that under right, liberal democracy, that if you are engaged in the earnest pursuit of the truth, as it can be ascertained, and you find yourself up against actors that you perceive or are malevolent or doctrinaire or demagogic, my God, how can you not feel that as a moment to rally.
And so I feel that very, very strongly right now. So I think it goes back to this question of how we represent ourselves if we represent ourselves as a group of intellectual, pencil necked geeks who breathe rarefied air and who can't speak to people outside of the very specific PhD community that we reside in. Then we're not going to succeed. But, the work that we do.
I think, again, it is underneath efforts to cure diseases, to reduce misery, to reduce suffering, to drive Enlightenment. And I think the people that we view as our opposition don't necessarily disagree with that. And I'm sure they don't think they disagree with that. So I think we need to figure out how to communicate those values. And I think that there are people we were talking about this yesterday and I were talking about some whether it was our plenary speaker yesterday or somebody like Tom Nichols, people do a really good job at communicating these values.
So more a better job than many of us ourselves do. So Ann, right, I'm going to also challenge the premise of the question. And it gave me pause as I was thinking about it. That word still. Are we still aligned. And I think at a macro level we are. So if you look at values like advancing understanding and supporting evidence based decision making and that search for truth and even progress, most of the public is going to say, yes, we get behind this.
But to be a bit provocative, I would say, how close is that alignment. And I started thinking about it as train tracks, we might be all heading in the same direction, but occasionally things would veer off and what we need is closer alignment so that we're each one rail of those tracks heading in the same direction. And the current structure really did serve science. I mean, yes, it served public health.
Yes, it did that, but it was I don't almost expected and assumed and not very closely examined. So in the 50s, 88% of Americans felt they had trust in science. And then in 2022, Pew did a study that said just 57% of Americans had trust in science. That's still a majority, but it's a much narrower majority. And so you have to think what went wrong. And there's a real irony for me in the fact that just as I think our communities have woken up honestly to this concept of public accountability and what we can do to help institutions and researchers share their impact stories is the moment where trust is at an all time low.
So we're working flat out to tell those stories. One example I can give on the LCA side is we're working with universities to build something called the fourth generation University community. And it's this idea of using data and metrics to help universities tell their story, but also looking at things not only publications, but patents and startups and alumni stay rates and using their data in combination with publication data to tell this much more complex and personalized story of what is happening.
So for all of us, I think it's a race against time to answer that call for publishing public accountability and help our institutions and researchers and libraries tell that story. So you can tell I'm a little passionate about it. Can I add one additional point just quickly, which is something Sarah said, which was I think you referenced this idea of being flexible as being malleable.
And I think that that's where I think the trajectory of the COVID pandemic really hurt, really hurt, because that notion of when the facts change, so do my opinions, right, which should be fundamental. I think that was an opportunity for so many players to insist upon to request of science, a single fixed it's truth. And I think also the communications around that were without getting into too much detail, there were a lot of hard decisions to be made in a given moment with lives at stake.
And so I think that notion of impressing upon people, that it is not weakness to change your opinion in response to evidence that I think is such a crucial part of this. I think we have to be we have to be really open to that. I think that early in the pandemic, right, when a lot of us bring groceries, leave them in our garage for a couple of days and say, I don't is this virus there or is the virus aerosolized or whatever.
And then when we understood know that this is an aerosolized virus, we should have said we got that wrong. And that's OK. I think probably too we should have said something in the US about, hey, we should have sent our kids back to school earlier because we're going to deal with the fallout of children being left behind for a decade or more.
And I think that there's something really interesting that we don't. So that's the negative way to think about this. But the other way that I think about this is scholars are explorers. They are looking for things that no one has ever done or made or understood before. And there's something really romantic about that I like that think about playing that old like, mind game on Microsoft where you clicked a button and all of a sudden, the world opened up, the map opened up in front of you, right.
And like, there's something really cool about that can get people excited about science and research and saying, no, it's OK if I take a step back and go this way a little bit because there's just more possibilities open. And that gives me a lot of hope. And I think that that's a way that our teachers, our faculty should be talking about science to young people. It's not a set of facts. T-rexes have little arms and we're carnivores.
What do we know about how did we get to know that even. How did who were the people behind it. And I think we talk more about the people, not just the egg headed folks who speak in 15 syllable words, but how do you make it accessible to everyone. And maybe one of the questions is, there's a lot we need to do now, clearly, as we talk about communication. But there's also a long game, which is how are we getting this into our elementary schools, into our K through 12 because half of this country isn't going to college necessarily.
It's like talking to our students in universities is not the place we need to be doing this. It's how do we filter this down to something that everyone is growing up understanding and seeing. And I think that's an area where the way you're talking it's like Explorer that. Kids get excited about that. So I think there's a real how we translate to many, many different audiences is important.
But thinking about that long term, we need to reestablish and reimagine how this country thinks about science. Can I add one other little tiny point, which is just because I think it's such a good illustration of what you both just said, which is that when I've been talking on campuses to students about publishing and trying to get them interested in the industry, it's really conspicuous how if you go on certain campuses on the Northeast Corridor, DC to Boston, everybody knows what publishing is.
They have a relative who's published. They have an aunt who's an editor, an uncle who's an editor or what have you. And then you go to HBCUs or you go to JUCOs and nobody has any idea what publishing is. And it took me a long time to work out a simple way to communicate what we do. And the phrase I latched on to was this notion of benevolent capitalism.
Because to your point, the idea, this notion of being an interlocutor for what we do, what is fundamental to the American ethos, it's capitalism. Regardless of your own personal politics, there was a guy on the PBS NewsHour last night talking about how we shouldn't let people into this country, students into this country, if they are anti-American, if they're anti-capitalist. And my ears perked up because I thought, like, wait, anti-capitalist?
That's expanding things rather dramatically, but that's the country that we live in. And so if you can figure out ways in which to communicate our values that are cogent and appealing and attractive while still being true to those values, I think that's crucial. And I think that goes to exactly what I think you were saying, Elizabeth. So definitely, there's a lot of work packed into how you all responded to that question, which I think does bring me to my next question.
Elizabeth, you talked earlier about there being multiple stakeholders involved in our ecosystem, if you will. And so obviously, there is some level of working together that's going to be important to moving things forward. But what it really comes down to it I mean, who do we think are the guardian of this system, these values, these principles when it comes to things like research integrity and access to the research and equity.
I mean, whose responsibility is that in this ecosystem. Well, I think it's obviously a shared responsibility. And so one of the things that's been very much on my mind of late has been the role that libraries play in providing access to the materials that are used for research. So nowadays that especially is meaning things like data and data sets and not just in other words, the finished and published product, but also everything that went into it.
And how that moves forward. And I think that as we have been seeing many of those data sets disappearing, that calls into question who is responsible for that. And I think that we have I think, Sarah, you were the one who talked about having leaned on the government for FUNDING long time. We've leaned on people who've kind of gone in and said, oh, we have this data, we can keep it.
But if it's not within their mission, then it is very easy for that to disappear. So I think that just looking at one component of it, that is a place where I think it's important to think about, not who has the money, who has the wherewithal to do it right now, but who really has it within their mission to do this. And so I think the same could be said, obviously, publishing, looking at the importance of a structure that allows for some review of what is being done.
I mean, we're in a moment where we might be moving more towards self-publishing. It would appear as some of our government agencies seem to think might be a good idea. So again, what is it that we believe is a core value and way of evaluating the work that's done so that there is some review. But I'm also in the middle of conversations that are questioning the effectiveness of the current peer review process.
And so I think this is, again, where we all need to be collaborating, where universities and faculty are saying maybe there are problems with it, but we know we don't want to get rid of don't want to just throw it all away. So there's a lot of work that has to be done. And I think that has to be done with all of these players, with our faculty, with our publishers, with our libraries that are all part of this organization.
And ideally with our granting agencies as well, because they play an absolutely crucial role as well, because they have an ability to decide to fund or not fund certain types of research. And so they're a critical player that we need to learn how to speak with, even in a world in which they may be making decisions that aren't the ones that follow our current values. Great Nico.
Yeah I don't have much to add to that. I think I would just say that I'm not comfortable with publishers being the explicit guardian of these values, because I think that spawn upstream, as we might be doing in the current moment. I think that the power to safeguard those values ultimately lies with political leaders, with government, with religious leaders, with the Academy. I think that publishers are in this particular framing, and this is not meant to sound evasive or I'm ducking responsibility, but I think we are more mirrors than active agents.
I think that we. Yeah so that's all I have to say. You looked like you were going to say something. No, I agree, I had written down, my thoughts about that question. And I said, definitely, policymakers are guardians of this. And if you go back to the days of Vannevar Bush, I mean, there was a mission for the nation actually here in the US to forward the scientific enterprise.
And we're in a very, very tricky time right now. Everybody saw the executive order for gold standard science that came out on Friday relating to nuclear. And if you look at it on paper, it addresses things like reproducibility and even peer review is mentioned. And so again, these are all things that we're striving for as part of this entity. But how it's applied.
It's thoughtful application of that policy. And we need to make sure that it's not distorted. I think it's our role to then look at that policy, inform policymakers and say we can actually help advance these goals. Here's what we've been doing all along in terms of research integrity. Here are the investments that we have made. And we need to hope that this is taken seriously and that it's applied in a noble way, actually.
So that's what keeps me up at night from our executive session application, thoughtful applications of those sorts of policies. That can add to that. I mean, so you referenced back to the 50s, right. And like the incredible trust in science and how that has eroded. Well, why did we get to that place. And I think here when we talk about the integrity and who's responsible for our values and maintaining our values, I think we probably have to take a closer look, too.
I mean, we probably all have examples of journals with editorial boards who probably got a little clicky and didn't let in different ideas in science, or it kind of ended up being a bit of a friends and family kind of journal. And I suspect that some of that notion takes us to where we're getting today. We've got people now who don't feel like they can have any kind of voice in scholarship.
And I can't believe I'm saying this. I was talking with my husband about this. He's like, you're really going to get up there and say that you think that some of these crackpots deserve to have the same kind of voices as great scientists. The answer is no, but they have to have a shot. They have to feel like they can be welcomed to even submit something to our journal, that they're not going to get laughed out of the arena.
And then you put it through the rigors of peer review and you and there's got to be something positive about that. And we have to talk more about what peer review can do and what it doesn't do. And when does it work. When does it fall apart. And it is a very tricky time. But I think some self-examination from us too, about how we broaden the tent is not a bad thing.
Yeah you can be maybe reassured by the fact that the Nobel Prize laureate, James Hek'ma, agrees with you and has published on that fact that right that there is even while those guardians are I mean, they are great, great scientists or great economists that there is a potential strangling of creativity and that the next new idea that is different and that's the challenge is how do you differentiate that from the crackpot idea.
So we all know historically, so many great ideas have been seen as crackpots. But at the same time, there are real crackpots. And so that's the filtering that's so hard to figure out how to do. And where again, I think that there is so much indication that there's a need for us to rethink this process. And yet it seems to really be stalling in conversation because we haven't yet come up with what is the different way of doing this that keeps our values, keeps the integrity that we're looking for, but allows for new ideas, different ideas.
I think that's right. We have to respond to what we're hearing as well. And I think to the several points that were made here, I mean, we have to be flexible to in how we go forward. It's not necessarily about defending the way we've always done it, but being able to evolve as things change, as the world changes and perceptions change around us as well. As I mentioned at the outset, we've had a lot of disruption, a lot of rapid change, and that's coming from multiple different directions.
So I think one of the things that's hard for folks right now is it sort of feels like we're drinking from the fire hose, and it's hard to know what are the things that we need to pay the most attention to. So as you think about the disruption that we're experiencing as an industry, what do you feel like are the most critical things that we need to give our time and attention to addressing right now.
I'm going to start with you, Anne. And I thank you. We've already discussed, I think, the potential for misapplied policies for destruction. I had two answers, and the first one is that one that keeps me up at night. The second one, of course, is AI and big tech. And we haven't touched on that yet in the panel. But AI is a huge disruptor, a double edged sword with great potentials to advance and accelerate scientific discovery.
But also it can be a purveyor of misinformation at a grand scale. And in 2023, more than 10,000 articles were withdrawn by scientific publishers, compared to just 4,000 in the previous year. I can tell you at Elsevier that whole AI transformation, as well as paper Mills and other things, have called upon us to resource our efforts. Five years ago, we had six people working on research integrity issues.
Today we have more than 130, which gives you an idea of the scale of our investment to work on that. On the brighter side, we also have developers, for example, that are working to put AI layers in association with a lot of our product ScienceDirect, Scopus, clinical key AI. And this saves researchers tons of time. There's an ability with this to for example, look at our content and pull out model data and insert it into tables like that work that would have taken researchers weeks, if not months to do can be done in a second.
So this opens up an infinite horizon of possibility. And it also creates efficiencies within the research enterprise at a critical time when cuts are happening. So we can see that maybe there's a positive convergence of these two things. But on the other front I. But on the other hand, there's challenges to copyright. And so we can see that big tech people find value in our content.
Look no further than big tech who want to get their hands all over it and ingest it in into their models. And so we can see that there's a concerted effort with the dismissal of the copyright registrar last week, Shira Perlmutter, the dismissal of the librarian of Congress. These movements are coming our way. So there has to be a way that we can assert the value of our content and protect it in this context, because what will happen is if we lose it, it's ingested incorrectly.
And then simultaneously, if you get a lot of the self-published works that we're talking about or new content that is less, well, peer reviewed, you're going to have misinformation perpetuate itself the more these models ingest. So I'll pause there. But this is the biggest disruptor and I think we can look forward to it, both in positive but apprehensive ways.
Thank you. I'd add to that on the AI front, right. It's not just like the US where the demise of copyright. I think the reinterpretation that we're seeing of the EU AI Act to be much more in favor of the tech people, rather than the rights holders and the creatives, that it feels a bit like an arms race right now about who's going to own the most data to be able to exploit. exactly.
Yeah well, and that's being framed within under the umbrella of patriotism. So capitalism, patriotism, and those are hard forces for us to argue against because those are guiding principles of America. There's also a cognitive dissonance between some of the calls for ultimate openness and national competitiveness. So on one hand, it's like you show all your data, give us all your content, but from a different country aren't allowed in our doors because we don't want you part of this system.
And yet, it's all open to everyone else in the cloud so that I struggle to reconcile. Actually, I think that piece about nationalism is really important because I think what we could see here in the US is the flight of a lot of scholars to other parts of the world. That's interesting. It happened the other direction in the 20s and seconds, but it's a generational realignment, for sure.
But it also means that those scholars who go elsewhere are going to be subject to mandates and policy decisions of different kinds of governments. If we have a lot of Americans who go to Europe, what does that mean going to mean about our industry and a more sudden shift to open access, rather than the mixed economy that we've got today. If we've got a lot more people who go to China, what does that mean.
I mean, China clearly has national policy directives and clear ideas about where they want their R&D to go. What does that mean for the kinds of scholarship that we publish. And where is the content going to come from. So I think that there's interesting things to I think those are things that we can probably readily adapt to but they're going to be changes. They're going to be disruptive.
Yeah, definitely. And I think I cut you off Elizabeth. No no no no that's fine. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the strategy. So these are not entirely new. Like we didn't just hear about these disruptions. We've had a little time to live with them. What strategies are you employing to combat these threats and ensure that society acknowledges the value of the process of our content and the role that we play as publishers and librarians in this ecosystem.
Let's start with you, Elizabeth. Well, I mean, certainly we were just talking about open access. And I think that there is a real important role in being able to have transparency and openness around the data that underlies the research that is being done. Which is not to say there aren't a lot of challenges, I think, that you're raising about how we think about that. We have both the issue of that kind of national sense of R&D.
There's also all of the issues around HIPAA and all sorts of data that needs to be locked down for a variety of reasons. And so I think one of the things that we're doing, certainly at the library is helping people think about their data and manage their data and manage their data responsibly, because that's another really important part of research integrity is there's the research integrity that's intentional.
And the research integrity problems that just come from really not doing a thoughtful job of managing that data. And so certainly that's an area libraries have been very focused on. We do a lot of outreach to our faculty, to our students about how to think about their data and manage it and think about how you share it down the road. Thank you.
Nico yeah, I was just thinking. So Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar who worked in the Obama administration, he has this theory of surprising validators. And I don't want to sound overly fatalistic here in terms of the things that we're doing, the strategies we're employing. But we live right now in a performative culture. That is indisputable.
And what I'm constantly struck by is the instances in which people take a position only for the position that they've supported, espoused or advanced to suddenly backfire on them. There was a piece in the paper yesterday about a small community where there was a person who lived in that community who raised her your children there. She was a short order cook, held a couple of jobs, and she was being deported.
And so the entire town rallied. Everybody has shirts that say bring Carol back. But this is a town that voted 85% for the current administration and for those policies. And I think that this is not a phenomenon, I should make clear that is exclusive to the political right. So a lot of signatories to the BDS movement, the boycott, divest, sanction movement regarding Israel, we've had instances where we've had people who have been in positions of authority, scholars who are series editors or who are responsible for modules for online products, whose names appear on those signatures.
And we go to them and say can't actually restrict people who are going to contribute to this product based depending on whether or not they live in Israel or they're Israeli citizens. And then they say, oh, I would never do that. And then we say, well, but you've kind of advocated for that by signing this particular petition. So I think to that point about surprising validators, what's going to be the most effective thing is when the consequences of espousing or supporting certain positions become clear, because we're not surprising validators.
It's the echo chamber point that we are espousing certain things that are ostensibly in our self-interest. Elizabeth and I were talking yesterday about how nobody, at least I was making this point to you about how nobody cares about learned society executive. Nobody cares about publishers. Like people don't even know what learned societies are, for the most part.
But everybody knows what a librarian is. And even if it's mom and Apple pie, and even if librarianship and the figure of librarian has blurred somewhat, it's still a lot more powerful and prominent. And so I just think until people start to see, the most Brutalist way to phrase this. And people start dying or certain people start dying. It's going to be really hard to effectively combat some of the things that we're currently trying to combat in our own very rationalist, deliberate, thoughtful way.
And I was recently at a meeting at the University of Utah. It was the University industry demonstration partnership conference, and that was very interesting because they have a very dynamic vice provost of research, who in that moment was having weekly town halls with her faculty to try to talk about how to navigate the grant landscape and what had been withdrawn, what to save, what not to. But in parallel with this, UDP brought in a government affairs advisor and they gave a talk.
And what she said was exactly what you said, Nico. This is not even on the profile of most Americans, and by extension, it's not in the sights of their congresspersons, so they don't really see it. And the arcane idea of peer review is very quaint. And I know when I go home to Redding, Pennsylvania is where I'm from. And that is where the last Republican rally had right before the election.
It's very interesting to navigate that landscape there and see what people understand. But what they do know is that town has been devastated by opioids. There's huge amounts of chronic obesity. And so these are communities that are in distress and feel that somehow science has not served them right. And so of course, they're going to gravitate to maybe alternate theories, they feel that the conventional scientific process hasn't worked.
So somehow we have to bridge that gap. And I agree, people will wake up when it affects them. When they're rural hospital system disappears or closed down, or when the Medicaid funding goes dry. But I don't know that scholarly communication is going to be the best way to reach them, although we can work with their legislators and congresspeople to explain that if then consequences, if this happens, that's what will happen.
And so that is something also that we are actually trying to do. You spoke earlier about the brain drain, for example. So a lot of the data that publishers have can illustrate who's collaborating with whom, who's working on where. And we can say, if you have somebody working on artificial intelligence who's collaborating over here, they're going to go to this country and likely continue that work.
So I think we can do a lot of consequential modeling at one level. But then also that gentle community outreach to these communities in distress is important. This is a time for empathy, as you said, and for all stakeholders to come together. Is there anything to add. I think I'd echo what you just said, Anne. I mean, I also grew up in a tiny town that was decimated by NAFTA 30 years ago.
Have it have it found its footing. So I get the economic distress, I get the lack of doctors and all of that. But I posted on the socials last week about it was the New York Times article about the cool first application of CRISPR to cure a baby of what was going to be a fatal disease or a genetic mutation. And the thing that was most gratifying was a friend of mine said, wow, if that had just been done four years earlier, her daughter Lindsey, who died of leukemia would still be here, right.
And so when you can tie the personal stories back to what's going on, that's how we start winning this war. I agree. I think you're right in every sort of conversation that I've had with others, you about how do we sway and educate is it really comes down to the personal aspects of what is the individual level impact of the work that we're doing.
So, so while we're sort of feeling like we're playing defense a lot right now, I think some of the situation that we're in, the disruptions that we're facing do provide opportunities. We've talked a little bit about that in terms of meeting the public where they are and things like that, but what are some other opportunities that you could foresee coming mean, out of this period of disruption that we're experiencing right now.
Let's start with you. Well, I'd like to go back to what I've said earlier, which is I do think that times of crisis bring solidarity in many cases. And I think we have a real opportunity right now to collaborate in new ways to recognize that we have challenges in front of us. And that together we would do a better job, working against them.
And so to me, that's the greatest opportunity that is presenting itself right now. I'd like to go back to some of the talk we were having a moment ago about. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity there, but I'm going to admit that I feel like I really don't quite know how to think about it. And so one reason I say that is one of the challenges that I can see might be a real problem with AI in our work is the black box of it.
And if you think of what are our values. Well, one of the greatest values of scholarly publishing is citation. Is that ability to trace it back. And so I actually find myself in a position of not quite knowing whether the way we should be thinking about it. And I know there is work being done in this way, which is how do we help AI align better with our traditional values of being able to understand where it got its data, what was fed into it, et cetera or do I need to think differently and understand this is a completely different technology that works in a different way, and to not try to hold on to those values, that's in some ways the exciting challenge that I see right now in opportunity is that we have this new world.
And of opening up in front of us, and we have to learn how to grapple with it. And again, I think that's something that needs conversation. It needs all of our expertise to help us navigate and get to AI being used in the right way and in productive ways. Thank you. And if I can just jump in, I mean, one of the value propositions that we do have in deploying AI on databases like Scopus, which includes abstracts from most of the people in this room, is that when it's run across that corpus, you have a trusted result set.
And we at Elsevier, and I'm sure many of you also have adopted responsible AI principles to address that very important issue of the Black box so that people can understand that we're using certain types of vector searches that reduce hallucinations and then show those result sets. But with that said, it's not perfect and it's constantly evolving, and it is also not necessarily adopted by everyone in the entire world who might be using different AI systems with different result sets yet again.
And I think that's where the challenge lies. We can sit there with our trusted corpus, and that's just great. And hopefully scientists will use it. But we know that there's this great democratization opportunity to the democratization of science afforded by AI. But if it becomes corrupted, then it's not a good value proposition.
And God forbid, publishers are associated with that. So I think it's good to have that differential right now. And I think that is the possibility is very strong there that while you may have your trusted it's one that the reputation will be driven by others. And then that is something I think we have to really think seriously about, because it will again reflect back on how people trust science and research.
Yeah, great. See we're aligned. Yeah loving the sense of collaboration, Sarah. I think some opportunities for us is to think about what are the other voices that are going to get heard in science as we like, come away from whatever destruction we've got here, right. New voices will arise.
New ways of thinking are going to come to the fore. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but I do think that we are going to end up with different people, different voices, different kinds of research and scholarship. And to me, that just that's all opportunity. I mean, we have to figure out how do we react to that. But boy, that's exciting too. Like, I like a good challenge.
Nico maybe the last word on this. Nothing really to add, other than I think that we are all at the very early stages of being buried by an avalanche of slop. I think that we are like, I think I genuinely believe that we are just in the early stages of just being crushed by a bunch of AI garbage. See it early on. So for me, I think doubling down on your phrase, trusted results and being reliable narrators, that sounds earnest and idealistic, but I think it's also existential.
I mean, what else do we do. If we don't do that, what else do we do. Like, I don't know if we do something else. I don't want to do that. And I think that we can as a means of sustaining ourselves, as let's say the New York times has done by creating all these word games and ancillary things that don't really have anything to do with the news. But neither did the classified advertising.
Like, that was not a fourth estate thing. That was just a happenstance way to fund to fund the fourth estate. So I think if we do that, that's fine. But to me, the core enterprise, if the core enterprise is not something that we can constantly affirm, then it just seems to me like it's time to turn out the lights. On that note, yeah.
All right. We have a couple of minutes for some questions. So we have the microphones coming around, please. I'm going to take chair's prerogative and do the first one. So my question this is drawing on the advice we got last night from David Shipman in the keynote and saying that facts don't sway minds. It's narratives.
I said, how do we bring publishers into the narrative of research and discovery when we're doing outreach and communications. Anyone want to. I'll take a stab at that. So we at ACS do a lot of training right now of like, authors and potential peer reviewers about how do you be a good author and how do you be a good peer reviewer.
How do you be a good editor. Why we have an opportunity to say, how do you be a good science communicator. And that's not going to appeal to everyone, nor should it appeal to everyone, as we heard yesterday. But we've had skills. We know how to disseminate information. We're darn good at disseminating information. So let's use that mantle and help our communities get the word out.
We are a derivative of the research community so we can help promote them. That's great. And I'll just come back to my first comment about aligning incentives. So you can actually offer. We can show, for example, for authors, does their research appear in policy documents, and is the University going to reward them for that.
It's kind of looking at rewarding that bridge to connection to society. So if we can start to shape things that way. People always say, once you set up, an incentive, people will game the system. Well, I welcome the gaming here. If we can settle, incentives for better scientific communication, more policy outreach, that will be great. Great Another question.
We have a question over here. Please identify yourself and your organization. Yes thank you. Alec hrushevsky. As a CEO of profi, I often talk to founders and publishers who are our main clients. As a University professor, I use their results on a daily basis, so I think I'm well equipped to speak about interconnection between them.
You all mentioned multiple times stakeholders and multiple stakeholders and the importance of dialogue between them. Yet I don't see a single founder or a single grand officer sitting here in this panel. And University of Maryland is across the street, and there are no University representatives sitting here yesterday, we tried to organize a breakout session between funders and publishers.
That was a tremendous success with many insights, and it shows how much value, how much potency is in this communication, in the communication. So now comes the question, what do we need to do that. Next year, we will have a plenary session involving all the key stakeholders. Thank you. Can I just address that.
I wasn't necessarily a question, but you raised a very, very good point about grant officers and publishers working closely with funders. And this is a huge lift. And from moving from 0 to 1 is hard. But Elsevier recently collaborated with the National Science Foundation's TIP directorate, the technology innovation partnership directorate, to map their grant investments in 10 key technology areas in a publicly available map that shows where their investments are going.
By congressional district. So you can click on that map and everyone can see it. But getting to those conversations and the way that sausage was made was very, very difficult because it's not necessarily a natural alliance between publishers and grantees. But again, this was the NSF wanting to tell the story about that directorate. So if we can work with more agencies, more grants, officers, I think the better.
And I think all publishers, not just Elsevier, have a role to play here. And imagine if we could do it for everyone. Thanks I also would like to go back to something you said earlier about incentives and another. So actually grants grant agencies are a big incentive. They have a lot say over what is getting funded, what is not getting funded, but another part of the incentive structure is the promotion and tenure structure, and we haven't really talked a lot about that.
But I think that raising that is another player the faculty themselves and the different University, associate deans that are particularly focused on promotion and tenure. That's another voice that needs to be, I think, part of this. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think getting all of those voices together is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to see if this is the right time to maybe have the motivation to get those parties together, and having those conversations and seeing how we can work together, because I think there is a common goal in there somewhere for that group.
One last question. Of hand here on the front. So Matthew Salter from the mathematical association of America. But I'd just like to make a general point. And I think we've got a bigger problem than what was discussed upon the stage, because the first thing when Elizabeth mentioned the statistics about trust in science, the first thing that stuck out to me was in the 1950s, it was 85% That was at the time when the American economy was booming, when the Salk vaccine was being developed, when space technology was being developed and 2022 was just after a pandemic where you had a science being attacked from all sides and particularly by powerful people.
I think we've got now a population where who are used to having things their way. How used to having things personalized. There's been, as we a kind of decline in respect for authority, people's belief that what truth is their truth. And so we have this onward March, and I don't really want to say it's because of late stage capitalism, but we have this movement in society where there's generally less trust where people were promised or they thought they were promised a certain lifestyle if they followed a certain pathway.
And they just distrust everything. And we find ourselves in groups where if you are skeptical about COVID vaccine, you're also likely to think it was an inside job or we never landed on the moon. Or it used to be a time when groups could adopt parts of each other's agenda or believe parts of each other's thing. But now we seem to be so split into one way or the other.
And the question is, how can we solve that. The answer is probably we can't as publishers, but I think we have a much bigger problem with the way society is moving, and artificial intelligence is just making that more pronounced. I think Anne touched a little bit on this, but I just wanted to put that out there that I think that we should think about what we do as publishers, but it's not necessarily all because we've made sort of bad choices about editorial boards.
We've done things. We need to look at that all the time. Of course, we do. But I think there is a much, much bigger problem playing out. And I brought the tone down and everyone's feeling more depressed after that. But I think there is a much bigger problem that we have. I mean, I think that's true, but it's true and it's of general somebody, I forget who said this, but my feelings don't care about your facts.
That's the world we live in right now. And I would just come back to what my co-panelists said about persuasion. Persuasion is basically about language. It's about anecdote. It's about showing, not telling. It's about not using words that end in. It's about individuals and flesh and blood examples. And so I think that we just need to keep moving back to that core premise that how do you convince people.
How do you teach people who are good at convincing others to do that. How do you scale persuasion. How do you scale proselytizing on behalf of the values that we hold. And I mean, that's all I've got in terms of countering that trend, which is accurately described, it seems to me. Well, and I do think the other thing that has been shown is that switch has also been a switch from, kind of trusting in authority to trusting in peers.
That is what has grown over time has been that. And so there are new ways social media is much more trusted and listened to than many other things. We've talked a lot about. How do we communicate out. Well, maybe publishers need to be thinking about in universities as well, doing more of that translational work in those kinds of media, which I think we're not as comfortable with and used to.
But I think that that's the new channels might be a new way of getting to people. I couldn't agree more, really. I think you make an interesting point about social media and stuff, and I think taking a different direction too, because I think with social media, you've we all have the ability to say, I'm going to go sort with my own echo chamber and your own echo chamber.
And really like this gets back to Matthew's question, what do we do not as publishers but as citizens, get to know your neighbors, be involved in your community and honest to God, have conversations with people who don't have the same views as you. Because when you can meet people on a human level across the fence over a beer, you open up dialogues that we aren't having today. And I think that helps with this end stage capitalism piece.
OK, wonderful. We are out of time. I want to thank our panel today, really for your insights and for sharing your perspectives on this important topic. So thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.
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