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STM Goes to Washington: Public Access, AI, Copyright ... and Yes, the Election
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STM Goes to Washington: Public Access, AI, Copyright ... and Yes, the Election
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Segment:0 .
Thank you all for being here today. Hello and welcome to our panel discussion on government, government affairs and how scholarly publishers can or can't influence policy. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm the head of Public Affairs and advocacy for Frontiers. I had the distinct pleasure of moderating this panel last year. Thank you very much for having me back. And we have some returning panelists from last year and some new ones as well.
They are a tremendous panel. They're going to provide some great insights. And we're looking for your insights and your questions as well. Before they introduce themselves and we get into the topics of conversation, just a few bits of housekeeping. We are, of course, running this session under SSPs code of conduct.
If you need to read that in full, you can use the QR code on the screen. Also, please be advised that we are running all of the sessions, not just this one. Under SSPs core values of community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity. Please remember that when participating in the session and just as importantly, please remember to identify yourself by name and affiliation if you have a question during the Q&A portion.
And with that, off we go. In the past three years, certainly longer, but especially the past three years, STM publishing and government oversight have significantly overlapped. But how publishing is discussed in Washington is very different from how those of us in this room discuss and think of publishing day to day. It can be difficult to understand how decisions are reached and just as importantly, how you can be involved in that decision making process.
And that theme is going to run throughout this session. We want to reinforce that you should be involved. You're probably involved in ways that you don't even think of as advocacy, but you should be involved. We have a short session only an hour, and we're going to break the discussion down into three rough sections. The panel will provide an overview of what's happening in Congress.
Also, we're going to review matters of technology and research integrity. These come up a lot when we speak to people in Washington, and we're going to explain how these topics might play out in November's election and beyond. I'll have a couple of follow up questions for the panelists. But as I said, we want to hear from you as well. With that said, I'm going to kick it off. Well, actually, first small round of applause for our panel for sharing their time.
So we're going to jump right into the thing that's been on most of our minds the past two years, which is the OSTP in Washington, had issued something in August of 2022 called the Nelson memo, or what we all refer to it as in shorthand that was put in place to replace something that we call the Holdren memo that was from the Obama administration in 2013. The Biden administration's OSTP put forward a new framework for public access to federally funded research, saying that it has to be immediately open.
No more embargoes, but it wasn't something that OSTP mandated happen immediately. They put out a plan on screen here that shows how that process is supposed to happen. Each federal agency is supposed to put together a plan for how it is going to make its federally funded research more publicly accessible. And we are right smack in the middle of this slide. Now we're in section 3.
So the major agencies, all of the agencies by this time have had to put out some kind of a draft plan. The largest agencies, the ones with the most funding, had to do it first, NIH and Nasa, agriculture, the Department of Energy. They all put out very big plans. In fact, some of you might have interacted with those plans. They put out calls for your input, your thoughts on how their public access plans should be done.
But now all of the federal agencies have had to March down that path, and those plans have to be done by the end of this calendar year. So that's one big thing that's happening in the next six months. But if I can hand it over to Miriam to start, there's been a lot of work that's happened in Congress on this front in the past, in the past six months, too.
If you'd like to speak to that. Yeah, absolutely. I think before getting into the details of how Congress is viewing this process and what they're doing, I just want to frame this year really as a year of transition. We're in transition in this memo process as we're waiting from draft plan to implementation. We're in transition as we wait for the elections. We're in a transition in terms of the rapid changes in the industry.
And what the future is ahead. So we hope to tackle all of those pieces just as Congress is also grappling with AI and other technology challenges. I also just want to mention the increased scrutiny that we are facing, both in terms of the higher Ed and research community in general and specifically in publishing. So we'll be talking about that as well.
We have a Harvard president who resigned over academic misconduct. And really thinking about those systems really coming under more scrutiny as well as hearings around COVID and things like that really focus on publisher practices, review, peer review practices. And so we'll get into that as well. In terms of the OSTP process and how Congress is looking at that, some of you may have seen that the house last year in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process tried to put a stop to this process and they put in language in their bill that would basically tell OSTP, and the agencies to stop all implementation and planning and things like that.
In the final this language came out, it activated a large community in support of the public Access Initiative that came forward and a lot of discussions had. Ultimately the language was removed. It was not put in the final bill. And what they did instead was they required they required OCP to do a new and better analysis of the impacts of this policy and the financial impacts and the future and things like that to try to satisfy.
I think some of the publisher concerns with the process to date. Now, they gave OSTP 100 days to do this and that is coming up like next month. But we will see if OSTP actually meets the deadline, first of all. And second of all, if they really do anything different than their original analysis, right that they put out with the Nelson memo.
And I think this is where we continue to see that. I think there's a bit of a disconnect in terms of the agency's marching forward in this process, thinking about the details of implementation and stuff like that. In the draft plans we've seen from many of the research agencies, right, NIH and NSF and the Department of Energy and USDA, they all put out their plans over the last year. But I think an acknowledgment that there are concerns, but a real lack of grappling with those concerns and what they mean.
So I think it behooves our community to continue to think about what is this future that we're going to see with the implementation of this memo, and how do we support the larger ecosystem given the changes that we expect to happen. So we'll talk more about that. And I'll stop there and let others jump in. No, Thank you very much, Miriam. Yeah, you're right.
The expectations around this seem to be very different. And one thing that keeps getting overlooked, or at least something that comes up in a lot of meetings, is that there's a lot of discussion about the access to articles, which I think a lot of us in here think about opening up articles immediately. But the Nelson memo says that not just the articles, but the underlying data of those articles has to be open immediately as well, which has brought up a lot of questions of data sharing and research integrity and others.
And I'm wondering if you could speak to that a little bit based upon what you've heard from Washington and from others in the past few months. This work. Yeah, of course. Hello Can you hear me OK. In the back.
Great so. In my role. I'm actually an Academic Affairs, not government affairs. But there's a lot of overlap with the work that I do liaising with academic institutions and funders in the US and Canada. And in terms of the research, integrity and research security component of the OSTP memo.
A lot of our focus as publishers has been on the public access component of the memo, but the research integrity component of it is probably equally important and it's actually, I think, an area of overlapping and mutual interest for us as publishers as well as for institutions and funders in this country. And it's probably the one area where we actually are all aligned in wanting to uphold research integrity, wanting to maintain trust in science.
And so in terms of the kinds of advocacy work that we're doing, we focus a lot on the topic of research integrity because we know that it is an area that funders and institutions are really thinking about, and there are implications related to the OSTP memo and additional burdens that come along with the directive that will and already are having an impact on institutions across the country.
The concept of research integrity and research security being sort of combined is something that is a little bit new. And there are, as I said, we're all invested in UF research integrity. But the research security component of the OSTP memo is something that could have significant implications in terms of international collaboration and co-authorship, which I think we need to be mindful of.
So that's something that we try to raise awareness about when we're having conversations with funders and academic institutions. I think research integrity is an area where we as publishers can really demonstrate our value. And that's a huge part of the message that we bring when we're having conversations with funders. There has been a lot of discussion about funding for public access, where the funding is going to come from, and some of those discussions don't end up going anywhere really.
But when you start talking about research integrity, I think that the funders really peer review is a major component for them and a requirement. And so it gives us an opportunity to say, well, this is something that costs money. We're making significant investment to ensure that the work that we're publishing is scientifically sound, that it's been rigorously peer reviewed.
So I think that's another point that I just wanted to stress, is that if conversations aren't necessarily going anywhere when it comes to discussing funding for public access, sometimes starting off with a conversation about research integrity might be more productive because then you can really talk about the value that we add, the need for funding to maintain those safeguards and. And that is something that we are actively doing as publishers.
So yeah, it's an excellent point, Kia. That is the thing that we need to explain to people. As I had said earlier, we live this every day. We know how we make our content. We know all of the background information around it, how it gets safeguarded, all the processes. You have to start from 0 sometimes when you're speaking to Congress or staffers. And something we'll get into later is how we've always assumed ourselves and we've been happy to in this STEM world to be seen as a neutral arbiter.
And now we're being dragged into these arguments that you see in other places inside of the culture that we didn't exist in before. And this is something new for us and we're definitely going to get into that. But before that, Roy, I would appreciate it if you could connect both worlds here, because being with the Copyright Clearance Center, you're dealing with rights holders, you're dealing with new technology, you're dealing with AI, which is something that OSTP has moved on to.
They certainly haven't gotten away from the Nelson memo and trying to implement it, but they've also put out some standards for AI. And so they are moving on and we're trying to bring them back into our world a little bit. And if you could speak to that would be great. Sure Yeah. There we go. I think you just had to wait.
So on STP at. There's no shortage of things you can comment on or write upon or engage with in government relations. So our general view is to try to be additive. And so if I look at OSTP, all these agencies are soliciting comments. And one of the things I love about the Nelson memo is it brought up issues of metadata and PIDs.
Now, if I go to a publisher and say, what do you think of the Nelson memo or are you going to submit they're going to submit something about public access or data or research integrity. Those are table stakes issues and you get one shot. That's what you're going for. You're going for what matters most. So we've been actually filling in on the PIDs because we're not going to say anything about research integrity or public access that people who are directly impacted aren't going to say better with a greater voice.
What are we going to say us to. That doesn't work. So we've been focusing a lot on the PIDs issue there, and I'll get to AI in a second. And so we've been submitting to the Department of Transportation. Anyone who asks, we say, OK, CCC, what are we or licensing organization. We also manage ABCs and agreements.
We're basically just a metadata and PID factory, right. That's all we do is metadata and PIDs. That's how we run everything we do, how we run, everything we do for you guys. So what we say, we have a very high level concept and it's any pit is better than no pit. So please do mandate the use of PIDs. But or and don't tell the market what PIDs to use because in certain areas there are multiple PIDs.
And if you most of you in this room use Ringgold and if you're mandated to use is near-war, that's going to have a massive tax on your internal systems because now you have to change everything. I can flip that if you're using raw and you're mandated to use Ringgold or isni. Same thing. Isni same thing. So what we're excited about is that the government seems to care about this.
There aren't a ton of voices on this because people are spending their resources on the things that matter most. So we're sort of coming in and saying, do mandate PIDs, don't mandate, which PID do register grants for Doi and do all those things that are required for linkage. So why do we need to link. Well, we need to link so we can do research integrity. So we know where the authors are actually coming from.
Why do we need to link for AI. So we have some integrity issues. So we know what versions or what went into the AI data set upon which I was trained. So now moving to AI, it's a little bit outside OSTP, but obviously a huge focus of all governments right now. I've been spending a lot of time in Congress with my prediction we're not going to have meaningful copyright action around AI.
There is the SHIP bill. So what's the shift bill. The shift bill is the AI Act in the EU disclosure requirement. So it says if you're using content and it's really using content without the consent of the rights holder, you need to tell them what they're using. There's a copyright reason to do that. There's also a good policy reason to do it because if your AI is going to make errors.
And I'm not going to say it's hallucinations, that's anthropomorphizing. When the tech industry anthropomorphizes, they're trying to hide that they made a mistake. We didn't make a mistake. We're hallucinating. We're not copying and coding. We're training. Any time you hear an anthropomorphic anthropomorphized word, recognize it, question it.
Number one, government relations technique when you're dealing with this stuff. OK, back to this. I think name and likeness will be the first thing we're going to see actual legislative proposals on. Most people agree you don't mess with Taylor Swift. And that's we go to Congress. We want to talk about AI.
They're like Taylor Swift. We're like, Yes, yes, we get it. So I think name and likeness, if we're going to see anything in the US, it will be that. Although I already mentioned the AI Act in the EU, they passed this massive law regulating AI. It's by definition, as they say, this is not a Copyright Act because we have already passed our copyright rules on what we're determining basically on text and data mining.
But what's great about it is it says you need to follow those rules if you want to offer an AI product in the EU and those rules, we can debate how great those rules are, but they do allow rights holders to reserve their rights for commercial reuse. So OpenAI, if they're scraping your content, which they are and not getting your consent, which so far they're not.
I think everyone in this room, I don't maybe there are some exceptions. If you reserved their rights, they can't do that and then avail themselves of the EU market, which is a very big market. And the EU got in a debate with someone on LinkedIn, someone was saying it's extraterritorial. No, it's not. You can set its own rules for privacy.
They can set their own rules for fuel efficiency. They can set their own rules. I think I stop there because I can keep talking about other governments. And maybe we'll get some questions about that. That sounds great. Thank you. And that leads into something that we wanted to say, which is about the last bit of the name of this session, which is we have an election in November.
And regardless of who the candidates are, let's put in place now we know who the two candidates are going to be. We know that a lot can change. The jury is literally out on that one right now, assuming that we think we know what's going to happen in November. It's an odd case in that it's a second term for both of them and priorities change in the second term.
Regardless of what you feel about the candidates, regardless of what you feel about the Nelson memo, a second term for any administration is different from the first term. But we in this room have priorities from this first term that we'd like to see taken forward. So how do we as a group, regardless of what happens in November, keep our eye on the ball, as it were.
Yeah so I just want to note we're tracking not just two scenarios for the elections, but I'm not going to do the math right now, but several because we have the potential for the House to flip the Senate to flip, and the presidency to flip. So someone else can do figure out how many different scenarios. That is. I'm going on no sleep here for the last 24 hours.
So anyway, so. So yeah, so, so. OK one thing I just want to note is I think the news about the administration's sometimes hides the things that they're likely to agree on. And in the space that we've already been talking about, the first Trump administration very strongly pro public access. They were going to put forward their own solution, which was focused on gold, open access.
They pulled that in the wake of the COVID pandemic. But I think assuming which isn't a which is an assumption that the same science people come back in the second in a potential second Trump administration, you would expect they would also be very pro open access. And what we don't know. And then the other thing is that the first Trump administration was very focused on AI as well. And so I would expect that continuation of the focus on AI in either case, what we don't know yet, though, is how much a second Trump administration should it come to pass will be reflexively anti anything that Biden did because the first Trump administration was reflexively anti anything Obama did.
And so I think that is where we're not sure. We'll just be like, we're trashing the Nelson memo because it was the Nelson memo and not because we have a disagreement. And so that's what we're waiting, waiting to see. I think it behooves our community, though, to really think about our needs and engage with both of these campaigns and think about what is our vision for the future, what is our vision, the vision for a robust publishing ecosystem that enables access and integrity and uses technology in responsible ways and respects copyright, all of our needs and priorities, and lay out that vision.
And I don't think we can't just become focused on one side or the other. One of the things we found in the first Trump administration is that the science people in the Trump administration were blocking ideas coming out of the rest of the Trump administration. So in 2018, when we had Stephen Miller, proposing internally to the Trump administration that no Chinese students come to the US, which would be incredibly problematic for the research community.
It wasn't external forces that stopped that. It was internal forces in the Trump administration that stopped that. So we want to have connections and good and we're very focused on that at Lewisburg. I just want to say one more thing on the AI topic for currently. The Congress has just laid out a bipartisan framework on the Senate side for AI legislation that includes regulation an and also innovation.
And on the innovation side, there's a lot of interest on how we get AI ready data sets. And so I think this is something we should think about as an opportunity space for publishers. We have tremendous expertise right, in how do we make data reusable and accessible and usable in the first place for AI. And so insofar as legislation is pushing innovation on this front, that might be something to think about as an opportunity space as well.
Does anybody else know. Yeah so not going to predict the election because I'll be wrong. I do think there's a reasonable chance that there's not a single party controlling. House, and presidency. So I've got a somewhat unique perspective. Having served as a limited purpose US government employee as a trade advisor.
This is something you guys should think about getting into if your US organizations. And I've done this since the Obama administration. So I just want to be clear. I've done this consistently and it's through this government program where basically industry advisors advise the federal government on trade matters because the trade reps and Department of Commerce, they don't know everything about scientific publishing or for that matter, film or for that matter, automobile automotive standards.
And so I'm trying to now, having done this now under a number of administrations, I would say in general, the first Trump administration set a lot of pro intellectual property things as far as its but the its trade policy was very interesting. It was sort of you're watching people reading tweets and saying, OK, what are we doing today.
And the trade policy is very hard to get a handle on actually what the government position was because it tended to be very personal to one person who was not always, if you could get into that many characters, that was the policy. It was kind of hard to figure out. And then Biden administration has tended to be. Generally a little bit less sympathetic to intellectual property.
But notwithstanding that, what we've seen in a lot of the trade agreements is actually putting in language, pro IP and pro copyright, particularly around AI. So it's very I guess all I'm trying to say is it's so hard to actually figure out what's going on under the hood. And even without naming names, because I'm not allowed to and that would not be fair. I find the government people are often saying, well, we're struggling to figure out exactly what's going on under the hood, more so under some administrations than others.
I think the thing that I'm watching the most or will be watching the most closely is issues related to research security. Because even though that's not something that necessarily impacts us until further down the road as publishers. I've been talking to a lot of academic institutions who are dealing with the National Security presidential memorandum and the implementation of that, the DENSpm 33.
And it has been a real burden for some academic institutions in this country with $50 million or more of funding who are being asked to create research, security offices and programs within their institutions and really monitoring foreign government sponsored recruitment plans, programs and any kind of perceived foreign influence.
And as a publisher, I have concerns about that because for us, international collaboration is a positive and international co-authorship is a positive. And we've seen enormous growth over the past several years in international collaborations. So this was something that was implemented or announced in the last Trump administration right at the end. It's been implemented by the Biden administration, and I expect that it will continue to evolve.
But I hope I guess the one thing that I hope doesn't happen is that it becomes even more restrictive and burdensome than it already is. And purely from an administrative perspective, I think a lot of institutions are having to deal with this on top of having to deal with a higher volume of research integrity concerns. And many times it's the same person doing both.
So I think that's a point that we can be making in these conversations is just be mindful of the administrative burden of all of these rules and regulations that you're imposing on institutions in this country and try to avoid anything that is going to undermine productivity, that's going to undermine our position in the global. Research ecosystem. I don't think there's anyone in this country who would really want us to fall behind in terms of our leadership position when it comes to science and innovation.
So I think that's a message that we can be bringing out to say let's not impose more regulations and restrictions that are going to hold us back and undermine our position. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah Yes. If you were just for. We have reached the halfway point. So if anybody has questions, if you'd like to start to queue up a little bit in the middle, we don't have a mic there, but I'll bring the mic out to you if you want to ask questions.
Roy, please. Yeah mentioned something that just reminded me some of you who've been in this industry a while will remember when we as an industry needed to sue the Bush administration over whether or not scientific publishers were allowed to peer review authors from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, but mainly Iran for engineering and Cuba for medicine. We so basically won that case.
The government backed down. So we didn't actually win the case. They backed down and the complaint was withdrawn. But that kind of thing, when we're talking about international collaboration and security, that could easily come back. And this is something that does genuinely worry me. Absolutely Thank you very much for sharing those insights and for seeing into the future as best you can at this point.
I do have a couple of follow UPS. I could ask a lot of follow UPS, but I want to see if anyone in the audience would like to ask anything before I move on, any questions from the group. Yes, absolutely. It's not on. Yeah, just click it. You have to click it.
Hi so communications is part of my faraway background and thinking. I'm sorry. Melissa Blinken with the American Chemical Society. You had mentioned about communicating with some of the government agencies and needing to make sure that they understand and that sometimes, depending on who's there, they may not always understand our message.
So just wondering, in your communications plans with government organizations, is there any talk about simplifying? And then Deborah mentioned yesterday like, repeat, repeat, repeat. Is that part of anything I'm thinking about. Jerry Seinfeld recently did a commencement speech, and I think it was like the fourth grade reading level and the words per minute and just they talked about the way that his speech was given was simplicity in a way that it could be received whenever a lot of times, especially educated folks giving speeches want to sound really intelligent, but they might lose their message in that.
So let me just jump in there. And at Lewisburg, I lead our societies and associations, practice groups. We represent a number of scientific societies. And when I'm talking to the OSTP people, the agencies, I think they're actually hearing our message loud and clear. They are not listening to our message. And there's a difference. And this is what I find.
You can say we're worried about the future and what this will bring and what this will do to the ecosystem. And they'll say Yeah, we heard that from all the societies. But they don't believe it. And I think we're going to have to navigate this. I don't think we're going to convince them with Better Messaging to stop implementation of this memo. So what I've been pivoting towards more is how do we think about the future of scientific societies.
Let's think out a few years and let's say sure, everything goes swimmingly fine, but why don't we plan for in case this change leads to consolidation. It leads to challenges to scientific societies. What are we doing to actually innovate in the policy space to protect the services that scientific societies provide to protect those workforce development pieces, the independent, integrity pieces and that we're providing the communities that we're providing.
And so I think we've been having a number of discussions with the agencies around that. And I think we think we've got some traction so far to start those start those conversations. Yeah so repeat, simplify. Absolutely it's really good. I mean, I said the other side. Anthropomorphizes the right to read is the right to mine.
I'm like, OK. But the right to make a copy for someone to read is an infringement. So why is it not an infringement to make a copy for a machine to read and machines don't read. I'm not going to give you that anthropomorphizing. I'll say what the difference is, but it's just not true. But even if it were true, get off your bumper sticker and let's have a conversation.
One thing to really keep in mind. I think it was the fourth in terms of when they were released. But the first in terms of chronologically Star Wars film where the empire and the rebellion and what were they fighting over trade routes. OK you're like, OK, this is Star Wars and they're fighting over trade routes.
A lot of comedians like, go off and riff on how ridiculous that is. Everyone wants to see a movie about trade routes, but when you're talking to a government, reduce this to jobs costs and the economy. So I could go to the Department of Transportation and say, this is the best pit I know. Which is the best pit. It's the one we own.
But I'm not going to get into that. I'm not even saying that. I'm not saying use the best PID. I'm saying don't choose which PID. Just give them a PID. Because if someone uses a PID, things will be more efficient and the government will save money. And if you demand a PID, then it's going to increase costs and the government's going to pay those costs.
At the end of the day, someone's paying those costs. So I would say absolutely reduce, simplify and put everything in terms of jobs and costs. Is this going to cost the taxpayer. Is this going to save the taxpayer. Is this going to make more jobs. And, look, we've become at CCC, a global organization. Let's be honest. When you're talking to the EU and they're like, you're an American.
I'm like, well, this is why this matters to the EU. This is why this matters to the UK. So reduce, reduce, reduce. And it's the economy. I won't add the word after it because I don't mean to offend anyone, but it's the economy. That's what they're looking at. Thank you. Any other questions from the audience.
OK well, while you're thinking of that, I want to follow up on that. Simplify, reduce and make it known that there's groups out there that are actively trying to obfuscate. Unfortunately, sometimes one of those groups is in the House of Representatives. There's a select subcommittee now that's looking into the origins of COVID 19.
Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of science, gave testimony there about a month ago. It was a fantastic short course on what scientists do, what scientific publishing is. What's a preprint, what's peer review. Again, all these things that we know and take for granted. And it's wonderful that he was able to put into the record what we do and why it's important. However, he was doing that in front of a committee that was formed pretty much to look for as much evidence as possible that the lab leak theory is the one true theory of COVID and that people have been trying to hide that we are getting caught up in these culture wars that used to not be ours.
We were in the middle. We were the arbiters. We were neutral. I don't see it stopping, but I'm wondering from the panel if you see a plateau or is it going to get worse. Where are we with this. The scrutiny of higher education and publishing has been tremendous. Also in terms of the war in Israel and Gaza and the campus climate around anti-Semitism, there's incredible, incredible scrutiny.
And now I think a real effort in many legislative proposals to punish offenders around these issues. And that means it is not it is not a messaging issue where you can just say I'm going to respond to the questions. And of course, they'll see that we are neutral arbiters and we're doing everything we can. It is there. This is a proxy war in the cultural fight.
And so we have to be really cautious about how we engage in that. For example, the National Science Foundation sponsored research into misinformation and how do we track it and things like that. And we had that this committee on the weaponization of the federal government say that the research is allowing social media companies to censor conservative voices. And thankfully, that hasn't gotten a lot of traction outside of that committee.
But these are the kinds of things where we can easily walk into, I think, traps. And so especially if we see a unified Republican Congress and presidency after the elections, I think we have to really be prepared for more legislative scrutiny and proposals that will be potentially harmful and be ready to activate our community against any very damaging proposals coming out of the Congress.
Do you want to. No, go ahead. Yeah so, sadly, it's not going to get any better. Everyone in the room knows this is not going to get any better. And it's. It's not even. Just what you're talking about. It's weird.
So I'll give you an example that I was. So there's a bill in Congress called the procodes act, and if any of you work for standards organizations or publishers who own standards organizations you're familiar with, procodes act, it's about cleaning up some aspects about copyright for technical standards. I'm not going to get into it. It says bipartisan support in the House.
So when it came time to be voted out recently, like in the last month or so. Large lot of support, but there are a couple of people who voted against it, and it was the people who you read about in the papers in the Republican Party who are generally, on the more extreme pro-trump side. And I was talking to a lobbyist who's actually a Republican lobbyist.
I'm like, OK, but the Republican Party supported this leadership, supported this, both parties supported this. What's their objection And the answer was they don't have an objection to the law. They've probably never read it. They just have an objection to anything passing. So forget about rational argument and explaining the difference between a preprint and a post print.
I mean, it's like we don't want anything. Yeah and that's part of what's going on in Washington now, which is you've always had strong views on other on all the sides. But just there's a nihilistic streak as well. And I don't think that's going to go away, no matter who wins. Yeah, I would just add to that in terms of what's happening at academic institutions, having spoken to some research integrity officers recently, seeing a lot more cases of politically motivated or sort of revenge motivated research integrity queries and with the structure the way it is now for federally funded research, every query needs to be reported.
And so to the Office of research integrity. So that's just an enormous burden for queries that are not directly related to what we typically define as research integrity concern. So I think we're probably going to be feeling the impact of that on the publishing side if we aren't already. So thank you. We have about 15 minutes left.
Any audience questions or anything that you might want to think of. If not, I have a couple of other questions. All right, Roy, you've spoken a lot about the AI aspects from the tech angle, saying like don't anthropomorphize this. They aren't humans. The machines can't read. So we know what big tech is saying when they go into these meetings in terms of the content.
Is there a unified front on the stem side of what we're saying when we go in to talk about the content or is that split up. So what's interesting is about a year and a half ago, my timelines, ever since COVID, I never know of anything happened yesterday or a decade ago. I'm going to guess a year and a half ago, the UK intellectual property office UK was the first to have a text and data mining exemption for non commercial.
And the reason it was non commercial was STM publishers largely were able to say let the commercial market develop. There's a developing commercial market. And so the compromise solution. So about a year and a half ago, the UK intellectual property office said we should do away with the limits on commercial text and data mining. Everything should be open.
And some of the other content industries, music, and films said Yeah, we're fine with that. Just exclude us. And the UK IPO said we're not excluding you. Everyone's in. Since then I would say that the content industry is and if you're a fully a publisher, your view might be somewhat certainly you might have a somewhat nuanced difference on some of the edges of what we're talking about here.
But all the content industry is all of a sudden woke up. In fact, I was in Brussels and someone said from a different industry said 10 years ago, you guys are saying pay attention to this, and we ignored you and now we're suffering, but we're with you now. So I think as an industry, we've been actually pretty good. And we're not out to block. I mean, half the panels here are how are we going to use AI.
How is AI going to improve the process. I'm extraordinarily pro AI. I just want a couple of things. I want consent. If your content is used and I want quality. So some of these mandates though, throw everything in a preprint server. I'm like Yeah, that's good. Preprint server has the best research in the world and the worst research in the world and research that you can't tell if it's the best or worst because it hasn't been validated and it's going to get hoovered up by an AI and it's going to make errors that they'll call hallucinations.
I think these things through. I think as a whole, our industry has been really good. I'll contrast it between film. They all want consent for the training, but that's where it ends. I got to tell you, the studios and the unions are not seeing eye to eye beyond the training. And again, I'm falling for the anthropomorphizing here. I'm calling it training when it's really copying and programming.
But I think as a whole, our industry has been pretty good about this. Others might disagree, but I think we've been good. Very good. Excellent and Thanks for bringing up the O aspect. I mean, because the inputs and the outputs are very important. Inputs like as a fully open access publisher, we presume everything we've ever published has already been scraped by anybody who wants to train these algorithms.
But the problem is you can't get an output and we're OK with that. We are for AI. We want you to train these algorithms on peer reviewed authoritative content. That's fine. We also want to especially since we publish under the CeCe BY license, the only thing we ask for is attribution and they can do it, but they'll only do it if they're obligated to do it.
Now, they're not obligated to do a lot, so they simply aren't. Any other audience questions before we move on to wrap up. And the wrap up part is going to be about getting involved, which we've talked about a lot. We hear are involved. All of you are, I believe, in some way involved. You might not think you're involved in advocacy just because it's not in your title or a part of your day to day work, but your voices are being heard but need to be heard more.
And I just wonder if the panel could wrap up with speaking to that a little bit. Yeah, I said this last year, but I'll say it again, which is I think for many membership organizations, especially, your public policy priorities are defined by your member priorities. And there's a real reticence to speak out and talk about your own institutional priorities. And I think it's very important for folks in this room to really think about what do we need as a community and where can we engage.
And especially for the nonprofits in the conversation are seen in a different light potentially than commercial publishers. And so I think we need all the voices at the table and engage your members too. It's not just that we have to have discussions from the staff, but also make sure the members are aware of the implications of these policies, of the challenges ahead, because they can have a real role, I think, in speaking about the value of the society and about the value that would be lost.
If this ecosystem is not protected. A few things. Responding to requests for information. I know a lot of us do that. It's really time consuming and frustrating, but. But the agencies are obligated to read the responses. And so I think that's one mechanism for making our voices heard.
There are a lot of other workshops, webinars, town halls. Sometimes we get invited to attend these, sometimes we don't. But know we should always be asking to have a seat at the table. And those can be those are great forums when you are able to go and sit-in the room to make comments, to share your perspective.
If it's online, share your comments in the chat, ask questions, ask probing questions. And I have been in so many of these where I've made comments as a publisher that have just been the response has been I had no idea that you did that. Well, that's the kind of thing that we're hoping to get across. We want people to understand our business. And there isn't a lot of understanding of our business.
I would also say we've been talking about government a lot, but talking to academic institutions and leadership at academic institutions, research integrity officers, those institutions across the country receive a lot of federal funding and they have a powerful voice in this. And they're complaining a lot about the administrative burdens that have been imposed on them by the government.
So, they can also speak up and highlight some of these issues at our a mutual concern for all of us and the research integrity. Topics related to research integrity. I think, again, an area of mutual interest for all of us and an opportunity for us to present the value that we add as publishers.
And it opens a door to having a conversation about funding as well. So yeah, so just. Requests for information. They're totally time consuming. Two tricks. One, you don't have to answer every question. Two, you don't have to answer any of the questions. They're going to read it.
So if you have something to say and you think they've missed the point entirely, write a paragraph, pop it in, or create a good template that you keep reusing, which is what I've been doing for the kids. So yeah, so just keep in mind that's how most people do this. Social media follow. Like I would tell everyone like, so I'm going to have to say it. Yeah, you can't follow me on LinkedIn because on Saturday morning I got banned from LinkedIn for fraudulent activity, which means either I was hacked or my tech overlords really didn't like what I said.
Probably the former. As much as I'd love to believe the latter, someday I may be reinstated, but I'm in a death loop because when you're banned from LinkedIn, you can't log in to get to customer service to anyway, so. But someday I might be on or follow someone who's like me repost those reposts. I've got a lot of government contacts on LinkedIn they read when I post something.
In the US, people love to hear what's going on in the UK or in California where they passed a disclosure law. So be active in social. That is government relations. Something that's interesting. I learned government relations from Pat Kelly. Some of you might have known him from Wiley, and he was a publisher of physical sciences and he was the head of government relations.
And I said, how come you don't have VP of government relations on your business card. He goes, Roy, they talk to government relations people all the time. They talk to lawyers all the time. They want to talk to a publisher. If you're a real person, what's a real person. Someone, not me. You don't have a JD, you don't have a government in your title.
They want to hear from you. You're a researcher, you're a publisher. You can actually not say, I'm representing this interest. You say, this is my interest, this is what will happen to me. This is what will happen to our industry. Immensely powerful. And again, you could do it formally. Most people in the government want to hear from you. That's the thing.
They want to hear from you because they're tired of hearing from people like me and they want to hear what's happening and they want to know what the implications are of what they're doing. And they're only going to know that from hearing directly from people. But it doesn't have to be a big commitment, right. It could be an email two second email to your congressperson saying, hey, I care about this.
If you ever have any questions, I'm a researcher, reach out to me. They will sometimes. So these are things you can do small things to get engaged. And is a fine and hopeful way to wrap up. Thank you very much, Miriam Roy Kaia, Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your insights. Thank you all as well for being here today.
Have a very good conference.
Segment:0 .
Thank you all for being here today. Hello and welcome to our panel discussion on government, government affairs and how scholarly publishers can or can't influence policy. My name is Tom Ciavarella. I'm the head of Public Affairs and advocacy for Frontiers. I had the distinct pleasure of moderating this panel last year. Thank you very much for having me back. And we have some returning panelists from last year and some new ones as well.
They are a tremendous panel. They're going to provide some great insights. And we're looking for your insights and your questions as well. Before they introduce themselves and we get into the topics of conversation, just a few bits of housekeeping. We are, of course, running this session under SSPs code of conduct.
If you need to read that in full, you can use the QR code on the screen. Also, please be advised that we are running all of the sessions, not just this one. Under SSPs core values of community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity. Please remember that when participating in the session and just as importantly, please remember to identify yourself by name and affiliation if you have a question during the Q&A portion.
And with that, off we go. In the past three years, certainly longer, but especially the past three years, STM publishing and government oversight have significantly overlapped. But how publishing is discussed in Washington is very different from how those of us in this room discuss and think of publishing day to day. It can be difficult to understand how decisions are reached and just as importantly, how you can be involved in that decision making process.
And that theme is going to run throughout this session. We want to reinforce that you should be involved. You're probably involved in ways that you don't even think of as advocacy, but you should be involved. We have a short session only an hour, and we're going to break the discussion down into three rough sections. The panel will provide an overview of what's happening in Congress.
Also, we're going to review matters of technology and research integrity. These come up a lot when we speak to people in Washington, and we're going to explain how these topics might play out in November's election and beyond. I'll have a couple of follow up questions for the panelists. But as I said, we want to hear from you as well. With that said, I'm going to kick it off. Well, actually, first small round of applause for our panel for sharing their time.
So we're going to jump right into the thing that's been on most of our minds the past two years, which is the OSTP in Washington, had issued something in August of 2022 called the Nelson memo, or what we all refer to it as in shorthand that was put in place to replace something that we call the Holdren memo that was from the Obama administration in 2013. The Biden administration's OSTP put forward a new framework for public access to federally funded research, saying that it has to be immediately open.
No more embargoes, but it wasn't something that OSTP mandated happen immediately. They put out a plan on screen here that shows how that process is supposed to happen. Each federal agency is supposed to put together a plan for how it is going to make its federally funded research more publicly accessible. And we are right smack in the middle of this slide. Now we're in section 3.
So the major agencies, all of the agencies by this time have had to put out some kind of a draft plan. The largest agencies, the ones with the most funding, had to do it first, NIH and Nasa, agriculture, the Department of Energy. They all put out very big plans. In fact, some of you might have interacted with those plans. They put out calls for your input, your thoughts on how their public access plans should be done.
But now all of the federal agencies have had to March down that path, and those plans have to be done by the end of this calendar year. So that's one big thing that's happening in the next six months. But if I can hand it over to Miriam to start, there's been a lot of work that's happened in Congress on this front in the past, in the past six months, too.
If you'd like to speak to that. Yeah, absolutely. I think before getting into the details of how Congress is viewing this process and what they're doing, I just want to frame this year really as a year of transition. We're in transition in this memo process as we're waiting from draft plan to implementation. We're in transition as we wait for the elections. We're in a transition in terms of the rapid changes in the industry.
And what the future is ahead. So we hope to tackle all of those pieces just as Congress is also grappling with AI and other technology challenges. I also just want to mention the increased scrutiny that we are facing, both in terms of the higher Ed and research community in general and specifically in publishing. So we'll be talking about that as well.
We have a Harvard president who resigned over academic misconduct. And really thinking about those systems really coming under more scrutiny as well as hearings around COVID and things like that really focus on publisher practices, review, peer review practices. And so we'll get into that as well. In terms of the OSTP process and how Congress is looking at that, some of you may have seen that the house last year in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process tried to put a stop to this process and they put in language in their bill that would basically tell OSTP, and the agencies to stop all implementation and planning and things like that.
In the final this language came out, it activated a large community in support of the public Access Initiative that came forward and a lot of discussions had. Ultimately the language was removed. It was not put in the final bill. And what they did instead was they required they required OCP to do a new and better analysis of the impacts of this policy and the financial impacts and the future and things like that to try to satisfy.
I think some of the publisher concerns with the process to date. Now, they gave OSTP 100 days to do this and that is coming up like next month. But we will see if OSTP actually meets the deadline, first of all. And second of all, if they really do anything different than their original analysis, right that they put out with the Nelson memo.
And I think this is where we continue to see that. I think there's a bit of a disconnect in terms of the agency's marching forward in this process, thinking about the details of implementation and stuff like that. In the draft plans we've seen from many of the research agencies, right, NIH and NSF and the Department of Energy and USDA, they all put out their plans over the last year. But I think an acknowledgment that there are concerns, but a real lack of grappling with those concerns and what they mean.
So I think it behooves our community to continue to think about what is this future that we're going to see with the implementation of this memo, and how do we support the larger ecosystem given the changes that we expect to happen. So we'll talk more about that. And I'll stop there and let others jump in. No, Thank you very much, Miriam. Yeah, you're right.
The expectations around this seem to be very different. And one thing that keeps getting overlooked, or at least something that comes up in a lot of meetings, is that there's a lot of discussion about the access to articles, which I think a lot of us in here think about opening up articles immediately. But the Nelson memo says that not just the articles, but the underlying data of those articles has to be open immediately as well, which has brought up a lot of questions of data sharing and research integrity and others.
And I'm wondering if you could speak to that a little bit based upon what you've heard from Washington and from others in the past few months. This work. Yeah, of course. Hello Can you hear me OK. In the back.
Great so. In my role. I'm actually an Academic Affairs, not government affairs. But there's a lot of overlap with the work that I do liaising with academic institutions and funders in the US and Canada. And in terms of the research, integrity and research security component of the OSTP memo.
A lot of our focus as publishers has been on the public access component of the memo, but the research integrity component of it is probably equally important and it's actually, I think, an area of overlapping and mutual interest for us as publishers as well as for institutions and funders in this country. And it's probably the one area where we actually are all aligned in wanting to uphold research integrity, wanting to maintain trust in science.
And so in terms of the kinds of advocacy work that we're doing, we focus a lot on the topic of research integrity because we know that it is an area that funders and institutions are really thinking about, and there are implications related to the OSTP memo and additional burdens that come along with the directive that will and already are having an impact on institutions across the country.
The concept of research integrity and research security being sort of combined is something that is a little bit new. And there are, as I said, we're all invested in UF research integrity. But the research security component of the OSTP memo is something that could have significant implications in terms of international collaboration and co-authorship, which I think we need to be mindful of.
So that's something that we try to raise awareness about when we're having conversations with funders and academic institutions. I think research integrity is an area where we as publishers can really demonstrate our value. And that's a huge part of the message that we bring when we're having conversations with funders. There has been a lot of discussion about funding for public access, where the funding is going to come from, and some of those discussions don't end up going anywhere really.
But when you start talking about research integrity, I think that the funders really peer review is a major component for them and a requirement. And so it gives us an opportunity to say, well, this is something that costs money. We're making significant investment to ensure that the work that we're publishing is scientifically sound, that it's been rigorously peer reviewed.
So I think that's another point that I just wanted to stress, is that if conversations aren't necessarily going anywhere when it comes to discussing funding for public access, sometimes starting off with a conversation about research integrity might be more productive because then you can really talk about the value that we add, the need for funding to maintain those safeguards and. And that is something that we are actively doing as publishers.
So yeah, it's an excellent point, Kia. That is the thing that we need to explain to people. As I had said earlier, we live this every day. We know how we make our content. We know all of the background information around it, how it gets safeguarded, all the processes. You have to start from 0 sometimes when you're speaking to Congress or staffers. And something we'll get into later is how we've always assumed ourselves and we've been happy to in this STEM world to be seen as a neutral arbiter.
And now we're being dragged into these arguments that you see in other places inside of the culture that we didn't exist in before. And this is something new for us and we're definitely going to get into that. But before that, Roy, I would appreciate it if you could connect both worlds here, because being with the Copyright Clearance Center, you're dealing with rights holders, you're dealing with new technology, you're dealing with AI, which is something that OSTP has moved on to.
They certainly haven't gotten away from the Nelson memo and trying to implement it, but they've also put out some standards for AI. And so they are moving on and we're trying to bring them back into our world a little bit. And if you could speak to that would be great. Sure Yeah. There we go. I think you just had to wait.
So on STP at. There's no shortage of things you can comment on or write upon or engage with in government relations. So our general view is to try to be additive. And so if I look at OSTP, all these agencies are soliciting comments. And one of the things I love about the Nelson memo is it brought up issues of metadata and PIDs.
Now, if I go to a publisher and say, what do you think of the Nelson memo or are you going to submit they're going to submit something about public access or data or research integrity. Those are table stakes issues and you get one shot. That's what you're going for. You're going for what matters most. So we've been actually filling in on the PIDs because we're not going to say anything about research integrity or public access that people who are directly impacted aren't going to say better with a greater voice.
What are we going to say us to. That doesn't work. So we've been focusing a lot on the PIDs issue there, and I'll get to AI in a second. And so we've been submitting to the Department of Transportation. Anyone who asks, we say, OK, CCC, what are we or licensing organization. We also manage ABCs and agreements.
We're basically just a metadata and PID factory, right. That's all we do is metadata and PIDs. That's how we run everything we do, how we run, everything we do for you guys. So what we say, we have a very high level concept and it's any pit is better than no pit. So please do mandate the use of PIDs. But or and don't tell the market what PIDs to use because in certain areas there are multiple PIDs.
And if you most of you in this room use Ringgold and if you're mandated to use is near-war, that's going to have a massive tax on your internal systems because now you have to change everything. I can flip that if you're using raw and you're mandated to use Ringgold or isni. Same thing. Isni same thing. So what we're excited about is that the government seems to care about this.
There aren't a ton of voices on this because people are spending their resources on the things that matter most. So we're sort of coming in and saying, do mandate PIDs, don't mandate, which PID do register grants for Doi and do all those things that are required for linkage. So why do we need to link. Well, we need to link so we can do research integrity. So we know where the authors are actually coming from.
Why do we need to link for AI. So we have some integrity issues. So we know what versions or what went into the AI data set upon which I was trained. So now moving to AI, it's a little bit outside OSTP, but obviously a huge focus of all governments right now. I've been spending a lot of time in Congress with my prediction we're not going to have meaningful copyright action around AI.
There is the SHIP bill. So what's the shift bill. The shift bill is the AI Act in the EU disclosure requirement. So it says if you're using content and it's really using content without the consent of the rights holder, you need to tell them what they're using. There's a copyright reason to do that. There's also a good policy reason to do it because if your AI is going to make errors.
And I'm not going to say it's hallucinations, that's anthropomorphizing. When the tech industry anthropomorphizes, they're trying to hide that they made a mistake. We didn't make a mistake. We're hallucinating. We're not copying and coding. We're training. Any time you hear an anthropomorphic anthropomorphized word, recognize it, question it.
Number one, government relations technique when you're dealing with this stuff. OK, back to this. I think name and likeness will be the first thing we're going to see actual legislative proposals on. Most people agree you don't mess with Taylor Swift. And that's we go to Congress. We want to talk about AI.
They're like Taylor Swift. We're like, Yes, yes, we get it. So I think name and likeness, if we're going to see anything in the US, it will be that. Although I already mentioned the AI Act in the EU, they passed this massive law regulating AI. It's by definition, as they say, this is not a Copyright Act because we have already passed our copyright rules on what we're determining basically on text and data mining.
But what's great about it is it says you need to follow those rules if you want to offer an AI product in the EU and those rules, we can debate how great those rules are, but they do allow rights holders to reserve their rights for commercial reuse. So OpenAI, if they're scraping your content, which they are and not getting your consent, which so far they're not.
I think everyone in this room, I don't maybe there are some exceptions. If you reserved their rights, they can't do that and then avail themselves of the EU market, which is a very big market. And the EU got in a debate with someone on LinkedIn, someone was saying it's extraterritorial. No, it's not. You can set its own rules for privacy.
They can set their own rules for fuel efficiency. They can set their own rules. I think I stop there because I can keep talking about other governments. And maybe we'll get some questions about that. That sounds great. Thank you. And that leads into something that we wanted to say, which is about the last bit of the name of this session, which is we have an election in November.
And regardless of who the candidates are, let's put in place now we know who the two candidates are going to be. We know that a lot can change. The jury is literally out on that one right now, assuming that we think we know what's going to happen in November. It's an odd case in that it's a second term for both of them and priorities change in the second term.
Regardless of what you feel about the candidates, regardless of what you feel about the Nelson memo, a second term for any administration is different from the first term. But we in this room have priorities from this first term that we'd like to see taken forward. So how do we as a group, regardless of what happens in November, keep our eye on the ball, as it were.
Yeah so I just want to note we're tracking not just two scenarios for the elections, but I'm not going to do the math right now, but several because we have the potential for the House to flip the Senate to flip, and the presidency to flip. So someone else can do figure out how many different scenarios. That is. I'm going on no sleep here for the last 24 hours.
So anyway, so. So yeah, so, so. OK one thing I just want to note is I think the news about the administration's sometimes hides the things that they're likely to agree on. And in the space that we've already been talking about, the first Trump administration very strongly pro public access. They were going to put forward their own solution, which was focused on gold, open access.
They pulled that in the wake of the COVID pandemic. But I think assuming which isn't a which is an assumption that the same science people come back in the second in a potential second Trump administration, you would expect they would also be very pro open access. And what we don't know. And then the other thing is that the first Trump administration was very focused on AI as well. And so I would expect that continuation of the focus on AI in either case, what we don't know yet, though, is how much a second Trump administration should it come to pass will be reflexively anti anything that Biden did because the first Trump administration was reflexively anti anything Obama did.
And so I think that is where we're not sure. We'll just be like, we're trashing the Nelson memo because it was the Nelson memo and not because we have a disagreement. And so that's what we're waiting, waiting to see. I think it behooves our community, though, to really think about our needs and engage with both of these campaigns and think about what is our vision for the future, what is our vision, the vision for a robust publishing ecosystem that enables access and integrity and uses technology in responsible ways and respects copyright, all of our needs and priorities, and lay out that vision.
And I don't think we can't just become focused on one side or the other. One of the things we found in the first Trump administration is that the science people in the Trump administration were blocking ideas coming out of the rest of the Trump administration. So in 2018, when we had Stephen Miller, proposing internally to the Trump administration that no Chinese students come to the US, which would be incredibly problematic for the research community.
It wasn't external forces that stopped that. It was internal forces in the Trump administration that stopped that. So we want to have connections and good and we're very focused on that at Lewisburg. I just want to say one more thing on the AI topic for currently. The Congress has just laid out a bipartisan framework on the Senate side for AI legislation that includes regulation an and also innovation.
And on the innovation side, there's a lot of interest on how we get AI ready data sets. And so I think this is something we should think about as an opportunity space for publishers. We have tremendous expertise right, in how do we make data reusable and accessible and usable in the first place for AI. And so insofar as legislation is pushing innovation on this front, that might be something to think about as an opportunity space as well.
Does anybody else know. Yeah so not going to predict the election because I'll be wrong. I do think there's a reasonable chance that there's not a single party controlling. House, and presidency. So I've got a somewhat unique perspective. Having served as a limited purpose US government employee as a trade advisor.
This is something you guys should think about getting into if your US organizations. And I've done this since the Obama administration. So I just want to be clear. I've done this consistently and it's through this government program where basically industry advisors advise the federal government on trade matters because the trade reps and Department of Commerce, they don't know everything about scientific publishing or for that matter, film or for that matter, automobile automotive standards.
And so I'm trying to now, having done this now under a number of administrations, I would say in general, the first Trump administration set a lot of pro intellectual property things as far as its but the its trade policy was very interesting. It was sort of you're watching people reading tweets and saying, OK, what are we doing today.
And the trade policy is very hard to get a handle on actually what the government position was because it tended to be very personal to one person who was not always, if you could get into that many characters, that was the policy. It was kind of hard to figure out. And then Biden administration has tended to be. Generally a little bit less sympathetic to intellectual property.
But notwithstanding that, what we've seen in a lot of the trade agreements is actually putting in language, pro IP and pro copyright, particularly around AI. So it's very I guess all I'm trying to say is it's so hard to actually figure out what's going on under the hood. And even without naming names, because I'm not allowed to and that would not be fair. I find the government people are often saying, well, we're struggling to figure out exactly what's going on under the hood, more so under some administrations than others.
I think the thing that I'm watching the most or will be watching the most closely is issues related to research security. Because even though that's not something that necessarily impacts us until further down the road as publishers. I've been talking to a lot of academic institutions who are dealing with the National Security presidential memorandum and the implementation of that, the DENSpm 33.
And it has been a real burden for some academic institutions in this country with $50 million or more of funding who are being asked to create research, security offices and programs within their institutions and really monitoring foreign government sponsored recruitment plans, programs and any kind of perceived foreign influence.
And as a publisher, I have concerns about that because for us, international collaboration is a positive and international co-authorship is a positive. And we've seen enormous growth over the past several years in international collaborations. So this was something that was implemented or announced in the last Trump administration right at the end. It's been implemented by the Biden administration, and I expect that it will continue to evolve.
But I hope I guess the one thing that I hope doesn't happen is that it becomes even more restrictive and burdensome than it already is. And purely from an administrative perspective, I think a lot of institutions are having to deal with this on top of having to deal with a higher volume of research integrity concerns. And many times it's the same person doing both.
So I think that's a point that we can be making in these conversations is just be mindful of the administrative burden of all of these rules and regulations that you're imposing on institutions in this country and try to avoid anything that is going to undermine productivity, that's going to undermine our position in the global. Research ecosystem. I don't think there's anyone in this country who would really want us to fall behind in terms of our leadership position when it comes to science and innovation.
So I think that's a message that we can be bringing out to say let's not impose more regulations and restrictions that are going to hold us back and undermine our position. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah Yes. If you were just for. We have reached the halfway point. So if anybody has questions, if you'd like to start to queue up a little bit in the middle, we don't have a mic there, but I'll bring the mic out to you if you want to ask questions.
Roy, please. Yeah mentioned something that just reminded me some of you who've been in this industry a while will remember when we as an industry needed to sue the Bush administration over whether or not scientific publishers were allowed to peer review authors from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, but mainly Iran for engineering and Cuba for medicine. We so basically won that case.
The government backed down. So we didn't actually win the case. They backed down and the complaint was withdrawn. But that kind of thing, when we're talking about international collaboration and security, that could easily come back. And this is something that does genuinely worry me. Absolutely Thank you very much for sharing those insights and for seeing into the future as best you can at this point.
I do have a couple of follow UPS. I could ask a lot of follow UPS, but I want to see if anyone in the audience would like to ask anything before I move on, any questions from the group. Yes, absolutely. It's not on. Yeah, just click it. You have to click it.
Hi so communications is part of my faraway background and thinking. I'm sorry. Melissa Blinken with the American Chemical Society. You had mentioned about communicating with some of the government agencies and needing to make sure that they understand and that sometimes, depending on who's there, they may not always understand our message.
So just wondering, in your communications plans with government organizations, is there any talk about simplifying? And then Deborah mentioned yesterday like, repeat, repeat, repeat. Is that part of anything I'm thinking about. Jerry Seinfeld recently did a commencement speech, and I think it was like the fourth grade reading level and the words per minute and just they talked about the way that his speech was given was simplicity in a way that it could be received whenever a lot of times, especially educated folks giving speeches want to sound really intelligent, but they might lose their message in that.
So let me just jump in there. And at Lewisburg, I lead our societies and associations, practice groups. We represent a number of scientific societies. And when I'm talking to the OSTP people, the agencies, I think they're actually hearing our message loud and clear. They are not listening to our message. And there's a difference. And this is what I find.
You can say we're worried about the future and what this will bring and what this will do to the ecosystem. And they'll say Yeah, we heard that from all the societies. But they don't believe it. And I think we're going to have to navigate this. I don't think we're going to convince them with Better Messaging to stop implementation of this memo. So what I've been pivoting towards more is how do we think about the future of scientific societies.
Let's think out a few years and let's say sure, everything goes swimmingly fine, but why don't we plan for in case this change leads to consolidation. It leads to challenges to scientific societies. What are we doing to actually innovate in the policy space to protect the services that scientific societies provide to protect those workforce development pieces, the independent, integrity pieces and that we're providing the communities that we're providing.
And so I think we've been having a number of discussions with the agencies around that. And I think we think we've got some traction so far to start those start those conversations. Yeah so repeat, simplify. Absolutely it's really good. I mean, I said the other side. Anthropomorphizes the right to read is the right to mine.
I'm like, OK. But the right to make a copy for someone to read is an infringement. So why is it not an infringement to make a copy for a machine to read and machines don't read. I'm not going to give you that anthropomorphizing. I'll say what the difference is, but it's just not true. But even if it were true, get off your bumper sticker and let's have a conversation.
One thing to really keep in mind. I think it was the fourth in terms of when they were released. But the first in terms of chronologically Star Wars film where the empire and the rebellion and what were they fighting over trade routes. OK you're like, OK, this is Star Wars and they're fighting over trade routes.
A lot of comedians like, go off and riff on how ridiculous that is. Everyone wants to see a movie about trade routes, but when you're talking to a government, reduce this to jobs costs and the economy. So I could go to the Department of Transportation and say, this is the best pit I know. Which is the best pit. It's the one we own.
But I'm not going to get into that. I'm not even saying that. I'm not saying use the best PID. I'm saying don't choose which PID. Just give them a PID. Because if someone uses a PID, things will be more efficient and the government will save money. And if you demand a PID, then it's going to increase costs and the government's going to pay those costs.
At the end of the day, someone's paying those costs. So I would say absolutely reduce, simplify and put everything in terms of jobs and costs. Is this going to cost the taxpayer. Is this going to save the taxpayer. Is this going to make more jobs. And, look, we've become at CCC, a global organization. Let's be honest. When you're talking to the EU and they're like, you're an American.
I'm like, well, this is why this matters to the EU. This is why this matters to the UK. So reduce, reduce, reduce. And it's the economy. I won't add the word after it because I don't mean to offend anyone, but it's the economy. That's what they're looking at. Thank you. Any other questions from the audience.
OK well, while you're thinking of that, I want to follow up on that. Simplify, reduce and make it known that there's groups out there that are actively trying to obfuscate. Unfortunately, sometimes one of those groups is in the House of Representatives. There's a select subcommittee now that's looking into the origins of COVID 19.
Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of science, gave testimony there about a month ago. It was a fantastic short course on what scientists do, what scientific publishing is. What's a preprint, what's peer review. Again, all these things that we know and take for granted. And it's wonderful that he was able to put into the record what we do and why it's important. However, he was doing that in front of a committee that was formed pretty much to look for as much evidence as possible that the lab leak theory is the one true theory of COVID and that people have been trying to hide that we are getting caught up in these culture wars that used to not be ours.
We were in the middle. We were the arbiters. We were neutral. I don't see it stopping, but I'm wondering from the panel if you see a plateau or is it going to get worse. Where are we with this. The scrutiny of higher education and publishing has been tremendous. Also in terms of the war in Israel and Gaza and the campus climate around anti-Semitism, there's incredible, incredible scrutiny.
And now I think a real effort in many legislative proposals to punish offenders around these issues. And that means it is not it is not a messaging issue where you can just say I'm going to respond to the questions. And of course, they'll see that we are neutral arbiters and we're doing everything we can. It is there. This is a proxy war in the cultural fight.
And so we have to be really cautious about how we engage in that. For example, the National Science Foundation sponsored research into misinformation and how do we track it and things like that. And we had that this committee on the weaponization of the federal government say that the research is allowing social media companies to censor conservative voices. And thankfully, that hasn't gotten a lot of traction outside of that committee.
But these are the kinds of things where we can easily walk into, I think, traps. And so especially if we see a unified Republican Congress and presidency after the elections, I think we have to really be prepared for more legislative scrutiny and proposals that will be potentially harmful and be ready to activate our community against any very damaging proposals coming out of the Congress.
Do you want to. No, go ahead. Yeah so, sadly, it's not going to get any better. Everyone in the room knows this is not going to get any better. And it's. It's not even. Just what you're talking about. It's weird.
So I'll give you an example that I was. So there's a bill in Congress called the procodes act, and if any of you work for standards organizations or publishers who own standards organizations you're familiar with, procodes act, it's about cleaning up some aspects about copyright for technical standards. I'm not going to get into it. It says bipartisan support in the House.
So when it came time to be voted out recently, like in the last month or so. Large lot of support, but there are a couple of people who voted against it, and it was the people who you read about in the papers in the Republican Party who are generally, on the more extreme pro-trump side. And I was talking to a lobbyist who's actually a Republican lobbyist.
I'm like, OK, but the Republican Party supported this leadership, supported this, both parties supported this. What's their objection And the answer was they don't have an objection to the law. They've probably never read it. They just have an objection to anything passing. So forget about rational argument and explaining the difference between a preprint and a post print.
I mean, it's like we don't want anything. Yeah and that's part of what's going on in Washington now, which is you've always had strong views on other on all the sides. But just there's a nihilistic streak as well. And I don't think that's going to go away, no matter who wins. Yeah, I would just add to that in terms of what's happening at academic institutions, having spoken to some research integrity officers recently, seeing a lot more cases of politically motivated or sort of revenge motivated research integrity queries and with the structure the way it is now for federally funded research, every query needs to be reported.
And so to the Office of research integrity. So that's just an enormous burden for queries that are not directly related to what we typically define as research integrity concern. So I think we're probably going to be feeling the impact of that on the publishing side if we aren't already. So thank you. We have about 15 minutes left.
Any audience questions or anything that you might want to think of. If not, I have a couple of other questions. All right, Roy, you've spoken a lot about the AI aspects from the tech angle, saying like don't anthropomorphize this. They aren't humans. The machines can't read. So we know what big tech is saying when they go into these meetings in terms of the content.
Is there a unified front on the stem side of what we're saying when we go in to talk about the content or is that split up. So what's interesting is about a year and a half ago, my timelines, ever since COVID, I never know of anything happened yesterday or a decade ago. I'm going to guess a year and a half ago, the UK intellectual property office UK was the first to have a text and data mining exemption for non commercial.
And the reason it was non commercial was STM publishers largely were able to say let the commercial market develop. There's a developing commercial market. And so the compromise solution. So about a year and a half ago, the UK intellectual property office said we should do away with the limits on commercial text and data mining. Everything should be open.
And some of the other content industries, music, and films said Yeah, we're fine with that. Just exclude us. And the UK IPO said we're not excluding you. Everyone's in. Since then I would say that the content industry is and if you're a fully a publisher, your view might be somewhat certainly you might have a somewhat nuanced difference on some of the edges of what we're talking about here.
But all the content industry is all of a sudden woke up. In fact, I was in Brussels and someone said from a different industry said 10 years ago, you guys are saying pay attention to this, and we ignored you and now we're suffering, but we're with you now. So I think as an industry, we've been actually pretty good. And we're not out to block. I mean, half the panels here are how are we going to use AI.
How is AI going to improve the process. I'm extraordinarily pro AI. I just want a couple of things. I want consent. If your content is used and I want quality. So some of these mandates though, throw everything in a preprint server. I'm like Yeah, that's good. Preprint server has the best research in the world and the worst research in the world and research that you can't tell if it's the best or worst because it hasn't been validated and it's going to get hoovered up by an AI and it's going to make errors that they'll call hallucinations.
I think these things through. I think as a whole, our industry has been really good. I'll contrast it between film. They all want consent for the training, but that's where it ends. I got to tell you, the studios and the unions are not seeing eye to eye beyond the training. And again, I'm falling for the anthropomorphizing here. I'm calling it training when it's really copying and programming.
But I think as a whole, our industry has been pretty good about this. Others might disagree, but I think we've been good. Very good. Excellent and Thanks for bringing up the O aspect. I mean, because the inputs and the outputs are very important. Inputs like as a fully open access publisher, we presume everything we've ever published has already been scraped by anybody who wants to train these algorithms.
But the problem is you can't get an output and we're OK with that. We are for AI. We want you to train these algorithms on peer reviewed authoritative content. That's fine. We also want to especially since we publish under the CeCe BY license, the only thing we ask for is attribution and they can do it, but they'll only do it if they're obligated to do it.
Now, they're not obligated to do a lot, so they simply aren't. Any other audience questions before we move on to wrap up. And the wrap up part is going to be about getting involved, which we've talked about a lot. We hear are involved. All of you are, I believe, in some way involved. You might not think you're involved in advocacy just because it's not in your title or a part of your day to day work, but your voices are being heard but need to be heard more.
And I just wonder if the panel could wrap up with speaking to that a little bit. Yeah, I said this last year, but I'll say it again, which is I think for many membership organizations, especially, your public policy priorities are defined by your member priorities. And there's a real reticence to speak out and talk about your own institutional priorities. And I think it's very important for folks in this room to really think about what do we need as a community and where can we engage.
And especially for the nonprofits in the conversation are seen in a different light potentially than commercial publishers. And so I think we need all the voices at the table and engage your members too. It's not just that we have to have discussions from the staff, but also make sure the members are aware of the implications of these policies, of the challenges ahead, because they can have a real role, I think, in speaking about the value of the society and about the value that would be lost.
If this ecosystem is not protected. A few things. Responding to requests for information. I know a lot of us do that. It's really time consuming and frustrating, but. But the agencies are obligated to read the responses. And so I think that's one mechanism for making our voices heard.
There are a lot of other workshops, webinars, town halls. Sometimes we get invited to attend these, sometimes we don't. But know we should always be asking to have a seat at the table. And those can be those are great forums when you are able to go and sit-in the room to make comments, to share your perspective.
If it's online, share your comments in the chat, ask questions, ask probing questions. And I have been in so many of these where I've made comments as a publisher that have just been the response has been I had no idea that you did that. Well, that's the kind of thing that we're hoping to get across. We want people to understand our business. And there isn't a lot of understanding of our business.
I would also say we've been talking about government a lot, but talking to academic institutions and leadership at academic institutions, research integrity officers, those institutions across the country receive a lot of federal funding and they have a powerful voice in this. And they're complaining a lot about the administrative burdens that have been imposed on them by the government.
So, they can also speak up and highlight some of these issues at our a mutual concern for all of us and the research integrity. Topics related to research integrity. I think, again, an area of mutual interest for all of us and an opportunity for us to present the value that we add as publishers.
And it opens a door to having a conversation about funding as well. So yeah, so just. Requests for information. They're totally time consuming. Two tricks. One, you don't have to answer every question. Two, you don't have to answer any of the questions. They're going to read it.
So if you have something to say and you think they've missed the point entirely, write a paragraph, pop it in, or create a good template that you keep reusing, which is what I've been doing for the kids. So yeah, so just keep in mind that's how most people do this. Social media follow. Like I would tell everyone like, so I'm going to have to say it. Yeah, you can't follow me on LinkedIn because on Saturday morning I got banned from LinkedIn for fraudulent activity, which means either I was hacked or my tech overlords really didn't like what I said.
Probably the former. As much as I'd love to believe the latter, someday I may be reinstated, but I'm in a death loop because when you're banned from LinkedIn, you can't log in to get to customer service to anyway, so. But someday I might be on or follow someone who's like me repost those reposts. I've got a lot of government contacts on LinkedIn they read when I post something.
In the US, people love to hear what's going on in the UK or in California where they passed a disclosure law. So be active in social. That is government relations. Something that's interesting. I learned government relations from Pat Kelly. Some of you might have known him from Wiley, and he was a publisher of physical sciences and he was the head of government relations.
And I said, how come you don't have VP of government relations on your business card. He goes, Roy, they talk to government relations people all the time. They talk to lawyers all the time. They want to talk to a publisher. If you're a real person, what's a real person. Someone, not me. You don't have a JD, you don't have a government in your title.
They want to hear from you. You're a researcher, you're a publisher. You can actually not say, I'm representing this interest. You say, this is my interest, this is what will happen to me. This is what will happen to our industry. Immensely powerful. And again, you could do it formally. Most people in the government want to hear from you. That's the thing.
They want to hear from you because they're tired of hearing from people like me and they want to hear what's happening and they want to know what the implications are of what they're doing. And they're only going to know that from hearing directly from people. But it doesn't have to be a big commitment, right. It could be an email two second email to your congressperson saying, hey, I care about this.
If you ever have any questions, I'm a researcher, reach out to me. They will sometimes. So these are things you can do small things to get engaged. And is a fine and hopeful way to wrap up. Thank you very much, Miriam Roy Kaia, Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your insights. Thank you all as well for being here today.
Have a very good conference.
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