Responding to change in scholarly communications: fight, face-off, fix and faff

Hugh Looks tells a long and amusing story about a minor train crash he was in as a child to indicate that despite the serious global threats that circulate in the world, it's often smaller more mundane problems that really derail us. Publishers are under pressure at the moment to sustain their margins and other divisions within their parent companies are also suffering, and unable to provide any support at this crucial time. We don't fully know the shape of tomorrow's pressures, though continuing economic uncertainty will be a shared problem and changes in research and education will have a growing impact, particularly as students become more demanding. Current developments will continue to change the shape of scholarly communications (OA etc).

Responding to threats

• Fight - lobby - consult - become indignant.
• Flight - sell (who to?) - close.
• Face-off - pretend it's not happening; ignore the problems.
• Fix - big deal, better terms, enhanced products
• Follow - accept that alternatives are needed
• Faff - make small changes without a real strategy.

So far we have witnessed a combination of fight, face-off, fix... and faff. The only real solutions are follow and fix. Fixing requires us to make it more attractive for people to stick with the existing model - super-consortia, increased big deal flexibility - creating efficiencies that allow reduced costs without lower margins. Follow (stay in the business, accept alternatives are needed) requires further changes to pricing models, with redistributed functions and costs (e.g. author pays).

There are 3 places where value is created and costs are managed in a networked business.

• At the periphery (libraries operate here) - close to the user with specialist expertise.
• At the core - where the shared infrastructure and expertise is (where the researchers are).
  
• In the middle - the distribution part - which is always most vulnerable to commoditisation, and is a hard position to defend. Libraries are partly here, as are publishers.

Alternative models that could be considered at the periphery include advertising and sponsorship - not a good market for this just now. We could take a leaf out of the mobile phone pricing market where pricing is comparatively low but with caps on usage.

There are no simple answers
The issues are all about transition - many of these models could work, and the problem is the disruption involved in getting there. None of us really understand how that's going to work, and it can only be managed on a system-wide basis (it can't be managed by individual entities). It may not even be a solvable problem. Potentially we're part way through a long cycle and we don't yet understand the beginning and end of it. We have to live with high levels of uncertainty which will lead to a lot more short-term Face-off (a great shame - waste of time and energy) and more Fix (because we haven't yet worked out what the Follow strategy is). "Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens" (Schiller - against stupidity, the Gods themselves struggle in vain) - deeply and painfully true, and at the root of most of our problems. We are only going to work this out with a lot of communication and some serious applied intelligence - there are no simple answers.

During questions, John Cox points out that it's very difficult for us to communicate well and to act as a system because of anti-trust laws. The only way out is for libraries to decide what they will demand of publishers and see what the response is. John also raised the idea of a telecoms style subscription model for scholarly publishing. I think it was Peter Burnhill who then noted the gap between funding for research and funding for libraries which have not risen commensurately.

Survival of the fittest: big deals at risk of extinction

Lucky Jill Taylor-Roe has a relatively healthy-sized audience for her graveyard slot at 9am the morning after the conference dinner. She wakes us up with a bit of the Byrds as she posits her theme: to every thing, there is a season. Jill is talking about change in the context of the Big Deal.

Background
In the early days of the Big Deal, the purchase model was based on maintained print spend plus an additional e-access fee that provided access to (almost) all of a publisher's collection. In the period since, Big Deals have been hugely advantageous, with a huge growth in full text downloads (Newcastle's Library is at around 1.5m downloads per year) and a huge drop in ILL and photocopying. NESLi Big Deals have become the major supply model for acquiring new journals.

Problems
But libraries are still not able to buy everything that is requested; in some subject areas (in Newcastle's case it's engineering and the humanities) new titles are not forthcoming because they are not available via any big deals - and the big deals are taking up the lion's share of the budget. This means the collection is compromised - and things will not improve as the credit crunch impacts the value of sterling against the currencies in which most journals are bought (the Euro and the dollar). Libraries are already having to ask for additional funds simply to maintain the current portfolio. In this context we need to reconsider the value of the big deal.

Research findings
Jill has been researching librarians' views of the big deal - early results show some obvious findings e.g. that the big deal simplifies administration and reduces ILL spend. But there is frustration with the limitations (cancellations) and the impact of titles moving publisher. There is a sense that the pricing model, based on retained print spend, is no longer satisfactory. Some are still happy with the big deal, but up to a third have cancelled big deals recently - due to budget pressures caused by currency weakness, in the newer cases - a challenge that will not go away.

Current solutions
In terms of managing the shortfall (median - £100k per annum), many librarians have been cutting the book budget. This is in direct contravention of stated student demand for more textbooks and leaves libraries open to poor ratings from students. Only one library noted that they were making up shortfall with a reserve fund set up for this purpose.

Future challenges
The VAT issue remains and while the recent cut to 15% has helped to moderate the effect of currency fluctuations, this is only a short term benefit - and there's a fee it will be raised to a higher rate than the original 17.5%.

The economic problems we face are not short term. In 2010 and beyond, libraries still plan to raid the book fund but will also tackle the serials fund. Jill's research shows an increase in plans to cut big deals, which will "no longer be sacrosanct". This is driven by other factors beyond currency fluctuations - budgets not keeping up with inflation, growing dissatisfaction with pricing models, an awareness that the books budget cannot be raided indefinitely.

Next steps
Jill's survey is ongoing and further results will become available but it is clear that inflexible deals that don't offer value for money will be vulnerable. Publishers must not bury their heads in the sand but acknowledge the warning signs and "think seriously about this - don't be complacent - there are hard times ahead for all of us and survival of the fittest is not just an empty phrase".

2020: a publishing odyssey

Ahmed Hindawi opened the afternoon plenary session by talking about the "three big changes" that will affect scholarly publishing in the next ten years. He started by looking at other types of publishing and the issues facing those industries:

Newspapers have traditionally had reader payments and advertising revenues, but lose reader revenue when they go online and make their content freely available. Per-page revenue is a fraction of what it was. But newspaper publishers made the decision to go free, and did so because the content they publish is reproduced in many places. This would result in price wars that would only end at zero anyway. There are some exceptions - the Wall Street Journal has managed to keep subscribers because its content is differentiated.

Trade book publishers are just starting to embrace digital. Challenges: no print, less need for publishers? Anyone can get a digital book into a book store, when they couldn't with print. 30m out of print books are "coming back from the dead" and becoming available online - the long tail will vie for space with the new titles.

The music industry has seen well-documented problems with piracy.

Scholarly journals publishing doesn't have these problems: unlike newspapers, the content of scholarly journals is highly differentiated, and you're unlikely to just go and read a different article if the one you want is too expensive or behind access control. Scholarly journals are bought by organisations, so there's still a "middle man" in the sale as compared to author to reader trade book sales. And piracy isn't a big issue.

The three changes that Ahmed predicts will affect scholarly publishing:

1. Open access vs toll
2. The journal as a brand on author side
3. The journal as a brand on the librarian side
   

(Blogs and wikis have their place, but won't significantly impact scholarly publishing..)

Drivers for open access

• Recognition of merits of OA by researchers
• Serials crisis = difficult to expand toll publications
• Green open access - publishers will realise gold is more secure and more financially viable.
  

The journal as brand on author side

• Citation databases could lead to the creation of author impact factors that become more important than journal impact factors
• This highlights the need for author identifiers! Scopus, Researcher ID, Contributor ID.
  

Journal as brand on library side

• Budgets - librarians can't consider individual titles, and will go for Big Deals instead when budgets are tight.

So, five possible futures for scholarly publishing.

1. The Near Past
Journals are toll access, and are important to authors and librarians. It's what we have or have just had, and has resulted in the serials crisis

Possible Future 2: Here comes the Big Deal
Journals are toll, are important to authors, but are in big deals and their brands are not important to libraries. Will see consolidations. Unlikely?
Should expect intervention from external markets.

Possible Future 3: Journal commmoditization
Journals are toll, but lose their brands on the author side. Publishers will have to work hard to keep authors. Publishers will accept more manuscripts (all that are factually correct). New pricing models will emerge - based on subject and downloads. Will be an ongoing market price, so competition for profit will be all about saving costs

Possible Future 4: Open Access
Journals still have a strong brand with authors, but libraries don't need to purchase journals. High impact journals will be able to demand higher author publishing charges. Will be more competition between journals and publishers.

Possible Future 5: Commoditization 2.0
Open access and lost journal brand on author side. All journals are like PLoS ONE journals, publishing all rigorous artlcles. A&I databases will be only place to navigate content.

What will materialize will be more complex than any one of these examples. Open Access is important, but isn't the only issue. Commoditization can bring benefits. Scholarly journals have many stakeholders. It's important to be as "humble and objective as possible" and consider all of the stakeholders. There will be winners and losers.

"If we invented the scholarly journal today, what would it look like?"

"Disorientation," says the University of Washington's Joe Janes. "And Dairy Milk."

(I love Joe for loving Dairy Milk. Having given it up for Lent, I'm also a bit growly at having had Dairy Milk brought into my frame of reference so early in the day.)

He talks about his strolls around Torquay in the last couple of days, and the "busman's holiday" treat of checking out the library ... which was closed (it was Sunday) - unlike the Tesco opposite with its poor excuse for a BLT.

"How much more disorienting things are," says Joe, "when things seem familiar, but are just a little off." He describes his first trip to Britain where everything looked normal but - wasn't. In scholarly communication, we're currently in the process of leaving a country that we know really well (because we built it) and entering one that seems familiar, but isn't. This is harder than just starting all over again - and the transitions we see before us will be fast, profound, radical and forever. "Your future," he notes to the students in the room, "will be nothing like this. Except the parts that are."

When we're disoriented, we look for guideposts and parallels to work out where to go from here. Scholarly communications matters in guiding future research activity - and all our pieces must fit together well for it to work (cites a story about a woman researching asthma who died because she did not find crucial information in PubMed - need Joe to write a comment expanding on this story!)

Editing, peer review, tenure, pricing and all these other functions around scholarly communications are currently up for grabs - access, e-science and a million other developments. The way in which scholarly artefacts are created, the form and structure they take on, the way they're searched, used, distributed and preserved - these are all changing as we speak - some will even change as a result of this conference. How much longer will an article be called an article? As we live in an increasingly digital, networked world, so the outputs of our research will be increasingly digital and networked. What about an article that includes a live satellite feed, or live peer-review? The containers of scholarly communications are cracking apart, and the object itself can begin to crack in and new aspects (video, audio, social networking) can become a part of it.

The scholarly journal looks like it does based on what was the common medium of communication in the 18th century. If we were to invent it today, what would it look like? Scholarship itself will take a dramatic leap in terms of authenticity and genuineness now that researchers can express more effectively what their results are - leading to different kinds of research endeavours and questions. Our new and forthcoming capabilities will change the face of knowledge itself - "a boon for all of us".

A lot of what we build into what we do is based on an assumption of permanence and endurance - giant buildings of bound journal runs. If we didn't have these, or put them somewhere else, it would change how we build our services and even our professional ethics. "I'm the token American here so I have to say change, hope and 'yes we can'!"

Some of us will make it happen and some of us will be cleaning up after it has happened. One approach to figure out where we'll go from here is to look for our signposts. We mustn't shoehorn new developments into old pigeonholes - a blog is not a scholarly journal, Wikipedia is not Encylopedia Britannica. The further down the road we get, the more we'll see what our current harbingers of change mean. We all have to be mindful of the long-haul - careful not to put our eggs in a basket that's not going to be around (remember Gopher?). It probably works to base our strategies on incremental change, but it might work better to think about starting over: what is the right way for us, together, to design the right system to engender, distribute, collect, scan and use the results of scholarly work?

"Maybe the question isn't 'where do we go from here', but 'how do we get there?'"

The future of learning: starting now

The journal and the book, suggests Professor Timothy O'Shea, will not die but will inevitably mutate as we find new modes of knowledge sharing and use - and ownership (individuals up to open collectives).

Technology is changing learning and research in universities - centralised systems, e.g. for authentication or records management; distributed software that's installed and used by random academics regardless of whether they are supposed to or not. All sorts of innovative uses of technologies for students e.g. audience-participation style clickers for lecturers to take quick polls during lectures (does this add much value over the old hands-up method?).

Dead horse of the week
Students are very at ease with technology and "view ICT in education positively and confidently". Interesting applications in veterinary sciences - virtual sick cats, dogs, cows - virtual "dead horse of the week" (first big audience chuckle of the day). Vet students also construct their own virtual subjects ("imaginary sick dogs") to support their own studies. Virtual sick animals are archived and can be reviewed in later years.

Vicarious learning
Vicarious learning happens by watching other students in action - even when the student is not actively participating in a discussion. YouTube is a great mechanism for organising vicarious learning and has been used for example in computing science lessons. Elearning students use Edinburgh's "best of breed" platform for elearning (Virtual University of Edinburgh - VUE) - they use Wikis, Second Life (constructing exhibitions within it) and "assess co-created artefacts". VUE is used by all sorts - staff, students, alumni - for awareness, e-learning, PhD projects etc. The people using it may never meet but share virtual spaces - often in hybrid form (real people in real offices connecting in a virtual shared space).

Speckled computing
Speckled computing is also changing research; it's based on specks: "miniature programmable semiconductor devices which can sense, compute and network wirelessly". These are e.g. placed all over a person to track their movement and reflect it in an avatar - enables a person to teach a robot how to dance. Tim also gave a good example of using specks in capturing movements of shy, nocturnal creatures like badgers - place the speck and it will wake up and start to monitor activity when it senses some movement.

Collaboration
Through collaborative activities like SAGES, we're seeing academics across a range of institutions (with different computing sources and sources of money) engaging in research which could not be done without the computational facilities their technical collaboration enables - intensive and large-scale data analysis that requires massive computing power. This is akin to the Large Hadron Collider, the data from which could not have been analysed prior to the super-computing era.

Innovation
Procurement is increasingly innovative and driven by the needs of learners. Scholarly communication is also evolving with Open Access presenting challenges as well as benefits - how do you motive researchers to engage, control versions, respect copyright - etc. Libraries are evolving as universities around the world invest in library spaces and move away from "librarians roaming the corridors shouting 'silence in the library'!" - Seriously, the library is a good place to remind students they are in the university; even if they're not using the resources they like to come in and soak up the atmosphere (particularly non-science students, who don't get to hang out in labs, and those not living in halls of residence). Edinburgh keeps its library open till midnight and still has to hustle out a few hundred students at that point - recognises the importance of "not having silly signs stuck up" and pointless legacy rules; using zones to allow for different work styles from vibrant to quiet. "Obviously, one has to support mobile computing" and recognise how many people will want to bring their own laptops - allow for enough workstations.

Conclusions
Student learning has changed - group work and digital assets. Research has changed, using technology to drive achievements that would not have been possible in the past. Technology's not just changing how people produce things but how people own things (more collective ownership). Libraries have changed and are continuing to change - mostly for the positive. More social learning - and considerable social benefits from learning and teaching with computers. Computers have not dehumanised learning just as email has not dehumanised communications. We'll see more research-led learning - because research is expressed in digital form and students have very easy access to the research output of the academics around them; research is published on websites, conference supp data etc - don't need to wait for it to be published in a journal now.

And the next 10 years will see even more dramatic change than the last 10. Eeeep.

How to make your IR effective as a publishing platform for grey literature

"I know nothing about IRs", admits Toby Green, "but I once wrote a paper about tidying up our grey literature at OECD, which seems to have garnered a lot of interest." Today he tells us he'll cover:

• Post-it-and-hope-Google-finds-it approaches to dissemination of content
• What does it take to satisfy the needs of various stakeholders
• What did the OECD do with its working papers

Post and hope
Out of 40 starters at this year's Grand National, 14 finished. Rank outsiders enter what is one of the country's hardest courses - perhaps hoping that everyone else will fall over and allow the rank outsider to win. Is "post it and hope" an equally unlikely strategy for success? It relies on a single discoverability system (search) which puts considerable pressure on metadata to be of sufficient quality to drive successful discovery. And it's a "survival of the fittest" environment: if you are not part of the "short head" (the blockbuster opposite of the long tail) your chances of discovery through major search engines are also limited. It's a passive strategy that is author-, rather than reader-centric. Ultimately, says Toby, it doesn't work. The OECD.org website is a platform for authors to upload their content - which they do - and 90% of it is *never* downloaded.

Stakeholder needs
What do the various stakeholder groups require from literature repositories? As a group - made up of representatives from libraries, publishers, agents, intermediaries - we brainstormed some of the things that different user groups require from a publishing system.

Authors

• need a channel for dissemination
• need visibility/recognition for career development
• need to be read
• need to claim ownership of ideas
• need to fulfil mandates (from funders, institutions)
• need an easy process, preferably with others doing as much as possible
• need reports on how the work has been used
• need archiving
• need links/dissemination to other platforms where they want to be visible/involved
  

Readers

• need full text but don't want to have to read it
  
• need integration with other workflow tools
• need easy discoverability - and access - for free
• need related data and inter-literature links
• need an indication that the content is authoritative
• need reliability/predictability of content's location
• need awareness and other contextual services

Institutional administrators; bosses

• need reports on usage, financial aspects (value for money), who has been published
• need prominent branding / enhancement of reputation
• need budget - and usage - a critical mass of deposits
  
• need quality to meet institution's standards and reduce later work

Librarians

• need more time, resource and better equipment
  
• need training
• need standards
• need tools to support processes
• need clearer legal guidelines from publishers
  

Funders

• need reports (on usage/what's been published) to show that grants are producing sufficient material
• need visibility, research profile
  
• need dissemination to expedite ongoing research

Intermediaries

• agents
• aggregators
• publishers need copyright and brand to be respected/protected; credit where due

What did the OECD do to meet these needs?
Originally, authors could post what they wanted, when they wanted. Readers, however, struggled to find this material. Administrators were concerned about quality control and reputation; funders were asking questions about impact and ROI. Librarians - were laughing - despairingly? Authors weren't asking for OECD's assistance; administrators didn't think it had anything to do with OECD. Papers were presented in a jumble on the OECD website

• no metadata standards
• no quality control
• no underlying database/workflow
• no common vision
• no knowledge of what readers need
• no understanding of discovery systems
  

OECD's solution was to get the publishing staff involved to

• establish metadata standards
• establish quality control steps
• create underlying database/workflow
• build common vision
• research readers'/librarian needs
• exploit discovery systems
• monitor results.

Metadata is key:

• analyse the papers to identify metadata fields
• add additional fields to meet industry standards
• sign off fields so database can be built
• QA existing metadata; fix numbering problems
• Fill and QA the database

OECD then created a workflow to minimise effort and create efficiencies - converting the paper to a PDF for hosting and onward dissemination. A single webpage now categorises the papers and links through to organised lists of papers within categories. Metadata is consistent and comprehensive (DOI, abstracts, keywords etc.), and is submitted to RePEc - vastly improving that database's coverage of this content, since authors had previously not been diligent in uploading their own content. And at the full text level, the workflow system adds a templated cover page with improved, consistent branding and clear, exportable citations.

Following this overhaul of the workflow, traffic to the working papers has more than doubled.

• authors needs are being met: data is more visible in more locations, the data is marketed within the OECD platform, reports are available from OECD and its partner platforms, and authors are not required to carry out any of the processes
• readers can access the full text and improved metadata helps them understand it without reading it, citations can be exported, content is discoverable, background data is linked, citation linking and "more like this" links are forthcoming, the content is clearly trustworthy and well serviced with awareness alerting
• administrators can download usage reports and assess financial value, branding has improved, quality is controlled (inappropriate content is rejected)
• librarians are not required to carry out any of the processes, legal guidance is clear
• funders are getting good value for money without additional expenditure.

In conclusion:

• QA - requires filtering to protect institution's reputation
• Distribute to disseminate - content needs to be widely discoverable with supporting capabilities such as MARC records
• Promotion - internal awareness-raising with authors so they understand why the process is valuable to them
• Reports and 'ego' tools (RePEc has good ones); reader tool
• Institutional repositories need to either outsource to a publisher, or employ people with publishing skills to manage the process effectively
  

What kind of publishers will we see by 2015?

Questions at the end of the morning's session were encouraged, in a novel twist, by Muir Gray's insistence that all delegates should turn to their neighbour and discuss the morning's findings. An interesting question that grew out of this: what kind of publishers will we see by 2015?

Huge consolidation in the industry, says James Grey. Publishers will start to serve very specific communities with content absolutely tailored to them, with better services than currently offered. Kevin Guthrie adds that the publishing environment will look more like eBay - a range of decentralised services, whether around credentialing or other, diverse aspects of the research process. Just as eBay requires seller ranking and ecommerce services, publication services will revolve around infrastructure platforms which will enable local enterprises to create niche markets (subcommunities) to grow alongside the major consolidated players.

"Today's value-add is tomorrow's commodity": sustainability through adaptability

The world changed, says Kevin Guthrie, when we began to use the same tool to search for "fish and chips in Torquay" and "acute lymphoblastic leukaemia". The speed of innovation and the growth of new products is "unimaginable" (cue lots of stats about growth of Hotmail, Facebook, YouTube etc). But if what goes up must come down, do we need to plan for a fall? "Today's value-add is tomorrow's commodity" - organisations have much less time to leverage competitive advantage of innovations.

Newspaper publishing can be seen as similar to scholarly journal publishing; similar competitive landscape, economic model, editorial infrastructure. In the digital era, circulation began to decline but revenues were not immediately adversely affected. But stock prices for news companies are now falling (42% in 2007) and ad revenues are falling - even online ads are in slowdown (accounting for less than 10% of newspaper revenues). The marketplace if shrinking/consolidating, and newspapers are limiting their remits (less coverage of "exurban" news) as they cut staff. A grim picture is painted and signed off with some depressing quotes ("Newspapers are f*ed", Buzzmachine).

What happened? Competing channels, substitutes - consider these from our perspective; the same pressures are there in scholarly communication, for example RePEc vs traditional economics journals. Every open-access-idealist start-up tries to use an online advertising model but of course the more ad inventory there is, the less value there is for each platform. With this diminishing revenue base, smaller players will be unable to operate - leading to fewer, larger newspapers.

There are signs of hope: extraordinarily niche local players do seem likely to survive (what could libraries do locally that other organisations can't?); there is "still a lot of money [in the newspaper industry] and what is required is strategic change, not giving up the ghost" (Chris Anderson, Wired). We need to embrace the digital era and improve our processes. We never thought Google would have the impact it has, and we are no longer insulated from change. Publishers continue to have important roles but these too have changed, though still valid for "credentialing" (brands as a stamp of authority for the tenure process).

Despite the similarities, newspapers are different. They are more commercial, more entertainment-related. Scholarly publishing supports a mission-based activity (advancing knowledge through research) and is more tightly connected to its audience. It will be protected from the perils afflicting newspapers by the core value that it adds. We need to embrace technology to strengthen this core. It will become appropriate to outsource non-core functions and to collaborate more effectively through investment in shared resources. The focus needs to be on users, their needs and their preferences - not on "how things have been" but on "how things are going to be".

Eeyore's view: biased reporting of research

"The literature is biased towards a positive, optimistic view of progress", posited Muir Grey as he opens his plenary session on "the deficiency of peer review". Extracts from scholarly papers indicated that the way in which evidence is presented can distort the conclusions drawn from it (e.g. - "most reviews published in peer reviewed journals or funded by industry have serious methodological flaws that limit their value to guide decisions" - Jadad et al, 2000, BMJ).

Grey accepted that some may suggest he has "an Eeyore view" and that peer review is not the only problem - journals can only report what they are given, and the problems begin further up the chain. Is it a failure to submit "negative" manuscripts or a choice by editors not to publish? (Grey had considered setting up The Journal of Negative Results.) Some researchers are simply not reporting negative results, and industry can influence the reporting of trials it sponsors. We depend on industry to invest, but we are uncomfortable with their influence and "this bias toward the positive".

Grey's proposed solutions:

1. Good systematic reviews - "the most highly-cited type of publication", but not all are good. There are just as many problems in the reporting of these reviews.

2. Better systems and skills - peer review, editing. What do we mean by peer review? "Like democracy, it's better than the alternatives, but everyone uses the word in different ways." What do we want it to achieve, and how do we know if it's achieving it?
We need to improve standards of reporting, and work with readers ("caveat lector") to ensure they are aware that there may be more to reported research than meets the eye.
The Equator Network is intended to train peer reviewers, editors, publishers and authors in how best to report evidence-based research.

In an unexpected turn (that indicates the penetration of such issues), Grey discussed the carbon footprint of the NHS and his plans for reducing it through the work of his recently-set-up not-for-profit organisation, "Getting Knowledge into Action".