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.

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.

Is sustainability really what we're after - Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka

Kevin Guthrie starts with a metaphor about pilot fish.

Q: If you're a pilot fish how fast must you swim?
A: Faster than a shark.

Q: How fast must you swim to find your next meal?
A: Faster than other pilot fish

Academic publishing is the shark apparently. We are the pilot fish.

Kevin highlights that digitisation changes and increases the symbiosis between "shark" and "pilot fish". Growth online is imense and speed of growth is staggering. YouTube was founded, grown and sold on within 2 years and users from none to 48 million in that time. This is a huge seachange.

The life cycle hasn't just shortened. Innovation adds layers - today's "value added" is tomorrows commodity. Things evolve so quickly and you must always be better than you were before (giving the example of evolution of videos through to online rental to video on demand in 10-2o years).

Kevin was previously with JSTOR at their birth and now works for a private organisation called Ithaka. JSTOR found it difficult to digitise at first but now publishers are fully onboard and involved.

Newspapers as Example
Traditionally there was protection for newspapers - geographical, advertising, media-specific view (not competing with other mediums). They relied on subscriptions and advertising (classified - thus local - advertising was key income). Even as challenges and benefits of digital production and distribution came through in the 1990's (and profits went up) the digital business started to become a threat to traditional print business.

What's been happening now is that profit margins decline. Stock prices falling 42% in 2007. Worst decline in 50 years. Even online advertising showing signs of slow down. Market place is shrinking, fewer titles, shrinking of journalist jobs (some moving online, some just ditched). Examples from multiple papers shrinking staff. The Guardian, as a contrasting example, offer multimedia training to journalists and will not cut staff who will transition to digital.

What happened?
Competition for audience - global market and competition from ALL news media. Indeed the Virginia Tech incident was actually reported best by Wikipedia - they absorbed new information most quickly. Enormous competition for advertising budgets and classified ads killed by eBay, CraigsList etc. Many papers (e.g. New York Times) are now going free rather than subscription online services (though others retain subscription is market can support - e.g. Wall Street Journal). Some serious lack of sustainability here though as all start ups seek advertising revenues. Resources of national papers stressed. By contrast small community papers are doing better as they have local information and news more relavent to their readers than cash-strapped national wire stories.

Kevin suggests a similar thing is going on in scholarly communication. Preprints and websites compete with journals. Open Access crosses territory with sustainable economic models. Consolidation is becoming key in newspaper world as it will in other digital areas. Libraries have one serious strategic advantage in their local knowledge. Niche targetted areas of knowledge also have advantages - in newspaper and libary worlds.

Kevin recommends a presentation on the similarities between newspapers and libraries:
http://www.slideshare.net/naypinya/what-rupert-would-tell-the-dlf/

Crisis of Wake-up Call?
Strategic change is required. It is very hard to implement though and academic areas are notoriously resistent to strategic change and reallocation of resources.

Scholarly Publishers
Historically they were insulated, walled search areas etc. Google is changing things substantially and it is now a very different commercial environment. Dissemination and intermediaries were important. Discoverability was by A&I databases and publisher marketing.

It is now the case that faculty do much of the selection more directly. Distribution quite different and threatened by the web. "Credentialing" is really the only competitive advantage of traditional serials brands - publishing in key journals still influences tenureship etc. This has not really changed.

Scholarly publishing must identify it's core values and explore new ways that the internet can enhance them.

What is needed so that new technologies can help to strengthen the core, not weaken it?

• Outsourcing - where some functionality is best taken outside organisations core work.
• Willingness to experiment and invest, not retrench and protect.
• Letting go of long-held attitudes and beliefs in what the situation was, in favour of moving to what it will be.
  
• Mindset shift to an ongoing focus on users and their needs and their preferences (not research project/funding drivers of content) - this will help make a much more sustainable model.
  
• Compromise
• Unprecedented industry-wide collaboration

Digital Supply Chain - James Gray, Ingram Digital Group

James Gray begins by introducing us to Nashville - home of country music, Ingram and James.

About Ingram
Ingram is a corporationg with largest inland shipper in the US, largest digital supplier etc. Core work is infrastructure and infrastructure - enormous machinery pictures showing barges, print on demand machines, warehousing etc. 3 prime content companies, Ingram Book Group, Lightning Source, and Ingram Digital. They are trying to put all those areas together and bring some of the print space ideas to the digital spaces.

There are a lot of parallels between print and digital infrastructure. Trades with 18,000 publishers and therefore has extremely large database of metadata and Just In Time distribution network.

Lightening Source is a print on demand company printing around 1.5million books per month but the average print run is 1.8 copies/book. Yup, 1.8. It's a truly an on demand model. You can order a book off Amazon this morning, it's printed immediately and can be delivered to your desk by the next day. Many publishers are now going this way as print runs really don't merit other traditional models.

Ingram Digital is about repurposing digital files. 100,000 academic titles, 3000 e-textbooks, 130,000 on eBay. Digital is more complex than print though.


Digital Supply Chain
The stages for print are linear. Digital includes multiple formats, different supply chains, differing readers etc. so these must be brought together into the supply chain. A complex supply chain flowchart illustrated this supply chain and the many differing options within it. It looks a lot like a giant jigsaw with differing routes, sometimes unique, sometimes overlapping, to take you through the supply chain, formats etc.

Similarities though. There are limitations of eBooks just as there are for print (they are just different limitations). In print there are a lot of intermediaries in the supply chain - agents, publishers etc. This becomes even more complex when you account for the different connections and communications and this varies by location. In a digital landscape larger organisations take out many of the intermediaries and, indeed, geographical issues. The supply chain thus becomes:

Basic Digital Distribution

Author
|
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Internet (and Google*)
|
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Reader

*James talked about the scale of server farms etc. Only Google and Microsoft have that kind of power and that has impact. Google, and it's indexes, are effectively an intermediatary for the

Consolidation is occuring at every level. No matter how good a publishers website is there has to be boundless linking between content so that it is easy to discover and navigate.

Content is core. With ejournals the core technologies and infrascructures are now in place. There are rights and business models to develop though.

Digital Asset Distribution:

Publishers offer editorial and selection elements
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Publisher portal (link publisher to Digital Asset Management)
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Digital Asset Management and Distribution System (content and metadata)
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Delivery Technologies
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Distribution Partners
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Discovery and Delivery

Some publishers are starting to produce their files with an xml workflow so that it may move anyway and into any system. This needs to happen to a greater degree.

MyiLibrary (ebook platform distributed through 3rd parties) allows searchability, Vital platform offers digital textbooks - this is a market about to explode in the US but this will be discounted model direct to users rather than libraries. Audiobooks: from flowing files you can automatically create audio files of any book automatically. A final crucial element is that the user chooses different delivery technology - could be print on demand, audio, digital text etc. It allows publishers to reach everyone in multiple formats (including specialist delivery such as for AmazonKindle).

Underlying all this work is a rich source of metadata. We are starting to harvest metadata for digital files. Interactive tables of contents, full text searching, it is a matter of utilizing the full text to discover content in a new way. OCLC MARC records have an important role and marketing is still important so that there is knowledge of what is available.

Content is evolving - chapters are priced individually by some textbook producers for instant. Ingram have worked with Microsoft (interestingly to help Microsoft "catch up with Google"). Want to help publishers get into digital publishing arena. Books are produced, scanned and go into file and body of content can go into on-demand and digital distribution process. Publishers opt in to possible print/distribution method. Curiously this starts with scanning rather than publishing file. For out of print books this is great - it means they are back in print (by demand) but for new books going straight to print on demand it seems a little odd not to cut out the scanning stage.

Mini widgets (the "next big thing") - these are flash based and can be copied and pasted into MySpace , websites etc. Allows content back on server to be accessed (with publisher-selected restrictions on what is available). This can support a library OPAC - 1st chapter, 5% of book etc. could be available as a starting point to choosing a book to purchase/borrow. A "completely new way" to support a library OPAC.

James now demonstrates usage of integrated metadata on MyiLibrary. Chapters, TOCS, full text etc. are far more searchable than traditional MARC records alone and thus allow new types of discovery. You can link from the search to the text in the (e)book.

Aligning print and eBooks - this means ISBNs etc are linked together to make available formats more obvious and transparent. Talking with Swets etc. about doing this.

Model for Consortia Shared Digital Repositories
Ingram are working with library consortia in the US to link together the content for the consortia and allowing individual libraries to select which parts of a package they select from that consortial collection

Future Distribution
Broadening distribution supply chain and seeing how content is used in different areas. Multimodal usage particularly coming into textbook market. Video and Q&A sessions, reformatting/remixing, note sharing etc. can all be built into textbooks delivered digitally. Various examples shown in the presentation show the various viewing/usage options.

Content is starting to be made available and then the component parts link content together so that users and students can get exactly what they want, when they want it from wherever they want.