Conference round-up and thanks

A month after the conference, I'm pleased to announce that (most of) the presentations and recordings are now live at:

• Plenary papers - slides and videos
• Breakout sessions - slides

With our growing number of speakers, it has been increasingly hard to get everyone's permission to post slides / videos, but you'll be pleased to hear we plan to work harder next year at getting permissions in advance. We'll also plan to load all slides to Slideshare, *during* the conference, and hopefully get videos edited and loaded on River Valley TV within about a week.

I would like to publicly thank (a) our sponsor, River Valley TV, for recording, editing and hosting videos of our plenary speakers, and (b) our ace team of bloggers for all their efforts in reporting on the conference. The stats show that we continue to be pretty well read BUT we continue to think about ways to improve / change. Given the growing usage of Twitter at the conference, and the renaming of our 'parent' journal (from which LiveSerials took its oh-so-witty name), we are considering whether we need to revise, rename, retain or retire this blog. *Please* let us know what you think (would anyone miss us?), either in the comments here, by tweeting @uksg, or by good old email.

Starting UKSG in a state of ... informed bewilderment

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." John Naughton (Observer columnist and OU academic) opens with this striking William Gibson quote, reminding us that you only discover new things if you know where to look and are willing to pay attention. We're in a state of "informed bewilderment", with no idea how the internet revolution will pan out, so should stop trying to predict the future, and pay attention to what's already here.

Dissolving value chains

This is either an exciting, fulfilling & rewarding time ... or a traumatic experience that is likely to be destructive to some well-established businesses (even industries). The internet is "a vast global machine for springing surprises ... a phenomenal enabler of disruption." (Read Barbara von Shewick's "Internet Architecture and Innovation", Jonathan Zittrain's "The Future of the internet - and how to stop it" or John's own "A brief history of the future"). In programming terms, "disruption is a feature, not a bug". It cuts out the middlemen that have been such an enduring feature of our economy - journalists, travel agents .. and librarians, and publishers? "The net dissolves value chains" - where once journalism and classified advertising had a happy marriage, now one is helped by the internet and the other is disrupted. It's impossible to predict when open access will overtake closed access in the scholarly ecosystem, but the direction of funding etc indicates clearly where we're headed, so we need to pay attention to the existing change.

An increasingly complex ecosystem

The scholarly ecosystem has grown complex in its proliferation (of publishers, authors, institutions etc), and "for a system to be viable, it has to match the complexity of its environment." But there's not a single organism in our ecosystem able to match the complexity of our environment. Complexity is the new reality, and complex systems are intrinsically unpredictable. The banking crisis warns us of the dangers of being dependent on a system so complex that few people understand it, a system that is too complex to be modelled, too complex to be understood.

The avalanche of data in science

Librarians' functions have traditionally been determined largely by the physical aspects of materials and their housing. Value and roles were clear in the print ecosystem, whereas now, many students don't visit the physical library. Teaching, scholarship and research increasingly take place in a digital environment; librarians will need to move to where the action is ("from place to space"). The traditional information skills will need overhauling. Cornell's "Seven Steps of the Research Process" starts with encyclopedias and catalogues and only fleetingly, in step 5, refers to finding "internet resources". This already doesn't reflect how students behave. We need to adjust to new realities in science, which is becoming more data intensive. John closes by quoting Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Consortia: not flaky, but unique

Kathy Perry reminds us that library consortia are not new; libraries have been cooperating for more than a hundred years (1876 - ALA committee on cooperation in indexing and cataloguing college libraries, and cooperative purchasing "expedition" started in 1913!) Since then, statewide consortia have sprung up - Ohio broke the mould by getting (new) state monies for this in 1987. ICOLC has been meeting twice annually since 1996 and now comprises 211 consortia representing over 5000 libraries, with particular growth outside the US in the last 10 years. Kathy quotes Merryll Penson (Galileo): "consortia are like snowflakes"; not flaky - "unique". Most have very low staffing and rely on volunteers.

Priorities are changing for consortia - tasks that wouldn't even have been on the radar some years ago are now among the top priorities - training, digital initiatives, next generation catalogues. Budgets are a problem here as everywhere - when asked how they are addressing this, one respondent to Kathy's recent survey said "Prayer". Tom Sanville, OhioLINK guru commented that "Flat is the new 'up'." Curiously, "negotiating contracts" is given as a 'new' priority - I don't understand how this wasn't already a priority for consortia! I was pleased to know that "advocacy / marketing" is a growing aspect of consortia's budget management - I think measurable end user engagement and traffic will be key to justifying and growing budgets ongoing (later, in the context of training, Kathy talked more about "justifying our value to our decision makers"). Very few consortia have research projects and very few are working together on issues related to archival storage of print collections.

During questions, Peter Burnhill suggested that a lot of information discovery, retrieval and usage is happening outside the library - between peers in both formal and informal contexts. How can libraries and consortia engage with this? Kathy's initial thoughts: this is why libraries and consortia are prioritising next-gen catalogues, to "more readily reflect the world as we know it". We're also working with products like Zotero to help researchers collaborate in a way that reflects not just scholarly publications but web-based materials and conversations. Libraries are trying to engage at this level. Jill Taylor-Roe adds comments from the OA perspective - we're managing a lot of the OA payments to publishers that we're also licensing big deals from, and there should be some synergies in managing the fiscal movements in a more cohesive and efficient way. Hugh Look notes the skills shortfall in this area and the lack of guidance. We need more investment in these skills that would be transferrable to many other areas.

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.

"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?'"

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.