In this blog, Alastair Horne, Press Futurist and social media correspondent at this year's ALPSP Conference reports on a packed few days in Windsor hearing from the scholarly publishing community.

 

 

This year’s conference once again

offered a range of perspectives from across the scholarly publishing ecosystem

on the key issues that affect us.

 

Keynote - Professor Chris Jackson

Thursday’s opening keynote was given by

Professor Chris Jackson, who shared his own experiences as a researcher who has

engaged deeply with the industry, publishing more than 150 articles, acting as

editor for three journals, and co-founding the EarthArXiv preprint server. In a

wide-ranging talk, Jackson offered some advice for publishers drawn from his

experience: to be transparent about APC pricing; to offer strongly reduced APCs

to early career researchers in order to build an affinity with new authors; and

to be clear about their views on metrics. On open access, though generally

enthusiastic, he suggested that Plan S had caused concerns among academics

and might create challenges for societies who relied on income from

subscription or hybrid journals to fund their other activities.

 

 

 

 

Open access was, inevitably, a

theme that persisted throughout the conference. The panel that followed

Jackson’s talk asked how societies and publishers should ‘accelerate the

transition’. Kamram Naim shared details of the ‘subscribe to open’ model used

by non-profit publisher Annual Reviews,

which addressed the twin problems of library policies on ‘donations’ often

preventing the support of open access initiatives, and the fact that APCs don’t

work for journals that publish invited contributions from scholars, rather than

receiving submissions. Their ‘Subscribe to Open’ model, which bears some

similarities to Knowledge Unlatched’s, sees libraries receive a discount on

their journal subscriptions if they choose to participate in unlocking

initiatives: if enough do so, then that volume’s issues of the journal become

available through open access; if not, then only subscribing institutions have

access. Naim’s fellow panellist Steven Hill, Director of Research at Research

England, and architect of the new REF, insisted that the new requirement for

open access monographs would not mandate any particular model. His position was

strongly challenged, though, by the panel’s third speaker, Goldsmiths Press’ Sarah Kember, who asked why the transition to open access for monographs was

happening at all, and called for a deceleration to allow time for more

consideration of differences across the sector. Plan S, she suggested, totally

disregarded the humanities and monographs, and posed a considerable threat to

academic freedom by restricting where researchers could publish.

 

Panel debate on Open Access

The following day, a further

session considered the impact of open access on library sales, strategies, and

solutions, as library directors from Europe and the US shared some insights

into their institutions’ recent cancellations of big deals. Wilhelm Widmark, Library

Director of Stockholm University, suggested that the Swedish universities’

decision to reject what he described as a ‘good’ proposed deal with Elsevier

was because it didn’t offer a sustainable route to full open access; the money

saved is being redirected towards fully open access journals. Jean François

Lutz, Head of the Digital Library at the University of Lorraine, and Adrian

Alexander, Dean of the Library at the University of Tulsa, added that their own

institutions’ decision to cancel some of their big deal contracts were prompted

by budget constraints and unsustainable pricing increases.

 

 

Friday’s opening session

considered another increasingly hot topic: customer data. Chris Leonard from

Emerald shared insights from their work in mapping user journeys in accessing

their content, and one key finding – that though a high proportion of people

who visit their site discover it through Google, the majority of those people don’t

have institutional access and so leave; people who come to the site via library

discovery services are far more likely to continue their journey further. Lettie

Conrad of Maverick Consulting spoke of the wealth of data available to

publishers, both internal – customer service records, sales reports, customer

data, market research findings, product testing and user studies – and external

– competitor analysis, discovery journeys, and usage analytics. Transforming

such data into usable information required strategic thinking and some

investment, she suggested, but it wasn’t rocket science. The third panel

member, David Hutcheson, told how BMJ had developed a strategy for using data

to inform their decisions, drive user engagement and deepen user understanding.

Working with consultants and stakeholders to create an overall plan, they

started by deepening their understanding of their existing technology and

resources and testing them to see what worked. Integrating their different

platforms to connect their data, and developing partnerships with suppliers,

the BMJ set up a small six-person data team to serve as a specialist centre of

excellence, supporting the rest of the business, automating processes and

delivering self-service reporting to enable and empower colleagues to make use

of the data produced.

 

 

The parallel sessions offered the

usual dilemma of which to attend, and though there’s too little space to

describe them all here, a personal highlight was a fascinating panel on the

digital humanities. Peter Berkery of the Association of University Presses,

Paul Spence of King’s College London, and Etienne Posthumus of Brill all discussed

recent experiments in finding modes of publishing that would support the

complex needs of this growing sector. Spence spoke of the need to fix a common

terminology for the different types of publications produced, while Berkery

talked through four marquee digital projects by university presses: Rotunda at Virginia,

Manifold at Minnesota, Fulcrum at Michigan, and .supDigital at Stanford;

Posthumus spoke on Brill’s own initiatives in labs and data.

 

Revenues from rights formed the

focus of the day’s final session, sponsored by Publishers’ Licensing Services: Rebecca

Cook of Wiley emphasised the need for thorough documentation governing what can

be done with content, while Clare Hodder urged publishers to invest in

metadata.

 

Code Ocean wins the ALPSP Awards for Innovation 2018

Then, at the evening’s gala dinner, the winners of two prestigious ALPSP Awards were announced: Richard Fisher was honoured for his Contribution to Scholarly Publishing over a long career, both at Cambridge

University Press and in his retirement, busier than many people’s main careers;

then the cloud-based computational reproducibility platform Code Ocean was

named the winner of the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing.

 

 

 

 

The final day of the conference

was dominated by ethical questions. Professor Graham Crow of the University of

Edinburgh explored issues in research and publishing ethics, before the closing

panel session addressed ‘The #MeToo Era in Academic Publishing: Tackling

harassment and the roots of gender bias’. Femi Otitoju of the Challenge

Consultancy shared some lessons drawn from thirty years of experience working

in this area, emphasising the need to create the right working culture by

focusing on positive outcomes rather than problems – having a ‘dignity at work’

policy rather than one on harassment, for instance – and prominently

highlighting such policies through posters rather than pages buried on the company

intranet. Karen Phillips of SAGE spoke of the need for publishers to learn from

each other, while Eric Merkel-Sobotta of De Gruyter emphasised the importance

of economic arguments in convincing management of the need to address such

problems. Dr Afroditi Pina shared the results of her research into sexual

harassment and successful strategies for addressing it: the need to agree

appropriate sanctions for unacceptable behaviour, the role that public

apologies can play in such sanctions, and the importance of listening

un-defensively to those reporting harassment.

 

The Beaumont Estate

If you would like to hear more about this year's ALPSP Conference, you can find video footage, audio and speaker presentations at:

 

https://www.alpsp.org/2018-Programme

 

The ALPSP Conference and Awards 2019 will be held at Beaumont Estate, Old Windsor, UK on 11-13 September. Please save the date!