Black Swan

A Black Swan Alights

1

As the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 makes its way through the world, scholarly communications are not unaffected. We have been following the flurry of cancelled or postponed publishing events (London Book Fair, Paris Book Fair, STM Association Meeting, Council of Science Editors, NAS Journal Summit) and cancelled scientific and scholarly meetings (see Item 5 below) amid the wider flurry of adjustments (the cancellation of professional sporting events, the postponement of the Summer Olympics) and the virtual lockdown of major cities and even entire countries. Universities have closed their gates, shifting courses online, labs are shutting down, and fieldwork is being postponed (see Item 12 below). Meanwhile, we see a greater reliance on virtual tools such as Zoom and WebEx. It takes little imagination to see that these developments will continue to ripple outward. Every day brings news of unprecedented developments.

Planning and sobriety are essential for this environment, even as the facts on the ground change daily. We recommend that everyone study this blog post from Sequoia Capital, arguably the world’s most successful venture capital firm. (At the onset of the 2008 financial crisis Sequoia made a presentation to the companies they invested in titled “R.I.P. Good Times” that has become legendary in Silicon Valley.) The post identifies the coronavirus as a statistically anomalous “black swan” and urges investors and entrepreneurs to prepare for a long, hard time.

Nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”

The natural temptation in challenging times is to tighten up, husband one’s cash, reduce one’s commitments, and wait out the storm. And for many organizations that is the necessary strategy, as they may be hurt badly by even a short-term slowdown and simply have no capital to move forward. Other organizations will be looking beyond even a long-term slowdown and make plans to adapt to, and thrive in, the new landscape.

A case in point is offered in this Wall Street Journal profile of Enrique Lores, the new CEO of HP:

….while HP is weathering the same storm every other company is, it has unique opportunities. The trick is to find them, analyze them, and seize them … Many of the startups disrupting older, established companies did exactly that during the financial crisis. Companies such as Airbnb Inc. and Spotify Technology SA were created during or immediately after the last major downturn. Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and other tech companies, meanwhile, experienced exponential growth then, following years of tinkering with unprofitable business models.

Disruption hurts some and enables others. This is in part a function of an organization’s balance sheet and the particulars of its revenue streams and market position. But it is also true that the steps organizations make now — and the opportunities they find amid the turmoil — will determine their rate of recovery and their market position on the other side of all this. In the middle of the long night, make plans for the sunrise.

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Source: Sequoia Capital (via Medium), The Wall Street Journal

2

The cover of the March 21st edition of The Economist shows a picture of earth with a sign hanging on it, saying “Closed.” “Planet Earth is shutting down,” the lead editorial begins. And it sure seems that way. Attempts to limit the extent of the pandemic have resulted in closed schools, businesses, and public events of any kind. A new acronym enters the lexicon as broad directives to WFH — Work from Home — wherever possible are issued. Of course it is not always possible. People who work in retail environments (among the lower paid in the American economy) cannot stretch out on the sofa with a laptop and get the job done, nor can telemedicine solve problems that require careful clinical examination or tests. Even those whose jobs are mostly involved with organizing information (scholarly communications, anyone?) may find WFH to be viable in principle, but difficult in practice, as out-of-school kids need tending and tax the home Internet connection. Speaking of which: Is it not amazing how the Internet has held up, the power is still on, and running water continues to flow as before? Even in a crisis where thousands, perhaps millions will die and no one will be left untouched, much of the bedrock infrastructure of modern society continues to operate as before, quietly in the background.

Still, The Economist is surely correct that we are in the midst of an economic crisis. People are losing jobs, mortgages and rents will be unpaid, the airlines are collapsing, many restaurants and retail businesses will not survive, the banks, the end point of all economic activity, will be buffeted with demands for more cash. It is hard to be an optimist when the ground collapses beneath our feet even with governments scrambling to introduce stimulus packages that would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago.

But closed? Rather what we are seeing is an abrupt slowdown, a shift in priorities (grocery stores and online retailers are hiring hundreds of thousands of people), and more clever workarounds than anyone could have imagined even two months ago. Our own company is virtual; we live in the cloud; our office is wherever (and whenever, alas) we happen to be.

So, no, not closed, but open — to new ideas. We are living and working in a very difficult environment, but the determined efforts of so many people allow enterprises to go forward. The global pandemic is more than a hiccup in our daily lives and the overall economy, but humans are ceaselessly creative.

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Source: The Economist

Professional and Academic Publishing

3

The Chinese government has announced a major policy shift in research assessment. Whereas China has previously rewarded researchers based largely on the number of papers published in journals with high impact factors, in the future research assessment will be based on a “representative works” model. In this model, researchers will put forward no more than five of their best papers for evaluation in a given evaluation cycle. A third of these papers must be published in domestic Chinese journals. The others may be presented at conferences or published in high-quality international journals — however, the journal impact factor (JIF) of the journal will not be considered. Additionally, this model of research evaluation will apply to only those researchers in the basic sciences; publication will be de-emphasized entirely for those working in the applied sciences, such as physicians and engineers.

This shift to a representative works model signals a seismic shift for STM journals. China is presently the largest producer of scientific papers. This shift will result in a significant decrease in paper output from Chinese researchers. Researchers will face pressure to publish the papers they do produce in high-quality journals. While JIF will not be considered, the overall journal reputation will be, and China intends to maintain both a white list and a black list of journals.

Writing in The Scholarly Kitchen, Tao Tao predicts that:

The decrease in submissions will be seen mostly in low-quality journals. Publishing with top, high-quality journals is now more encouraged than before and those journals may even see increases in manuscript submissions.

The policy is designed to improve the overall quality of Chinese research. Another implication of this policy is the likely increase in publication of China-based English-language journals. As Nature notes, the policy is “… aimed at boosting China’s own research-publishing industry, which the government has wanted to do — but which is difficult if the best research is published internationally.”

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Source: Nature, The Scholarly Kitchen

4

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., the FDA made the decision to forgo tests developed by other countries, as well as those of the World Health Organization. This was a fateful decision as it resulted in a delay in ramping up testing in the U.S. In making this decision, the FDA, as well as top officials in the White House, have said that foreign tests have demonstrated false-positive rates of 47%. 

According to The New York Times, Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, is quoted as saying:

It doesn’t help to put out a test where 50 percent or 47 percent were false positives. Imagine what that would mean to the American people. Imagine what that would mean to tell someone they were positive when they weren’t.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn also commented in a March 11 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition:

It’s really important to understand, getting an accurate and reliable test on the market is important. Our team can provide you with an abstract that was recently published in the literature about a test that was performed in another country that demonstrated a 47% false positive rate. Now, think about that, David. What that means is that if you had a positive test, it was pretty close to a flip of a coin as to whether it was real or not.

The 47% false-positive figure comes from a paper published on March 5 in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology (a publication of the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House). The paper, titled “Potential False-Positive Rate Among the ‘Asymptomatic Infected Individuals’ in Close Contacts of COVID-19 Patients,” was published in Chinese with an abstract translated into English.

Citing this paper as the basis of the FDA and Trump administration’s decision regarding testing turns out to be problematic for a number of reasons. First, as The New York Times points out (and Birx subsequently acknowledged), the paper is discussing Chinese tests and not WHO tests, which were developed in Germany. Second, the 47% figure is not describing the overall false-positive rate but only the false-positive rate among asymptomatic contacts of known cases. And third, as NPR noted, the paper has been retracted.

The paper, with the English abstract, was indexed in PubMed within days of publication. The paper was then retracted by the journal a few days after it was published. According to Wired, however, the retraction notice was not posted to PubMed until last week, meaning the paper appeared in PubMed for two weeks with no retraction notice — and it was during this two-week period that the abstract was read and cited by Hahn and Birx. The specific reason for the retraction has not been specified.

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Source: The New York Times, NPR, Wired

5

A great many societies are reeling from the cancellations of major spring and summer meetings. Cancellations include the meetings of the American College of Cardiology, American Chemical Society, Materials Research Society, American Association for Cancer Research, American Library Association, HIMSS, and a great many others. The reverberations will be felt for some time. The meeting cancellations of course impact society revenues (more than 42,000 people were expected to attend the HIMSS meeting). In many cases, insurance policies do not cover pandemics, meaning societies are not just losing revenues but bearing many of the meeting costs as well. In addition to the impact on societies, there is the impact on hotels, restaurants, airlines, taxi fleets, convention centers, city tax revenues, and so on. 

Beyond the financial costs, researchers are also losing the opportunity to present their work. In some fields, conference presentations are more important than journal articles in terms of career advancement. Some conferences are shifting to a virtual format, which allows at least some presentations to move forward. Nonetheless, the career implications, especially for early-career researchers, can be significant. 

A  story worth noting is that of the American Physical Society, which was the first society in North America to cancel a major scientific meeting. The APS meeting, scheduled for March 2, was cancelled just 36 hours before the conference was to have started. Many of the 10,000 anticipated attendees had already arrived in Denver, or were en route from around the world. APS took a lot of criticism for the last-minute cancellation, but it was the right call. As would become apparent only later, a biotech company’s leadership meeting in Boston the previous week became a major COVID-19 spreading event — and that meeting was only attended by 175 people. The potential risks posed by an international meeting with 10,000 attendees were enormous. But this is hindsight. On February 29, this was not an obvious decision. We applaud the APS leadership for making this difficult decision. Not only did this reduce the risk of a major international spreading event, but it served as a benchmark for other societies with meetings in early March, likely prompting other cancellations.

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Source: AIP’s FYI, The Boston Globe

6

eLife makes some thoughtful changes to its editorial policies in the wake of the global pandemic. These include:

• Curtailing requests for additional experimentation during revisions
• Suspending the 2-month limit on revisions
• Making the posting of preprints to bioRxiv or medRxiv the default for all eLife submissions (authors may opt out)
• Extending the “scoop protection” policy to cover competing work that is published on preprint servers prior to submission
• Mobilizing early-career researchers (e.g., as reviewing editors)

We look forward to hearing about what other journals are doing to help researchers during this challenging period.

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Source: eLife

7

Cambridge University Press temporarily halts printing of journals citing “significant disruption to the global supply chain.”

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Source: Cambridge University Press

8

The EU Commission has awarded a contract for setting up an open access publishing platform to F1000 Research Ltd., surprising absolutely nobody. 

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Source: European Commission

9

The Modern Language Association has reached an agreement for Cambridge University Press to publish PMLA, the flagship journal of MLA. Clarke & Esposito worked with MLA to broker this notable agreement, with the transition taking place in January 2021. 

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Source: European Commission

Publish and Read

10

Despite events of the last months, a few publish and read deals were announced:

• Elsevier signed a two-year read and publish agreement with California State University (not to be confused with the University of California).
• Rockefeller University Press announced that it has entered into a pilot read and publish agreement with Jisc, the first such agreement for a U.S. university press.  
• De Gruyter signed a three-year publish and read deal with Michigan State University Libraries.

Want your transformative deal considered for coverage in The Brief? Send us a note with a link to your press release (info@ce-strategy.com). 

Higher Education

11

In the United States we have been preoccupied with the problem of student debt, which can rightly be called a crisis. Studying the data carefully, however, shows that student debt is tightly linked to another major problem in higher education: low completion rates. The stereotype of higher education, in which students live for four years on ivy-draped campuses, is far from the norm, where most students attend public institutions, including two-year community colleges, and may struggle to complete their degrees on time, if at all. In a thought-provoking essay by Jim O’Donnell of Arizona State University, we learn that Cal State (an example O’Donnell cites) has a four-year graduation rate of 23% — and that’s up from 19% a few years ago. Students borrow money to go to college, but when they leave without a degree, they are left with debt but without the potential for earning a higher income that a degree can confer. Fixing the student debt problem really requires addressing three problems: the amount of money to support students (relieving them of debt burden), the cost of higher education, and a focus on getting students through the system in a timely way.

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Source: Against the Grain

12

The New York Times published a series of snapshots on the impact of shutting down research labs across the country on various research projects. Many researchers note that they will use the time away from the lab to write papers. Is it possible that the shutdown of labs will result in more, and not fewer, papers, at least in the short term? 

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Source: The New York Times 

The Book Business

13

ViacomCBS, the owner of Simon & Schuster, has put the venerable publisher up for sale. CEO Robert Bakish noted that, in a company based on video entertainment, a book publisher is an outlier — “nonstrategic,” in the parlance of the corporate titan. (Among the many highly commercial properties controlled by ViacomCBS, we have a soft spot for the Star Trek franchise and a great deal of respetto for The Godfather.) S&S is one of the “Big Five” U.S. trade publishers; likely buyers include the other four: Penguin Random House (the largest by far), HarperCollins (a Rupert Murdoch company), Hachette, and Macmillan. Macmillan is linked through ownership to both Digital Science and Springer Nature. Also mentioned as a candidate is Amazon, which would make the rest of the book world shudder.

In our view, this story is being poorly reported. The Wall Street Journal declaresthat prime publishing properties like S&S rarely come on the market, so a heated auction is anticipated. But S&S has been on the market for twenty years. The fact is that no one was willing to pay the freight before. What is being lost in the conversation is that this event is not about S&S but about ViacomCBS, which itself is likely to be sold in due course, as video streaming becomes the new paradigm, leaving broadcast- and cable-oriented ViacomCBS in a weak position. ViacomCBS is being dressed up for sale to a bigger streaming player, perhaps Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple, AT&T (which already owns HBO), or even Verizon. In such a sale to a streaming entity, S&S would carry no value. Hence it is better to lop it off now, even at a discount, as a way to realize some cash from it.

The special case is that of Amazon, which alone among the streaming players may have a reason to swallow both the ViacomCBS video assets (which include Paramount Pictures, which could have Jeff Bezos himself star in a remake of Star Trek or even The Godfather) and S&S. The moral of this tale is that publishing is a small industry and easily and frequently gets tossed about by the investment thesis of a larger, adjacent business.

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Source: The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Melville House, The Wall Street Journal

14

Perhaps this was in the works before COVID-19 made us all rethink how we do things, but the timing could not be better: MIT Press announced a virtual book series that will present authors discussing important topics of the day online. The service will help keep people informed on important topics, as all university press books do, but it also has a marketing component — the promotion of MIT Press books and authors. We would add that the series also puts MIT Press into a D2C (direct to consumer) relationship with its potential customers, unlike the B2B (business to business) model of almost all book publishers. We have seen other D2C initiatives at the Press since Amy Brand was appointed Director.

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Source: MIT Press

15

The 2020 PROSE awards for the best scholarly books published in 2019 have been announced by the American Association of Publishers. The top honor, the R.R. Hawkins Award, went to Carmen C. Bambach’s Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, published by Yale University Press. The book is described as a “modern rethinking of the career and vision of one of the greatest artists of all time on the 500th anniversary of his death.” 

Excellence Awards, for scholarly books in subject categories, were also announced. These include:

• Biological & Life Sciences: S. Nassir Ghaemi, Clinical Psychopharmacology: Principles and Practice, Oxford University Press
• Physical Sciences & Mathematics: Philip Ording, 99 Variations on a Proof, Princeton University Press
• Reference Works: Fikret Yegül and Diane Favro, Roman Architecture and Urbanism: From the Origins to Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press
• Social Sciences: Mary Anne Franks, The Cult of the Constitution, Stanford University Press

Congratulations to this year’s winners.

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Source: Association of American Publishers

Technology

16

There are four technologies we are watching closely related to COVID-19: ventilators, testing kits, therapeutics, and vaccines.

Ventilators and respirators 

• A research group at MIT is working rapidly on a respirator design, with the aim of releasing the technical information in an open source manner, enabling others to pick it up and run with it. The design goals date back to a project from a decade ago, which foresaw the need for low-cost technology to address a pandemic. The current iteration of the project is still under development, but the research team has already contacted the necessary regulatory agencies for fast-track approval. 
• Dyson and Airbus are repurposing existing airflow, motor, and air filtration technologies into ventilator designs with the aim of producing 30,000 devices in short order.
• Ford is meanwhile partnering with 3M and GE to boost ventilator and respirator production in the U.S. 
• Elon Musk has announced that Tesla is converting its factory in Buffalo, NY, to produce ventilators “as soon as humanly possible.” 

Testing kits

• Abbott has developed a 5-minute test kit and will begin manufacturing 50,000 a day starting this week. 
• While Abbott’s test will identify individuals with an active infection, it will not identify individuals who may have already recovered without realizing it (either because they were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms). To detect such past exposure an antibody test is necessary. The UK has ordered 3.5 million such tests. And San Miguel County in Colorado is providing antibody tests to all 8,000 residents. Knowing who has already been exposed to the virus and recovered could mean that certain individuals are now immune and can safely resume work or care for others.

Therapeutics
The CDC is maintaining a list of known potential therapeutic options for COVID-19. The word “potential” must be emphasized here; there are no treatments that have cleared clinical trials and been proven effective. The WHO is seeking to provide such evidence and has announced the launch of a global “megatrial,” called SOLIDARITY, focused on the four most promising therapies. As the R&D process for new therapeutic agents is measured in years, not months, the treatments that are being explored are all based on existing drugs used to treat Ebola, malaria, or other diseases. 

Vaccines
The race for a vaccine is on. Prospect has a good roundup on the state of vaccine development and why it is likely to take at least 12–18 months before a vaccine can be ready (and why that is astoundingly fast relative to the development of other vaccines). Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, argues in last week’s issue of Science that the current efforts are not enough.

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Source: MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, CNN, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, NewScientist, The Atlantic, CDC, Science, Prospects

People

17

There were two notable transitions this month:

• Bill Gates announces he will step down from both the Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway boards of directors to focus on his work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• Nigel Fletcher-Jones announces he will retire from his role as Director of the American University in Cairo Press.

Miscellany

18

We mourn the death of mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson. Among other things, his work advanced quantum electrodynamics (or QED). He speculated on a method to achieve eternal life (“Some advanced consciousness could encode itself into a form of matter that would persist indefinitely into the cosmic future”) and that “alien civilizations, seeking to maximize their supply of energy, would build elaborate megastructures around their parent stars to capture much of the solar radiation.” These megastructures became known as Dyson Spheres. He was 96.

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Source: The New York Times, The Washington Post

19

We note the passing of Daniel Greenberg, who is credited with bringing a critical eye to science journalism.

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Source: The New York Times

20

Tunes for the times, here, and here. 

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Source: YouTube

21

With so many people at home, baking has skyrocketed — so much so that there are shortages of flour and yeast on some grocery store shelves. If you run out of yeast, here are some tips from a yeast geneticist for finding some on common items in your kitchen.

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Source: Sudeep Agarwala (@shoelaces3) via Twitter

22

These days, sometimes one just needs a drink. To lighten the spirits of those stuck at home during the virus outbreak, C&E offers its own recipe for the C&E Quarantini:

Ingredients:

• 2 ounces gin
• 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1 slice of lemon

Take the slice of lemon and rub it across the rim of a martini glass. Then pour all ingredients over ice in a shaker. Let cool for one minute. Shake vigorously. Then strain contents into glass. Sip. Repeat.

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Source: The New York Post

From Our Own Pens

23

Michael was interviewed by the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the LP Spotlight, highlighting his recent Learned Publishing article on publishing services agreements:

Publishers negotiate and sign many such deals every year whereas a society may only negotiate one every 5–10 years. And independent societies considering a PSA may have no experience with such agreements. The aim of this article was to provide some information that can help societies rebalance this information asymmetry.

Meet with C&E

It was just a month ago that this section of The Brief listed a full roster of spring events. The world has changed with breathtaking rapidity. With spring and summer meetings cancelled, we are finding ourselves on video conference services more and more. Let’s schedule a Zoom. We’d love to hear from you and talk about how we can help your organization adapt to these unprecedented times.

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Nature always has more imagination than we have. ― Freeman Dyson