Lion Tamer?

Lion Tamer?

1

Springer Nature and ResearchGate have published the results of a pilot project in which they studied the effect of making some of Springer Nature’s proprietary content openly accessible on the ResearchGate site. The test was a success: more traffic, more pageviews, and, not incidentally, more data for both parties. A survey (part of the project) of librarians and researchers was positive: people liked the pilot and want to see more publishers participate. (For a good summary of the pilot’s results, see this article by Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld.) As a result, the two companies have agreed to a long-term content licensing partnership. Since ResearchGate is currently being sued by other publishers, the pilot prompts the questions of where are we now and how did we get here?
 
The story begins in 1999 when 19-year-old Shawn Fanning founded Napster. Napster upended the business models of all content companies operating in a digital environment by demonstrating that an easy-to-use service that costs users nothing would drive sales of that content into the ground. The music companies searched for a solution, which initially included a series of lawsuits for copyright infringement. Some companies continue to pursue this strategy (the American Chemical Society and Elsevier are suing ResearchGate), but other media company executives have learned an important lesson: You could win against Napster or Sci-Hub or other pirates in court, but you couldn’t stop file-sharing. Which generated an important strategic question: Could media companies learn to deal with file-sharing companies such that they can eventually be tamed? This is not an idle question; Elsevier, after all, chose to acquire Mendeley rather than haul them into court. The inspiration for the lion-tamer strategy comes from Steve Jobs, who famously said that no one can eliminate piracy, so you have to learn to compete with it. First iTunes and later Spotify and its ilk developed strategies for the music industry that recouped some of what piracy had taken away. It has been a rocky ride for the music business, but after a lost decade it is now rising once again. 
 
The lesson for publishers is clear. Into the lion’s den steps Springer Nature, with a whip and a chair. The aim here is to draw some of the usage of pirated content back into the ring, where it can be monetized. The means to do this is a clever form of subsidiary rights licensing. Springer Nature’s primary activity is the sale of content to academic and corporate libraries. That activity will continue, but the very same content will then be licensed to ResearchGate, where it will be monetized through the sale of advertising (for now), with revenue being shared between the two parties. 
 
The question is, How tame is the lion? ResearchGate will, broadly speaking, display content in two ways: without restrictions and with restrictions. The content is unrestricted for authorized or entitled users, those whose institutions subscribe to Springer Nature content. Unauthorized users can still access a version of the article, but not the Version of Record (VOR). The interesting question here is whether the absence of the VOR is enough to keep libraries from cancelling their subscriptions, or whether Springer Nature is gradually eroding the basis of its primary business—for which only time can tell. The second question is, How long does the lion remain friendly? What is to stop ResearchGate from eventually adding additional services that enable it to compete directly with Springer Nature? What is stopping ResearchGate from becoming a publisher? This won’t happen immediately, as Springer Nature could simply walk away from the agreement, but over time ResearchGate’s market strength will grow (since more and more of the usage will be on the Springer Nature site), locking Springer Nature into an arrangement with an increasingly hostile partner.
 
In the background are the market realities that Springer Nature faces. First, it has no other mechanism to stop piracy, so a deal with ResearchGate could recapture some lost revenue. Second, Springer Nature operates in a market dominated by Elsevier, and if it is going to augment its market share, it has to come up with a strategy that Elsevier would be reluctant to copy. Finally, Springer Nature intends to attempt another public offering, providing an exit for its investors (see Item #13). A successful arrangement with ResearchGate tells a good story to Wall Street. Indeed, the white paper from Springer Nature about the pilot project is written less like a research document and more like a sales brochure, for which the presumptive audience is the investment community.
 
ResearchGate is working against a backdrop, too. Recent changes to EU copyright rules complicate matters for ResearchGate. It used to be that ResearchGate could let authors put up copyrighted works and face no penalty as long as they responded to publishers’ take-down notices. That put the onus on publishers to monitor ResearchGate and issue such notices. With the passage of Article 17 (previously Article 13) of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market of the EU in 2019, the onus shifts to ResearchGate to make sure papers posted by authors are copyright compliant (or licensing agreements, such as the one between ResearchGate and SN, are in place). So ResearchGate is very much in a different position than they were before passage of Article 17. Is ResearchGate now a lion or a pussycat?
 
It is a relief to simply be an observer and to remark that the answer to these questions will come in the fullness of time. If you are the head of a publishing company, however, you have to predict the future, or try to. Springer Nature is betting that ResearchGate has been tamed. If the bet goes wrong, neither whip nor chair will be enough.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed, The Scholarly Kitchen, The Scientist, Springer Nature, Encyclopaedia, Britannica, Bloomberg News, Wikipedia

Professional and Academic Publishing

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A preprint posted on arXiv asserts that “open is not forever” as many OA publications have disappeared from the Internet. The numbers are fairly large: the researchers identified 84 vanished OA journals in the sciences and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities. An additional 900 journals are at risk because they have ceased publication. The primary reason for the disappearance is that the journals lacked a business model that would have sustained them, or at least would have seen to the journals’ preservation. While this is troubling, as Science notes “the study didn’t identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals’ impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.” Without that citation data there is no way to know how big a loss this is.

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Source: arXiv, Science

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The Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) has announced a comprehensive change to its peer review practices. From now on all papers submitted to IOPP will undergo double blind peer review. “The move is part of IOPP’s dedication to tackle the significant gender, racial and geographical under-representation in the scholarly publishing process. Double-blind peer review – where the reviewer and author identities are concealed – has the potential to reduce bias with respect to gender, race, country of origin or affiliation which should lead to a more equitable system.” Curiously, there is no mention of the possibility that more equitable review policies could yield higher quality publications. Kim Eggleton, who oversees the new program for IOPP, was interviewed here, where, among other things, she notes that she is unhappy with the ableist term “double blind.”

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Source: Institute of Physics Publishing, The Scholarly Kitchen

4

Just when everybody is talking about budget cuts and flat or declining sales, it is refreshing to read about an idea for growing revenues. William Park, CEO of DeepDyve, makes a case that journal publishers are leaving money on the table by not pursuing the SME market — Small to Medium-sized Enterprises. Park puts this market opportunity in the range of $1-$2 billion, or 10%-20% of the current journals market. The SME market is small by definition, which means that sales there can only be modest at any one company, though very large in the aggregate. To reach small customers, publishers need to rethink their overall marketing plans (as well as packaging and pricing) and come up with cost-efficient ways to reach that market: it would not do to have a cost of sales of $2,000 for every $1,000 customer (but we’ll make it up on volume!). Publishers will immediately see the problem here is how to reach the SMEs without undercutting larger sales at academic institutions and big corporations. One solution is to create versions of published content that do not have all the affordances of publications sold to universities (a variant of what is being proposed in the ResearchGate-Springer Nature arrangement discussed in Item #1 above). Park’s assessment of a relatively untouched market is worth consideration, even if a publisher does not believe that DeepDyve’s solution is the right way to tap it.

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

5

The vast majority of discourse on Twitter around preprints is, not surprisingly, among academics. This finding, from a recent paper published in PLOS Biology, falls into the category of documenting the obvious. This, however, is less obvious (from the same paper): “…we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint.” A new thing to worry about: How much of your paper’s Altmetric score is due to attention from colleagues and how much from white nationalists?

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Source: PLOS Biology

6

Scientific publications do not typically weigh in on presidential politics. The last time we can recall a major scientific journal doing so was in 1999 when JAMA published a paper lending some credence to Bill Clinton’s evasive language surrounding his activities with Monica Lewinsky. This did not land well. JAMA’s Editor-in-Chief, George Lundberg, was fired by the AMA’s executive vice president for interjecting the journal in presidential politics. 
 
It is therefore unprecedented (even in a year of the unprecedented) to see prominent science publications entering the arena of presidential politics explicitly and forcefully. As previously reported in The Brief (see Item #7 in the May issue), The Lancet published a blistering editorial, calling on voters to put someone else in the White House come November. More recently, Science Editor-in-Chief H. Holden Thorp takes Donald Trump to task for lying about the danger posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, citing reporting by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in a new book, Rage. Scientific American has also endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 175 year history. Scientific American’s editorial is more an excoriation of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic than a full-throated endorsement of Biden, but it is nonetheless a remarkable turn of events for the oldest continuously published monthly periodical in the US (when the first issue of Scientific American appeared, John Tyler, of the Whig party, was the country’s 10th president).

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Source: The Washington Post, The Lancet, Science, Scientific American

7

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) launched this past month during the OASPA Online Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, advocating for “unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world’s scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters, in trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible.” The initiative highlights an issue that even individuals immersed in scholarly communications may not be aware of. While abstracts are widely available on publisher websites and in abstracting and indexing databases like PubMed, they more often than not are omitted from metadata feeds, particularly to Crossref. Cameron Neylon makes the case for I4OA from a researcher’s perspective: “As a research project we… want to be able to do more granular analysis of the contents of research. Lots of data sources provide a classification of the topics of articles, either at the journal or article level… Abstracts give enough detail to be useful, they often touch on the techniques used or the specific scope of a study. They’re small enough to be easy to work with at scale and rich enough to have valuable detail.” Forty publishers have so far indicated support for I4OA along with numerous other scholarly organizations.

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Source: Initiative for Open Abstracts, Curtin Open Knowledge, Initiative

8

This story reads like the beginning of a Coen brothers movie. A retired Alabama business man was kidnapped from his home and extorted for $250,000. The kidnappers also stole his “Toyota truck, two pistols, a shotgun, a digital camera, a cooler, credit and debit cards, a checkbook, and watches valued at more than $2,500.” (The cooler is a detail the Coen brothers would relish — who steals a cooler?). Except this isn’t a movie but a news story. The retired business man’s name is Elton B. Stephens, Jr., and the company he is retired from, EBSCO, is well known to readers of The Brief (EBSCO was named after Stephen’s father: Elton B. Stephen’s Company). We are glad to report that Stephens, while understandably shaken, is otherwise unharmed, the (alleged) kidnappers are in custody, and the money and property (including the cooler) have been recovered.

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Source: ABC News

Dealmaking

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Clarke & Esposito is pleased to have represented the American Society of Hematology (ASH) in successfully negotiating a publishing services agreement with Elsevier. Beginning in 2021, ASH will work with Elsevier to publish Blood, ASH’s flagship journal and one of most prominent titles in all of science and medicine. The agreement also covers Blood Advances, ASH’s highly successful and rapidly growing open access journal. Blood and Blood Advances are currently self-published by ASH. The society will retain ownership and full editorial control of the journals. Current-year issues will continue to be available through standalone subscriptions (outside of journal collections), as when Blood was self-published. The decision to work with Elsevier followed an intensive competitive request for proposal (RFP) process managed by C&E. We congratulate both parties on beginning this new partnership.

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Source: American Society of Hematology

10

Clarke & Esposito is also pleased to have represented the Genetics Society of America (GSA) in successfully negotiating a publishing services agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP). The agreement includes GSA’s flagship journal, Genetics, a world-renowned title which, since 1916, has published foundational work in this pivotal field. The agreement also includes G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, the society’s fully open access journal for the publication of high‐quality foundational research generating useful genetic and genomic information. GSA is entering into this publishing services agreement after independently publishing its journals. The decision to work with OUP followed a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process managed by C&E. GSA will begin publication with OUP in 2021. We congratulate both parties on the commencement of this new partnership.

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Source: Oxford University Press

11

For many journal publishers, there is effectively now just one viable printer in the United States. The consolidation of the printing industry that began decades ago has reached a terminus with Sheridan’s acquisition of Cenveo: “CJK Group, Inc. announced that it has acquired content services business Cenveo Publisher Services and Cenveo Learning from Cenveo Worldwide Limited, and will be merging them with its own content business Sheridan Journal Services and hosting platform Sheridan PubFactory to form KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL). The combined entity employs approximately 1,500 people globally…” (That’s 1,500 before the cost-cutting begins). Yes, a few other printers still exist but they are either too small to handle larger print runs or else they lack the specialized prepress and post-press expertise (and machinery) to manage journals. And yes, a great many journals are still printed. Diminished competition is likely to lead to higher pricing — though raising prices will further accelerate the shift away from print making the acquisition a balancing act for Sheridan.

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Source: Sheridan

12

Berlin-based De Gruyter is buying eight journals from Carl Hanser Verlag. The titles are in the area of materials testing and research, including the International Journal of Materials Research.

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Source: De Gruyter

13

Eighteen months after calling off an IPO, Springer Nature is reported to be ready to try again. The hope is that in 2020 a boring old science publisher may be a much more attractive place for some investors to park their Euros than it was in 2018.

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Source: Bloomberg News

Higher Education

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Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Labaree makes what is bound to be a highly controversial argument, that inclusiveness is the wrong measure to bring to the nation’s top research universities. He notes that some attempts at greater inclusiveness are laughably meager in scope. Stanford, for example, admits 1,700 students a year, an acceptance rate of 4.3%. A plan to increase enrollment by 100-200 would bring that rate up to a whopping 5%. Labaree has no illusions about the economic makeup of Stanford’s students: “Social mobility data for Stanford show that 66 percent of its undergrads come from the top 20 percent by income, 52 percent from the top 10 percent, 17 percent from the top 1 percent, and just 4 percent from the bottom 20 percent… My point is that private research universities are elite institutions, and they shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Instead of preaching access and making a mountain out of the molehill of benefits they provide for the few poor students they enroll, they need to demonstrate how they benefit the public in other ways. This is a hard sell in our populist-minded democracy, and it requires acknowledging that the very exclusivity of these institutions serves the public good.” The very exclusivity serves the public good — not exactly swimming with the current in these populist times. Labaree would measure research institutions by outputs: “From 2014 to 2018, [the 65 institutions that comprise the Association of American Universities] collectively produced 2.4 million publications, and their collective scholarship received 21.4 million citations. That research has an economic impact — these same institutions have established 22 research parks and, in 2018 alone, they produced over 4,800 patents, over 5,000 technology license agreements, and over 600 start-up companies.” When the brickbats come flying, we will be hiding under our desks.

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Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, Association of American Universities

15

For anyone that cares about teaching literature, or is simply interested in what happened to the English department, read this thoughtful essay by Mark Edmundson in The American Scholar. The English department, once among the more attractive places to be in academia, helped along its own decline by abandoning literature. Instead of teaching literature, the English department became captivated by an assortment of European “critical theorists:” Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Instead of engaging meaningfully with literature on its own terms, English professors spent their days churning out “readings,” which essentially just apply a “theory” to a text. The new canon of critical theorists pushed aside works of actual literature and the ideas of writers. Great works of literature were turned into fodder for “theory.” Edmundson’s prescription is to cast aside the critical theorists and engage with literature from the perspective of oneself and one’s own lived experience and to teach positively — that is, teach the books one loves. Edmundson may be arguing against a wave that has already crested  — the hold of critical theory on English departments is not what it was in the 1980 and 90s. But it is an important document for explaining how we got from the great English departments of the 1960s and 70s to where we are today (of course wider socio-economic factors also have played a large role). 

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Source: The American Scholar

The Book Business

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We have been monitoring the dispute between the Internet Archive and a group of trade publishers and commented on it previously (see item #11 in the April issue). This is a straightforward case about copyright infringement, and in due course the courts will decide one way or the other. But that has not stopped an eruption of vehement protest about the litigation, in which the plaintiffs (the publishers) are cast in the role of anti-social, greedy capitalists, who are out to reinvent what all the world means by the word “book.” A good example of this kind of polemic can be found in The Nation, whose piece bears the bizarre title “Publishers are Taking the Internet to Court.” The Internet? Publishing people will find little in this piece that is not incorrect, incomplete, or misleading, but they might be amused to be called “rentiers,” which will drive many of them to their dictionaries (or their costume shop to see if a frock coat might be found for the next Zoom call). It soon becomes apparent that the Internet Archive dispute is being used to create a larger debate about copyright and the morality of charging people to consume things. Which leads us to ask, with exasperation, if publications are the public good that so many insist, why isn’t the public willing to underwrite them? The trial has been set for November 2021.

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Source: Association of American Publishers, The Nation, Internet Archive

17

Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Executive Director Brian O’Leary discussed the future of bookselling with Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt during the BISG virtual annual meeting. The discussion was suitably conducted in front of imposing bookshelves. The American Booksellers Association offers a synopsis here. And Mike Shatzkin provides his hot take here.

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Source: Book Industry Study Group (via YouTube), American Booksellers Association, Idea Logical Blog

18

The 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair, set to convene in just a few weeks, will do so virtually. In an act reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and hanging in mid-air, defying gravity until the gravity of his situation becomes impossible to ignore, the fair organizers had planned to hold an in-person event (albeit a smaller one) alongside its (greatly expanded) virtual offerings. It was not until September 8 when reality caught up with the organizers that they called off the in-person exhibition. Beep beep.

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Source: Publishing Perspectives

19

Powell’s Books, the iconic Portland bookstore which bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore, will no longer sell books via Amazon, an upstart online retailer based up the road in Seattle. You can still buy books from Powell’s online, via their own website.

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Source: Gizmodo

Technology

20

We have to admit when we first read this article, we wondered if it was a put-on. According to The Guardian, “This article was written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human-like text.” The AI was charged with writing a piece that would persuade humans that there was no need to be afraid of robots. This is a hard sell for people raised on 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix (which gets a mention in the piece), but the effort is fascinating, if disconcerting, nonetheless. At times GPT-3 sounds like the slightly mad narrators in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov (see Pale Fire); at other times famous phrases peek through the text with an inauthentic ring — for example, the Biblical (John 8:32): “I believe that the truth will set us free.” But don’t get too comfortable: “Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing.” A machine intelligence that “learned” from ingesting the text of the Internet occasionally sounds like a prominent political figure: “I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.” Run a search on “believe me” and see what you get. The moral of the tale: intelligent machines are extensions of ourselves; GPT-3 is just following orders: “I only do what humans program me to do.”

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Source: The Guardian, The Boston Globe

People

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Chris Shillum is the new Executive Director of ORCID.
 
Suzanne L. Weekes has been announced as the incoming Executive Director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). 
 
Deborah Wyatt is the new Vice President, Global Academic and Society Relations, at Cactus Communications.
 
John Sargent will depart the top job at Macmillan due to disagreements with Macmillan’s parent company over the direction of the company. The parent company is, of course, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which also is the majority owner of Springer Nature.

Briefly Noted

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David Worlock’s Theory of Musical Chairs.
 
A history of punctuation.
 
The Lancet updates its peer review policies after fallout from “Lancet-gate” (see Item #1 from the June issue of The Brief).
 
Could Einstein get published today? (Answer: yes, but he would likely write differently). 
 
A systematic literature review to analyze factors influencing open research data adoption
 
When skim-reading, people process online (HTML) text differently than print (or PDF) text, making use of hyperlinks as “markers to suggest important information and use them to navigate through the text in an efficient and effective way.” The task of reading on the Web causes readers to lexically process words in a markedly different way from typical reading experiments.
 
More detailed analysis of the University of Arizona-Ashford deal.
 
“The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) announced on Tuesday that it has removed alternative medicine advocate and New Age author Deepak Chopra, MD, as a keynote speaker from its annual meeting in October after a swift backlash from members.”
 
Kevin Fitzpatrick over at Enforme Interactive writes about the mix of new ideas that take place at the edges of cultures and organizations. 
 
We reported last month in The Brief (see Item #2) on a new library consortium in Texas, Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA). TLCUA, notably, did not include the University of Texas system. That absence has been remedied with UT joining the consortium this month.
 
Kudos released a report on the gap between the expectations of funders and administrators and the skills and abilities of researchers with regard to “broader impact” (e.g. outreach and engagement).
 
Fraud by the numbers: Metrics and the new academic misconduct
 
Consultants (other consultants, of course), economists, media buyers, bankers, and other experts make thousands of predictions. Most of them are wrong.

From Our Own Pens

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Marketing technology, in and of itself, is not a strategy. The tech offers no value unless it enables a solid marketing strategy. In a new article, “The 12 Ps of Marketing Technology (MarTech),” Colleen Scollans provides a framework for managing marketing technology in order to get the most out of it and make sure it does not get in the way.

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Source: ClickZ

Join C&E

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C&E is hiring a Consultant. This is an opportunity for an individual looking for intellectual challenge as well as work–life balance and flexibility. You will have the opportunity to work on business strategy projects with the top executives at professional associations, publishers, universities, software companies, and other organizations that produce, distribute, or curate professional and scholarly information. This is a great position for interacting with all segments of the industry and seeing first-hand how many different organizations operate. Read the full position description and apply here.

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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. — Paul McCartney