Professional & Academic Publishing
1
Years in development, medRxiv has launched. A partnership between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (creators of bioRxiv), BMJ, and Yale University, the preprint server began accepting papers on June 6. While in many ways a clone of bioRxiv, medRxiv employs additional scrutiny of content submitted to the platform due to concerns about the potential impact on patient safely. According to an interview in Science with Harlan Krumholz, the cardiologist at Yale who first proposed the platform, medRxiv will employ three “guardrails”:
First, authors will have to “declare,” or certify, that their preprints include ethics reviews, clinical trial registration, patient consent, funding sources, and conflict of interest information. Second, the papers will be screened for general legitimacy by volunteer researchers, known as “affiliates,” and a professional medical editor who—at least at first—will be the only person who can post the preprint. Finally, prominent labels will describe manuscripts as not yet peer reviewed and caution medical journalists to keep that in mind if they write about the paper.
Additionally, medRxiv will decline papers on sensitive topics (e.g., anti-vaxx papers) with implications for public health. This is all well and good. The stakes are higher with clinical content and often fraught ethical issues with which a basic research preprint platform need not contend. On the other hand, this additional “screening” by “affiliates” sounds not terribly dissimilar from peer review (especially the “sound science” peer review practiced by an increasing number of journals). “Screening” implies that papers are accepted or rejected on a thumbs-up/down basis, whereas peer review often involves at least one stage of revisions and other substantive feedback. But the bright line between what is a preprint and what is a journal article begins to look not quite as bright as it once did, even if there is a big message at the top of every article proclaiming that the paper has not been reviewed. Does this matter though? As long as medRxiv is used like bioRxiv (which is to say, as a preprint server with the majority of papers going on to publication and formal peer review), then it doesn’t seem like it does. The extra scrutiny seems both welcome and warranted.
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Source: medRxiv, BMJ, Science
2
The 2019 European Big Deals Survey Report (the second of its kind) has been released. It represents over 1 billion euros in content and covers 167 contracts spanning 31 consortia and five major publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and American Chemical Society. As one would have expected, open access topics are centerstage in the report, though not monolithically so. Controlling costs remains the most important concern in negotiations. Combining subscriptions and open access fees (e.g., “Read and Publish”) was indicated as a main point of negotiations by only 65% of respondents—though only 19% of respondents currently have such terms in place. The respondents reported €726 million in spending on journal Big Deals. Of this total, €475 million was spent with the five publishers listed above. Elsevier walks away with the lion’s share, or 56% of the €475 million. And yet, many respondents reported that Elsevier represents the best value on a cost per download basis. A lot of interesting information here even if only a slice of the market.Put content here
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Source: European University Association
3
OhioLINK, a library consortium serving 89 colleges and universities in the State of Ohio, has announced a pilot project with Wiley for Open Access publishing. Under the agreement, OhioLINK will administer a central fund for article publication charges (APCs) in Wiley journals. According to the press release, “OhioLINK is the first North American library consortium to centrally fund the creation and dissemination of open access research.” This is also notable because of the heterogeneity among institutions in the consortium. OhioLINK encompasses both institutions with modest research output (“Read” institutions) and those with large research agendas (“Publish” institutions)—and these institutions have different interests. OhioLINK’s Executive Director, Gwen Evans, said, “Our members are deeply committed to open research and publications, but these transformative agreements will have different implications for different types of consortia.”
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Source: Wiley, The Scholarly Kitchen
4
While many of the initiatives from funding agencies, including those for Plan S, have as one of their goals the reduction of APCs, a contrarian voice has emerged on the blog of the London School of Economics. The argument is that many authors believe that there are quality issues connected to OA publishing (whether this is true or not is irrelevant: the essential point is that many authors believe this). Such authors thus seek better OA outlets for their work, and higher APCs are (to these authors) a signal of quality. “It is hard to imagine any downward pressure on APCs. Low-fee journals are associated with predatory behaviour, making authors increasingly wary of unfamiliar publishers and journals. In a market where higher fees help to indicate prestige and legitimacy, the profit-motive of commercial publishers and careerism of authors is perversely aligned.” We have been studying this matter for many years now; Joe first wrote about it in 2004 and updated his thinking five years ago. Whether the architects of Plan S will be able to change authors’ beliefs and behavior remains to be seen.
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Source: LSE Impact Blog, First Monday, The Scholarly Kitchen
5
In March of this year, Springer Nature and ResearchGate launched a pilot project to determine what would be the effect of placing Springer Nature articles on the ResearchGate site, as part of author profiles. The pilot was limited; only 23 Springer Nature journals were involved. Now the two companies have announced that the pilot resulted in positive feedback from users (including authors of the articles) and that they will extend it. The extension takes multiple forms, the principal ones being the addition of more Springer Nature journals (including some highly specialized ones) and an examination of full vs. limited access to the articles. As part of the extended pilot, researchers without a Springer Nature institutional subscription will be able to view articles only in a non-downloadable format. Subscribers will have access to full text on the ResearchGate site as well as a downloadable copy. ResearchGate has also committed to promoting on its site the libraries’ role in making the content available.
Is this pilot a prelude to an acquisition of ResearchGate, either by Springer Nature or its sibling Digital Science? The willingness to work cooperatively with publishers (or at least one publisher), and to provide different levels of access based on institutional entitlements, certainly represents a change in stance for ResearchGate. That said, we surmise that the passage of Article 13 of the 2019 EU Copyright Directive might have more than a little to do with this newfound spirit of collaboration. The same directive may also result in a substantive haircut to ResearchGate’s valuation. The primary use case for ResearchGate (if you ask researchers) is to share papers. This activity (sharing papers) will now occur under the terms set by publishers as Article 13 requires ResearchGate to proactively obtain permission from copyright holders for any articles that appear on its platform. This will likely hamper ResearchGate’s growth prospects and path to profitability (if such a path has ever existed) as well as interest in attracting additional investment, all of which make an acquisition more likely in the near term. As an aside, the Plan S requirement for copyright to be retained by the author and the Plan S prohibition against CC-BY-NC licenses result in an end-run around Article 13 that can be employed by ResearchGate (along with other platforms). It is notable that the Wellcome Trust and Bill Gates are both investors in ResearchGate—and that the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are signatories to Plan S.
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Source: Springer Nature, BBC
6
Carl Malamud is back. The force behind Public.Resource.org, Malamud is known among public domain advocates as the man who tried to make the law freely available to the public. He has also campaigned effectively for putting published industrial standards into the public domain if they are referred to in statutes (“incorporated by reference”). His latest venture concerns text- and data-mining rights to scientific articles, a huge number of which he has gathered together (they were sourced from Sci-Hub, but Malamud is not saying how he got them) and placed in a database in India. Malamud’s goal is to make the huge database of material available for machine analysis, which brings us to the interesting legal argument that TDM is not a form of copyright infringement as it is “non-consumptive,” that is, it is not read by a human and thus has not been “consumed.” (Readers may wish to study Matthew Sag’s argument that machine-reading is “non-expressive”—since machines cannot express anything—because they are, well, machines.) What distinguishes Malamud’s new venture is that he is attempting to create a piece of infrastructure that would enable researchers everywhere—excuse me: I meant machines everywhere—to experiment with this database. The aptly named tech blog Techdirt is gleeful about Malamud’s current project and includes the following snarky section below the headline: “from the sci-hub-to-the-rescue-again dept,” reinforcing our dismal view of tech industry coverage of scholarly publishing.
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Source: Nature,The New York Times, ABA Journal, SSRN, Techdirt
Higher Education
7
Amid a struggling local economy and declining oil and gas revenues, the governor of Alaska has just implemented a 41% cut ($130 million) to the amount the state provides for its university system. It is a figure so high as to be essentially unthinkable, as it will involve closing campuses, eliminating faculty positions, and reducing student enrollment. It is unthinkable until it happens, as it is now. The university is already preparing to furlough large numbers of its employees. The governor campaigned to restore the dividend each state resident receives for energy royalties (formerly $3,000 per individual per year) and to close a large budget deficit. The university is not the only affected area, but it is noteworthy because of the scale of the cuts and the implicit comment about the future of the Alaskan economy. The governor summarized his rationale by asserting that “We can’t continue to be all things for all people.” Sadly, just as the situation in Alaska came to light, news came of comparably devastating action in Puerto Rico, where the “public university system is facing cuts of a similar magnitude, and on a similar, albeit somewhat longer, time frame. The appropriation for the University of Puerto Rico’s operating expenses was slashed by $86 million this year, to about $501 million, following on a $44 million cut the year before that and a $203 million cut the year before that.”
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Source: The New York Times, Inside Higher Ed
8
College administrators are bracing for what could be a huge shortfall in young applicants beginning in 2026. This anxiety is based on extrapolations from enrollment numbers in K–12 schools, which dropped sharply with the number of live births during the Great Recession. As many colleges and universities, especially public ones, get their funding based on enrollments, this could prompt an ongoing series of budget cuts and reduced programs. Not all institutions will be affected equally; the elite colleges and universities are likely to experience continued and even increasing demand; “So it looks like it won’t get any easier to get into Harvard. Sorry, kids!” What is unknown is whether all demographic groups will behave as they have historically. For example, young Hispanic people have in the past been less likely to apply for college than the average for Americans as a whole. A change in that one large demographic group could upend the forecast of decline.
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Source: Bloomberg
9
Another defense of Stanford University Press. Interestingly, it is written by a libertarian, who notes: “Academic presses published pathbreaking books by leading libertarian thinkers, including F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, at a time when other publishers were reluctant to print them. Without those crucial early publications, libertarian ideas might not have achieved their current prominence. The same is true for many other schools of thought that challenge dominant intellectual orthodoxies.”
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Source: The Atlantic
10
Barnes & Noble is to be acquired by hedge fund Elliott Advisors, ending, at least for the time being, a saga of decline that began when Amazon began its brisk march to invent, and then dominate, online commerce. Vulture has provided a timeline of B&N’s many missteps, which makes for dispiriting reading. The new firm will be run by the CEO of Waterstones, James Daunt, who is credited with turning around the UK bookseller (Elliott now owns both companies). It is an open question whether Daunt’s merchandising strategy, with its focus on local curation, will work in the far greater geography of the U.S. and how the combined entity will fare at the task of working on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. The activist investing style of Elliott Advisors will be another factor in the new combination. A profile of Elliott founder Paul Singer in The New Yorker makes it clear that the future of B&N will not be a children’s story. We would love to see a thriving network of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, but perhaps that ship has sailed.
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Source: The New York Times, Vulture, The New Yorker
Technology
11
We have been digesting the latest edition of Mary Meeker’s annual survey of the Internet. This year the presentation weighs in at over 300 slides, packed with data. How much advertising is there on the Internet? Who controls it? What are the growth rates? How do people access the Internet? (Answer: with mobile phones.) What is the geographical distribution of the user base? The market capitalization of the largest players? The data go on and on. No online marketer can afford to overlook this reference. Vox summarizes a number of key points, of which this is one: “Of the top 25 most valuable tech companies, 60 percent were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. They employed 1.9 million people last year. New stricter immigration laws could negatively impact the tech industry and perhaps prevent our next Elon Musk from getting to the US.”
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Source: Vox
12
Every year we pore over Marshall Breeding’s library systems report, which remains the best overview of what is happening in the world of library automation. In this year’s report, Breeding makes some reasonable estimates about the length of the “innovation cycle”:
The innovation cycle in academic libraries will likely run to completion in the next five years with ever-growing momentum. The window of opportunity is limited for new systems to enter and disrupt the current wave of movement toward Alma and WorldShare Management Services.
Yes, momentum continues toward Alma and WorldShare, despite the range of options Breeding catalogs. This year, however, we read the report with a twinge of skepticism. Will we really have to wait five years for the current paradigm to mature, or are the fault lines in the current offerings, including Alma and WorldShare, already beginning to show, especially in the area of the management of electronic resources? At the same time we have begun to think about the relatively modest size of the market for library platforms and to wonder if any vendor has developed a strategy to think beyond the ILS and the library, providing broader functionality and enabling greater revenue growth. Before five years are up, might library systems begin to provide an additional suite of analytic services that could put them in contention with Clarivate and Elsevier? No librarian will be able to shush the fierce combatants, with so much riding on the outcome.
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Source: American Libraries
Miscellany
13
The heartwarming stories of public libraries never end. We now learn of a library in a boat. “Sweden has a floating library—the bokbåten—that brings thousands of books to people on dozens of remote islands in the Stockholm archipelago twice a year. Every spring and fall since 1953, the Stockholm Library Service rents a boat for a week, loads it full of books, and charts a course for about 23 inhabited islands.” Does the library charge late fees?
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Source: Mother Nature Network
14
For the Highly Recommended reading list we nominate the posthumously published Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life by Princeton economics professor Alan Krueger (Penguin Random House, 2019). Krueger’s aim is to illustrate some important issues in economics, in particular the “winner-takes-all” phenomenon of certain industries, with reference to the quintessential superstar industry that is music. There are analogs, if not precise, to scholarly communications: Why do some journals get so many submissions? Why are their impact factors so high? In music Krueger notes that the combination of scale (global markets reached through mass communications) and distinctive talent (with a dollop of luck) makes superstars possible. There is on every page a concise introduction to an aspect of economic theory, making this a candidate for extensive classroom use or simply for those looking to brush up on the dismal science.
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Source: Penguin Random House, The New York Times
15
In a brilliant photo essay that might constitute the best (or at least most humorous) coverage of a scientific meeting we have ever come across, Scott Alexander reports on this year’s conference of the American Psychiatric Association. Alexander remarks that he is “reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.”
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Source: Slate Star Codex
16
As we spend a great deal of our time in our professional lives herding cats, we were intrigued by the findings of an experiment in which tiny video cameras were strapped onto 16 cats, reported on in Science. The cats were placed outside and did what cats do, with the cameras recording everything. Among the observations: cats behave differently depending on whether they are inside or out and differently again when they are around humans, to whom the cats are attached (who knew?). The cats were not all cooperative (which surprises precisely no one): “We started with 21 cats, but only 16 tolerated the cameras. The others either started racing around or tried to scratch them off. One mother cat was like this, and when we put the camera on her son, she began hitting him. So we didn’t use either cat.” As territorial as cats can be, it was something of a surprise to find that they often did not engage each other aggressively, but sat a few feet apart from one another. We were also charmed by the acknowledgments: “I always acknowledge the animals I work with. I’ve been doing that since my Ph.D. thesis. I do feel thankful because if the cats didn’t oblige us, we couldn’t do the study.”
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Source: Applied Animal Behavior Science, Science
From Our Own Pens
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Joe wrote about a controversial move by Knowledge Unlatched to create an aggregate site of all OA books. OA advocates have attacked KU for this, but, as Joe points out, the real problem lies in the CC licenses that OA publishers use—and advocates insist on. Fix the license and the problem goes away.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
Meetings & Events
We will be attending the following events. Let us know if you would like to set up some time to chat. We’d love to hear from you (info@ce-strategy.com).
- Silverchair Platform Strategies, September 25–26, 2019, New York, NY
- Charleston Conference, November 4–8, Charleston, SC
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution―is not my solution. – Zadie Smith, White Teeth