Professional & Academic Publishing
1
“OA tipping point in 5 years” has become the new “Print will be dead in 5 years.” Knowledgeable industry experts have been predicting the end of print for over 20 years. “Print will be dead in 5 years” has been uttered in more presentations and conference bar discussions than we could possibly count starting in the late 1990s (here is an article on the topic Joe wrote in exasperation in 2015). And yet here we are heading into 2020 and print die-off in journals has only really just started. PNAS, a bellwether for the industry, only ceased printing earlier this year. Paraphrasing William Gibson, print, much like the future, is unevenly distributed. Medical journals are still mostly printed, as are those in the humanities. Academic monographs are still primarily a print product; the vast majority of sales are to the print edition.
One hears fewer predictions about the demise of print these days—the parlor game has moved on to open access and when the “tipping point” (a sudden global flip to OA) will arrive. This parlor game, of course, presumes there will be a tipping point. In both this presumption, and the messianic fervor in which the event is described in some quarters, the OA tipping point has come to resemble predictions of the Singularity (the AI tipping point).
This panel at the recent ALPSP conference is the latest to engage in OA tipping point predictification. (It is a good panel discussion and kudos to Sarah Greaves at Hindawi for prefacing her question, which prompted the discussion, with the acknowledgment that such predictions have been made with a five-year moving time horizon for a long time. Also kudos to Cadmore Media for the provisioning of a video viewer that allows links to specific points in a conference video!)
The future is a vexing creature. It seldom turns out the way we expect it to and even if it does ultimately intersect with our expectations it may do so on a very different timeline. What seems like a straight path may very well make several unexpected u-turns. Remember when MOOCs were going to take over the world? And also megajournals? Who would have predicted that sales of vinyl records would continue long after the decline of the CD and the rise of streaming music? Who would have predicted the surprising staying power of the print codex (some publishers have actually reported declining sales of ebooks relative to print) and the unexpected rise of audiobooks?
And so we approach any predictions with regard to a timeline for an OA tipping point with skepticism. It is also not at all clear that there will be a tipping point. It is entirely possible that we will end up in a pluralistic world with multiple formats and business models coexisting. Funding agencies in the US, the EU, and China may ultimately support different open access policies (the lack of enthusiasm for Plan S outside of Europe may foreshadow future geographical policy divisions, as Richard Poynder discusses in detail—see Item 4 below). The market may also bifurcate with selective journals continuing to be oriented around the subscription model and less selective, high volume journals operating under one or more open access business models. The challenge for publishers and other organizations operating with imperfect views of the future (which is all of us) is to simultaneously prepare for multiple possible future scenarios, at least one of which includes the continued existence of the much abused but still vital subscription.
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Source: ALPSP, The Scholarly Kitchen, Pew Research Center
2
Speaking of the lack of enthusiasm for Plan S outside of Europe, India will not be joining the coalition after all. Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, the country’s principal scientific adviser, had announced back in February that India would be signing on to Plan S. Speaking to The Wire last month, VijayRaghavan explained that “Since February 2018, some water has flowed under the bridge. We have done substantial work here and had consultations with government, individual scientists and the academies.” In other words, VijayRaghavan socialized the idea of joining Plan S and found there was not a lot of support for the plan once people actually digested its implications. He went on to say that the government’s “directions will be entirely determined by the interests of Indian academia and of India.”
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Source: The Wire
3
Jean-Claude Burgelman, the European Commission’s open access envoy, appears frustrated by the news from India and, more generally, the lackluster reception of Plan S beyond the coterie of mostly European funding agencies signed on to the plan. Times Higher Education reports that Dr. Burgelman has proposed a “geo-specific access model” that would effectively block the rest of the world off from open access to Europe’s scientific papers.
Writing for The Scholarly Kitchen, Lisa Hinchliffe has dubbed this model “geowalling” and notes that when Elsevier proposed the same thing back in 2017 they were “soundly pilloried.”
Geowalling, of course, undermines the moral aims of OA as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) principles that have long guided the OA movement. In this context it is a baffling proposal. But as Richard Poynder reminds us, “for governments open access is not viewed as a moral issue but a way of boosting the economy…” In fact, Jean-Claude Burgelman has said this explicitly, stating in 2018 that “EU officials do not view open science as an ideological debate but rather as an effort to provide a better return on investment of our public money.” Whether a geowalled OA would provide this “better return” is debatable but it is helpful to understand where Burgelman (and presumably other EU policy makers) is coming from.
Moral and economic issues notwithstanding, geowalling presents logistical complications. First and foremost (as Hinchliffe points out), is that Plan S mandates CC-BY licenses, so anyone in the world could simply take the papers and legally post them outside the European geowall. Scopus or PubMed Central or Meta (see Item 8 below) or whomever could simple hoover the articles up and provide them for free to researchers anywhere in the world. In order to make the geowalling concept workable, Plan S would have to develop a restrictive, geo-specific copyright license. But even this would present challenges. What to do about Germany, which has not signed on to Plan S? What about Sweden and Italy, where some funding agencies participate but others have notably withdrawn from Plan S? The geowall approach assumes a monolithic approach to OA, which does not exist even in Europe.
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Source: Times Higher Education, Open and Shut, AIP, The Scholarly Kitchen
4
Richard Poynder has released a situation analysis for the open access access movement. Entitled “Open access: Could defeat be snatched from the jaws of victory?,” this 82 page document is essential reading for anyone who works in or cares about scholarly communications. While many in the OA movement believe we are on the verge of an “OA tipping point” (see also Item 1 above), Poynder posits that such an outcome is far from inevitable. The world that created the OA movement is not the world we live in today. Globalism is in retreat and the costs of “free” information are becoming apparent. The idea of an open and unregulated Internet as a force for uniting humanity in a global conversation now seems profoundly naïve. Poynder argues that the OA movement has largely ignored both the profound geopolitical changes since BOAI and the growing list of unintended consequences related to OA models that have become manifest in the last two decades. Both of these things could cause the battle for OA to be lost even while some OA activists appear to be preparing to celebrate. Pour yourself a stiff drink, turn off your notifications, and read the whole thing. At the very least, read Rick Anderson’s excellent summary.
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Source: Open and Shut, The Scholarly Kitchen
5
The MIT libraries has published a “framework” for publishing contracts, aimed to preserve authors’ rights and to effect a migration to a fully OA environment because “The benefits to society are greatest when this scholarship is freely and immediately available to the entire world to access, read, and use; without restriction and for any lawful purpose.” The framework lists six points: no author will be required to waive any requirements imposed by funders or institutions; authors must not be required to relinquish copyright but have instead generous reuse rights; publishers must oversee or effect the depositing of materials into institutional repositories; publishers must provide access for TDM; publishers must participate in long-term digital archives; and pricing will be fair and sustainable. The MIT libraries view publishers, in other words, as printers (e.g. services providers) and not as publishers (which evaluate, invest in, and develop content). The MIT libraries has signed up a number of organizations in support of the framework (see this interesting comment from the head of the Harvard libraries).
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Source: MIT Libraries, Harvard Libraries
6
Something we talk about a lot around here at C&E is that the rush to “transformative deals” leaves most societies, as well as other smaller independent publishers, behind (see, for example, here and here). And so we read with interest the announcement that the Microbiology Society has inked a Publish and Read deal with both JISC and the CAUL consortium (though we note that the CAUL deal is on an opt-in basis and we do not yet know if any institutions have opted in). We are glad to see consortia like JISC and CAUL experimenting with smaller deals. That said, it remains to be seen if such deals will provide a template for other smaller publishers—and whether other consortia will follow suit. We will also be interested in hearing more about the economics and whether such deals can be streamlined into a broadly adopted framework.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen, JISC, CAUL
7
RELX group is now the largest publisher in the world by revenue, a perch long held by Pearson.
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Source: Publishers Weekly
8
After a long period in beta mode, Meta is open to one and all. Meta is free a discovery tool built on machine learning—a “push” service that brings articles of interest to researchers as they are published. Meta has already ingested millions of scientific articles into its database and continues to bring in more every day. Articles are analyzed by the system and then placed into the appropriate feeds of Meta’s users, whose own navigation through the scientific literature in turn modifies and personalizes the algorithms that deliver the content. Meta launched a month after Atypon’s similar discovery service dubbed Scitrus, which we covered last month in The Brief. Meta and Scitrus enter a space (research discovery) that is at once crowded (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, Dimensions, PubMed) and yet, despite the competition, seems to be making little headway in reducing the amount of time researchers spend looking for information. Meta’s push orientation and adaptive algorithms are designed to do just that. Meta was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which operates it today.
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Source: Meta, Medium
9
Elsevier and Carnegie Mellon University have just signed a deal that is being called “transformative.” For this deal CMU gets full access to Elsevier’s publications and CMU’s authors have the option (but not the obligation) to publish in Elsevier journals on an OA basis (assuming they pass editorial muster, of course). So this sounds like a Read and Publish deal. But the details of this arrangement are sketchy at this point. There has been no disclosure of the financial terms: is CMU paying more? Less? The same? Are OA fees currently paid by CMU faculty (or their funders) factored in to the (undisclosed) base cost? (Inside Higher Ed reports that both the “read” and “publish” sides of the arrangement are included for one fixed price, but we don’t know what that price is.) Noteworthy is the fact that CMU only publishes a tiny number of articles each year in Elsevier journals—about 175 (by our math, this is substantially fewer articles than represented by the CAUL deal with the Microbiology Society— see Item 6). This is such a small deal that the use of the word “transformative” to describe it strikes us as somewhat aspirational.
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Source: CMU Library, Inside Higher Ed
10
Further signaling that the Chinese government is intent not just on publishing in international English language journals, but on publishing international English language journals. Chinese Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (Science Press) has acquired the French EDP Sciences. Science Press is majority owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A Q&A on the deal can be found in The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Source: EDP Sciences, The Scholarly Kitchen
Higher Education
11
We have previously written about the ongoing ordeal of Stanford University Press. For those new to the kerfuffle, after providing the Press with an operating subsidy of about $1.7 million a year for the past 5 years, the provost’s office declared that enough is enough and announced it was cutting off aid. Predictably, there was an outcry, leading the provost to appoint a faculty committee to review the situation. The committee’s report is now in. Among the findings is that the Press does not have as strong a reputation as the university itself, which is reflected in the universities its authors come from and whether the authors are assistant or full professors. Much is made of governance—the Press needs more of it, a decision based on reviewing the practices of a number of presses from peer universities (but not of peer presses). The report acknowledges that it is hard to break even publishing books alone, but offers not a single sentence that would help the current Director with what is essentially a business problem, not a matter of editorial selection (which dominates the report). An astute critique of the report, wonderfully entitled “Slouching toward Palo Alto,” appeared in Inside Higher Ed. The author, the editorial director of The Johns Hopkins University Press, notes that the faculty report is all about reputation and fails to discuss the books themselves or the role they play in the scholarship of their respective fields. We would add to this that the Director’s line of reporting is to change, from the head of the Stanford library to the very provost that wanted to eliminate the Press’s funding in the first place. And the committee’s recommendations? Keep the subsidy going at the same level for another five years, add more oversight boards (which will do what exactly?), and submit some more reports to the administration.
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Source: Stanford University, Inside Higher Ed, The Scholarly Kitchen
12
Enrollments in the humanities went into sharp decline over the past decade, a worrisome development for higher education in general and humanities departments in particular. In response to this, a series of programs are being tested, some with early exemplary results, to move the trend line in a different direction. Among the ideas being tested is to focus on bringing in students who are majoring in other fields. So, rather than attempt to build a larger cohort of history and English majors (desirable though that would be), many departments are redesigning courses and programs for non-majors. At Purdue, for example, where only 7% of students had ever taken a history course, there is now a liberal arts certificate program, which presents a series of courses tailored to incoming students to provide a “cornerstone” education. Other institutions are part of an increasing trend to have senior faculty teach introductory courses. Taken together these steps are reversing a decline that had been precipitated by changing cultural expectations and a challenging economy.
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Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes
13
The U.S. Department of Education has just released data on the earnings of recent college graduates. How much is an English major earning one year after graduation? An engineering major? How much debt do these students have? How do the earnings vary by institution, and within institutions (but between majors)? The Wall Street Journal has built a tool that allows a user to poke around at the data, and we have been doing so, with fascination. Our guess is that there is a predictable path: first you look at your alma mater and your major, then (if you have kids) you check out your kids’ schools; then on to the schools of friends and family and a couple-three iconic institutions. We were struck by a number of things in the data. First, recent college graduates, regardless of major, are not being showered in riches. But the real story is the disturbing one when the first year’s salary is paired with the average debt load. We would like to see a similar database for earnings and debt ten years after graduation.
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Source: Inside Higher Ed, The Wall Street Journal
The Book Business
14
It is hardly news that libraries and publishers dispute any number of things, but recently these disputes have stepped up to a new level, as the American Library Association has now petitioned for an anti-trust investigation of Amazon based on its ebook lending practices, adding kindling (ahem) to the fire of Congressional scrutiny of the tech giants. This moves comes just as libraries launch a campaign in opposition to the lending practices of trade publisher Macmillan, which has imposed an embargo on libraries for new titles, believing that library lending of ebooks undermines Macmillan’s sales to individuals. A shrewd analysis by Bill Rosenblatt suggests that Macmillan aims to “Spotify” libraries, making them into the initial free tier of usage (Spotify uses an advertising-supported bottom tier for this) with the aim of “upselling” thwarted library patrons into paying consumers. We suspect that Macmillan’s situation will be sorted out in the marketplace rather than in Congress, but the antitrust claims against Amazon may reverberate at least through the 2020 election and maybe thereafter.
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Source: Axios, Copyright and Technology, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly
Technology
15
We follow developments with Amazon closely because of its origins in the book business and because, well, it’s Amazon. We are not alone; the outpouring of pieces on the company and its billionaire founder are never-ending. We have sampled just a handful of these here, but please begin with the outstanding piece by Charles Duhigg, which surveys Amazon’s business practices. Amazon, Duhigg claims, is not a product company but a process company; it is a way of doing business. At the heart of the Amazon business philosophy is the metaphor of the “flywheel,” practices and assets, including information, that can be used for multiple activities, which generate more energy, which is then itself introduced to the flywheel: the wheel goes round and round, faster and faster. (Amazon’s practices sound eerily and creepily like those of Koch Industries.) The working conditions in some Amazon facilities are robotic and dystopian, but this should be no surprise for a company that continues to source products from factories that other retailers have blacklisted for their terrible treatment of workers. One futurist claims that Amazon’s high tech future will be anchored on robots inside its factories, supported by tens of thousands of poorly treated human workers outside them—another dystopian extrapolation from the present tense. No market should be overlooked: Amazon has now emerged as a contractor to the Department of Defense. We have come a long way from Pat the Bunny. But what is the purpose of this metastasizing company and the riches it generates for its founder? One theory is that Bezos is doing all this because he really, really wants to work to populate the solar system through his Blue Origin space company, a notion that perhaps is reinforced by the fact that Amazon is now underwriting more seasons of the space opera The Expanse. We think a New Yorker cartoon should have the last word: “Alexa, play ‘As Time Goes By’.”
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Source: The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Amazon, The Toronto Star, Condé Nast
16
Domain names for not-for-profits are likely to get more expensive.
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Source: The Verge
Miscellany
17
Best tenure announcement ever.
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Source: Harvard University
18
We often say that we are going to the dogs around here, as all of us at C&E are dog guardians and often find our wards participating in conference calls and occasionally delaying a deliverable with an imperious bark. But we always thought we knew how old they were in human terms—chronological age times 7. It turns out that this humiliating method for determining a dog’s age is unscientific. A new method “is based on a relatively new concept in aging research: that chemical modifications to a person’s DNA over a lifetime create what is known as an epigenetic clock. Scientists have built a case that one such modification, the addition of methyl groups to specific DNA sequences, tracks human biological age—that is, the toll that disease, poor lifestyle, and genetics take on our bodies.” In other words, compare the DNA methylation of one species with another and you can get the relative biological age. Alas, our own dogs object to the bias in the methodology, as all the dogs in the study were Labrador retrievers and thus unrepresentative.
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Source: Science
19
Philip Roth left an estate worth about $10 million and decided to bequeath $2 million of it to his hometown library in Newark, New Jersey. The money is to be used exclusively for the purchase of books (no capital projects for this money), at a rate of approximately $80,000 a year. Readers of Roth know that Newark figures prominently in his fiction; the gift represents Roth’s desire to help the city rebuild. In addition to the bequest, Roth left his personal book collection to the library. It will be housed in a special, dedicated room, with some odd stipulations: no photographs may be taken of the books and visitors must check their phones at the door.
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
From Our Own Pens
20
We previously noted on The Brief that Joe had participated in a project on Library Acquisition Patterns with Roger Schonfeld and Katherine Daniel of ITHAKA S+R. We are pleased to find that that report has received a highly favorable review on Learned Publishing. From the review: “The LAP is a remarkable achievement. The study tests basic assumptions about acquisitions in academic libraries and provides evidence of trends we have previously observed but not quantified.”
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Source: Learned Publishing, ITHAKA S+R
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).
- ITHAKA The Next Wave, December 4, 2019, New York
- Academic Publishing in Europe, January 14–15, 2020, Berlin
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Lately, it occurs to me/What a long, strange trip it’s been. ― The Grateful Dead