APE 2020: Plan S Revisited

APE 2020

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True to brand, APE 2020 was information-dense, entertaining, controversial, collegial, and rollicking. There have been several excellent write-ups of the meeting already. These include this overview by Roger Schonfeld for The Scholarly Kitchen that highlights the geopolitical tensions and anxieties at play throughout the meeting, especially between Europe, North America, and China. Over at Bloomberg Opinion, Justin Fox describes the embrace of open access models by publishers and how the shift to publish and read is unlikely to change the players so much as the basis of payment. Writing in The Geyser, Kent Anderson provides an overview of the second day of the meeting, focusing on open research data. And back at The Scholarly Kitchen, Ann Michael, Roger Schonfeld, Michael Clarke, Rick Anderson, and Lisa Hinchliffe provide this APE roundup.

The geopolitical anxieties observed by Schonfeld were on display throughout the meeting, most notably in the talk by Jean-Claude Burgelman, the EU open access envoy. (This is the same Burgelman who mooted the notion of “geowalling” scientific content.) For Burgelman, OA policy is first and foremost an economic tool to be deployed with the aim of keeping the EU competitive with China and North America. Burgelman believes that open access and open science (two separate concepts that he used interchangeably) are economic drivers for the European Union. He cited the examples of Nokia and Minitel as cases where European companies had lost their lead due (in his analysis) to “hesitation” (in the case of Nokia, hesitation to develop smartphones and in the case of Minitel, hesitation to embrace the World Wide Web). The EU’s OA policy is therefore designed to (among other things) help Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wolters Kluwer, and other European publishers avoid this fate by prodding them to move with alacrity to (what EU policymakers believe will be) the next business paradigm. We imagine these publishers are grateful for such regulatory attention and glad to know that Brussels is so diligently watching out for their interests.

It was just one year ago when Plan S architect Robert-Jan Smits proclaimed at APE 2019 that Plan S would soon (before he left his post in March of 2019) account for over 30% of global research output. At the time, Plan S accounted for about 3.5% of global research output. Smits’ forecast turned out to be… optimistic. Between last year’s APE and APE 2020, Plan S has witnessed a net loss in terms of the market share (as measured by research output) accounted for by its funders. Funding agencies from both Norway and Italy have left the coalition. In France, the country’s largest academic consortium has continued to ink deals that are not Plan S compliant, leaving a question mark as to whether the EU’s 3rd largest research producer will meaningfully participate in the coalition. Meanwhile, the UK, the EU’s 2nd largest research producer, is planning to depart the EU at the end of this week and the extent to which the UK will continue its alignment with EU science policy remains to be seen. (The EU’s largest research producer, Germany, has never signed on to Plan S.)

The presentation by Marc Schiltz, President of Science Europe and emissary for Plan S, was oddly out of sync with this backdrop. Rather than strike a conciliatory note in view of the clear failure of Plan S to gather momentum in the market (and with the potential for more funder defections looming as researchers become aware of Plan S policies and their implications), Schiltz doubled-down on the most contentious of the Plan S policies: its prohibition against hybrid journals. As publishers are unlikely to flip their entire portfolios to Gold OA when the vast majority of the market appears comfortable with the hybrid model, one must wonder how long Plan S will continue this quixotic crusade. On the other hand, perhaps Plan S funders have come to the realization that if publishers choose to comply with Plan S predominantly via the Green OA route it will cost the funders less to achieve their ends and hence the crusade against hybrid will continue—if only as an excuse to withhold funds for APCs.

Speaking of APCs, a presentation by Frank Sander of MPDL Services GmbH was illuminating. As Michael noted in The Scholarly Kitchen roundup linked to above, MPDL Services GmbH is a subsidiary of the Max Planck Society tasked with the administration of Projekt DEAL. Sander described the process by which the costs of Projekt DEAL will be distributed among the consortium members. Members will pay MPDL at the beginning of the year based on what they paid the previous year. At the end of the year, there will be a true-up process accounting for the publication output of each institution that year. It is unclear if institutions that overpaid at the beginning of the year will be issued a refund or if the previous year’s spend constitutes a baseline. This model (especially if there are refunds following the year-end true-up) will result in a massive shift in costs to research-intensive institutions. The German U15, representing 15 of Germany’s top research universities, has already expressed concern about this model. It is also unclear to us (based on the information in Sander’s talk) how MPDL will be funded and how much the administrative costs will add to the total cost of Projekt DEAL.

Among the most notable talks of the conference was that of Lin Peng, from China Science Press. China Science Press made headlines recently by acquiring French scholarly publisher EDP, perhaps the strongest signal yet of China’s ambitions as a publisher of English-language journals. When asked by a member of the audience if China Science Press planned to purchase any other European publishers, Lin coyly replied, “If you are willing to sell, and we can afford to pay, we are willing to have discussions.” Lin provided some interesting figures related to scholarly publishing in China. He noted that there are nearly 200 STM publishers in China that collectively produce 5,052 STM journals and another approximately 5,000 HHS titles. Of these, only 330 are presently in English (152 of these are published by China Science Press). China also produces a staggering 90,000 STM books annually. Lin explicitly affirmed that “Chinese researchers have a great demand for launching high-level academic journals in English.”

In case the impending rise of China as an English-language publisher was missed by anyone, Michael Mabe came back to this topic in his insightful closing address. Mabe noted that in addition to all the publication trends we are familiar with (China now produces more scientific papers than any other country), 44% of Chinese students majored in STM subjects (as compared with 14% in the U.S.). It is not just numbers; in China science attracts (and retains) the best and brightest and scientists are paid more than doctors and lawyers. Mabe cited the recent report on improving Chinese scientific journals commissioned by CAST, NSFC, CAS, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Science and Technology. The report expresses the aim of China to become a publishing powerhouse (Nature reported on how China has recently started investing in initiatives toward this end).

We are looking forward to the posting of the meeting videos so we can review some of these talks again. Kudos to APE organizer and impresario Arnoud de Kemp for another successful APE. We are heartened to hear that, while Mr. de Kemp will be handing off logistical matters related to APE, he will remain responsible for the conference program (supported by an august program committee) and its unique tenor.

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Source: APE, The Scholarly Kitchen, Bloomberg Opinion, The Geyser, Science, German U15, EDP Sciences, Nature

Professional & Academic Publishing

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The rumor that Sci-Hub and Alexandra Elbakyan’s “Robin Hood” act is a front for a far darker purpose has been widely circulated in professional publishing circles for some time. Lending credence to this rumor, The Washington Post reports that the United States Justice Department is investigating Elbakyan “on suspicion that she may also be working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors.” Immediately after the Post article appeared, security company PSI posted an open letter to the academic community about the threat that Sci-Hub poses. 

It’s important to note that while the Justice Department is investigating Sci-Hub and Elbakyan, they have made no public announcement about their conclusions. And lest publishers are lulled into thinking that any government agency is expressing an interest in their business quandary, the investigation is about stealing defense secrets, not copyright piracy. This has not stopped arguments, pro and con, about the investigation and Sci-Hub to break out. We refer the reader to the vitriolic comments on the Post piece, and then pinch yourself: This is scientific publishing we are talking about.

We note parenthetically that it appears Elbakyan is more fully embracing the role of a pirate: In a recent hearing before the St. Petersburg State University ethics commission, she was ejected for spitting on one of the commission members.

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Source: Quartz, The Scholarly Kitchen, The Washington Post, PSI, Meduza 

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Taylor & Francis announced the acquisition of F1000Research. The transaction does not include F1000Prime and F1000Workspace, which will continue to be owned and operated by founder Vitek Tracz. One pundit has speculated that this is a shrewd maneuver by T&F to “neutralize the Plan S threat” by co-opting a low-cost publication venue and thereby obviating the need to transition its entire portfolio to Gold OA to comply with Plan S. In our opinion, this view overstates the threat posed by Plan S. While we agree that T&F is unlikely to transition its entire portfolio to Gold OA anytime soon, this has nothing to do with F1000 (why would any publisher transition their entire portfolio for a customer segment that represents 3% of the market?). Our perspective is that the F1000Research acquisition provides T&F with a sandbox to experiment and infuses the organization with some start-up thinking. The fact that F1000Research comes with a technology platform may have also been a consideration in the acquisition calculus. T&F’s portfolio is hosted on Atypon’s Literatum platform, which is owned and controlled by Wiley. F1000Research provides a technology platform now under direct control of T&F with which they can make more rapid changes and test ideas in a lower-stakes environment. And finally, F1000Research provides a deeper relationship with some key funders, including Wellcome Trust and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for whom it provides publishing services. 

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Source: Research Information, Martin Paul Eve 

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Last month in The Brief we reported on the rumblings about the resurrection of the Springer Nature IPO. More details have since been released. Reuters reports that the company has paid down some of its debt, one of the issues that led to weak investor demand last time around. The IPO, which will be led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is anticipated to take place as early as May or June of this year.

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Source: Reuters

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The Russian Academy of Sciences appointed a commission to study ethics in academic publishing, and the commission dropped a bombshell: evidence of widespread violations of accepted practices, resulting in the retraction of over 800 papers. The violations included a great number of instances of plagiarism, including a large amount of self-plagiarism, but also included such money-making schemes as selling “slots” for authors on papers that had already been accepted for publication. The scandal exposes serious quality problems in Russian-language academic publishing, leading some to argue that the best way to improve the quality of Russian scholarship is to publish in the established world of English-language journals. This, of course, would be a difficult and expensive undertaking and no doubt a bitter pill to swallow for the nationalist regime.

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Source: Science, Times Higher Education

Higher Education

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It may come as a surprise to many that universities, often seen as a bastion of personal privacy, are increasingly tracking students on campus, often requiring them to install phone apps that connect to a network of beacons located throughout the university environment. One gets the eerie feeling of watching a dystopian movie to read this account in The Washington Post, which is the rare item we put on a “must read” list. 

Universities are increasingly requiring students to install apps on their phones that track students’ attendance, note when they visit the library, and enable interventions to “nudge” students to better behaviors. Interestingly, strong support for these apps comes from athletic departments, who want to be sure that student athletes remain eligible to play. (It will be noted that a sports coach has a different relationship with a student than a member of the faculty.) Is such monitoring a good thing or bad? It depends on one’s point of view. One parent notes that after paying $30,000 to send a kid to college, it’s reasonable to want to know if the kid is attending classes. On the other hand, there is an argument that such surveillance infantilizes students, making it harder for them to take on adult responsibilities. The notion of living in a “surveillance society,” of course, is nothing new, even if such a world is not as fearsome as the one depicted in 1984. [For some other versions of such a society, see, among countless others, The Circle (Knopf, 2013), Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books, 2003), and Gnomon (Penguin Random House, 2017)]. This is not the “surveillance capitalism” that Shoshana Zuboff has warned us about but surveillance higher education.

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Source: The Washington Post, LSE Review of Books

The Book Business

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Not all kids in the U.S. are being taught history the same way. In an analysis by journalists, versions of the same textbooks were compared for students in California and Texas. The examples are telling. In a California version, for example, a section on the Second Amendment notes that the courts have permitted some controls on gun ownership, but the Texas edition bears no such note. Books for both states cover the Harlem Renaissance, but only the Texas edition goes on to say that some critics have challenged the merits of the Harlem Renaissance artists. Unfortunately, the journalists who did the study fail to note that these variations have been going on for decades and leaves the incorrect impression that the partisan nature of the books is a reflection of the current political environment. For better or worse, textbook publishing was politicized a long time ago.

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Source: The New York Times

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One of the perennial questions of the book business is, Why isn’t it more like the music business? After all, for a modestly priced monthly subscription, music fans can sign up to any number of “all you can eat” services such as Spotify and Apple Music. While there are some limited book subscription services (all digital, of course), the concept has not yet caught on. In the U.S. market there is a limited service from Scribd, a venture capital-backed firm, and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, but both of these services are missing the one thing that prospective subscribers want: access to the catalogs of major trade publishers (called in the industry “the Big Five”—Hachette, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins—who collectively control over half of the U.S. market). Some observers believe the time for such an ebook service has come, however, as the major publishers are facing slow-growing and even flat markets, even as they long for the enormous success of the music streaming services.

There are many problems in setting up such a service, however, not the least being that no one publisher could do it alone (because they don’t have a comprehensive catalog) and working together is likely to invite antitrust action. (We pass along a rumor that Penguin Random House, far and away the world’s largest trade publisher, is contemplating creating its own streaming service.) There is also the ticklish problem of getting the rights for such a service, not just from publishers but also from authors, a problem the music industry was able to sidestep because of different conventions for intellectual property agreements. But there are large entities that may take a stab at this: Apple, Walmart, Spotify, and Tencent. Meanwhile, in academic book markets successful services from EBSCO, ProQuest, Springer Nature, and Cengage serve as enticing examples.

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Source: Forbes, The New Publishing Standard

Technology

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We have been active in the library automation area for some time now and were pleased to be invited to work with Ithaka S+R on a “visioning” project undertaken on behalf of OhioLINK. The outcome of that project is a white paper, coauthored by Gwen Evans, Executive Director of OhioLINK, and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R. While the report is careful to declare that it is not an indictment of the current offerings of the vendors of integrated library systems (ILSs), the challenge is clear: the current platforms on offer must be wholly rearchitected in order to meet the evolving demands of academic libraries. Specifically, ILSs must go from being centered on a particular institution’s tangible collection to a new focus on the needs of the user, who may draw on materials from a range of resources and locations. The report calls for a great number of changes and additions to the services currently provided, but we note in particular the call for the ability to extract data for analysis, which can then be used to further refine a library’s services—and to develop new and constantly evolving requirements from platform vendors.

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Source: Ithaka S+R

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The Internet domains that we use every day—.com, .edu, .org, etc.—are controlled by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN designates an organization to manage the domains; such management includes the ability to charge fees, typically $10–$20 per year to control a domain. Currently the .org domain is managed by the not-for-profit Public Interest Registry, but (as we reported in the November 2019 issue of The Brief) that group is contemplating a sale of its management rights to Ethos Capital, a private equity group, which is offering more than $1 billion for the rights. As the .org domain is intended for not-for-profit organizations, ownership by a commercial firm has understandably triggered protests. The Public Interest Registry seeks the sale in order to raise money to finance its other operations, but a new group has arisen to challenge the sale, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants. CCOR is now lobbying ICANN to assign the rights to them, which would keep the domain in the not-for-profit world and allow it to be run as a public resource. One of the twists of this story is that one of the directors of the newly incorporated CCOR is Esther Dyson, who was the Founding Chair of ICANN in the 1990s. This situation raises the larger question: Will there be no corner of the Internet left for noncommercial activity?

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Source: The New York Times, SaveDotOrg

Miscellany

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Scholarly communications is very much a component of the global technology and media industries, with researchers collaborating with others around the world and disseminating findings at the speed of the Internet. That situation is being challenged now, however, with political forces sometimes attempting to “de-globalize” communications, even as market forces push for greater international penetration. The recent report that Russia has successfully tested a separate version of the Internet, monitored by the government, is unsettling. This is an instance of what technologists have called the “splinternet,” a multitude of networks whose connection to one another may be weak or nonexistent.

Russia is not alone in altering the global nature of communications, and the Internet is not always the mechanism. Recently, the Chinese government has begun to ban the import of a number of American books. The reasons for this are not clear, though it may be an aspect of the ongoing trade war. Even so, no one is surprised to hear about censorship in China, but the current dispute may be part of the plan of Xi Jinping to lessen the influence of foreign media.

Meanwhile, The Economist has a fascinating article on how the media industry develops globally when politics gets out of the way. Streaming media companies now address a global market through the clever adaptation of dubbing and subtitles. To reduce costs, streaming services may produce video in less expensive parts of the globe and then introduce the material, through dubbing or subtitles, to the larger U.S. market. And prominent American actors may have their roles dubbed outside the English-speaking world by the same actor, film after film, in a particular language, giving the dubbing actor a curious celebrity afterglow. Methods vary by country. In Poland and Russia, for example, instead of dubbing the market has opted to have the action of a film narrated like a lecture, as un-immersive a technique as anything created by Brecht. So which way will scholarly communications go, centripetally toward national culture, or centrifugally, like Netflix?

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Source: BBC, Fortune, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist, Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Annette Thomas has been appointed CEO of the Guardian Media Group. Damian Pattinson has been appointed Executive Director at eLife. The American Library Association has announced the appointment of Tracie Hall as its Executive Director. James Milne has been named President of ACS Publications.

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Source: The Guardian, eLife, American Libraries, American Chemical Society

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A number of companies are jockeying for position in the public library market. In December Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, announced that it was acquiring Innovative Interfaces, a major player in library automation. In addition to fleshing out its already dominant market position in academic libraries, the acquisition makes Ex Libris the leading forcein library automation for public libraries as well. Now we have learned that Rakuten has agreed to sell its OverDrive division to KKR, the world’s largest private equity company. Rakuten is a Japanese ecommerce company that competes with Amazon around the world and, most importantly for our purposes, owns Kobo, a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle ebook program. The odd thing about this divestiture is that Rakuten acquired OverDrive, the leading ebook vendor to public libraries, just two years ago, which suggests that it was a failed investment strategy. Also intriguing is that the acquirer, KKR, also owns RBI (Recorded Books Inc.), the largest independent audiobook company, with a dominant market share in public libraries, and has a sizable interest in Cengage, one of the largest college textbook publishers—and which itself is planning to combine with McGraw-Hill. Among Cengage’s properties is Gale, a leading vendor to the library market. 

Meanwhile, as we have reported previously in The Brief, there is an ongoing heated dispute between libraries and ebook vendors, principally Macmillan, about terms of sale, in particular “windowing,” the practice of withholding content in one sales channel until a higher-margin channel has been exhausted (think of waiting 6 months before a major feature film shows up on streaming services). Arguing over terms of sale is nothing new, but what is different today is that there is so much data available upon which publishers can make their decisions. It appears that the underlying economics of the public library sales channel are now being exposed by data analysis, which invites market participants to adjust their strategies and their portfolios. What is odd about this is the fact that the public libraries’ materials budgets are small, about $1.5 billion a year in aggregate, which brings to mind Hamlet’s astonishment to find armies that will fight over “a little patch of land / That hath in it no profit but the name.”

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Source: Library Journal, Ithaka S+R, KKR, Inside Higher Ed, Publishers Weekly

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This gives new meaning to the term “real-time”: “Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.” The two chips were not connected either physically or electronically. As reported in Nature Physics, the communication takes advantage of quantum entanglement, which enables instantaneous communication over any distance. 

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Source: New Atlas, Nature Physics

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According to psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos at the University of Sheffield in the UK, the reason you don’t catch your own typos is not because you are stupid but because you are smart. (Whether it is true or not, this is clearly the explanation for any typos you might find in The Brief). Stafford’s observations are based on research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

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Source: Wired, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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We mourn the death of Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote a highly influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma(Harvard Business Review Press, 1997), on disruptive technology; it remains controversial. We are admirers.

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Source: The Boston Globe, Wikipedia, The Scholarly Kitchen

From Our Own Pens

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Michael inked an article on publishing services agreements between societies and commercial publishers. Appearing in the January 2020 issue of Learned Publishing, the article discusses the challenges and complexities facing independent society publishers and the reasons why some societies choose to enter into publishing services agreements, whereas others choose to remain independent. It also provides an overview of the structure of such agreements and the processes for leveling the information asymmetry that exists between commercial publishers and societies.

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Source: Learned Publishing

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Joe wrote a piece for The Scholarly Kitchen on how the heads of organizations seek information on which to base decisions. Some leaders opt for the creation of a brain trust, an informal group of close advisors. But what is the role of the brain trust and how are people recruited for this task?

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

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Joe was interviewed by Kent Anderson for The Geyser this month. An excerpt:

Outside of the Yankees and the Beatles, I mostly talk about books. Not the book business, but the books themselves. We are living in an intellectual renaissance. A trip to a physical bookstore to survey the new titles on display leaves me awestruck. So many smart, accomplished people! So many areas of study, such displays of erudition! Ten minutes in a bookstore, and it becomes self-evident that all settled matters are now unsettled. The riches flowing out of our research institutions—ideas and people—are changing the landscape, creating new solutions, new opportunities. I am irrepressibly optimistic and cannot understand why everyone seems to be crying in their beer.

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Source: The Geyser

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).

• NISO Plus Conference, February 23–25, 2020, Baltimore, MD
• STM U.S. Annual Conference, April 28–30, Washington, DC
• Society for Scholarly Publishing 42nd Annual Meeting, May 27–29, 2020, Boston, MA. We are pleased to announce that we will be moderating the session at SSP titled: “The Publisher RFP Process: Key Considerations for Societies (Before, During, and After).” We look forward to seeing you there!

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A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ― Oscar Wilde