Outbreak

Professional and Academic Publishing

1

The coronavirus outbreak is at once (among other things) a public health story, a science story, a political story, an economic story, a human-interest story, and a scientific publishing story. The Wall Street Journal has told all of these stories in recent weeks, but it is the last story that is of most interest to The Brief. In a recent article, the Journal discusses the growing role of preprint servers in communicating the latest research on the virus. 

With a viral outbreak poised to become a global pandemic, the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv have become a hub for breaking research on the new coronavirus. According to the WSJ, bioRxiv and its sibling medRxiv have each been receiving around 10 manuscripts per day (20 across both platforms) related to the coronavirus and posting them in subject collections (here and here). Another preprint server, SSRN, has received a smaller influx of papers. “Many researchers once snubbed preprint servers, fearing that sharing their work there would jeopardize their chances of publication in an established academic journal,” noted the WSJ. But that view is changing, both among researchers and the editors of journals. Prominent journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, are coming to accept preprints as part of the scientific publishing landscape. We will be watching to see if the Covid-19 outbreak results in a substantial uptick in postings to bioRxiv and medRxiv—across many subject areas—as awareness of preprints, and familiarity with the practice, spreads. 

While the role of preprint servers in disseminating medical research is noteworthy, the WSJ only just touches on the edge of a bigger story, which is the Herculean efforts by hundreds of journal editors, thousands of reviewers, and dozens of publishers to rapidly review, synthesize, translate (in some cases), and publish a vast amount of research. The New England Journal of Medicine alone is receiving 20–45 papers per day related to coronavirus. The editor of JAMA reported to The Brief that JAMA has received approximately 200 coronavirus manuscripts since mid-January. Add to this all the coronavirus papers received by The Lancet, BMJ, Cell, and Nature journals—and hundreds if not thousands of specialty journals. The amount of research being produced by researchers, and disseminated with alacrity by journals, is truly astounding. 

Nearly all of this research is being published free of any access restrictions, and all notable publishers have affirmed their support for free access to relevant papers related to the outbreak. Publishers have also rapidly developed “hubs,” aggregating all papers relevant to coronavirus, along with other resources, together in one place. Notable hubs include: 
Elsevier | New England Journal of Medicine | JAMA | Lancet | Cell Press | BMJ| Springer Nature | Wiley | Infectious Diseases Society of America | American Society for Microbiology | 1Science (part of Elsevier)

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Source: The Wall Street Journal, STAT, JAMA, Wellcome

2

Just 2 months ago the White House seemed poised to issue an executive order that would require federally funded research to be made freely accessible immediately upon publication. This would be a seismic change to federal policy, which is generally oriented around a 12-month embargo, following guidelines set out in the 2013 Holdren Memo.

Following extensive discussion and pushback from publishers and scientific societies (as well as universities, according to reporting in Times Higher Education), the White House appears to have put the order on hold. The American Institute of Physics’ FYI reports that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is seeking further input and has issued a request for information. We suspect they will get an earful. 

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Source: Association of American Publishers, Times Higher Education, FYI, US Federal Register

3

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) I has issued a consultation related to its open access policies. The document outlines areas where UKRI is firm about its policies (such as not accepting CC-BY-NC licenses) and where it is still weighing options. Surprisingly, one of the areas where it appears to be deliberating is the funding of papers in hybrid journals. As Rob Johnson of Research Consulting notes:

The consultation document suggests UKRI hasn’t yet formed a clear view on many of the critical issues, such as the role of hybrid journals, transformative agreements, price transparency and licensing.

This comes as a surprise as UKRI is a signatory to Plan S, and a core principle of Plan S is that “funders do not support the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing.” UKRI is the largest research funder to sign on to Plan S. If UKRI elects to support hybrid journals (beyond those in transformative agreements), it will be a blow to Plan S—especially as two other of the top three funders in Europe (Germany and France) already are out of alignment with Plan S. Germany has never signed on to Plan S (and has no prohibition against hybrid journals), and while France’s Agence Nationale de al Recherche remains a Plan S signatory, the country’s largest consortium continues to support subscription journals (rendering the “hybrid question” effectively moot).

Another surprise in the UKRI consultation is the proposal floated to require monographs to be made open access within 12 months of publication beginning in 2024. Plan S has not, as yet, proposed a timeline related to monographs so the setting of a deadline in the near term has alarmed scholars, especially those in the humanities, given the lack of details on how OA monographs will be funded.

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Source: UKRI, Research Information, Science, Times Higher Education

4

RELX, the largest publisher in the world (Elsevier is a division of RELX), has released its Annual Report for 2019. While there were no surprises in the report, it does make interesting reading. While this will come as news to no one, it is still remarkable to see the 20-year trend line for print (p. 6). It is also remarkable that 45% of Elsevier’s STM revenues come from North America and 24% from Europe, whereas China (the largest producer of STM papers) remains lumped in with “ROW” totaling 31% (p. 14). This points to the challenge that Elsevier would face in migrating to a publish and read (or fully OA) model globally, as current revenues do not align with research outputs. In a fully OA world, North America would pay much less and “ROW” much more. Such a realignment of revenues may require a 20-year runway, much as the transition from print. 

We will take this occasion to restate an observation recently made by Justin Fox over at Bloomberg Opinion (in a footnote to a recent article) that continues to amaze us: RELX’s market cap (approximately $50 billion) is almost 6 times that of News Corp, whose holdings include the Wall Street Journal and HarperCollins among many other assets. 

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Source: Elsevier, Bloomberg Opinion

5

The OA Switchboard Initiative has released a progress report, and much progress has been made. The initiative has moved from a rough concept to an organization with a steering committee, working groups, project manager, and implementation plan. The OA Switchboard aims to provide infrastructure to support a variety of open access publishing models by “connecting systems and improving open access-related article-level information exchange between authors, publishers, funders and institutions.” This infrastructure is much needed in order to reduce the management costs associated with emerging publish and read models. We will be closely following this effort.

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Source: OASPA, OA Switchboard Initiative

6

Cactus Communications acquires UNSILO.

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Source: Cactus Communications

7

The Materials Research Society (MRS) and Springer Nature announced a new publishing alliance. Clarke & Esposito had the privilege of representing MRS in brokering this notable deal that encompassed MRS’s five renowned journals as well as the society’s books program. This transition will take place in January 2021 following nearly a decade of collaboration with Cambridge University Press.

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Source: Materials Research Society

Publish and Read

8

The University of California (UC) has reached an agreement with the Public Library of Science (PLOS), whereby the UC libraries will pay the first $1,000 toward the article processing charge (APC) if an author chooses to publish with PLOS (and is accepted by one of PLOS’s seven journals). For APCs over $1,000 (all of PLOS’s APCs at this time are greater than that figure), the author is expected to make up the difference from grant funding. If authors declare that they have no available grant funding, then UC libraries will pay the full APC.

A cap of $1.5 million has been put on the deal. PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt comments in an interview with Richard Poynder: “This cap reflects library spend plus grant funding declared by authors. Once that spending cap is reached, PLOS has committed to cover the cost of additional UC publications…”

The framework for this deal was based on a recent agreement between the UC libraries and JMIR Publications.

The emergence of the “pure publish” agreement is a mechanism for fully OA publishers to level the playing field in competing for papers coming from institutions with publish and read agreements (if authors do not have to pay from their own funds to publish in journals covered by a publish and read agreement but do have to pay an APC to publish in a natively OA journal, the natively OA journal is at a disadvantage). A challenge here is that paying for APCs via such an agreement is a new cost for the library—and a cost (paying for research publication) that many libraries do not view as within their purview (this can be less of an issue in publish and read deals where the library can repurpose subscription monies). For this reason, the multipayer aspect of this deal is important—though, we note, it makes for complex management.

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Source: University of California, Open and Shut?, The Scholarly Kitchen

9

Other notable “transformative” deals in the last month:

• ACM inks transformative deals with the University of California, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Iowa State University.
• Brill and UKB, the Dutch consortium of university libraries, have reacheda transformative agreement for the years 2020 and 2021. 
• The Company of Biologists and MALMAD, an Israeli consortium of leading universities, announce a 3-year transitional OA agreement.
• De Gruyter signs publish and read deals with UKB, the Dutch consortium of university libraries, and Michigan State University.
• IOP Publishing renews deal with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (Kooperation E-Medien Österreich, KEMÖ) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
• Wiley signs a 3-year read and publish license with FinELib, a Finnish consortium of higher education and research institutions.

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

Higher Education

10

What is the value of a university press to its home institution? This is the question that the directors of the presses at the University of Arizona and Columbia University set out to answer in an opinion piece that is likely to be tapped by press directors everywhere as they discuss or negotiate their financial plans with university administrators. Presses are valuable because they disseminate important areas of research from scholars around the world and serve as a vehicle for evaluating scholarly work, which in turn is used for internal assessments of faculty. Beyond that presses serve to educate the broader public and policy-makers on matters of importance, all the while serving as “brand ambassadors” for their institutions.

Unfortunately, the timing of this piece coincided with the news that Wayne State University Press had just dismissed three mission-critical members of its staff, prompting speculation that the university was reducing its support for the press, which the university denies, saying it is seeking “deeper community connectivity.” Then 14 days later the dismissed staff were all rehired, without explanation. We expect to hear more about this in due course. But meanwhile we ask, for which community is the university seeking greater “connectivity”?

These events prompted us to look up an important essay from 2000 by Daniel Greenstein, who at that time oversaw, among other things, both the California Digital Library and the University of California Press. He writes: “About a quarter [which is about three times the average, we note] of the two hundred monographs produced each year by UC Press are written by some of UC’s … faculty—a significant proportion of the UC Press’s output but a mere fraction of the faculty’s annual oeuvre. The sheer imbalance undermines the logic of maintaining a university press.” It is easy to see in Greenstein’s comment an ancestor of today’s publish and read arrangements, where the university’s own output takes precedence over the disciplined act of assessing scholarship from multiple institutions. A university press, in other words, provides a community function, but it now competes with the institutional function of a university’s content marketing. At large institutions, which house most university presses, this is an asymmetric competition.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed, Publishers Weekly, Detroit News, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 

11

Business school may no longer be the ticket to riches that many imagined. Enrollment is in decline, challenging both prestigious programs and lesser-known institutions to fill their classrooms with qualified students. One way to turn this situation around is to do a business analysis of the situation and come up with a new plan. Why are students not signing up? There are several reasons, including an unwillingness to take on more debt, a strong job market, and competition with employers, who increasingly are providing training for specialized skills. Actions that a business program might take include reshaping the program to better align with how students view the job market developing in 10–15 years and also the possibility of exchanging the business degree or MBA for certificates for specific skills. We were struck by this sentence in an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece:

Business education serves the field best when we produce graduates who can think critically, creatively and conceptually; can understand coding and computational work; can communicate effectively; and can thrive in a constantly changing environment.

Wait a second: Doesn’t this sound a lot like a traditional liberal arts degree? This subject caused us to return to an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education from earlier in the year, which decried the collapse of law school enrollment. Thus two paths to financial security seem to be narrowing. This has broader implications for universities, as business and law schools historically have generated a surplus at many institutions, thereby helping to finance “unprofitable” programs in STEM and HSS. We hope the strategic assessment looks at the overall financial picture holistically.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education 

Technology

12

Moore’s Law has driven the growth of the computer industry for decades, and along with it the growth of any number of other industries. It has made possible so much that we now take for granted, from the ability to “Netflix and chill” in our homes to developing AI to analyze huge databases. But its astonishing prediction—a doubling of computer power every 2 years—may be coming to an end. Which raises the question, What will we do when we no longer routinely get twice the computing power for half the price? What predictions about the future will not come to pass; which of our favorite science fiction novels will forever remain fiction? (But please, please spare Charles Stross’s Accelerando [Ace, 2005].) While many involved in the chip business see a number of likely innovations that will extend the run of Moore’s Law, it is indisputable that the research effort has become much more expensive. This in turn has shifted some investment into specialized applications, which cannot provide the broad changes in technology and the economy we have enjoyed to date. Some researchers working in the field are calling for massive public investment in order to maintain the pace of innovation. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? That is as reliably predictable as Moore’s Law itself.

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Source: MIT Technology Review 

People

13

There were a number of notable announcements in the past month:

• Ed Pentz is leaving Crossref after 20 years.
• Mary Ellen Davis, Executive Director of ACRL, has announced her retirement.
• Ian Mulvany is departing SAGE to become CTO at BMJ.
• Gwen Evans, Executive Director of OhioLINK, is joining Elsevier as Vice President, Global Library Relations. We have worked closely with Gwen at OhioLINK over the past four years and wish her well.

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Source: Crossref, American Library Association, ScholCommsProd, OhioLINK

Miscellany

14

For a stimulating long read this month we point you to Ian Parker’s engaging profile of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Harari is the author of three best sellers: Sapiens (HarperCollins, 2015), Homo Deus (HarperCollins, 2017), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Random House, 2018). Harari writes in the Big Ideas genre (compare to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel [W. W. Norton, 2005]), and thus is likely to irritate some readers even as he impresses others. Sapiens is the big book, the one that launched Harari as a public intellectual and celebrity; it sets out to provide a complete history of humankind up to the present moment. In Homo Deus Harari speculates on the future of humanity, which he sees as post-humanism, a world dominated by AI, in which intelligence is distinct from consciousness. 21 Lessons is a collection of edited essays about the present. Parker’s profile is not a hagiography; indeed, Parker seems barely able to restrain himself as he struggles to knock Harari out of his Buddhist detachment and speak out on current affairs. Harari, with the help of his agent and husband, is now evolving the Sapiens name into a brand, to be used on other media properties, including (this is for real) an illustrated version for young people. If you have not yet heard of Harari, you will.

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Source: The New Yorker

15

One of the oddities of scholarly communications is that academic publishing is pulling one way and all other media in another. For scholarly work the trend is toward information that is free to the end user, whatever variant of OA (green, gold, diamond, bronze, etc.) you wish to call it. Producers of other media—movies, television, newspapers—having attempted to thrive, or at least survive, by making content free to end users, are now turning to various paid models, with subscription access to aggregations at the top of the heap (but don’t call it a Big Deal!). The situation is asymmetrical. Consumer media (e.g., television) was never OA in the way we think of “free to the end user” in the scholarly area; rather consumer media was primarily supported by advertising. But with advertising revenue having migrated to meta-services (Google) and platforms for user-generated content (Facebook, Twitter), companies that invest in content are now seeking to be paid directly for the content they create. Examples abound: Netflix, Disney+, The Wall Street Journal, Audible, Apple TV+, and so on. Into this world comes Jessica Lessin (in an article titled “Maybe Information Actually Doesn’t  Want to be Free”), whose The Informationis now an expensive ($399 per year) must-have read for the tech elite and for anyone else interested in where tech and the overall economy are going. Lessin, an alumna of Harvard and The Wall Street Journal, claims that her success is editorial: no one else is covering what is important, a proposition that, frankly, we find hard to dismiss out of hand. The Information has been profitable for several years and should earn $20 million this year. Meanwhile, the blessings of paid content are celebrated in an article in The New York Times about the recent earnings report for The Times Company itself. The Times now has over 5 million subscribers. Digital revenue now exceeds $800 million a year, of which over half ($420 million) comes from subscriptions. You can feel the sigh of relief on the reporter’s part as he writes this piece. Advertising revenue, however, for both the print and digital editions is down. The future is paid content. And so we wonder: Will paid content reassert itself in scholarly communications or will academic publishing continue to buck the trend of all its media brethren?

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Source: The New York Times, The Information

16

At this year’s Midwinter American Library Association (ALA) conference, a major topic of discussion was the organization’s finances. ALA is losing money; there are multiple reasons. For one, a decision was made to make a big investment in IT. Even so, that big investment did not anticipate an 87% cost overrun in the IT budget. (Variances like this make a budget useless. There clearly is a problem with project management.) At the same time the three revenue sources for the ALA were all down: conference attendance, membership dues, and publishing income. This has put ALA into a cash crunch, though it does have assets that it could theoretically borrow against until revenue and costs are once again aligned. On that point, however, there is another discouraging note: even as revenue missed targets, the organization experienced “inflationary” increases in costs. In response to the outcry about the situation, the ALA leadership released an explanatory letter, but it does not provide much encouragement. From our vantage, ALA appears to be in need of going into turnaround mode, with all the hard choices that a turnaround entails. Meanwhile, ALA has recruited a new executive director, whose first day on the job will be a couple of days before you receive this issue of The Brief. Was the search for a new head of the organization done with the need for a turnaround in mind? Was the situation fully disclosed to the incoming executive director so that she could be prepared? We fear that we may be hearing more bad news from ALA in the coming months.

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Source: Library Journal, American Library Association

17

A recent Gallup poll revealed that Americans frequent libraries more than any other public space, including movie theaters, museums, casinos, and sporting events. This is not a new development; libraries have come out on top in previous studies. The Gallup report does not explain why some public venues were not included (in particular, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops), but it does make the point that all the home-based digital services have not undercut the propensity for humans to seek the company of other humans. The poll’s results varied by a number of factors, including geography (people are more likely to go to museums in the East) and household income (people with less money, especially men, are more likely to go to casinos). Among the least attended venues are zoos. And so we wonder: could you boost attendance by putting a Starbucks next to the ape house? The 800-pound gorilla is next in line.

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Source: Gallup

18

We wonder who assigned the metadata. It turns out that Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who stars on February 2, lives in the local library in the off season.

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Source: American Libraries

Meet with C&E

We are presently booking meetings in conjunction with the following events. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss a new project with you or just hear about what you are working on. To set up a meeting just write to us (info@ce-strategy.com) and let us know when you are looking to meet.

National Academy of Science Journal Summit, March 19, 2020, Washington DC
We have helped to develop the program for this invitation-only biannual event for many years. It is, in our humble opinion, among the best meetings in the industry. While we don’t book meetings at the Summit itself, if you are coming to the meeting and are in town a day early or staying on an extra day—let us know.

STM US Annual Conference, April 28–30, Washington, DC
Michael is on the planning committee for Society Day, which occupies the first day of the conference. There is a great lineup of speakers and Michael will be attending the event. 

Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting, May 2–5, 2020, Portland, OR
Laura Ricci will be presenting on the unprecedented level of change in the industry and providing some thoughts on what might come next. 

Society for Scholarly Publishing 42nd Annual Meeting, May 27–29, 2020, Boston, MA 
Pam Harley will be moderating a session titled: “The Publisher RFP Process: Key Considerations for Societies (Before, During, and After).” All of us at C&E will be attending SSP this year. We look forward to seeing you there!

We also meet regularly with clients in DC and New York— let us know if you are passing through town. We’d love to hear from you!

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Those who appear the most sanctified are the worst. ― Queen Elizabeth I