Read through the take-home messages from various SSP 2009 Annual Meeting attendees!
Keynote: Rearchitecting Science: A New Vision and Framework for STM in the 21st Century
Adam Bly, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Seed Media Group, delivered the opening keynote address. Bly articulated the relationship between science and culture: The world is complex and interconnected, and science is more critical than ever in the development of society today. President Obama recently endorsed science as the key to growth, politics, arts, and a sense of self, “the driving transformational agent of the 21st century.” Science is part of our culture, arts, and literature, and global collaboration in science is fundamental (62% of scientists are involved in international collaborations). Scientists care; most believe science can address peace and the problems of the world, feel obligated to communicate with the public and policymakers, and are environmentally conscious. Demographics of scientists are changing: The born-digital have come of age and the amount of information is increasing astronomically. Development of Web tools for collaboration with the international community is essential. Today’s scientists need a new infrastructure that includes a digital core, not just accessories; common standards that connect crowd-sourced information; a free flow of information; restructuring of societies; connection of the developed to the developing world, and a common language of communications – a universal science literacy. Bly described Seed Media’s introduction of “Research Blogging” for aggregation and dissemination of science and the extension of this network to publishers and societies via “Research Blogging Connect” that will bring the conversations from the blogosphere back to the publishers. Cross-referencing and linking to arXiv, PubMed, and companies with large datasets will increase connections for science information and allow all those interested to participate in scientific discovery and progress. –Patty Baskin, Neurology
1A. We Have Seen the Future and It Is Us: Publishers and Libraries Collaborating to Transform Scholarly Communications
The future necessitates collaboration between libraries and publishers, and Sylvia Miller, Maria Bonn and Catherine Candee illustrated examples of how publishers and libraries are working together to offer innovative publishing through both specific projects as well as publishing within the library. The projects and those involved share a common goal of producing high-quality scholarship and face challenges including balancing scalability and sustainability, as well as other issues including legal, ethical, editorial, technical, diplomatic, and monetary. – Kimberly Steinle, Duke University Press
1B. Society Publishers in an Age of Anxiety: Practical Strategies to Help Keep Members and Member Subscriptions from Drifting Away
In the current economic climate, society and association publishers are being forced to address the issue of declining memberships and renewals. Barbara Meyers Ford (Meyers Consulting Services) presented the data from a survey of societies: For most responders, membership in the society increased, but circulation of the print journal decreased slightly. To promote new memberships, she suggested that a lucrative area for marketing is the people within our own groups – such as meeting attendees, abstract submitters, authors, and reviewers. Member surveys can help you determine what is needed to attract members. For better retention of members, ask for earlier renewals with incentives, email personal reminders from the president, make personal phone calls to non-renewers, and add new benefits such as credit union memberships. In promotion activities, focus more on library and institutional subscriptions, shift some of the costs to digital-based promotions, and make full use of listservs, email, and advertising in library journals. If possible, offer reduced rates for online-only versions, sponsor Webcasts and Webinars for members’ benefit, and have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Eleanor Tapscott (American Society of Hematology) reported that her society’s journal is considering opt-out-of-print for members, online rapid response, and online highlighting of articles picked by the Editor, along with enhancing social networking. Betsy Solaro (AMA) pointed out that it is important to try to give members more for their money, but to back up your decisions with metrics, set priorities, and focus first on maintaining your loyal customers. Announce new features and products at the time you ask for renewals and offer free trials for interacting with your Web sites. –Patty Baskin, Neurology
1C. Publishing for the Google Generation
Vikram Savkar, from Nature Publishing Group, outlined how the “Google” generation sees content differently than previous generations. There have been three primary drivers for this change: search engines, crowd-sourced content, and free information. In order to have a successful publishing model, it must have parallel access and be punchy/need-oriented, convenient, and affordable. He offered five recommendations: (i) protect your content; (ii) don’t repurpose, reconceive; (iii) partner with others; (iv) hire young people; (v) build management expertise. Best lesson learned: for greatest success, adapt quickly to new technologies (and embrace them!). –Holly Manning, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
2A. Going Global: Content, Research and Outreach –A Two-Way Train
Keith Collier from Thomson Reuters presented some provocative data regarding global trends in submitted and accepted manuscripts fueled by the ease of online submission systems; hot spots for submissions include Brazil, Australia, India, China, and the Mideast, with China likely having the largest number of submissions by 2012. He exhorted publishers to embrace these changes by gearing up to provide international tools and services as quickly as possible. Sue Silver from the Ecological Society of American spoke about this society’s outreach efforts to China, where researchers are required to publish in high-impact journals, and sponsoring of workshops there to help investigators move through the Western publication system and improve their acceptance rates. Crispin Taylor from the American Society of Plant Biologists presented the Society’s outreach and global marketing efforts to advocate for and educate the 40% of their members who are international by sponsoring periodic meetings in other countries and joining symposia with other organizations overseas. In finding ways to support the international scholarly community, we will be also be expanding our publications’ reach to global audiences. – Patty Baskin, Neurology
2D. Building Social Collaboration Tools: A Practical Guide for Scholarly Publishers
This session gave several examples of how to utilize social networking tools to enhance the value of your publication. Phil Roberts, from CABI, presented their rationale (cheap, externally hosted, familiar, customizable, easy editor features, secure, etc) for using the existing social site Ning. From their vantage point, they are creating a community to connect with users and facilitate discussion around their content. In order to “hook” people, their site offers all their abstracts for free and have scanned printed sources. A community coordinator starts discussion threads and oversees memberships – spending about an hour a day on the site. An important take-away was to create the site not to promote your self, but to enable, inspire, and influence people who are interested in being a part of the community. –Holly Manning, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
3A. Brave Adventures: New Publishing Models for the “Now” World.
Twitter was enabled during this fascinating session with speakers Geoff Bilder from CrossRef and Kent Anderson from New England Journal of Medicine, resulting in 170 tweets being received by the moderator. The audience was intrigued by the speakers’ visions for the future of publishing and rethinking of the business models for publishing today.
Kent pointed out that information now needs context, which is provided by the users, and apomediation (in a scarcity model, intermediation by publishers or librarians) will be the driving force to convince users to choose the options publishers provide. Publishing is evolving so that producers and consumers have the same capabilities; there has been an undeniable growth in blogs (almost 4x faster than the mainstream media) and elegant content management software for them has been developed. Publishing is going “digital to the core” rather than digital as an accessory; building to devices (with the audience having control) is the future in publishing. This future involves allowing users to tag and apply meaning, using platforms instead of publications, quick decision making, long-tail consumption, and greater fixed costs.
Geoff emphasized that we need to compete with the gorillas of industry – Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft – who are disrupting our publisher space. He pointed out that publishers’ and libraries’ sites seem to conspire to annoy researchers, who don’t want to take time to navigate silos built around society and political issues or unnecessary library interfaces that make users have to think to find their information. He proposes models similar to iTunes (iPub) – which depends on strength of the products, a critical mass, simple interface and purchasing, disaggregation, cheap pricing, and a safe, convenient, simple interface, the iPod – to open up new sources of revenue and reach new audiences, with price points low enough for experimentation. And when all scholarly publishing is stripped to the information level, our brands become our real asset and we must figure out how to become sellers of trust rather than sellers of content in containers. –Patty Baskin, Neurology
3B. Scholarship 2.0: Creating an Online Community
One of the most interesting parts of this session was Tricia Hudson’s (from Oxford University Press) description of their dalliance into Facebook advertising, where they actually had more success than advertising with Google for their publication, Early Music. It was pretty cost effective and hit their target audience. Jocelyn Dawson, from Duke University Press, encouraged participants to have realistic expectations of how much time social networking requires of the staff and to put in the appropriate amount of effort for the desired results. –Holly Manning, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
4B. Now on the Horizon: Start-Ups and Scholarly Apps that can Change Your World
Tom Scheinfeldt, George Mason University, maintained that the Web is sufficiently transparent that custom tools can be shaped to meet the needs of scholarly publishers. Examples include Zotero, a Web research management tool, and Omeka, a Web publishing and museum collections management tool. The impact of these tools is vital to scholarly publishers, who need to experiment and innovate, who need to stop being mediators and start being better facilitators for tools already available to authors. Kevin Stranack, Public Knowledge Project Librarian, reported how the Project will focus on new technologies to build tools and infrastructure to help researchers move forward and to look at tools to offset the high costs of dissemination of academic publishing. Open journal systems (open source software, like WordPress) is built on open architecture and allows easy, agile development to help sustain a healthy environment for scholarly communication. Victor Henning, Mendeley Ltd, compared research activity for researchers to development of an online music profile; Mendeley does the same for researchers, providing online backup and access, desktop research management software, and bookmarking/document import across open Web sites and databases. – Lettie Conrad, SAGE Publications, Inc. The take-home message: There is room for experiments and innovation and for new ways to connect to and use information. – Rachel Slough, Indiana University Wells Library
4C. Publishing 2.0: Tools and Technologies Shaping the Future of Publishing
The presentations about tools and technologies shaping the future stimulated the audience to twitter, email, and text messages in response or to ask questions. Thane Kerner from Silverchair stated that STM publishers must have a semantic strategy to avoid being marginalized in the future; we need a semantic taxonomy for consistency and effectiveness and need to add semantics to our workflows by embedding semantic tags into the XML (content) data sets. Caroline Vanderlip from SharedBook, Inc. talked about custom publishing options, using as an example the knitbook site, which curates the content and allows users to choose a collection of patterns to make up the book and choose a cover. She stressed the importance of taking advantage of social media by allowing the community to annotate the content of a document (rather than edit it as in a Wiki); the community discussion thus becomes part of the document in a footnote.
Julie Noblitt from HighWire Press underscored the importance of making content portable and interoperable. She discussed multi-channel publication, an example being the New York Times, who repurposes their content in “about 25 different” ways – as podcasts, widgets, digests, and other products. Online, dynamic books – updated, video-enhanced, multiple-linked, indexed, abstracted and cited, blogged, tweeted – are the wave of the future. Intelligent content integration across multiple publications is now occurring with the AAP Red Book and Pediatrics online, the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols database products with other publications and a blog, the Royal Society of Medicines’ updateable Handbook of Practice Management with their newsletter, and the Science Signaling Knowledge Environment (virtual journal, directory, forums, podcasts, glossary, and more). More experimentation is coming in the areas of social networking and bookmarking, recommendation systems, and annotation technologies. The winners in STM publishing will be those who can add value to the data and figure out how to monetize it; the losers are the traditional publishers who cling too tightly to their “cash cow” journal models and can’t effectively ride the next wave. –Patty Baskin, Neurology
4D. Managing the Research Lifecycle: The Development of a Virtual Research Environment, the Research Information Center
A small Microsoft research team aiming to optimize and extend Microsoft software to meet the specific needs of the academic community has teamed up with The British Library to create Research Information Centre (RIC). RIC is a research environment – free for the taking – that sits atop Office SharePoint which is used at many academic institutions. RIC is cool and puts the researchers at the center, personalizing their experience. Researchers can: manage collaborative projects, conduct simple content searches in relevant resources, bookmark and tag documents or download them, rate content and share their views with colleagues, look for grant information and see examples of similar applications that have been successfully submitted to a given agency, submit research for publication or for conferences and manage that work, and ultimately preserve their project record working with the library. Good stuff. – Heidi McGregor, Ithaka
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