The Conversations
Wiley’s interview series features bright minds and leading experts from the world of academic publishing. The Conversations is all about sparking lively discussions on thought-provoking subjects, challenging the status quo, and embracing bold perspectives. Together with our guests, we dive into subjects shaping the future of scholarly communications. Don't miss out on expert insights.
The Conversations
Beyond the Paywall | What's Next for Open Access?
Welcome to episode 2 of The Conversations, where we take a deep dive into the evolving landscape of Open Access (OA) in scholarly communication. Join us as we explore the benefits, challenges, and future of open access with leading experts from across the publishing industry.
Whether you're a researcher, academic, or simply curious about the transformation happening in scholarly publishing, this episode provides valuable insights into the #openaccess movement and its influence on the future of research.
🔔 Subscribe to stay updated as we release new episodes on the latest trends in academic publishing and the future of scholarly communication.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Conversations, a show brought to you by Wiley, a global leader in research and education publishing. This series is about exploring the biggest opportunities in the world of academic publishing. It's about asking tough questions and getting into meaningful debate about where our industry needs to go. Today, we have with us Professor Alan Moore from the University of Georgia and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Nate Harnett from Harvard Medical School and co-editor of Mental Health Science, and Colleen Campbell, the Open Access Advisor at Max Planck Digital Library. Now, let's start the conversation. All right, welcome everyone. Al and Colleen, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come and talk to us. I'm going to start by just sort of saying the first time I heard about open access, it was 1999. I was in Philadelphia at the American Library Association meeting. I remember exactly where I was. I remember the first time I ever talked about it. Let's just start with you. Tell us where your open access story begins and a little bit about your career and what got you here so far.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so happy to do that. So I'm Nate Harnett. I run a lab at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. And we look at the neurobiology of PTSD and trauma and try to understand what in the brain leads people to develop PTSD. And so obviously, I had to go to grad school to do that. And as part of grad school, you do research, you try to publish papers. And so for the first paper that I ever tried to publish, I remember sitting with my PI, my advisor, and trying to think about why are we allowed to publish in one journal? Or why was he telling us we could publish in this one journal? but not this other one. And what it came down to at the time was the cost of open access and whether or not our lab had funds to do that. And so as part of my career, I've been very mindful about how do we as researchers afford sort of the processing charges to get into open access, what are the benefits of it, and then thinking about as I moved on to taking a role as co-editor for mental health science, how we really think about open access and sort of global community and why we'd want to do that to sort of put research forward.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So it's been basically a fact of life for your whole career. Yeah, I think it really has been. Okay, awesome. Maybe for you, not so much.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, indeed. Open access, for me, the first time I started hearing about it was, gosh, 2000s. No, actually, 2010s, actually. And it was hearing about the white paper published by the Max Planck Digital Library and this notion that subscription funds invested by universities and libraries was sufficient to cover the cost of open access publishing. And so I was then... engaged to work with the Max Planck Society, the digital library to promote open access. I'm strategic advisor for open access there. And it's, I'm super excited to be here having this conversation with so many different stakeholders that have to do with scholarly publishing because from what I see, it's gonna take all of us working together to achieve open access.
SPEAKER_03:Out of curiosity, what were you doing before that?
SPEAKER_00:I was actually working for JSTOR, which is a platform of scholarly journals and an archive as well. And one of the things that I was really excited about working for JSTOR was the fact that I was working in Europe, bringing access to scholarly content, in particular in Eastern Europe, where the libraries and universities weren't able to afford access to all of the journals. And so having access to JSTOR really broadened the access that they had. And so That actually was really when I started thinking hard about, you know, what does this mean for students who don't have access to all the journals they need for scholarship?
SPEAKER_04:Right. Okay. What about you, Al? Well, so I go back a little bit for Aziz and Nate. Not quite to Stone Age and tablets, but back to the days when you actually mailed manuscripts in to publishers and waited three months and hoped they actually got it. But around, I guess around 2008, 2009, I became editor-in-chief of a society journal, and Wiley was publishing it. So I got to know some of the people at Wiley, and around, I guess, 2010, 11, Wiley was talking about publishing open access journals, and Liz Ferguson, who worked at Wiley, came to me and said, what do you think of this idea for ecology and evolution area? And I said, There's no money in that area. I don't see how they're ever going to do this. And she said, well, you know, who would you think would be a good editor in chief? And I gave it some thought. And I realized at the time we were handling a couple hundred papers as editor in chief of Journal of Evolutionary Biology. And I figured open access, we're talking about 10, 12 papers a year. Sure. So I volunteered. obviously, to be editor-in-chief of this new open access journal. That was my first exposure to it. I did it as an experiment to see how the field would respond to open access. To put it in context, we handle about 3,000 papers a year now.
SPEAKER_03:So a few more than 10 or 12.
SPEAKER_04:I was disappointed,
SPEAKER_03:yes. And in your mind, what caused that shift? I mean, just out of, if you could pick one or two things, what caused that shift from, oh, this is, kind of an afterthought. I'm going to get a dozen papers a year too. We're getting 3,000 papers a year. We're getting, you know, 10 papers a day.
SPEAKER_04:It was really the scientists younger than me. Okay. It was really that it was so obvious to them that this is what we should be doing. The internet was was not a new thing, it was a part of everyone's life. Why are we putting things on paper? Why aren't we putting things on the internet? And then letting anyone see them that wants to see this information. So the big attraction for scientists was getting their knowledge to a much wider audience and not just to a very special set. hidden away in the library, which was great in academia, but maybe not outside of academia. So everyone that thought about it and had grown up with computers at that point realized this was the future. We're not going to have paper copies of anything. Sure.
SPEAKER_03:So legacy structure, those legacy power structures, those legacy beliefs that kind of hold this discussion back. Do you think there are any other misconceptions about OA that are, let's take, Let's just sort of take it in the last couple of years, like some of the development. Anything that you would point out that misconceptions you think we ought to be correcting or addressing together?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I think open access right now, we sort of talk about it as a business model.
SPEAKER_03:You see what I did there,
SPEAKER_00:right? Yeah, I don't think it's a business model at all. It is actually the most natural mode of SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION. RIGHT. AND WE DO A DISSERVICE ABOUT PUTTING IT IN A BOX OF IT'S A BUSINESS MODEL. SO IF OPEN ACCESS IS HOW RESEARCH SHOULD BE DISSEMINATED AND COMMUNICATED OPENLY WITH AUTHORS RETAINING COPYRIGHT AND CONTROL OVER HOW THEIR WORK IS USED, YEAH, IF THERE ARE THINGS THAT WE NEED TO DO ABOUT IT, I THINK IT'S FIRST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IT'S PART OF A BIG TRANSITION OR A BIG Not even transition. How about it's part of an evolution in scholarly communication that is in continuous evolution. It just continues. So if we can acknowledge that and stop putting it in a little box of a business model or give it a timeline. It's now or, and if it doesn't work, then we're going to throw it out the window and start something new, right?
SPEAKER_01:If I may, I think that ties back really well with something you mentioned before about how authors and librarians and these other systems, authors and librarians and these other systems are really not communicating with one another. Because as a researcher, I think of open access quite often when I'm in that sort of scientist, I need to submit the paper mode as a business model. I'm thinking about the funding that we're using, how much we're going to pay, and what the sort of benefits are. And thinking about the same point that you raised about moving to other metrics, I love when I publish open access and I get to look at like the alt metric scores, other sort of like what's, you know, is that article being shared? What are the tweets or Xs now, whatever they are, and how that's related to sort of whether or not the information is being spread. And I really like that idea in terms of like looking for other metrics to look towards because the simple, you know, citation count or reads on the website don't really encompass what we're doing anymore with open access. And so I think, you know, again, with what you said, thinking about how we increase the communications that especially authors and scientists don't think of it as a business model, but maybe more of an investment sort of deal.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think the business model versus the communication is a really important distinction. And they just haven't caught up with each other yet. I think from my perspective, open access took me by surprise at how fast it grew and how much people wanted it. And that's the communication side of it. The business model, we've all struggled with it. My lab struggles with it, your lab struggles with it, we all struggle with it. Where do we come up with the funding to do this? Because prior to open access, prior to online publications, we weren't asked to pay anything generally. Sometimes there were page charges. You avoided those. So it switched things over really quickly, and we haven't figured it out yet. That's a real problem for us. And then also, open access means that our information is more available all over the world now, which is excellent. It doesn't mean that everyone has the same opportunity to contribute to that information. Correct. And
SPEAKER_03:that's the other problem. All right, so that's the other thing, a criticism that can be leveled at either publishers or open access advocates, depending on who's doing the leveling, about the equity of access to those services. In the old model, subscription model, anybody could submit to a journal and didn't have to worry about an APC getting levied against the article because it was free to publish. Now, with about half the... front list article content in the world outside the paywall, there's a one in two chance that a researcher from a developing economy from the global south might need to pay or might be asked to pay. And at whose feet should we lay this burden?
SPEAKER_00:If I may jump on that. Please. Sure. Yes. About half of the output is now open access. the other half still behind a subscription paywall. But then if you look at the investments in each of these kinds of the publishing right now, actually 80% of the revenue or cost to institutions, to the research community, 80% of the cost is actually associated with subscription paywalls. So I would argue that That's a huge resource of funding that we need to find a way of repurposing and channeling to cover the costs of publishing also for authors in parts of the world that are less resourced because I assure you, their libraries are paying for subscriptions, and grant funders are giving authors money, and somehow we just need to do the channeling in the right way.
SPEAKER_03:All right, so I'm going to get into the weeds and nerd out on the economics, and then we're going to pull back out and talk for a second. But we've got to have this conversation. So the reason that that is is because only about three publishers in the world, Wiley included, with the most transitional agreements, only about three publishers in the world are being asked to come to the table in Europe to negotiate transitional agreements. agreements. And they together make up about 20% of the revenue. But the other 2,997 scholarly publishers aren't getting invited to Berlin to flip their business model. They aren't getting invited to London to have those conversations or to Paris or other places. So how does the American Society of Microbiology or how does the the New Zealand Veterinary Association, get invited into this party with the big institutional funders and with Rich Northern Europe in order to have that conversation. Because right now they're being frozen out. And that's not what I say, that's what the American Society for Clinical Oncology says.
SPEAKER_00:I guess that's for me. Yeah, let's get into it. I mean, it's a great talking point,
SPEAKER_03:but it sort of elides the actual thing from my
SPEAKER_00:perspective. Sure. I mean, this is, I'm going to go back to what I said before and talk about evolution and timeline, right? I think it's, you're a businessman, the 80-20 rule, right? So if you are going to have an effective strategy, it's a good thing to focus on what is going to have the highest impact, right? So if we, in library consortia around the world, are starting with the big three, the big five, in terms of their negotiations to transition to open access, that's a lot of bang for their buck. And so I think that's probably the most effective and intelligent thing they could possibly do. And I think that it's probably a necessary step because these transitional agreements I want to call out, I'll get back to that. I think it's important to understand that in a transitional agreement, there are two parties, right? There's the publisher and there are the institutions, the libraries. And transition, transformation is required on both sides. So just as such an agreement requires certain workflow adaptations on the side of a publisher, equally so on the side of libraries and the institutions and for authors. So having this experience of You have to start somewhere, right? So we're going to start where we get the biggest bang for our buck. And that experience then, it does a lot of things. It gives us, on the research side, the opportunity to work out those workflows in a way that is rational, sustainable, gets us organized, reorganizing the funding, which then will open the door, right, for we have more experience, we know how it works, we can... good practice, and we can apply that to other agreements with other publishers. The long tail is the long tail. I mean, there's no doubt about that. But time goes on, and I think we are working out. And maybe there are other models that we can start experimenting with. Sure, like Diamond or Subscribe to Open. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're proving to be very effective. So I wouldn't say it's this is it right here, right now. I mean, we continue to work on it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think the funding streams are a super important point. I don't want to spend all our time talking about the economics. Let's talk about open access versus open science. And let's talk about, so I want to bring you in on that. The thing that I'm really interested in is, you know, we have, I think got agreement around this table. And by the way, just from Wiley's point of view, we want to move as fast as our customers want to move. And we also really believe in the benefits of open dissemination of this content. We think that content outside the paywall is a better way to service the research community. So we all align on that. I think that's really important. But what about everything else? What about the methods? What about the data that isn't getting published? What about the four next papers that you want to write in that data that you're squirreling away on your hard drive? And the NSF, where you work, mandates that the data gets deposited. But how's that working out? And the rest of that open science ecosystem, open code, open peer review, open source, how do we bring that into this discussion? Because, yeah, it's not just a business model. It's an ethos. How do we bring it all together?
SPEAKER_04:That's a good question. I think it's not going very well, would be my personal opinion, that it's not happening very quickly. It's a cultural change that hasn't quite happened. It's interesting that everyone is okay with getting the paper out, but the data and everything behind it, they're a little concerned about having other people have access to that. I was involved in something called Dryad, which is a repository for ecology and evolution. Actually, it's broader than that now. But when it was started, it was funded by the National Science Foundation to get it started. And they said, but you have to develop a business model that will maintain this repository forever. And the person who really drove this was a guy named Mike Whitlock. And Mike had the brilliant idea of saying, well, let's tie it to the publishers. And we'll say that If you publish in our journal, you must deposit your data because here's the problem. We can ask people or tell people they must do things, but there's almost no way to go back and find out whether they did it. In my community, basically, everyone expects to put their data and their R code and everything else into repositories. It's just a given now. Nobody even bothers to argue about it. Early on, people argued, look, I have 15 more papers that I want to publish from these data. I don't want to deposit them. We don't get that argument
SPEAKER_02:at all anymore.
SPEAKER_04:We don't get an embargo on the data anymore. Very rarely we'll have human data that will be embargoed for a year or so. But rarely do we embargo data. They're available with the publication. So there are ways to do it, but that's a slower change in the community, getting people to share. The reality is nobody's going in and stealing their data and publishing papers behind them.
SPEAKER_03:Right. Is that something you hear earlier career researchers worried about? getting scooped if you put your data in an open repository, somebody comes along and says, well, I'm going to write that up.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I think everyone, to some extent, worries about being scooped. From my perspective, I don't hear that as much. I think that most people, at least in the circles that I'm in, are really in favor of having ways to store data, to store code, to make it more freely available. But I do hear from many different people that sort of concern of like, I do still have four papers that I want to write. Or we've secured this$10 million grant to collect all these data. We want first dibs for the first five, six, seven years or something. And on top of that, I think that one of the challenges that we have had and others have had with sharing data are just the platforms to actually share the data themselves. Yes. And that some of them really aren't very good, it's hard to figure out what format the data needs to be in. Are you sharing really raw data? Are you sharing process data? What's the most applicable for the paper that you've now deposited or published? you know, what really makes the most sense and can the system actually handle that? You know, there are many instances, for example, with like the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive, the NMH Data Archive, which really houses a lot of human clinical data. They want it in very specific formats. It's almost like you need a whole other person to be able to format that data and then deposit it and then get it ready to go. Is there really the resources for that, especially again for early career researchers who are now also paying for open access costs to support that? I think those are just very difficult sort of transitionary questions as we try to figure out what are we gonna do for these things.
SPEAKER_03:Are we asking the right questions? I worry a lot as a publisher about the data mandate side of things. I worry about code getting lost. I worry about the reproducibility questions. And increasingly, paper mills and research integrity and straight up fraud in the publication process as the incentives are so tightly coupled today to publishing output. So are we asking the right question about where the burden for, or like who pays and organizes all this data and all this code and all these methods and all this important stuff? The communities, are they self-organizing? Are the funders getting together around this? Who's setting the standards? I sit, I look back, I stand back and I look at this problem and I just go like, I don't know if I even want to wait in. Maybe I'll just hang out and make PDFs.
SPEAKER_04:I do, well, there is that. I do think It is, as you said, it's part of this evolution, this transition that we're in the middle of, and I think it's all wrapped together. I do believe that whatever model we end up with in supporting the communication of the research, how do we get around this problem of predatory publishing? And I think the answer is by requiring all the information that went into that. How do we get around AI? By requiring the data that went into that. How do we know that this paper is solid, that we really should... we should support that research, because you have more than just the paper to go by. So I think ultimately this is gonna be a whole ecosystem that comes together, and the way in which we support that I think will have to be all integrated. I don't think that it'll be separate for each one.
SPEAKER_03:By the time this goes to air, we will have retracted a paper in the journal Proteomics. Big deal on X this week, as we're talking. Somebody took somebody's data and In one of the repositories, I think it was a researcher in Utah, and deposited his data in a repository, and they took his prose and they ran it through an AI, and they resubmitted the whole thing. And there's nothing in the ecosystem right now that can detect that. Now, I think the ecosystem's improving and I think we're going to get to a place in the next four or five years where we can detect that kind of intentional fraud. But in the meantime, we have to retract. And so when you talk about predatory publishing and you talk about the reputational impact, how much of this is rightly or wrongly associated with open access? Or do you think they're entirely independent? If it's not a business model and it's a whole system thing, then shouldn't open access have to shoulder some of the like responsibility for helping us sort this out
SPEAKER_04:i don't know that it's open access necessarily but it is the the electronic communication. We went away from publishing a paper journal and mailing it somewhere. I don't think there was quite as much fraud back then, and it's easier now to have journals that are soliciting papers and saying, we'll write it for you, we'll do things for
SPEAKER_03:you.
SPEAKER_04:And obviously, I don't know anyone who's actually doing that, but it's possible that it could be done. The case you're talking about is pretty egregious, one of the wildest ones I've ever seen. and why they thought that was a good idea, I have no idea. But it was possible because of the electronic. And so there is obviously new safeguards we need to have. And I'm not sure what those will be, but it will be AI-based in part, AI fighting AI. And I think that the publishers desperately want that to happen. They don't want to have the reputations brought into question, obviously. And same with researchers. So I think this is a transition period, again, for that as well. But is it open access? I don't think it's an open access. I think it's just electronic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I would agree with that. I don't think like open access as a concept is to blame when researchers or scientists or anyone else commits fraud or falsification. But I think it's part of the ecosystem that we've sort of developed. And I think that we've kind of been talking around a little bit as we talk about open data, open access mandates and things like this. I do not support fraud and falsification, but I also understand from the scientist's perspective, there are a lot of things that they have to do. There's a lot of pressures to get papers out. There's a lot of pressure to publish and have it, you know, widely viewed and recognized by their peers. And so when we have things, I think this is go back to the equity question as well and affordability. When you have researchers who shoulder the brunt of getting grants to support their research, to support publishing open access, to support how do we organize the code? How do we upload the data? How do we do this? How do we do this? How are you running your little business and all of your little people? And then trying to figure out all these regulations that you don't necessarily learn in grad school that you're picking up on the fly. What are the pressures that are then put on people to act in these ways? And it's not permissible to act with fraud. Plenty of people experience these pressures and don't do that. So that's okay. But how are we going to readjust the burden and all these different questions of open access, of open science, of different research frameworks to prevent sort of the burnout, especially of junior scientists who feel a lot of this pressure so that we lessen sort of maybe the possibility or likelihood of these sorts of high-profile retractions occurring.
SPEAKER_03:I can tell you from our perspective that the complexity is eye-watering. We do it on a global scale. The regulatory landscapes, each society with different standards, requirements, points of view, we're talking about that a little bit earlier, right? But yet we want to help. I want to help. We're all aligned that we need to take the inefficiency out of the system. We want to do this better, faster, cleaner, more transparently, more reproducibly. If a publisher had a role in that that you wanted us to play, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01:That's a really good question. I think that As an author, as a sort of junior editor, what I think about when I'm looking at submitting a paper, when I'm thinking about what are the sort of requirements that I need to do, is how do we make this as both rigorous, but also as most efficient as possible. It's very difficult when there are you know, 14 different forms that you're entering the same thing in three different ways. You're uploading the same paper. You get the proofs back and everything's incorrect or some things that like really could have been fixed by a proof editor don't seem to have been edited at all. You know, these questions prop up of like, what are we really doing and what are we really getting out of the papers that we're sort of publishing? And I think that that level of transparency for authors or for scientists of like, what are the services that the publisher offers? Not necessarily Wiley, not necessarily and one of the other ones as well. What are you really getting when we choose to submit to that journal, when we choose to offer the work that we've been doing to that publisher? What are we getting out of that aside from just a vehicle to have our work seen? Because if we're going to pay the open access fees, if we're going to edit the whole thing, if we're going to make it ready to go such that people are just clicking a button and letting it go, who's going to offer us the benefit of maintaining our code or maintaining an open research platform and repository that confines with federal mandates and things like that. I
SPEAKER_04:think the other thing that publishers have done, have been doing in the past, has been the arbitrators of peer review. And everyone thought that was sufficient. Peer review solved everything. And I think what's very clear is that peer review does not solve hardly anything.
SPEAKER_02:It
SPEAKER_04:acts as a barrier to publication, but it doesn't necessarily enhance publication. And I don't have the answer of what publishers can do in that space, but I think what you're getting at is enhancing the publication, finding ways to provide confidence to the readers, providing ways to provide confidence to the reviewers that they can focus on you know, I don't need to rewrite your manuscript for you, you know, although they always want to. But rather saying, you know, this is not clearly expressed. And reasons to publish rather than reasons to reject. And I don't know how we get there, but if publishers can get to that space, that would be a big difference.
SPEAKER_03:Reasons to publish rather than reasons to reject feels like a bumper sticker that we should all put on our cars. Is there, you're well established, you're a full professor, you got a good gig, you've had a great career. For somebody who's just starting out in their career, you know, maybe they need to be a little more selective because their peers are watching what papers they're accepting. It's their first editorial board assignment and their peers are going, oh, wow. Isn't the, very much like the US News and World Report rankings, at the University of Georgia. Isn't it all about marketing so you get more applications so that you can reject more people, so your acceptance rate can be lower, so you go up the ranking?
SPEAKER_04:Absolutely. So what do we do about it? And my hope is, and the reason I'm involved at all with this, to be quite honest, is to change that I really want to see the researchers coming along, evaluated with different metrics, maybe not metrics, but different eyes than happened for me, not because I had any bad time of it, I've obviously not, but rather because I see that as barriers to getting the full diversity of talent through the system and getting the full diversity of talent and education and research through the system, you know, so it's not all the same, because we've been saying, you know, if you don't publish in journal X, Y, and Z, then you're not gonna get tenure. If you don't have 20 grants, you're not gonna get tenure. Well, what if you can do the really good research without a lot of grants? Isn't that okay, too? But we need to know what is really good research. So I think, you know, I don't know where we're headed, but I really believe that the Research coming along now, I'm starting to think maybe we've been a little bit sloppy in how we evaluate each other. Maybe we should be a little more sensitive to the various ways that people are contributing. And that it's not the name of the journal.
SPEAKER_03:It feels like a long journey. What do
SPEAKER_00:you want to say? No, it just came to my mind also thinking about open science as we were talking about it earlier. I think that we have, right now we have this container that is the journal. And I think maybe we would like to go, we would like to somehow undo that container, right? Make it more, let it breathe, let it grow. And I'm going to go back to the fact though that the subscription paywall I think, is something that is holding that growth back and holding that unleashing back. As long as we have that subscription paywall, this is how we organize how we pay for scholarly publishing. And so if we can get to a place where it's not focused on that paywall, this renewal here, that will help unleash that and let I think
SPEAKER_04:it goes back to the comment of we're really in the business of communicating knowledge. If we go back to that fundamental principle, then the way in which we do that doesn't have to be bound by the traditional structure. And what we do, the sorts of things we're doing, what kinds of knowledge we're putting out there, the way in which we're presenting that knowledge doesn't have to be what Gutenberg invented. So I think that's where we're headed. We're really headed towards publishers looking at how do we assist in the communication process.
SPEAKER_01:What do you think? I think all of that sounds great to me. I think that one of the things that is on my mind as we have this conversation though about wanting to change the system is who are we changing within that system? Because at the end of the day, we still have, I'm still evaluated by faculty peers. I'm still evaluated by people at different levels who have different viewpoints. And so part of what I'm hearing is how do we change the systems and i guess part of what i'm curious about is how do we change the culture around that how do we move people towards you know the evaluation of the research and not using journal shorthands to evaluate whether or not it's quality work or something like that how do we actually push the culture that we've developed away from focusing on journal impact factors, away from having these associations, I think, that you raised between open access and, quote unquote, less rigorous, more faulty science. I don't have an answer for that either. But I think that as we think about the roadblocks and barriers that we might come up against as we're moving towards that, thinking about how we do that is going to be really important.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I mean, we haven't started a subscription journal in 10 years, probably, right? And so all the new journals are OA. And we've managed to do high impact, quote unquote, publishing in a variety of disciplines. But I certainly think that all these other domains are going to require a lot of investment, right? And there's a lot of change and cultural change that's going to be required simultaneously. And it does have a little bit of a chicken and egg to it in the sense that, you know, very personally, I would love us to move to more modern evaluation frameworks because I personally think that's a great idea. It wouldn't necessarily be a rational business decision unless There was a collective agreement on the part of funders, on the part of faculty review, tenure committees, on the PIs and advisors who were talking to their postdocs, that we were all going to do this together. And just how do we move together? What is the way that we bring all these various stakeholders to the table? Because I can guarantee you, we're not, we as Wiley, at least, aren't the ones who would say, well, we need to keep things the way they are.
SPEAKER_04:I do think there's a distinction between different countries and how this is working. I would say the EU and the US function completely differently. Yes, they do. And so one of the things that I see is that it may be a little bit easier in the EU where you can get some agreement amongst groups of funders and institutions. In the US, I think one of the things that I've seen missing, this is not a publisher problem, it's a US problem, the institutions haven't bought into this yet. And so my institution, where I have to put where I work on every paper I publish and everything that I do, doesn't see that it's their job to help me do that right now. So the way we have things structured, it's become the researcher's problem. And I believe very strongly that we need to get the institutions involved in this. We need to get the institutions to buy into this cultural change and say, we want to evaluate differently our faculty. We want our faculty to be evaluated on how widely they're communicating their knowledge, not just where they published it and what impact factor that journal happened to have. So I think if we can get the institutions on board, I see it happening, like I say, more in Europe than I do in the US. If we get the institutions on board. And Wiley and other publishers are doing that to some extent, bringing them together, the California system and New York system and others. And actually, my institution at the University of Georgia has bought into agreements so they help us publish. But I think if selling, what the publishers can do is sell to the institutions, we're going to help you with your educational mission, which is what publishers have always done. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I THINK THE KEY HERE IS BRINGING FUNDERS OR AUTHORS OR WHOEVER HAS THE GRANT FUNDING MONEY TOGETHER WITH THE LIBRARY AND THE INSTITUTION AND LOOKING AT IT ALL TOGETHER AND UNDERSTANDING, OKAY, WHAT DOES THIS PICTURE TELL US? WHAT ARE THE FUNDING FLOWS RIGHT NOW? BECAUSE AS I SAID BEFORE, IF THIS IS OUR VISION, IT'S GOING TO TAKE COLLABORATION AT THAT LEVEL. You mentioned in Europe. Well, 20 years ago, we didn't know how to do it in Europe either. And you start figuring it out. You go to the accounts department of the university and say, listen, I need a fund code for APCs. That way I can start counting what is being paid in APCs. And that'll give me, OK, I've got this data. And then I can go to the university provost and say, well, how much are we spending on marketing? I've got a great way that we can market the research that we are at our institution. It's called Open Access. And, you know, I think we can start having those conversations and then talking also with grant funders and helping them to see how this collaboration can actually save them money, right? Because if you look at these agreements that are in place in many countries, negotiations happen where you've got a consortium and therefore there is a discounted APC, right? So that discount is money that authors can use for their research. It's saving the grant funders money on what would otherwise be spending on the actual research. So it's bringing them benefit as well, is what I'm saying. So if we can show, see that benefit, maybe it'll get us more in the mood to collaborate across stakeholders and, yeah, find new... Yeah, new ways to... In the U.S.
SPEAKER_04:at least, yeah, I'm sorry. In the U.S. at least, I see that happening in indirect costs rather than direct costs to the researchers. Again, the problem with that is that it's an institutional benefit and the PI is thinking, as a U.S. PI, thinking, I'm not here to help my institution, right? Although maybe we should. But actually, the indirect cost is a way to do that, because then it's spread evenly across the institution, and then individuals that may not have funding will still be able to publish in open access. So I think, but it goes back to what you're saying. You have to document how much you're spending on it, then that can be included in the calculations of indirect costs from federal agencies in the U.S. In Europe, it may be different as governments fund universities different certainly in
SPEAKER_03:Europe. Sure. Well, and there's a single source of funding for libraries, and there isn't the federal system that we have here in the U.S., which means that there isn't this mixture of state, local, federal, private grant. And there isn't really a phenomenon of private universities in Europe either. So it's like it's a very totally different ballgame. Does any of this matter to a single PI? You said before, I'm running a small business. I found that such a fascinating comment. But it is. It's like Nate Inc. And you've got a couple of employees. And you've got two postdocs in your group? One leaving postdoc. Smaller
SPEAKER_01:business now.
SPEAKER_03:And you've got you know, some grants and you have data science needs, you have institutional support needs, you got an office, you have all these overhead costs you're getting charged, they're getting billed against your grant, the university's taxing you for your business card, however that works. At the end of the day, are you, how do you bridge between this kind of utilitarian thing about, I'm not in it for my institution, I'm in it for Nate Inc., and where you think this ought to go, like your personal ethos, your personal point of view about like what's good for science or what's good for my community of researchers?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's a really good and important question. I think how I end up viewing these things is I am one person and I can make choices for me, but I have to live and exist in this ecosystem and cards on the table, I'm proud of what I achieved in this ecosystem. If they take me out tomorrow, I'm not that really worried about it. It was a great run. So I'm more than happy to put my cards and invest in how do we try to make open access the thing that we're gonna do. I'm happy to try to put money towards making sure that the articles that we publish as much as we can are gonna be open access. And I think that both of you hit on something that was really important is that when we're talking about changing the system that we live in now, we have to talk about changing the system, right? Because each individual author can only make choices within the sort of structure that we've already developed. But if we can find ways to find the pressure points to say, yeah, let's move the funding for ABCs to indirect costs from grants. Let's find ways to get the institutions to have a specific code so they can renegotiate these types of things. That to me seems like a great way of getting this sort of pressure off the individual of stopping to think about, okay, well, the small business is the problem. but to think about it more as the business that the world that the business is operating in, that's really what we need to start to change. And so I think to me, all of these conversations are important and all of them are really moving us towards where we need to be going in terms of open access
SPEAKER_03:it's interesting because the publishers are the only ones who know where these apcs are right now right in internally we call them the apcs in the wild right and we bring those to the table when we talk to librarians we say hey look it's this and that and it's the other thing and the librarians go that's great except i don't have access to that money and and so it reminds me a lot of the print to digital transition it was the exact same thing that happened during print to digital there were You remember this, there were departmental subscriptions, right? And the law library had some journals, and the chemistry library, back when there was such a thing, had their own journals. And the veterinary school, which was 20 miles away, had their own journals. And the first time the librarian even got sight of any of this was when the publisher showed up and said, well, here's kind of what it looks like. And printed digital allowed us to get a lot of inefficiency out. Open access has the promise of allowing us to get a lot of inefficiency out. But beyond the sort of raw economics of it, you said before something about we're in the business of, what did you say? We're in the business of helping institutions achieve their- Communicate knowledge. Communicate knowledge. So if we were going to take a blank piece of paper and sort of think about 10 years from now, what's that seamless, frictionless ecosystem that We're evaluating the right things, measuring the right things. We had all the technology we wanted. We didn't have the legacy power structures or infrastructures to overcome. What's it going to look like?
SPEAKER_00:A lot more transparent, first of all. A lot more transparent, where everyone can see what is happening in the landscape and we have an understanding of what's happening in the landscape. Because I think that is one of the, we were talking earlier about what do we actually mean by transparency? And we all had different definitions of transparency or where the transition, excuse me, the transparency is lacking in our own little piece of the world. So I think in that future, the first thing is it will all be out there and we will be able to see it and to track it. And yeah, so I'm going to give that characteristic.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, it'll be transparent.
SPEAKER_00:And
SPEAKER_03:since you all had different definitions, what's yours?
SPEAKER_00:I was looking at transparency of cost. So having an understanding of right now, the APCs, the subscription investments, how much they are, what is the value for service that I'm getting for them, what am I actually paying for? I don't know, what were some other thoughts on transparency?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think mine was very similar to your last one of like transparency of what you're actually getting, what happens to your manuscript after you submit, after it gets quote unquote accepted, what's really happening? And I think to the point of where are things gonna be in the next 10 years, I suspect, and I really think that what we're gonna end up with, with this sort of open access world that we're living in, is a much more living ecosystem in terms of how science is done, how it's communicated. These things about the very rigorous, you know, hard lines of this is published, this is accepted, this is under review. I think a lot of that's gonna go away as we have open data. I think manuscripts are gonna become a lot more living. The way that science is done is gonna be, not as, you know, it's gonna be fluid, but still rigorous in a sense.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and I think that transparency will translate into one of the big problems we have in society is we expect everything that comes out of a science is black and white. It's like yes or no. And all of us that ever have done science know that it's very uncertain. There's shades of gray, there's all sorts of nuance, there's all sorts of variation, and so transparency will bring that to light as well. I think that the knowledge and the uncertainty around the knowledge then becomes transparent.
SPEAKER_03:Believe it or not, I once saw the guy who started Archive, the preprint server, Rick Luce, the Los Alamos National Lab, the librarian there, give a talk 25 years ago where he described a future. This was 25 years ago he gave the talk where the manuscript was more fluid and it was like a medieval wizard. He was sort of saying, look, these data are gonna be interoperable and two people can edit the same document using this thing called the internet. And it was all, it was a fascinating talk. It impacted me as a young, publishing professional. It really changed the way I thought about like the promise of tech. I love that vision of, you know, making those publishing steps far less codified and making the content outputs and artifacts a lot less bound by those legacy structures. I mean, that for me is a big picture goal that I think certainly I would love to see us get to. All right, imagine you were at a table with a senior publishing executive. I know it's hard to imagine. And you could get any question out there you wanted. And I'm not speaking for the whole industry, just Jay for Wiley at this point. Like, what do you want to be sure that you get out on the table? Burning question. We'll start with you.
SPEAKER_01:Burning question. Thank you for that. Yeah, no, I was ready to go with that one. You were ready to go? All right. No, no. I think my question at the sort of end of the day, in terms of your perspective, maybe I'll ask the easy one, right, is what is your perspective on open access? How do you see researchers interacting with the publications that you manage? How do you think open access really should work for them? Should they be paying the APCs? Or how do we move towards, in your view, this sort of more equitable system that we've been talking about and speculating on?
SPEAKER_03:So I think there's enough money in the system, first off. I think that the amount of money that gets allocated to publishing the entire, I think R&D global budget is about a trillion dollars. I think the total revenue of the entire publishing industry is about$10 billion. So you can do the math. As a sort of ROI metric or a proportion of allocated cost, it's just not that great. I think it's a super inefficient way to do it to run it through libraries. Article output grows at 7%, 8% a year. Library funding grows at about a percent a year. The publishers can't fix that. And so we need to find other ways of bringing funding in to make it work. I do not think authors should be paying. My wife works in research in here in New Jersey. They don't want to be spending their grant money on that. They want to be spending their grant money on postdocs and travel and poster sessions and going to meetings and mentoring students and doing all those things. So I think there's a way to work it out where we find more efficient, more open, more transparent ways to disseminate the information. And I do think it can be more economical for sure. There's a lot of waste in the system, right? We peer review every paper. If each paper gets peer reviewed three times before it gets published, gets rejected twice and then finally gets published, like that's a lot of wasted energy in the system. If we're not reusing, if we're not standardizing peer review reports, if we're not standardizing methods, I mean, these are things, standardizing workflows, these are things we can work on. So it's not a very pithy answer to your question, but from my personal perspective, there's still a lot more to do.
SPEAKER_00:Great, yes. enough money in the system. Libraries, I see an opportunity for libraries, actually. So if the library sees that, yes, the future is not necessarily or not only supporting readers, learners, but also supporting authors and helping them to be able to publish in any venue they find most appropriate to their research, I see a huge opportunity, actually, for libraries. What do the business models look like? Granted that we are going to figure this out, the funding flows, whether it's through institutional funds, university library funds are flowing also, grant funds coming together, covering the cost of many venues. What do the business models look like?
SPEAKER_03:I think they're more atomized. I think all the things I hear today, if I think 10 years from now, there's a huge to-do list of things that a lot of people want publishers to do that they didn't have to do 10 years ago. They want screening for plagiarism, they want screening for AI, they want to fight paper mills, data deposit mandates, all these things we've talked about. The demands on the publisher side do nothing but increase. And I think that's fair given the amount of tech investment that we need to make and given the changing landscape. that we've talked about. So it's fine. I think we should embrace that role. We should be on the vanguard about paper mills and research integrity, about image manipulation, about p-hacking, about all the things, authorship for sale, all those things that happen. We're in a good position to do that. We need to collaborate and share information. We need to set up ways to do that. But I don't think that each one of those things can be bundled into a single APC or a single subscription. And I think we need to get more sophisticated about how we find not just buyers for those services, but the way that we as in the ecosystem create funding for those different services. And I worry a lot that there are mandates now from funders laterally, famously, that say, well, you need to publish open access, but you can't use our grant money to do it. And that researchers are supposed to magic that money up from someplace else. That's really challenging, I think. So yeah, I'm here for that. And I would love us to figure out ways to make that work.
SPEAKER_04:So you kind of answered a little bit of my question. My question is based around, we currently live in a world where the publishers and the authors are not getting along. There's some suspicion on the author's side of what publishers are doing, and my question really for you, and I think you answered to some extent, do you think technology is going to get us beyond that? Because I see that it's not really helping either side, that we are not collaborating with each other, that I think ultimately we need to be in collaboration, we need to be working together, and APCs have pushed us apart. Do you think we can get around that with technology or is it going to be a funding model that gets us around
SPEAKER_03:that? Speaking for myself and as somebody who has been thinking about this for approximately 25 years, I never envisioned we'd get to a place where authors were bearing these APCs. It was never what was promised to me when I went to these negotiations and folks said, oh, we're going to move the funding from libraries, from libraries we're gonna move the business model or we're gonna move the pricing from subscription to OA sounded great. If I had known then what I know now, I think I would have pushed for different solutions. And I was at the table in a lot of this conversation. So I agree, we have been driven apart a little bit by that. I don't think it's purely technology, except that on this other page of my notebook here, I have a whole list of pain points that Nate was just talking about, right? Why is it so slow? How come the proofs don't work? You know, all these, all these things like that we can get after with technology. And I, I feel like Wiley is probably a year out from having all of its journals on a brand new submission system, which is going to take the, the, the taxing job of it's Saturday afternoon. I only, I have four spare hours. Maybe I'll submit a paper and turning that into a 15 minute job. And that's going to be amazing. And that's going to be amazing for a million authors a year, first authors a year who submit to us. And I think those efficiencies that we're going to unlock there are going to be great. So thanks. I want to just thank you all for taking your time. It was a great conversation. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this evolves and look forward to seeing you all again. All right. Thank you so much for taking your time. Thank you. All right. Take care.