Travelling Hopefully in a Time of Change

I had the pleasure of chairing The Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum at the London Book Fair yesterday. The forum brings together academic publishers of all shapes and size, and a smattering of other stakeholders, to explore the challenges and opportunities of change within and beyond the publishing industry. The programme covered topics such as organisational culture, political developments, artificial intelligence, and open access, and highlighted the importance of collaboration, innovation, and trust in the research ecosystem.

As I noted in my introduction to the event, a year or two ago it felt like were in a ‘permacrisis’, defined as, 'a long period of great difficulty, confusion, or suffering that seems to have no end'. 2023 and early 2024 have seen us emerge tentatively from the unrelenting grimness of 2020-2022, but we still face a host of potential turning points that will shape the world, and the publishing industry, for the foreseeable future.

My suggestion to the attendees and speakers was to recognise that many of these turning points could take us in both positive or negative directions, or even both, and that we would do well not to focus only on the negatives. In this article, I will summarise the main points and takeaways from each of the sessions. I hope this will provide a useful overview of the forum and spark further conversations on the issues that matter to the research and scholarly publishing community.

Successful Transformation Comes from Within

The forum kicked off with a keynote discussion moderated by Charlotte Talmage, CEO and Founder of Uuna, a consultancy that helps organisations navigate change and transformation. The panel featured Joyce Lorigan, Group Head of Corporate Affairs at Springer Nature, Antonia Seymour, Chief Executive of IOP Publishing and President of the Publishing Association, and Daniel Ebneter, CEO of Karger Publishers. They shared their experiences and insights on how academic publishers can respond to the demands for change and transformation, and how to foster a culture of resilience, innovation, and purpose within their organisations.

Some of the key points from the discussion were:

1.Change is not episodic but ongoing, and publishers need to build resilience and adaptability to cope with uncertainty and complexity. Yet, as Antonia observed, this is challenging at a time when people’s resilience has already been eroded by the ‘permacrisis’ of the last few years. She advocated for a scientific approach to change, taking a hypothesis and seeking to test it, but accepting that sometimes decisions will need to be made with incomplete data.

2. Publishers must not only communicate a clear and compelling vision of their purpose, but also find ways to align their strategy and operations with this vision. Joyce emphasised the importance of project and change management in this process as a means of identifying individual responsibilities and moving successfully from vision to implementation.

3. Publishers need to embrace a mindset of experimentation and learning, and be willing to try new things, fail fast, and iterate. This is not something that comes naturally to many in the industry, with Daniel Ebneter observing that the traditional publishing mindset is focussed on delivering a perfect, or close to perfect, product. This quest for perfection is ‘deeply rooted in the mindset of publishers’ and has an impact on how open people are to failure, which is often a necessary part of change.

Strategies and Trends in Academic Publishing

The second session was a panel discussion chaired by Mark Collins, Director of Academic at Virtusales Publishing Solutions. The panel consisted of Pooja Aggarwal, Director of Academic and Professional Publishing at Bloomsbury, Christie Henry, Director of Princeton University Press, and Jim Ramage, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Elsevier. They covered topics such as advances in technology and innovation, trends in international collaboration, experimenting with new publishing models and revenue streams, and ethical considerations such as sustainability, diversity and inclusivity, and integrity of peer review. Three observations that stuck out for me were:

1.????? Jim emphasised that AI can be a positive and powerful tool for enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility in the publishing workflow, though it also poses challenges in relation to security, privacy, and quality. He noted AI’s potential to play a positive role in the recruitment process - taking out bias, helping with onboarding and using the right language in job adverts to attract a variety of people. ‘But we still need to apply human oversight as well as the technology,’ he added, noting that, ‘The technology is not perfect, it can go wrong’.

2.?????? Christie argued that, ‘We are still looking for ethical compasses to navigate AI.’ Her role is to steward the IP entrusted to the Princeton University Press, so, ‘who I entrust it to is critical’. The lack of transparency in the content used to train large language models is a concern and she called for credit, consent and compensation – ‘the three C’s everyone is talking about’ - wherever content is used by AI companies.

3.????? Pooja asked how publishers can use ‘tell new stories and make new people visible?’ She stressed the importance of looking more closely at interdisciplinary areas, which are not so 'clean cut'. How does migration affect climate change, for example? Bloomsbury are looking at open access, she noted, but it remains unaffordable to so many people across the world. She and her colleagues are working to address this by having institutions and libraries collectively make content OA. This involves getting a lot of feedback, running workshops and working with libraries and authors to work out an equitable and sustainable way forward.

The Year of Elections

2024 is the biggest election year in history, with more than 2 billion voters across the world casting their ballots in potentially transformative and era-defining elections. The third session was a panel discussion moderated by Will Crook, Head of Policy and Communications at Publishers' Licensing Services, and featuring Caroline Cummins, Director of Policy and Public Affairs (Interim) at the Publishers Association, Leslie Lansman, Global Permission Manager at Springer Nature and Chair of the ALPSP Policy Committee, and Simon Horton, Senior Policy and External Affairs Manager at Taylor and Francis. They examined the implications of the political developments and elections that are taking place in 2024, and how they might affect the future of research and scholarly publishing. Taking key regions in turn:

1.? The UK government has elevated science and technology to a cabinet position, noted Simon, following the formation of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and has ambitions to become a 'science superpower'. However, as the Nurse review pointed out, UK research faces challenges such as investment, policy volatility, and long-lasting approach to policy development, with the term ‘science superpower’ failing to register positively with either scientists or the public. Roundtable discussions between publishers and tech companies on the regulation of AI and IP ground to halt last year, and there's not a lot of time - and perhaps [political will - for the current government to find a solution. Caroline emphasised that the important thing is for the issue not to be seen as a tension between innovation and growth and protecting rightsholders' rights: 'the two can work together'.

2. In contrast to the UK, which proposes a sector-based approach to the regulation of AI, the EU has moved swiftly to adopt a single AI act, approved buy an overwhelming majority of lawmakers on 13 March. This will set the standards and rules for the development and use of AI in the region and will have implications for publishers and other stakeholders. ‘A lot of companies will be looking at this to develop a workable way forward’, according to Leslie, but she cautioned that, ‘The devil is in the detail and there's still a lot of room for everyone involved in the ecosystem to find ways for AI and content to work together.’

3. Turning to the US, Leslie noted that the political outlook is 'uncertain', but that history tells us that, after seismic events like the COVID-19 pandemic, polls tends to favour the change candidate. This raises the very real possibility of a Trump victory and a radical change in policy direction. The US is also 'lagging behind' in its adoption of open access policies, but as Leslie's concluded: 'It's anybody's guess as to what might happen in America.’

The panel also took in developments in other countries, such as Japan and India, which are developing their own open access policies and initiatives, all of which will have an impact on the global research ecosystem.

The Transformative Influence of AI on Academic Publishing

In the penultimate session of the day, I chaired a panel including Thomas Sütterlin, Vice President AI at Springer Nature, Richard Mollet, Head of European Government Affairs at RELX, Catriona Stevenson, General Counsel and Deputy CEO at the Publishers Association UK (PA), and Priya Madina, Director of External Affairs and Policy at Taylor and Francis. We discussed the challenges and opportunities that arise with the implementation of AI in scholarly publishing, and how to strike a balance between fostering innovation and ensuring accountability in the field of AI.

Some of the key points from the discussion were:

1. Catriona shed further light on the impasse reached in the IPO roundtable process in the UK, with the spectre of various lawsuits meaning tech companies would not admit any large-scale use of copyrighted content. She drew comfort from the House of Lords' report on 'Large language models and generative AI' which concluded that the Government “cannot sit on its hands” while LLM developers exploit the works of rightsholders. She also highlighted the ongoing lawsuit between Getty Images and Stability AI as one that will set the tone for future licensing arrangements, with many in the legal profession believing Getty's claim that Stability AI 'unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright' has a strong chance of succeeding.
2. Richard emphasised the significance of the EU's new act, noting that the transparency obligations it introduces can provide the 'frame for addressing the copyright issue'. He explained that, in addition to being a content provider, RELX is an AI developer in its own right, noting that 'we need to know what we are playing with, we need to know what’s inside LLMs and?we need to know what protected works have been used to train models.' Rightsholders will be working with EU legislators to design a template for developers to explain their LLMs and disclose the content on which they have been trained.
3. Priya explored the link between AI and research integrity, explaining that while, 'publishers are always working on accuracy and truth... AI makes it difficult to maintain integrity.' Paper mills are a growing problem, driven in part by the increase in research output enabled by AI. More fundamentally, the question is: 'Why will people go to something they need to pay for and has been curated when they can generate it or access it for free?' Publishers' role is to support authors, who often don't know what is the right approach, and to recognise that AI offers benefits as well as risks. These include enabling researchers to focus on substance rather than formatting, particularly those for whom English isn’t a first language, and reducing the burden placed on peer reviewers.
4. Thomas outlined the approach that Springer Nature are taking to the adoption of AI, following an innovation funnel that sees ideas taking from 'pitch to production' in three stages: ideation, seed and grow. Applications include the provision of personalised recommendations, detecting text and image manipulation (e.g. SnappShot image integrity tool) and easing the discovery process.

There was clear agreement that publishers face common challenges in the adoption of AI, and so there is need to collaborate to share best practices, standards, and tools, and to create a more diverse and inclusive research ecosystem.

Evolving the Role of Open Access

To close the event I moderated a thought-provoking panel discussion on the evolving role of open access in reshaping the research paradigm with Victoria Eva from Elsevier, Nick Lindsay from The MIT Press, and Nicola Ramsey from Edinburgh University Press. It's a sign of how times have changed that OA was relegated to end of the programme rather than being the headline act, yet it remains a key area of challenge and opportunity for publishers of all shapes and sizes. My takeaways from this one were as follows:

1. Nick Lindsay highlighted MIT Press's ambitious goal of making the majority of its content open access by 2025/26, emphasizing the importance of addressing unanswered questions regarding the implications of this transition. Drawing on the recent MIT report 'Access to Science and Scholarship', Nick encouraged us to think about how we might assess the impact of OA policies, determine success metrics, and address the potential equity issues arising from paid OA models.
2. Nicola explained that Edinburgh University Press currently publishes 300 books a year, accounting for 80% of its revenues, but as an AHSS-focused publisher most of this research isn’t externally-funded. At this point only 6% of the Press's monograph output is OA, but she expects this to rise over time, driven in part by UKRI's OA policy for monographs, and the associated funding to support this. Citing one of the Press's past chairs, she stressed: ‘We don’t exist to make a profit but without a profit we don’t exist’. The challenge for publishers like EUP is to figure out how to operate at scale while retaining bibliodiversity.
3. Turning to the global picture, Victoria observed a shift to immediate OA occurring in many countries and regions, but that OA policies worldwide remain a mixed bag. Gold OA via transformative agreements remains popular in Europe and Japan has recently announced a new immediate OA policy, as noted above, but other areas like the US are focusing on subscriptions, while diamond remains the dominant model in Latin America. She echoed Nick's point about the need for more equitable models, something Elsevier is exploring through the use of new geographical pricing models.

As we drew the discussion to a close I asked the panel whether they felt OA was 'running out of steam' or 'picking up speed'. Despite all the questions around sustainability and equity, the collective opinion was that OA is continuing to grow in popularity around the world, meaning the open access evolution of publishing still has some distance to run.

Travelling hopefully...

The mix of excitement and trepidation associated with the rise of generative AI was almost tangible in yesterday's discussions, but I was encouraged by the positive note that most speakers struck. It is a cliché, but also true, that we are living through a time of great change and anyone hoping for things to slow down, or to arrive at a point of relative stability, is likely to be disappointed. Still, on the basis of yesterday's discussions it seems to me that the publishing industry is well-placed to travel hopefully into the future.

Disclosure: In keeping with the themes of the conference, I used Microsoft's Copilot AI to help me turn the scrappy notes made by my colleague Lucia and I during the event into a coherent (but rather sterile) narrative. I then did my best to inject a little humanity back into the AI-generated text by editing and tightening it up overnight. Whether or not I succeeded I shall leave others to judge, but I can say with some confidence that I wouldn't be publishing this piece the morning after the event without the time-saving benefits of generative AI.