Alex Lazinica

The Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Alex Lazinica, CEO, Underline Science, Inc.

Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com> movement. We just wanted to share our journals and books free

Column Editor’s Note: I am very pleased to be part of the ATG family with the introduction of my column titled, “The Innovator’s Saga.” I chose this title as the innovator’s work is never complete; it is truly a work in progress. — DG

As technology evolves, the innovator must balance many choices to ensure that his/her business remains an ongoing concern. Our mission is to highlight those individuals and companies that “put it on the line” every day to improve the critical path of scholarly research. Our stories will include both the success stories and the “lessons learned” stories. I look forward to your feedback and comments, both good and constructive, as our goal is to provide you, our reader, with the best and latest information on the innovators.

Our inaugural column focuses on a gentleman who has established the world’s largest open access book publishing house, IntechOpen (https://www.intechopen.com/). Now he has launched the world’s first streaming of livestream and virtual content repository for scientific conferences, Underline Science, Inc. (https://www.underline.io/).

DG: Alex, can you share with our audience a little bit about your experience, knowledge, background and education, which is quite fascinating?

AL: I graduated from an engineering school in Croatia. I’m of Croatian origin. After graduation, I went to do the Ph.D. studies at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and I worked there as a robotic and artificial intelligence researcher for six years or something. I spent some time at the EPFL, Lausanne. It’s a quite famous university.

I was doing my specialization in multi-robot simulation software. The research I was doing was in the area of multi-robot systems for the manufacturing industry. But, as I was always kind of curious in biology as well, I was researching the behaviors of a flock of birds and a swarm of ants and how to replicate those behaviors in multi-robot systems. Robots were simple as a unit, but as a group they should perform intelligent behaviour.

DG: Very Fascinating!

AL: Yes, so I was kind of intrigued with engineering and biology as well. It was quite interesting.

DG: After that, you decided to launch a company called IntechOpen, but it actually started because you wanted to find a way to communicate and collaborate with other researchers and scholars. Is that correct?

AL: Yes. So, you need to understand, it was a quite different time back then. It was really hard for us, you know, to find the high-quality literature which we needed for our studies, for our research. Even though Vienna University of Technology is in Europe, their library has quite a big budget for subscriptions; but, they were struggling as well. And I remember, one time I wanted to get one book from one famous professor from Japan, and then I called my colleague in Tokyo, and then he was photocopying the book and sending it to me via post, you know.

So, that was one reason why we started to publish open access. We didn’t even know that it was called “Open Access” or that there was a Those were the days.

of charge with the robotics community. The whole idea started as a hobby project. We were just Ph.D. students, so quite young, and we wanted to connect with our peers. You know? It was quite exciting to communicate with famous professors from MIT, Stanford, et cetera. That was the reason. And then the whole robotics community and artificial intelligence accepted our open access idea; so, I decided to leave academia and then to try, you know, entrepreneurial life.

DG: Right, and that launched IntechOpen which is now the world’s largest open access book publisher.

AL: Well, we didn’t start from a garage, but, yes, from a small office at the Robotics Institute at the university. Yes, it was 15 years ago. I was the book editor of our first book, and most of the chapters were written by my colleagues and my friends. At this moment IntechOpen has published almost 5,000 original book titles in all areas of science, technology, and medicine. Yes, it’s quite a successful story, I would say.

DG: You have some Nobel Prize winners as authors and editors, correct?

AL: Yes, actually, we have three Nobel Prize winners as our authors. Yes, quite exciting, other famous people as well from all over the world. We are strongest in technology, since that was our core discipline. Yes. But, medicine is quite a big field as well.

Intech is in Europe, in Croatia, in the UK, in London, in China and has a presence in India and the U.S. It’s a global business and a global company. Most of our authors are from the U.S. and Asia, and that’s quite obvious since most of the research is done in those two parts of the world.

DG: And as an entrepreneur, one of the key things that I’ve witnessed over the years, because I’ve gotten to know you since 2016, is that you’re able to hire really talented people to run your operation. What are the criteria that you use to select the people who do such a good job for you?

AL: I mean, you need to make a lot of mistakes during this journey, you know. The saying is, as you grow, the more I practice, the luckier I get. So, I think that you need to be, I mean, at least that’s for myself, you need to be honest with your people, with your team. You need to inspire them. People need to see that you have honest goals and your vision, and they need to identify with that. It’s a daily job. The job I would say, it’s not easy; but, yes.

DG: And at some point, you were publishing both books and journals; but, I think it was in 2017-18, or whatever, you decided to just focus on the book program.

AL: I think it was in 2015.

DG: Thank you for correcting it.

AL: Yes. So, our first open access book came from a robotic open access journal. We decided to collect the ten most read journal articles and gave those authors the opportunity to write more on the same topic and create an open access book. And I would like to say that it’s the world’s first scientific open access book; I cannot claim that, but I have a good feeling.

DG: I think you’re right!

AL: Yes, it came from a need, or coincidence, I can say. During those few years, we figured out that we have a unique value proposal in open access books, and expertise, knowledge and technology. At that time, it was not possible to buy the software for the publishing process to produce books, open access books, so we were kind of forced to make our own system. And now that was all unique, and then we decided strategically to focus on the books and we are the best in the world, yes, so far.

DG: That’s great.

AL: And SAGE approached us and they acquired our project.

DG: And you found a great home for your journals because SAGE is a very reputable publisher. And so you have IntechOpen, a successful business, and then I read an article about your Yellow Submarine gourmet hamburger chain in Europe, which is voted one of the top 50 gourmet hamburgers in Europe. How did you decide on a hamburger franchise for your second business?

AL: It started as a hobby project, again. I like to cook a lot, and we used to live for a while in New York, and then I got hooked on one famous organic burger chain. I noticed that in Europe the market is not so crowded with those concepts. And, together with my friend, we started one outlet. I mean, we didn’t know what to expect. But, five years later, we have 150 employees. Yes, it’s a growing chain.

DG: And I must say, when I was in Croatia a year ago, I had the opportunity of enjoying a Yellow Submarine gourmet hamburger, and it was delicious, and the service was excellent, and the environment was very funky, in a good way.

AL: Yes, yes. I mean, that “Yellow Submarine.” (laughter)

DG: Yes, that’s right. The IntechOpen business has opened an office in London, and you have established a very successful gourmet hamburger business. So, what prompted you to take the next step to launch your third business, Underline Science?

AL: As you and all of us do, we attend a lot of conferences during our career or life. And I noticed a great lack in this ecosystem, you know, in a way, frustration as well. When you get to the conference, first, you need to get to the conference. You need to have time and money or energy to fight with jet lag, and all of the processes. When you get there, there are always multiple sessions. You need to make a choice about which room to enter and which lecture to attend. When you come back home, there is no platform where you can re-experience the whole event. And that’s kind of frustrating, you know.

There is no repository platform where you can just log in and watch the lecture of your favorite colleague, mentor and/or leader from the last conference he or she attended. That’s something we need to change. With today’s technology, this should be easy, doable, and quite manageable.

DG: And so Underline Science is a virtual streaming video conference platform that works both in a live environment and a virtual environment. Wow! That is dynamic. So, what you’re saying is that if there’s a concurrent session going on, you’ll be able to attend the live event if you want to, and then catch the other ones pretty much “on demand,” as it streams.

AL: Yes, yes. It’s the world’s first live streaming and repository platform custom-made for scientific or academic conferences. We have basically two value proposals, one for the conference organizers and one for scientific societies. We are giving them the possibility, technology, and support to organize online events, which is quite important today, especially in this COVID-19 environment. In the past we have lacked one for end-users — a repository of the most important scientific conferences in their field. Users can watch the lectures from wherever, whenever.

Due to the COVID-19 situation, everything is under lockdown. And we have great technology and great features. We are building new features every week. And since we are, in a way, not from that industry, we are thinking out of the box.

On the Underline site, when the whole event ends, it all becomes part of the Underline Science repository platform. So, we are hosting and broadcasting the lectures. We are enriching the lectures with the transcriptions, translations, DOI numbers, which we can talk about a bit later on, slides and PowerPoint presentations. You can cite the lecture. You can share it. You can search. You can connect with the speaker, since we know that the community is one important aspect of the conferences in general. We are building the community features on the platform. So, you can read the short biography of the speakers. You can start a collaboration. Yes, it’s quite exciting. We are developing something that’s not seen in this industry, especially, so far. I’m quite excited about that and thankful for my team.

DG: Very exciting. And if I understand correctly, you’re transcribing the lectures, which means that they’re searchable.

AL: Yes, yes.

DG: The demonstration that I saw earlier, you were able to change the language from English to Mandarin, to Spanish, at a click of a button. Tell us about this particular transcription service that you’re using that really translates it at a very high level.

AL: Well, we are using machine learning coupled with linguistic experts to build our transcription and translation feature. Yes, it’s quite fascinating to see how you can change the language “on the fly,” and, I mean, with this, I want to say to the world that the language should not be a barrier to science. Science is a global discipline, and we all need to be unified, and our next phase is to work with the conferences which are being presented in the non-English languages, to translate those to English as well. Yes.

DG: You’re one of the few publishers that I’ve ever heard to voice that, that you feel that science should not have language as a barrier versus saying that science should be in English, that science should have no barriers. That is awesome, Alex.

AL: I mean, that’s a huge problem in today’s world, and I had that problem as well, and you can see it. We need to be more inclusive to all researchers. There are a lot of countries doing great science, but they’re not English-focused. So, you’re...

DG: So, Underline Science is capturing conference content which is groundbreaking, simply because before you’d attend a conference and that information was forever lost, or it was just in the minds of the people who attended the conference, but

that record, that scholarly record, wasn’t shared with anyone. I guess you were shocked that no one was providing this level of service, especially when you think about the larger publishers who have the financial wherewithal to build such things.

AL: I mean, the importance of conference lectures is, without any question, very important. It’s not unavoidable, but it’s one of the most important parts of the scholarly communication process in general. And, you know, all the ideas people present and invest a lot of their time and energy to prepare for the lectures, to do the proper presentation, all of that just vanishes after the last day of the conference. You know, there is no platform where you can re-experience that.

DG: And what about the poster sessions?

AL: That’s something, you know, which needs to be changed. I like to say that the lecture is just another type of information exchange. Like journals, like books, like conference paper proceedings. And with today’s technology, you know, it’s the right time to build the repository which preserves that information for many years to come. With regard to the poster sessions, we are doing that, especially during our online events, you know, it’s an important aspect of the conference for the conference organizers and societies. So, we’re building poster session rooms, virtual ones, yes, but our focus is video lectures.

DG: So, your first Livestreaming event for the AAMAS Conference is coming up.

AL: Yes, AAMAS is one of the leading AI conferences in the world, and we are quite flattered, again, that they have chosen Underline Science as their partner to do the online event. It means a lot to us, for me especially. I’m a former AI scientist; yes, and to have such a famous and important event as one of our first customers, it shows us that we have a promising future.

DG: That’s right. I know you’re excited about Underline Science, but what do you think is the most exciting feature of the platform when you’re talking to a prospective conference or publisher?

AL: Yes, I would say, the most exciting features are the ones that are being built. So, let’s keep it, in a way, a tiny secret.

DG: Okay.

AL: We just started, so what you see now on the platform is our starting position, yes.

DG: And when you go to the site, you can see current conferences that have been recorded and see the lectures.

AL: Yes, good point, Darrell. So, we are offering to conference organizers the service of filming the lectures at the venues as well. We have our internal team and a network of freelancers all over the world. We can film the conference wherever it is happening, and we did that for a dozen conferences before this crisis.

DG: Which is nice. And the profiles of the presenters, it’s very professionally done. So, it looks far better than what we see on other social media platforms or academic platforms. So, congratulations on that.

AL: Thank you. We are just now building the new features, as I told you before, so the speakers will have their dedicated pages where they can log in and see the really detailed analytics of their lectures. They can see who is watching their lecture from each country, for how long, how many minutes and they can connect with those as well. And I would like to mention, as well, that we have a Q and A feature so that you, as a viewer, can pose a question to the lecturer, and then the lecturer gets informed through our system, and then they answer your question. That’s really important; then it’s the start of some collaboration as well.

DG: Yes, I’m happy you brought that up because you have a team behind the scenes that are actually producing the events. So, the organization putting on the event, they don’t have to worry about introducing people, or moving things around to introduce people, share screens, and all of that. Tell us a little bit more about the Underline Science philosophy and about how to run an effective conference, whether it’s live or if it’s a hybrid.

AL: Yes, so we are here to help societies, publishers, or individual conference organizers. So, we are not just giving them the technology. We are giving them the support and knowledge to organize the online event. Through our team, or through technology, or through our marketing services, you know, in the end, it’s the same. We are here to support them.

So, together with them, we are building the scripts, really detailed scripts for each day of the live event. We have a professional studio, director, and a professional moderator who is moderating the event. We are focused on the visual identity, the branding of the whole event because it’s important in the end as to how you present your conference. The content is important, but the visual identity is important as well. Our team is coming from the gaming industry, and the professional TV industry, with big show experience. So, they have a lot of knowledge and expertise in doing the live-streaming.

DG: Let’s talk about the Coffee Break rooms for people to interact at the virtual conference.

AL: Yes, that’s something we are building right now since, as I said, we know that the community is one important aspect of the conference event as well. So, we are now building the feature where people can attend one virtual room and speak informally through video chats. We call it the Coffee Break Room Sessions.

DG: Yes, it’s going to be cool. And then to build on that, to help to fund the conference, you are able to build exhibit halls for sponsors where sponsors can demonstrate their services.

AL: Yes, we are kind of mimicking the behavior at the conference, the activities which are happening at the conference booths or stands. So, sponsors or exhibitors can have their leaflets, you know. They will have video chats so that they can communicate with the attendees. They can present their products or services through video, through different digital types of communication. So, in a way, the digital world is quite diverse, I would say. You just need to be creative and, yes, you will have amazing products.

DG: So, Underline is bringing forth this great platform, and the research community is going to have this new tool, right? This new area of information that they’ve never had before. So, when you mesh the two together, hopefully, it’s going to move scholarly research forward in a more productive way.

AL: Well, I hope as well that the future for Underline Science is, I can see it now that it’s promising, it’s exciting for the research community as well. I mean, it’s the new tool, a new platform for scientists, it’s like a new pool of knowledge or information, which did not exist. So, imagine in a few years when we get to more content as well, you know. We are building great stuff, and people are already noticing that, and I’m quite excited. Regards to the... I thought you were asking about the research community in general, yes. continued on page 76

Squirreling Away: Managing Information Resources & Libraries — Our Grand Intermission: Libraries & Change Management

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Phone: 734-764-9969) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

If you wondered what I was listening to these days, you will likely hear classical music from my two favorite stations. 1 If I am not listening to that, it is likely I am listening to Broadway on XM or the brilliant cast recording of Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s brilliant show that captured the 2019 Tony Award for best musical on its way to a total of eight wins along with 14 nominations. This brilliant re-telling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice set in a time period that conjures up the image New Orleans during the Great Depression.

At one point, Orpheus is asked to share a toast to Persephone to welcome her back and celebrate the arrival of Spring (in the song titled Livin’ It Up On Top).

And if no one takes too much, there will always be enough

She will always fill our cups

And we will always raise them up

To the world we dream about,

And the one we live in now!

When I first heard that beautiful turn of phrase, it might as well have been 1,000 years ago. Right now, we definitely find ourselves wondering about the world we dream and about the one we live in now.

And as our libraries, theaters, stadiums and convention centers remain quiet, we are left to wonder and ponder what the future will bring. It is as if we are in a gigantic intermission and we are all left wondering when the house lights will flash to let us know when we can return to our seats. It has been weeks and weeks — we are still wondering. the case over the last few years, we have been asked to address the “Top 3 Things Affecting Your Library.” What I shared might make sense for a broader audience.

Building a Library for the World We Live in Now

In thinking about this question, I broke it down into three terms: Resources, Relevancy and Resiliency. I also want to address one more term, the need to be grounded in Reality.

Resources can make or break a library. Resources, very loosely identified, give the library the fuel they need to run. These resources include financial resources (needed to grow and acquire collections), personnel resources (needed to provide services and assistance for the community), and space (needed to operate and provide places for students and community members to work). If a library is deficient in any of these resources, then providing services and information tools to the community is impaired. Larger libraries and smaller libraries have one thing in common, neither have enough resources to fully satisfy their campus communities. In the world of COVID-19, there are not many libraries that will have the people and budget they need to fully support their communities. For librarians who support their community through print resources, our world has been flipped upside down with the shuttered buildings and the need to close face-to-face services. Working through this new world order will require libraries and librarians to be creative and collaborative here to bridge the gap. If international students are not coming to North American universities (especially the business schools) or students decide to defer a year or two — this could get much, much worse.

If there was ever a time to ponder Relevancy stems from the simple change management, maybe it is this question are we providing the retime. Strike that — it is definitely sources and services that our campus the time to think long and hard about community needs. I was thinking what we are doing and what will be about the billions of dollars of print needed of us after get to return to books that are sitting on the shelves normal — or what we think will be of our locked libraries these last 2-3 normal. months. While we will get back

If you read my earlier columns, I into the buildings someday — was have broken down change managethat the best way to help our camment into six key terms: inevitabilHatchlings on campus. Not practicing social pus? I also saw a message from a ity, rapidity, flexibility, hospitality, distancing at Hatcher Library, University of vendor encouraging the adoption of accountability, and empathy. These Michigan (Ann Arbor), April 15, 2020. OER textbooks (this is good) with terms are particularly important to a purchase of a printed set of the use in the context of your institutional culture and identity. freely available 32 volumes for your reserve collection (this is Through these six terms, I was exploring how to best manage bad — especially now). I know why you would want to have a your operation in less than optimal conditions (and let’s face it, print option available — but is this the best use of money for a most libraries are operating in exactly that “place”). I need to library? The desire for us to be the library of old will make us work on hospitality, but given the state of the travel and food less relevant for what our community needs. When all our free service industries, maybe a pause might be in order. Instead, I access to resources dries up this summer — will we be able to want to share some thoughts that I pulled together for my annual help the campus as effectively as they need? report to the Academic Business Library Directors. 2 As has been continued on page 76

Resiliency might actually be the most important here. How do libraries bounce back after this longest term ever in Winter 2020? How do we grow and change to reflect our current world? There are many librarians who see our current situation as something that will be over in due time. But in many ways, this will last longer for institutions in the higher education space. A colleague at the University of Michigan Library astutely pointed out that our austerity will far outlast the public health crisis. This is a complete change in the way that we operate and what we can do. From this event, there will be schools that consolidate, merge, and collapse. From this event, there will be publishers that will do the same. The most important task we have as librarians is to see this not as an event or an episode, but an opportunity to change how we operate and how we interact with our campus and our users. It might not be 100 years until the next pandemic…

Reality did not make the initial trio of elements — but it might be the trickiest. Maybe it is my role embedded in the Ross School of Business, but our reality heading into the Fall Term is one that cannot truly be figured out just yet. I was listening to an interview with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who talked about his state’s response to COVID-19 as stone to stone. As you cross the morass, you plant your foot on a stone and wait for it to steady before moving the other leg. Our new reality is one that will forever change our environment and should forever change the way that we think about services for our communities. When we first moved Kresge Library Services to a library without print holdings in 2014, I thought we were 20-30 years ahead of the curve. Now, I think we are less than 5 years. Just as COVID-19 accelerated the demise of many retail and travel entities, I think this will accelerate problems across our environment. The things that we could count on in libraries may not be there for us in the year coming up.

So in many ways, we need to raise a toast, “to the world we dream about, and the one we live in now!” We need to see this as two distinct places and act accordingly. While it is great to dream about the 2020 that we all planned to have, in the end, it will not help. We have a new reality and our job is to look forward. Don’t look back, whatever you do. It will not end well for us, as it did not end well for Eurydice.

Corey Seeman is the Director, Kresge Library Services at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also the new editor for this column that intends to provide an eclectic exploration of business and management topics relative to the intersection of publishing, librarianship and the information industry. No business degree required! He may be reached at <cseeman@umich.edu> or via twitter at @cseeman.

Endnotes

1. WRCJ-FM (90.9 from Detroit, Michigan) — Classical Days and Jazzy Nights — https://www.wrcjfm.org/ or KBAQ-FM (89.5 from Phoenix, Arizona) — great classical music all day long under the name KBACH — https://kbaq.org/. 2. See ABLD at http://www.abld.org/.

DG: Yes, I was looking at how this is really going to help the research community to be more effective, to be able to capture more information. As we know, researchers build on each other’s ideas. And having access to this conference information, even poster sessions where it can spur someone’s ideas or enhance someone’s idea, I think it’s going to be extremely valuable.

AL: Yes, yes.

DG: What closing thoughts would you like to leave with our audience about Underline Science?

AL: We all need to work together now towards an open society, connected world, the world in which we are, in a way, leveling the playing field. I always like to emphasize that we, as humankind, we need to build the bridges, not the barriers. And that’s the way to go forward. And that’s easy to say but it’s, yes, it’s not so easy to do, but we at IntechOpen and Underline Science, I’d say it, we are one tiny brick in that bridge. Yes, I would like to conclude with that.

DG: That was well said. Build bridges and not barriers. Very profound. Alex, thank you for being our first guest for “The Innovator’s Saga.”

AL: Thanks for inviting me.

Optimizing Library Services

from page 68

Van Krieken, T., and Pathirage, C. (2019). Factors Affecting Community Empowerment During Disaster Recovery. International Journal of Disaster Response and Emergency Management (IJDREM), 2(1), 15-32. doi:10.4018/IJDREM.2019010102

Column Editors’ End Note: As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely impact institutions and libraries as they transition to an online-only environment and serve as emergency response hubs for COVID-19 updates and educational resources, IGI Global continues to actively publish the latest information in library and information science, online education and resources, and more, to better serve institutions, librarians, and their patrons. Well in advance of the increased demand for electronic resources, IGI Global offers all of its research content in electronic format, including e-books and e-journals, all of which are available in IGI Global’s InfoSci-Databases (www.igi-global. com/e-resources/). To learn more about the InfoSci-Databases, or to request a free trial, email IGI Global’s Database Team at <eresources@igi-global.com>. Additionally, learn more about the research surrounding the topics in this article by checking out IGI Global’s Research Trend article “What Is the Role of Libraries During the COVID-19 Pandemic?” at https://bit. ly/3ckQCRd.

by Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net>

NISOPlus2020: A New Event on the Information Conference Calendar

Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, this is an abridged version of my report on this conference. You can read the full article which includes descriptions of additional sessions at https://against-the-grain.com/2020/06/v32-3-dons-conference-notes/. — DTH

The NISOPlus2020 meeting convened in Baltimore on February 23-25, 2020. Organized by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), it brought together information creators who work with publishers and others who supply content and add value to the user community. A highlight of NISOPlus was the prestigious Miles Conrad Lecture. The meeting was limited to 240 attendees, and it was sold out.

Lord Baltimore Hotel, NISOPlus2020 Venue

Opening Keynote

The opening keynote address by Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, was entitled “The Other i-Word: Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge.” She noted that we are all pioneers working on the leading edge of information, and our world is becoming more open. We must think about possible unintended consequences of openness. Information is the life blood of a community, and the struggle for control is prominent everywhere. Amy Brand Technology is driving the transformation of knowledge (Brand called it “Techknowledgy”). The future relies on distributed networks, librarians, startups, and vendors, but entrenched models remain a hindering force.

Is peer review an adequate quality control measure of knowledge? Methods for peer review transparency need to be developed, and researchers need help in tagging to identify their

Knowledge is the greatest legacy of human achievement. Brand closed her address by recommending reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses (known as the “master builder” of New York City).

Big Data

Mark Hahnel, CEO of Figshare, 1 said that everything is getting more computational, so we must deal with many file formats. The goals of big data are to find different ways to group it together and mark it up. NIH has mandated open access to research data which will have a major impact because it is the biggest grant funder in the world. Data should be FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. We need to motivate researchers to send their data to publishers so it can be checked and validated.

According to Karin Wulf, Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2 “big data” in the humanities can actually be fairly small. The humanities differ from scientific disciplines because humanities research is not project-driven, and the data is frequently textual.

Seamless Access

Seamless access to information provides a single sign-on infrastructure through one’s home institution, while maintaining an environment that protects personal data and privacy. A final recommended NISO Recommended Practice published in June 2019 3 concluded that there were no significant security risks for users.

The CRediT Initiative

The CRediT (Contributor Roles Technology) Initiative will help researchers get the credit they deserve for all their contributions. It assigns up to 14 roles to different project members, which can then be used to generate metadata for research reports such as articles, books, etc. NISO members have just voted to contributions to collaborative projects.

develop a standard for CRediT. 4

Lightning Talks

This was a session of 10 5-minute presentations on new or updated services, tools, or events in the industry. • Charles O’Connor, Aries Systems: Liquid XML. Corrections can be made by authors and editors in XML. Anne Stone, TBI Communications is organizing the 4th Transforming Research Conference, which will be held on October 12-13 at Emory University in Atlanta. 5

Vandana Sharma, InfoBeans Inc. Are we still investing the same amount of time in research as when we only had physical files? InfoBeans helps users make the right decisions so their work can be done in a more sustainable manner. It uses an automatic bot to issue information to all attendees at a meeting. John Dove, Paloma & Associates. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an infrastructure player like many organizations and has designated four new “ambassadors” to advocate for it with publishers and researchers.

Violaine Iglesias, Cadmore Media is Chair of a NISO group on audio/visual (A/V) standards to treat A/V with the same care as journals and articles. Linda Thomas, APTARA: A new platform, SCIPRIS, delivers smart content, providing web-based payment of Author Publication Charges (APCs). John Seguin, Third Iron: Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) fall short for users because they refer to a publisher’s website and so must be hosted at an IP-based institution. Third Iron’s new platform, LibKey.io/DOI, provides authentication for about 10,000 institutions globally. Tim Lloyd, LibLynx: Combining an on-demand real-time analytic solution using an online tracking system allows building real-time reporting dashboards to tell which organizations are reading the content. Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: Many researchers’ publications are from conference posters and presentations where they cannot be easily accessed. Morressier is helping organizers digitize early research content, assign DOIs, and bring it to a platform where it can be accessed.

Brian Trombley, Data Conversion Laboratory

(DCL): DCL helps companies format their metadata for discovery by creating a master record and associating it with content. The DCL Discovery Bridge creates feeds for each discovery vendor so content gets up quickly.

The Future of Search and Discovery

Christine Stohn, Director, Product Management, ExLibris, noted that we currently have many new types of resources and more data sources. Users are now heavily influenced by social media and in an academic environment they are expected to use more diverse materials, for example: •

Many users are focused on articles and books.

Many parameters determine scholarly value, but we do not have them for many resource types.

Are there metrics beyond peer review that can be used to evaluate research?

How do we index masses of data?

How do users search for and find material beyond articles and books? How should they?

How do we flag content appropriately? Sometimes “search” does not mean traditional searching. In the ocean of material, search alone is not enough anymore; serendipity is as important as knowing what you are looking for. Methods for creating new discovery paths include following the citation trail, letting others inspire you, and browsing virtually to discover “visual” treasures in a collection.

Alex Humphreys, Director, JSTOR Labs, described how JSTOR used different types of resources to build an archive of interviews. The system shows topics of the interview that can be clicked on by using linked open data to connect the materials. Topicgraph 6 can explore a scholarly book and use natural language processing to determine its subject, then display a graph of occurrences of the selected term and related terms.

Research is multi-valued and diverse, and a major tool of research is searching, so students are often trained to search for PDFs. JSTOR’s Text Analyzer 7 lets users search their own documents for mentions of articles and books. New researchers in a field do not know its major keywords, so the Analyzer eliminates a lot of “keyword thrashing.” The JSTOR Understanding Series searches primary text for concepts, finds relevant articles about them, and flags those that are more important.

Information Privacy

According to Quiana Johnson, Collection and Organizational Data Analysis Librarian at Northwestern University, privacy means consuming information with little outside observation. She noted that there are 48 laws protecting the confidentiality of printed library records, and it will not be long before they also apply to electronic records. Users often choose to forego viewing information because someone might be observing them. There is a fine line between data-driven decisions and protecting privacy. Do users know that data is attached to their name and another person might view it?

Laura Paglione, consultant and advisor at the Spherical Cow Group, 8 and formerly Technical Director at ORCID, asked how we engineer a system with privacy at its core. Users expect privacy, so tools should be engineered to be privacy-preserving.

Major questions:

Who is at risk as we move forward in collecting data to

provide enhanced services? Are we forcing people to disclose information to access something that their organization has paid for? We are in an evolving world of less and less privacy and are all at risk when privacy is not prominent. Librarians are at risk when collecting user data. Many data leaks make libraries look bad, even when the vendors have not protected the data, but users get angry at the library.

How can we build in privacy by design? A widespread tendency is to collect data in case we might need it in the future, but a better approach is to identify the smallest amount of data needed to answer a question. How long must raw data be kept? How are we articulating to users what is being collected? Asking users to evaluate vendors’ privacy controls is burdensome. We should disclose the business reasons for collecting information. The issue is often not about what information we collect, but rather how we care for it and preserve it.

How can we engineer comfort levels or determine degrees of transparency and control to foster trust in information re

sources or environments? How many privacy agreements has a library agreed to on behalf of its users? What data is being gathered and with whom is it being shared? Users view their relationship as with the library, not with a third party organization. If data is breached, trust is broken. How hard is it to build trust into the licenses that we sign? We are complaining about privacy policies of vendors, but how many libraries have a privacy policy on their websites? Not many! We need guidelines about how to conduct an audit. 9

Economics of Information: Funding, Sustainability, and Stakeholders

Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University, said that serious information tipping points are emerging as librarians push back against Big Deals, pricing, and subscriptions, while shifting towards OA.

Big deals are affecting all players in the information community: libraries, readers, publishers, and societies. Webster presented this quotation by Jan Velterop, former publisher at BioMed Central,

“Only librarians, on the whole, complain about the Big

Deal, since their researchers are mostly not aware of costs and cost increases. And librarians have limited power.

They also have no strong track record when it comes to negotiating, only in rare cases employing professional negotiators, it seems. That is their weakness, and the publishers’ strength.”

Many libraries have annual budget increases of only 1%, but journal prices have increased 6% annually, so many researchers are using ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. Librarians complain about pricing and Big Deals that limit their ability to cancel titles. They question why they should pay high prices since their faculty did the research, which is leading to support for OA. In response, publishers point to exploding volumes of content, increases in costs per download, Big Deal discounts, and the good things they do. They want to work directly with faculty members and be regarded as partners in the research process. 10 Some publishers say that they will support OA if they can meet their costs, which has raised a debate on what APC charges should be.

The Miles Conrad Award Ceremony

Deanna Marcum, former Managing Director and now senior advisor at Ithaka S+R 11 introduced the Miles Conrad Award Lecture with a brief biographical sketch of G. Miles Conrad and a history of the Award, a highlight of NFAIS meetings since it began in 1994. (Marcum was the final president of NFAIS before its

Deanna Marcum merger with NISO in 2019.)

G. Miles Conrad was a Director and Trustee of Biological Abstracts; 12 before that he was a Documentation Specialist at the Library of Congress. Based on his work in the early days of electronic information, he saw the potential of computer technology applications in the creation, organization and dissemination of research information, and he spearheaded meetings of professionals from organizations in the industry, leading to the creation of NFAIS, with Conrad as its first presG. Miles Conrad (1911-1964) ident. After Conrad’s death, 13 the NFAIS Board of Directors created a lecture in his memory that became a highlight of the NFAIS annual meetings. Since then, a wide range of industry leaders has been honored as Miles Conrad Lecturers. 14

Closing Keynote

In her closing keynote address, danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, and founder and president of Data & Society, 15 questioned the legitimacy of data and asked why AI is being discussed so much. She quoted Geoffrey Bowker, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who said, “Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; on the contrary, data should be cooked with care.” As soon as data got significant power, people started to tamper with it, and then it becomes vulnerable to being used for business or political interests, as Jeff Hamdanah boyd merbacher, Founder of Cloudera 16 and former leader of the data team at Facebook, said:

Legitimacy comes when we can believe that data are sound and useful. The problem is often not what is included in the data set but what is missing.

Here are 4 areas to consider: 1. Data have power. 2. Vulnerable data infrastructure. 3. Agnotology (the study of the production of ignorance)

and manipulation.

4. Towards a more secure future.

NISOPlus2021 will be on February 21-23 in Baltimore.

Endnotes

1. https://figshare.com/ 2. https://oieahc.wm.edu/ 3. “Recommended Practices for Improved Access to Institutionally-Provided Information Resources: Results from the Research Access in the 21st Century (RA21) Project,” Final report available at ra21.org. 4. https://librarytechnology.org/pr/25092 5. http://www.transformingresearch.org/ 6. http://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph 7. http://www.jstor.org/analyze 8. https://sphericalcowgroup.com/ 9. Lists of references can be found at https://libraryfreedom.org/. 10. See the report published by the STM Association, “An Overview of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishing and the Value it Adds to Research Outputs,” April 2008. (Available at https://www.stm-assoc. org/2008_04_01_Overview_of_STM_Publishing_Value_to_Research.pdf.) 11. https://sr.ithaka.org/people/deanna-marcum/ 12. Now part of the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/webofscience-biological-abstracts/. 13. A full obituary of Miles Conrad is at https://www.nytimes. com/1964/09/11/archives/g-miles-conrad-publishing-aide-biological-abstracts-officer.html. 14. A list with links to each lecture is on the NFAIS website at https:// www.nfais.org/miles-conrad-lectures. 15. https://datasociety.net/people/boyd-danah/ 16. A software platform for data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning, and analytics (https://www.cloudera.com/).

The 2020 Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture

Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, this is an abridged summary of this lecture. You can read the full report at https://against-the-grain.com/2020/06/v32-3-2020-milesconrad-memorial-lecture/. — DTH

This year’s Miles Conrad Lecture was presented by James G. Neal, University Librarian Emeritus at Columbia University. Neal has had a distinguished career in the library world, and has held offices in many other professional organizations. 1

Neal began his lecture by answering three questions that had been given to him: Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive

When you started in Director (L) and James G. Neal library leadership, what were the pressing issues the information community faced and how have they changed over your career?

46 years ago, they were: not enough funding, imminent technology, new collaborative strategies, and social unrest.

What has been the most disruptive change in information dissemination during your career, and how well or poorly have we as a community reacted to that change?

We have not reacted well to global scholarly communication, online learning, user-managed applications, big data, streaming access, and smart access and systems.

What do you see as the biggest challenges faced by libraries, publishers, and information intermediaries over the next five to ten years?

• Democratization of creativity, • Born digital explosion, • Policy chaos, • Diversity, equity, and inclusion, • Human-machine symbiosis, and • Blended reality.

Future trends of our industry are particularly challenging to define because the community of interest is narrow. We have entered a period of constant change, productive and powerful chaos, radical shifts in our traditional staffing, and massive leadership turnover. The library has always been a significant player in the learning and research process, but changes in our environments are challenging this relationship and raising questions about its value in the community.

The emphasis for libraries in the next decade will be not on what we have but what we can do with the content. Open resources and tools to support innovation, collaboration, and productivity will be more prevalent; self-publishing and niche technology will dominate. Measured transformation will be the key: what we are, what we do, and how we are viewed and understood.

Here are five commandments for the future: 1. Thou shalt preserve the cultural and scientific record. We have done a modest job at preserving analog records, but have lacked with digital records, which are being produced in large amounts. We must hold, secure, and care for the content while enabling access to it. 2. Thou shall fight the information policy wars. We must represent and advance the public interest and the needs of users and readers. Network neutrality, open access to research, copyright, and intellectual property are areas of concern. Publications and databases provided by libraries are increasingly covered by contract law, not copyright. Technological controls and digital rights management systems are reducing libraries’ ability to apply fair use to their operations. 3. Thou shalt be supportive of the needs of your users and readers. Users are far more diverse than we realize. They want more and better content, access, and convenience, as well as technology and content ubiquity, places for experimentation (particularly in their communities), support services, and privacy spaces. 4. Thou shalt cooperate in new and more vigorous ways. Although cooperation is in our lifeblood, we need more radical strategies, deeper integration of operations, and a commitment to shared knowledge repositories. We are now in a polygamous period of widespread partnering, but are we ready to form more selective and deep collaborations? We must move beyond conflict in the relationships among libraries, publishers, and information intermediaries. 5. Thou shall work together to improve knowledge creation, evaluation, distribution, use, and preservation. Researchers want to share their results and communicate with their peers globally through publication. They need support and help in navigating, analyzing, and synthesizing the literature, and guidance for an open environment. The new model is one of informationists and partners, where researchers get help with disparate sources of information and grey literature.

Our challenge now is how to support these shifting research conditions.

Following Neal’s lecture, he and Deanna Marcum discussed these issues: 2

How do organizations like NFAIS and NISO have a role? How can we be more effective in leading the community? How can we capture and preserve the digital record? How do we deal with the expanded scope of our institutions?

Donald T. Hawkins is an information industry freelance writer based in Pennsylvania. In addition to blogging and writing about conferences for Against the Grain, he blogs the Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian conferences for Information Today, Inc. (ITI) and maintains the Conference Calendar on the ITI Website (http://www.infotoday.com/calendar.asp). He is the Editor of Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, (Information Today, 2013) and Co-Editor of Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits (Information Today, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley and has worked in the online information industry for over 45 years.

Endnotes

1. Details of Neal’s professional career are at https://library.columbia.edu/james-neal.html. 2. See the full report (URL above).