Evolving as a STEM Publisher to Meet Changing Library Needs

By Melissa K. Fulkerson (Vice President, Research Reference, Elsevier) <m.fulkerson@elsevier.com>

Introduction

Late in 2019, I took on leadership of the global STEM books portfolio at Elsevier. This encompasses all channels libraries use to access and acquire books: print, all major aggregators, and consumer electronic channels, but most notably our own institutional platform, ScienceDirect, where our roughly 40,000 pieces of reference content live alongside our journals. This article is not intended to promote ScienceDirect or Elsevier books specifically, but rather to share and reflect on what I’ve seen as we have all worked through the last 22 months and all the uncertainty, challenges, and unexpected opportunities that have come with the pandemic. As mentioned in the September 2021 issue of Against the Grain on eBooks from the academic library perspective, the print to electronic migration for eBooks began over two decades ago (Gibbs, 2021). At the time, publishers were trying to understand the best way to deliver content electronically. What readers most often got was a flat PDF, and over time the more interactive EPUB format took hold in consumer channels. A version of this is often what readers will get if downloading an eBook from a retailer for personal use today. But in the academic library market, what we all hoped would be simple ultimately became complex, due to the large number of publishers and vendors all having slightly different views on how electronic content should be delivered and priced. And now, many years later, our industry asks our librarian community to play a significant role in ensuring that eBooks are requested, acquired, promoted, and used by stakeholders inside academic institutions. Again, as mentioned in the librarian viewpoints issue, “managing eBooks is mentally challenging” (Dinkins, 2021). Indeed, it has become so. Access is inconsistent, with some platforms offering DRMfree eBooks and others limiting concurrent usage. There are proprietary readers and PDF downloads at the full-book or, more often, chapter level. There are many, many business models, from EBA/DDA to ownership to subscription, which are intended to serve the wide and varied needs in different global markets but make offerings more complex. The challenge for publishers and vendors in this space is to deliver an increasingly useful and meaningful body of content in a way that makes it as easy as possible for librarians to ingest and derive value within their limited budgets.

COVID-19 and its Impacts

I came into my new role with many ideas about how our eBooks were going to become a stronger part of the research community. Exactly 100 days after starting this job, the world shut down. Our employees went home from their offices, our customers shuttered their libraries, and the patrons we both aim to serve were left, at least at first, with few options for continuity of access to the print materials the libraries had spent decades acquiring and maintaining. I don’t want to belabor the point, except to say it was a herculean effort by librarians, faculty and administrators to shift from in-person to virtual learning and research on such short notice. As a publisher/vendor that was anxiously watching to figure out how best to help, it was remarkable to witness and reinforced how important libraries — and librarians — are to the successful outcomes of their students and researchers. As a publisher, we worked swiftly to ensure access to our textbook content in the short term. We fully empathized with librarians who gave feedback that the temporary free eBook access offers from various publishers, while appreciated, in some cases caused logistical headaches with the communications needed to let patrons know the content was available — and when it was no longer available. We take that feedback and, though we hope to never be in this dire a position again, will use it to evolve for the future. The biggest takeaway I had from that first six-month period was that this content was being used, often and at high volumes. Through survey data, we could see that much of the traffic to this textbook content and our ScienceDirect Topics (which are created from foundational reference content) were largely driven by undergraduate students. For years we hadn’t considered undergrads, or any non-research users, a true core market for our STEM books, outside of the small number of true textbooks we published. But the use of our textbooks and reference materials alike opened our eyes to the demand that exists for foundational reference content in STEM fields, in electronic format that can be accessed anywhere.

Looking to the Future

So how does a large STEM book publisher take the lessons from these unprecedented events and pivot to ensure we are providing what our community needs? As I look to the future, the following questions arise: • How can we provide librarians better insights into how our content is being used to ensure user needs are being met?

• How can we help our librarian customers serve a wider patron base — not just researchers, as our content has historically been assumed it was limited to, but undergraduate students as well? • What is our role in ensuring scientific literacy for an emerging generation of learners? I’ll take these three items each on their own, with the caveat that we are constantly learning and evolving, and we actively seek feedback to ensure we are addressing the right problems in a meaningful way.

Providing Better Insights

Our team at Elsevier spends numerous resources identifying and delivering insights into our content that can be shared with customers to aid in decision-making. Simple data points like usage and turnaways are standard at this point across vendors, but we are also providing tools to look at the overall ScienceDirect landscape and identify where library investments might be best targeted to ensure the strongest ROI on both books and journals. For example, in disciplines that show high co-usage

(usage across books and journals), we can identify trends or potential opportunities for libraries to strengthen their offerings. In addition, we are learning more about the impact books can have on research, and we can use the data we have available to illustrate the landscape at a particular institution. Globally, we see through our internal analysis that journal articles that cite books (from any publisher) have a 25% increased Field Weighted Citation Impact than those that only cite other journals. This type of insight can help a librarian buyer understand where they might need to target their eBook acquisition to better support the research needs at their institution.

We are also looking to provide better insights at the business-model level, and to help librarians make the tough decisions about how to invest their book budgets to ensure the widest possible access based on their needs. It could mean the difference between a subscription to one collection or the full catalog; or acquisition at the collection or title level versus an evidence-based model that allows the data to drive the purchase but still keeps the librarian in control of the budget and the decision-making process. The options are plentiful, but we can’t expect our librarian customers to be well-versed in all the nuances across dozens of vendors, so our team aims to help make it easier and tailored to what customers need.

Serving a Wider Patron Base

The biggest question that has emerged for me from the pandemic and the increased usage of our content is the question, what is a textbook? And for that matter, what is a reference book? We identify foundational reference content by its most prominent use case, which is “getting up to speed,” as compared to journals, which help users “stay up to date.” The combination of these two content types on a single platform helps ensure we are providing the full view on any given subject within the scientific disciplines. But what is “getting up to speed” if not another name for learning? Should student learning be confined to a classroom, with students reading from a pedagogical text they may or may not have purchased, and just as often may have chosen to avoid altogether (Lumpkin, 2020)? Or does learning happen via multiple types of content, provided in multiple ways? Can learning primarily be done through materials sourced through libraries? If we expand our view of what learning materials are, the potential benefits are many: • Librarians can generate stronger relationships with faculty. Many librarians have shared with us that during the height of the pandemic, faculty were often unaware of what library resources were available. Many course-adopted texts are still print-preferred; if faculty were aware of the many resources their library invests in, would they be more inclined to change their syllabi? • Libraries can use their budget to support a well-documented student pain point, which is the cost of textbooks (Lumpkin, 2020). If a student can get most of the foundational content they need on a given subject through library materials, it would directly impact their experience. • Libraries can better fulfill their missions to support research and the curriculum and to promote access (Bangert, 2006). • By expanding access and serving a student population with foundational STEM content, librarians can stretch their budgets further. Many customers still use costper-download as a primary measure of value. While we are developing insights that demonstrate the impact of books on research as noted above, if “cost-per” metrics are important, as they are to most libraries, expanding the user base expands the potential for use and value to be gleaned from the investment in books.

Supporting Scientific Literacy

If we ask the question “what is a textbook,” we also need to ask “what is a researcher” and “what is a student.” Everyone in academia had to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually in a classroom, learning about a new topic that sparks curiosity and passion. But not all students are equipped early on with the tools to embark on this journey into the scientific landscape in a meaningful way. All students should be equipped with the ability to understand “the problem-solving nature of scientific inquiry” (Zen, 1990), but students in scientific disciplines have a particular need to do so early on. I think about the undergraduates majoring in STEM disciplines as early-early career researchers. They will specialize as they get deeper into their undergraduate studies, and many will go on to grad school or join the workforce. An understanding of scientific literacy will serve them well whether as citizens trying to understand the world around them or specialized researchers trying to make the world a better place through their work. If we expand the role of foundational reference content to reach undergraduate students earlier in their careers, we can play a role in ensuring they get up to speed on the topic at hand. By becoming more comfortable with the foundational scientific literature earlier on, they will be more confident researchers as they grow into their fields.

Conclusion

Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as saying “change is the only constant in life.” If there is anything we have learned in the past two years, it is the rapid pace at which our customers’ needs are evolving. Just as science moves fast, we need to move fast with it if we want to continue to build value and trust with our customers that eBooks will help them solve their most pressing challenges and fulfill their missions more completely.

References

Bangert, S. R. (2006). Thinking boldly! College and University Library Mission Statements as roadsigns to the future. Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/ nashville/bangert Dinkins, D. (2021, September). The Trials and Tribulations of Providing eBooks: A Small University Library Perspective. Against the Grain, 33(4), 9-11. Gibbs, D. (2021, September). eBooks in Academic Libraries: The Librarians’ Perspective. Against the Grain, 33(4), 1. Lumpkin, L. (2020, January 17). Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ local/education/textbooks-keep-getting-pricier-so-studentsare-getting-creative/2020/01/17/4e1306b8-30b9-11ea-91fd82d4e04a3fac_story.html Zen, E.-an. (1990). Science literacy and why it is important. Journal of Geological Education, 38(5), 463-464.