Against the Grain v35#1, February, 2023 Issue

ISSN: 1043-2094

The New World of Preprint Review

Guest Edited by Michele Avissar-Whiting (Program Officer, Howard Hughes Medical Institute)

Begins on Page 14

If Rumors Were Horses

Happy February and March! Sorry the groundhog wasn’t more optimistic! It’s been warm here but I suppose we are in for a few more cold snaps! I was interested to read that even crayons have to retire! Only burnt sienna survived this round!

International Dateline

It’s a new year for ATG and we are happy to announce that the creative, resourceful, and charismatic Sven Fund is joining ATG and the Charleston Conference as our international correspondent and advisor! “Innovation is one of the most debated issues in scholarly publishing. While some believe the industry is the avantgarde of innovation in publishing for sure, others despair of the slow pace of innovation and timidity of execution. There is agreement in one trueness though: Change in publishing is global, even more so than in librarianship. We believe that our appointment of Sven will help increase the expanding international scope of ATG and the Charleston Conference. Sven has more than 20 years experience in scholarly and trade publishing. He worked for Bertelsmann, SpringerNature, and De Gruyter. In 2015, Sven became the MD of Knowledge Unlatched, the innovator in Open Access that was acquired by Wiley at the end of 2021. At Wiley, Sven is responsible for the integration of KU and its products, like oable, into the

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

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If you are a primarily undergraduate institution* with an active ACS All Publications subscription, your researchers now qualify for no-cost open access publication in any ACS journal.

Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2022 by the name Against the Grain, LLC is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/ January by Against the Grain, LLC. Business and Editorial Offices: PO Box 799, 1712 Thompson Ave., Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. Accounting and Circulation Offices: same. Subscribe online at https://www.charleston-hub.com/membership-options/

Editor:

Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)

Associate Editors:

Cris Ferguson (Murray State)

Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston)

Matthew Ismail (Charleston Hub)

Research Editors:

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Assistants to the Editor: Ileana Jacks

Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

International Editor:

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University)

Deni Auclair (De Gruyter)

Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University)

Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico)

Todd Carpenter (NISO)

Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University)

Will Cross (NC State University)

Anne Doherty (Choice)

Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County)

Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University)

Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC)

Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte)

Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University)

Donna Jacobs (MUSC)

Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University)

Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.)

Tom Leonhardt (Retired)

Stacey Marien (American University)

Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University Libraries)

Alayne Mundt (American University)

Bob Nardini (ProQuest)

Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University)

Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries)

Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University)

Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s)

Jared Seay (College of Charleston)

Corey Seeman (University of Michigan)

Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)

ATG Proofreader:

Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub)

Graphics:

Bowles & Carver, Old English Cuts & Illustrations. Grafton, More Silhouettes. Ehmcke, Graphic Trade Symbols By German Designers. Grafton, Ready-to-Use Old-Fashioned Illustrations. The Chap Book Style.

Production & Ad Sales:

Toni Nix, Just Right Group, LLC., P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435, phone: 843-835-8604 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Advertising Information:

Toni Nix, phone: 843-835-8604 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Publisher:

A. Bruce Strauch

Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 cell: 843-509-2848 <kstrauch@comcast.net>

Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This issue was produced on an iMac using Microsoft Word, and Adobe CC software under Mac OS Monterey. Against the Grain is copyright ©2023 by Katina Strauch

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

55 years of social scientists asking “Why?” have produced more than 5,000,000 answers.

From Your (riveted) Editor:

Ihave to admit that here on Sullivan’s Island we have been riveted by all the Murdaugh news. Long time ago in an early life, I was working for AHEC and my job was to set up hospital libraries in the Walterboro, Hampton, Allendale, Barnwell, Hilton Head area. So you might understand my interest. Did you watch the trial, or have you seen the Netflix documentary?

We have an amazing issue on the topic of preprints, guest edited by Michele Avissar-Whiting (Howard Hughes Medical Institute). Many of you may remember Michelle from her previous role at Research Square as well. She has deftly put together an overview of the new world of preprint review for our readers.

We have articles from Elliott Lumb (CEO, PeerRef) about their journal-independent open peer review platform. We also hear from Stuart RF King (Research Culture Manager, eLife) about reimagining peer review in light of preprints, and from Daniela Saderi, Ph.D. (Co-founder and Director of PREreview) about how to tackle bias and inequity in the peer review process. Ben Mudrak (Senior

Product

Letters to the Editor

Manager, ChemRxiv) reports on preprints in Chemistry, and Michael Parkin (Data Scientist, Content, EMBL-EBI) covers the topic from an indexer’s perspective.

We have an Op Ed featuring the first of three installments on errata and retractions in scholarly journal publishing from Daniel Dotson (The Ohio State University), focused on the frequency of errata. And we have three intriguing interviews: Jeff Israely, cofounder and editor of Worldcrunch.com, interviewed by Darrell Gunter; Emily West is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, interviewed by Nancy Herther; and John Thompson, professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College, also interviewed by Nancy Herther. And the ever-astute Ann Okerson gives us an update and reprise of her earlier report (see the June 2022 issue) on Ukraine in this issue’s Back Talk column: Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this issue! Thanks to all of our contributors, featured authors, and especially Michele our guest editor. Love, Yr.Ed.

Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the Charleston Hub at http://www.charleston-hub.com/contact-us/.

Dear Leah:

Many thanks for your message regarding the formation of a new Charleston Hub Advisory Council.

I am very honored to receive your and Katina’s invitation to join as a member.

The Charleston Library Conference is dear to my heart and I am sincerely willing to contribute to the development of the

AGAINST THE GRAIN ADVERTISING DEADLINES

VOLUME

35 — 2023-2024

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT

Toni Nix <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Phone: 843-835-8604

Charleston Hub as a librarian and a researcher in LIS based in Europe but with an international vision.

So please count me in! I am looking forward to working with you, Katina and all Charleston friends.

Kind regards, Gaelle

Gaelle Bequet (Director, ISSN International Centre, 45 Rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris, France; Tel: +33 1 44 88 22 13) <gaelle.bequet@issn.org> www.issn.org

ATG Readers: Be sure to read the announcement in Rumors for more details about the new Charleston Hub Advisory Council.

Thank you, Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Conference, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

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To submit: opticaopen.org

Rumors continued from page 1

Wiley portfolio. On the side, Sven is a novice in beekeeping, runs Reviewer Credits and teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin (librarianship) and Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart (innovation in publishing).” I am excited to welcome Sven to our teams! Thanks, Sven! The sky’s the limit!

Happy St Patrick’s Day! One of my wonderful Physical Therapists has a Claddagh Jewelry ring which is a token of friendship, love, and loyalty. La Fheile Padraig sona duit!

Shout-outs

I do hope that libraries will always be libraries and publishers will always be publishers, but we have to, as they say, embrace the future. I love libraries and here is a special shoutout to the Edgar Allen Poe branch Library of the Charleston County Library. Their app Libby makes it easy to check out and return print and eBooks! I will always love print, but reading on an iPhone or tablet is easier than I expected.

Speaking of which I have to give another shoutout to Abebooks! They have books and editions that are not available elsewhere. They are a subsidiary of Amazon after they were acquired in December 2008. Their headquarters are located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. They also have an office in Munich, Germany. Books everywhere!

In Between and other Charleston News

The Charleston Conference is planning another “Charleston In Between” April 4 and 5! The theme will be “The Future of Scholarly Communication in a ChatGPT World .” The event will be virtual! Confirmed speakers include Peter Brantley (UC Davis), Heather Staines (Delta Think), Gary Price (InfoDOCKET), Raymond Pun (Alder Graduate School of Education), Wendy Queen (Project MUSE), and Kyle Jensen (Arizona State University). Confirmed AI Tool presentations from scite, Scholarcy, and Prophy, with more to be confirmed. Watch for more info soon! https://www.charleston-hub.com/ the-charleston-conference/welcome/charleston-in-between/

Exciting news from the Charleston Hub! In order to include content, topics, and people that are on the cutting edge in the library, information, and scholarly communication industry, we formed a group of thought leaders and luminaries to contribute to an Advisory Council. The emphasis will be on trending topics, emerging names, future thinking, and trend forecasting. The group will consist of a wide variety of viewpoints, experience levels, diverse genders, geography, race, and cultural backgrounds and be balanced between librarians, publisher/vendors, consultants, and others. Please help us extend a warm welcome to the inaugural council members for the 2023-2025 term:

• Gaelle Bequet, ISSN International

• Peter Brantley, University of California, Davis

• Trevor Dawes, University of Delaware

• Gwen Evans, Elsevier

• Sven Fund, Knowledge Unlatched/Wiley

• Richard Gallagher, Annual Reviews

• Matt Hayes, Technology from SAGE

• Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

• Dracine Hodges, Duke University

• Daniel Hook, Digital Science

• Violaine Iglasius, Cadmore Media

• Roy Kaufman, Copyright Clearance Center

• Michael Levine-Clark, University of Denver

• Elaina Norlin, ASERL

• Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Coherent Digital

• Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R

• Elizabeth Siler, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

• Kevin Smith, Colby College

• Alicia Wise, CLOCKSS

• Tony Zanders, SkillType

• Michael Zeoli, De Gruyter

Plans for the 2023 Charleston Conference are underway! Save the dates from November 6-10 for the in person meeting in Charleston, and November 27-December 1 for the virtual conference week. Theme and keynote speakers will be announced soon, and the Call for Papers will open in late April. https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/ Speaking of the conference, we have a new Conference Hotel Liaison! Welcome to Kendra Davis, who will be stepping in to help Shirley Davidson. Kendra has worked at the Registration Check In Desk for many years, and lives in the Charleston area. Group rates for hotel guest rooms will be announced when conference registration opens in June.

Personal News and Updates

Time passes too fast! Alicia Wise has been at CLOCKSS for two years already! Gosh! Congrats, Alicia! And I didn’t realize that we both studied at UNC-Chapel Hill! (Alicia, PhD, anthropology.)

Our friend (and Closing Keynote speaker from the 2022 Charleston Conference) Derek Law has a new book coming out next month, The Baltic Cauldron: Two Navies and the Fight for Freedom! We asked him all about it: “Well, the book launch is scheduled for mid-March and will take place in London on the retired/museum second world war cruiser HMS Belfast beside Tower Bridge. It’s an updated and substantially rewritten version of a book first published in Swedish two years ago. The current state of affairs in Russia/ Ukraine and the Baltic region makes it particularly timely to look at the history of how European countries have dealt with Russian imperialism over the last five hundred years. The involvement of yours truly make the bibliography and index particularly well organised! I also wrote a couple of chapters and there is other work from major historians such as John Hattendorf from the USA. It will perhaps help to show that librarians help to create books and not just distribute them!” Congrats, Derek!

Here’s a short update from T. Scott Plutchak, who’s keeping busy as ever in retirement: “We almost made it to Charleston last year, but scheduling conflicts interfered. Right now it’s on our maybe list for this year. We’ll see how the travel budget and schedule evolves. I think my presentation days may be behind me, though. I’m doing more writing than ever these days, but not much having to do with scholcom issues (see https:// heyscott.substack.com/). I intended to do a short piece on the

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Scholarly Publishing Roundtable for the Charleston Hub but got sidetracked. I do still want to get back to writing up the specifics of our foray into retraction policies, though. It’s an important piece of the history but at the moment the documentation is all scattered. In any case, always a treat to hear from you. I hope all’s well. I’d say the odds are slightly better than ever of seeing you in November!”

In Other News

Just heard some exciting news from Skilltype, the talent management platform for libraries. Skilltype has raised $1.7 million in seed financing, led again by Pearl Fund, with participation from the Ruthless for Good Fund, Revelry Venture Partners and Manifold Group. In addition, they are bringing in their first strategic investor with the addition of Technology from SAGE, a portfolio of digital services from SAGE Publishing that improve the patron workflow. These partnerships also allow them to add Aaron Walker from the Ruthless for Good Fund,

and Martha Sedgwick from SAGE to their board of directors. “Identifying strategic partners like SAGE has been a top priority since day one” says Tony Zanders, founder and CEO at Skilltype. “Future-proofing the library workforce is too tall a task for any one organization or team to accomplish, and SAGE’s track record in prioritizing library futures gives us a variety of opportunities to support our mission.”

Maddie Hinds, our former social media and graphics intern, shared some cute photos from a recent hike at Rainbow Falls, near Lake Toxaway in upstate SC. She made the 4 mile thereand-back hike with her boyfriend Selwyn and her cat Forrest. Forrest has her own Instagram account! Wow! Follow @forrest_ underfoot for more “feline travel influencer” adventures.

Lived Places Publishing is proud to announce the release of the first three books in their Disability Studies Collection, aimed at promoting a deeper understanding of disability issues and advocating for a more inclusive society. The three books, Improving the Experience of Health Care for People Living with Sensory Disability by Dr. Annmaree Watharow, No Place for Autism? by Dr. Jim Hoerricks, and A Life Lived Well as a NonBinary and Autistic Mental Health Advocate by Yenn Purkis, provide insightful perspectives on the experiences of people living with disability. David Parker, the founder of Lived Places Publishing, expressed his enthusiasm for the collection, saying, “We are excited to publish these important works that offer a deeper understanding of the experiences of people living with disabilities.” David also has another fantastic installment of his “Learning Belongs in the Library” column in this issue of ATG, so be sure to check it out!

March Madness

This is really cool! It’s just like a sports tournament with brackets, wild cards, rounds, champions and all! March Mammal Madness is coming end of March 2023 and was established ten years ago in 2013, celebrating a decade of science education,

Libby is the perfect reading app for your digital-native students. Leverage its unrivaled ease of use to connect your campus community with ebooks, audiobooks and streaming media for whole-student education. continued on page 14

Bet You Missed It — Press Clippings — In the News

Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths

Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

The Lost English Village

By the end of the 20th century, there were scads of published reminiscences of lost village life. All were spiritual descendants of Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield. Published in 1969, it is an oral history of farmers, thatchers, gardeners, blacksmiths, gravediggers, schoolmistresses in the Suffolk village where he was born.

Critics loved it, and it became a best-seller. A film adaptation was made and viewed by 15 million. It captured the lost rural life of jingling harnesses, hayricks, and vegetable pickers, all now replaced by industrial farming. It was a hard life with much poverty, but a sense of loss is still profound.

See: Jack Watkins , “Britain’s greatest masterpieces,” Country Life, Oct. 12, 2022, p.88.

Movie Villains and Their Lairs

So when did villains cease to live in old dark houses and move into angular, high-style modernist creations? It all started with Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. And along with it, the character of the villain became dashing and charismatic, wielding wit and charm. The pairing of the two became a storytelling device.

Drawing on the availability of Frank Lloyd Wright type modern designs in Southern California, the trend advanced to hideaways that could only be done through matte paintings as in Dr. No. Glass block walls, neon tube accents, and bent-steel chairs completely replaced the crumbling castles and creaking stairs of the old-time crazed villain.

Fans have searched the landscape for Hitchock’s Vandamm House, but it is entirely studio created although inspired by Wright’s iconic Falling Water.

The John Lautner-designed Arthur Elrod House in Palm Springs houses the billionaire villain in Diamonds Are Forever. Bambi and Thumper try to drown Bond in a skyhigh swimming pool.

Brian De Palma used the cliff-hanging Lautner-designed Chemosphere for Body Double. The Richard Neutra-designed Lovell House is the villain in LA Confidential.

See: Christine Madrid French, “The Angle of Suspense,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 20-22, 2022, p.84. The article was adapted from French’s The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the films of Alfred Hitchcock published by UVA Press, 2022.

Let’s Read Writers on the Run

(1) Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940) (after a brief unhappy time at Columbia, Hughes signs on as a steward on a freighter in a symbolic departure from his past); (2) Anna Seghers, Transit (1944) (Seghers sails on a boat of refugee Jews from Marseille to Martinique); (3) Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (1974) (young Nigerian girl in a Künstlerroman — novel about an artist’s development); (4) Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton (2012) (Rushdie’s life in hiding from the fatwa); (5) Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied (2017) (memoir in verse of a trek from El Salvador to California).

See: Patrick Bixby, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22-23, 2022, p.C8 Bixby is the author of License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport.

Obit of Note

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) published seven middling novels before Wolf Hall (2009) changed her life. She was suddenly proclaimed an author of high art that were also page-turners. She published 17 in total, but her Tudor trilogy brought her the acclaim — Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020).

See: “The novelist who brought history to life,” The Week, Oct. 7, 2022, p.39.

Sweat and Proteins

DNA keeps a static record of ancestry, but proteins which metabolize our food and carry messages, are a running commentary on our health. In the past, to get a protein read, you needed to destroy a tiny bit of the object of study. And archivists were not okay with doing that to historic documents. Now, advances in proteomics allow study of documents without damage. A 500 year old letter from Vlad Dracula kept in Rumania reveals traces of sweat, saliva, and tears. The article teases, but doesn’t tell us anything about Dracula.

However, tuberculosis proteins have been found in a George Orwell letter and the shirt collar Anton Chekov wore when he died. A Stalin copy of a Tolstoy play revealed traces of lithium. Stalin was bipolar.

Jack London was found to have had undiagnosed diabetes. Rumors of his heroin addiction were disproved by traces of over-the-counter patent medicines of the time.

See: Jo Marchant , “Invisible Evidence,” Smithsonian, Nov./Dec. 2022, p.50.

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A New Type of Transformative Agreement for Research Publishing in Biology

“A sustainable path to open publication of biomedical research is a long-sought objective among the many science communication initiatives at Cold Spring Harbor. Our transformational offerings provide a model for any research-intensive institution whose scientists wish to make their articles openly available in these long-established, prestigious, not-for-profit journals.”

— Dr. John

Inglis, Publisher of CSHL Press, co-founder of bioR χiv and medR χiv

Turn your subscription license into an OA publishing license — Immediate benefits for your authors and no extra cost for most institutions

Subscribers to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (CSHLP) journals who renew for 2023 now have the option to adopt a Transformative License Agreement. This allows corresponding authors from your institution to publish unlimited OA articles (once accepted for publication), while giving your users access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals.

Transformative license agreements offer a fully OA publishing option for your researchers whose papers are accepted at Genes & Development, Genome Research, Learning & Memory, RNA, or Molecular Case Studies. For more information about a transformative license with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, please contact Doug LaFrenier at dlafrenier @cshjournals.org

Benefits include:

• Unlimited open access publication in CSHLP research journals

• Access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals

• No additional cost for most current subscribers (some minimums apply)

• The option to create a branded channel in bioRχiv for preprints posted by your authors (includes medRχiv postings)

Present your institution as an “end to end” open access advocate for the biological sciences.

For complete details, including specifics for your institution, visit https://bit.ly/cshlpressopen

Let’s Read Australian Novels

(1) Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006) (metaphysical goingson); (2) Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains (2018) (refugees put in offshore detention center); (3) Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (1980) (tale of two Aussie sisters in the postwar world); (4) Michelle de Kretser, Scary Monsters (2021) (satirical look at Asian immigrants);

(5) Christine Stead, For Love Alone (1944) (female obsession and pursuit of a man).

See: Brigitta Olubas , “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 5-6, 2022, p.C8. Brigitta is the author of Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life.

Underground Library

In the Blue Ridge Mountains near Culpeper, Va. is an old nuclear fallout shelter owned by the Library of Congress since 2007. Ninety miles of underground shelving houses the world’s largest collection of movies, TV programs, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings.

While most is closed to the public, an art deco style theater on the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center screens free weekend classics.

See: “Southern Agendas,” Garden & Gun, Dec. 2022, Jan. 2023, p.174. Also see https://loc.gov/programs.

In the same issue, the editor announces a new bookclub and plugs some great Southern reads: David Wright Faladé, Black Cloud Rising, James Chapin, Ride South Until the Sawgrass, Charles Dodd White, A Year without Months, S.A. Crosby, Blacktop Wasteland.

See: David DiBenedetto, id. p.20.

Still Time to Register for the 2023 Fiesole Retreat!

A collaboration between the University Library Basel, Casalini Libri and Charleston Hub, the 23rd edition of the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series will be held in person in Basel, Switzerland, May 2-4, 2023.

Location:

Our host is the University Library Basel at the oldest university in Switzerland. The conference venue is the Odelya Conference Center and Hotel, a historic building that formerly served as a mission house, in inner-city Basel near the university and the botanical gardens.

Program:

The Fiesole Retreat is intentionally designed to cover the latest topics and to foster and stimulate dialogue and collaboration within the scholarly publishing sector. It offers a unique opportunity to interact with a select group of your colleagues in a relaxed and thoughtful setting.

Sessions will begin on Tuesday afternoon, May 2, and will conclude on the afternoon of Thursday, May 4. Panel presentation topics include “Better Connected than Lost,” “Enabling Open Access in the Humanities, “Technology Developments in Publishing,” and “Perspectives and Practices of the APC Model.” Included among presentations will be a resident ChatBOT, as part of a lively discussioin of AI and its effect on Researchers, Publishers and Librarians.

On the social side, the Retreat will include an opening cocktail reception, a conference dinner featuring a local cultural presentation from a Basel Carnival group, as well as several optional tours and excursions for attendees to take in the sights and culture of the city.

Registration:

Registration, as well as the full preliminary program and other practical details, can be accessed at https://fiesoleretreat.org/

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“One for All and All for One: The opportunities and challenges bringing libraries and publishers together.”

The New World of Preprint Review

By Michele Avissar-Whiting (Program Officer, Howard Hughes Medical Institute) <michavissar@gmail.com>

On the first two days of December, I had the pleasure of visiting the ultramodern, ultra-picturesque Janelia Research Campus for the first time. The occasion: an intensive two-day workshop with ~200 colleagues from across the research, publishing, and funding spaces to dive deep on the topic of preprint review. The timing was ideal because I had just recruited writers for a preprint-focused issue of Against the Grain, and the peer review angle seemed to have a special gravity. This signaled to me that the novelty of preprints has worn off. Just a few years ago, it was not unusual for a journal to refuse to review a paper that had been posted on a preprint server. Now, at least one journal will only review preprinted submissions. We’ve come a long way in a short time on preprints, and we are moving on to the next phase: what does peer review look like in a preprint world?

There is a reluctance to refer to this practice as post-publication review — lest we admit that posting a preprint counts as “publication” — but that is effectively what it is. Preprint review refers to the act of layering scrutiny, analysis, and context onto a piece of scholarship that has been made publicly available by its authors. It happens directly on preprint servers, on specialized preprintreview platforms and (arguably) on social media — although to wildly varying degrees between disciplines and communities. Amidst the feverish proliferation of preprints in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a paradoxical status became more prevalent. Preprints — which had been consistently

Rumors continued from page 9

innovation and impact during a virtual event. The simulated animal tournament at Arizona State University Library returns with a community of learners over 660,000 strong. The event features Katie Hinde , associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, and Anali Maughan Perry, head of Open Science and Scholarly Communication at ASU Library. Hinde, who has continued to serve as March Mammal Madness editor in chief and a team of scientists,

defined as “unreviewed manuscripts” and emblazoned with cautionary text to reflect this fact — were getting reviewed. And the reviews were publicly accessible to all readers. Some, in fact, were reviewed more thoroughly within a few days of publication than most journal articles have ever been reviewed.

Still, most preprints are not publicly peer reviewed. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, they do not get reviewed at all until a subsequent version ends up published in a journal. This is unfortunate, as sharing new findings openly should be considered as part one of a multi-part open process. Public scrutiny and scholarly discourse between the authors and the community should follow. But just as it has taken time for researchers — particularly in the life science fields — to come around to the idea of posting preprints, it will take time to accept the idea of public peer review.

Going (ahem) against the grain and breaking with norms is hard, but the discussions at the Janelia meeting and the content of this issue’s features give me hope that change is underway. Elliott Lumb from PeerRef and Stuart King from eLife first discuss the myriad of benefits of preprint peer review and how their organizations are helping — in different ways — to normalize and operationalize the practice. Next the PREreview team looks at peer review of preprints through the lens of equity and explains how PREreview aims to educate and expand opportunities for participation in the practice. Ben Mudrak from ChemRxiv provides a view into preprint adoption in chemistry and touches on attitudes toward preprint review in this more recent entrant into the preprint space. Lastly, Michael Parkin gives us a tour of EuropePMC’s approach to surfacing peer review of preprints.

illustrators, conservationists, librarians, designers and educators, join Perry to kick off this year’s tournament, which runs from March 13-April 5, with stories from the past decade and what players could look forward to this year. There is even a libguide! Check it out! I think this would be great for our grandkids as well as all of us! https://libguides.asu. edu/marchmammalmadness

Be sure to send any rumors our way for future publications! We’d love to hear from you at editors@against-thegrain.com. Happy spring!

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“But just as it has taken time for researchers — particularly in the life science fields — to come around to the idea of posting preprints, it will take time to accept the idea of public peer review.”

PeerRef and the Future of Preprint Peer Review

By Elliott Lumb (Founder CEO, PeerRef) <elliott@peerref.com>

Introduction

Academic publishing has been in a state of constant change over the past decade. Open Access has become the primary way to publish research. A growing number of national mandates are driving the increase in open data sharing. The use of preprints continues to rise. Traditional publishers are continuing to grapple with the new business models associated with open research. Recently, peer review has become a focus for innovation. Several platforms, including PeerRef, are striving to improve the peer review process.

What is Peer Review

Researchers and funders agree that peer review is an integral part of the scholarly communication process. However, there is limited consensus on what constitutes peer review. We believe that traditional, journal-based peer review has three main facets: reviewers provide insight into the rigour and validity of a manuscript, give feedback on how to improve a manuscript, and assess a manuscript’s fit for a particular journal. Journal fit can derive from a range of standards including scope, perceived impact, and novelty. Repeated peer review at multiple journals is a common occurrence due to high levels of rejection following peer review. We believe the traditional journal-based approach is wasteful and creates more value for publishers than it does for the research community.

The Rise and Utility of Preprints

The publication of preprints has grown rapidly over the past few years. Over 450,000 preprints were published in 2022, representing approximately 10% of scholarly publications. The growth in preprints accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when it became more important than ever to rapidly share results. The number of preprints continues to grow year-on-year. We expect this growth to continue as researchers, particularly early career researchers, find unique value in preprints. Funders are also driving this growth as they continue to encourage the use of preprints.

The rise of preprints has provided benefits and new opportunities across scholarly communication. Preprints can accelerate discovery, be used as evidence of productivity in grant or job applications, and are associated with higher citations for the Version of Record. Preprints are also enabling innovation in peer review.

What is PeerRef

We launched PeerRef in September 2021. Our goals are to make peer review open, provide researchers with greater choice in how their research is shared and evaluated, and reduce waste in the academic publishing process.

PeerRef is a journal-independent open peer review platform. It helps authors by organising open peer review for their preprints. The peer review reports are published on the PeerRef platform, assigned a DOI, and posted alongside

preprints on several preprint platforms. Authors can use the feedback in these reviews to improve their research. The reviews can signal to readers that the research is verified by expert peers, without journal publication. Readers also benefit from the extra context provided in the open reviews.

Journal-independent peer review of preprints gives authors more choice in how they share research. They can use the package of their preprint and its peer reviews as the final product, or they can send the preprint and reviews to a journal editor, who can use the reviews to inform or make rapid publication decisions. The reuse of PeerRef’s open assessment creates a single point of peer review, which reduces waste by eliminating the need for repeated peer review at successive journals.

PeerRef is field agnostic, serving all research communities. Its journal-independent open peer review of preprints can revolutionise the academic publishing process and benefit authors, reviewers, publishers, and research funders.

Sourcing Peer Reviewers

Journal editors note that it is difficult to source peer reviewers. It is also reported that 10% of reviewers do 50% of global peer review. We hypothesise that the root cause for both phenomena is that a relatively small group of researchers are repeatedly asked to conduct peer review. This may be caused by journal editors only asking their established pool of reviewers to evaluate articles.

PeerRef has a unique approach to peer reviewer selection. It does not have an editorial board. Instead, it has a tool-first approach to sourcing reviewers, using a mix of internal and third-party tools to identify suitable expert reviewers for all types of research at scale. In addition to improving efficiency and precision, we intend for this approach to broaden the pool of reviewers to include more early-career researchers and researchers from middle and low-income countries.

A Better Approach for Authors

For authors, peer review at a single journal can take 4-12 months. There is a global average rejection rate of 45% , and the reviewer reports are not publicly shared. Therefore, almost half of the research must undergo several rounds of peer review at multiple journals. With 5 million publications in 2022, it is estimated that repeated peer review wasted 45 million hours of researcher time. This process is delaying research and distracting researchers from their priorities. We can solve this problem by organising peer review of preprints outside of a journal and publishing the peer review reports. Peer review can be conducted once with journal-independent peer review and used by anyone, including journal editors. Journal editors will no longer need to organise a full round of peer review themselves. Instead, they can use existing open peer reviews to inform or make publication decisions. This accelerates publication, reduces repeated peer review,

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and gives researchers more time to focus on generating knowledge.

Typically, authors can only access peer review by submitting their research to a journal for publication, which is arguably not necessary for all research. Journal publication can be a timeconsuming and expensive process. And the research must meet a journal’s criteria for acceptance, which often entails being perceived as novel or potentially impactful and communicating positive results. These requirements tend to preclude many types of research, such as iterative studies, replication studies, or studies with negative results, that may benefit from peer review. By decoupling peer review from journals, we can empower authors to seek evaluation for more types of research and to choose which of their peer-reviewed outputs should go through the journal publication process.

Recognition for Reviewers

In traditional peer review, the reviewer provides a service to a journal. They help to protect the journal’s brand by advising an editor on whether a piece of research meets a subjective set of standards. This is not the case with journal-independent open peer review of preprints. In this model, the reviewer is solely focused on assessing the rigour and validity of the work without acting as a gatekeeper. By putting the research at the centre of the assessment, the reviewer can provide constructive feedback from a collegial, rather than adversarial, position. Ultimately, when conducting open peer review on preprints, the reviewer provides their service and expertise to the author and research community, which benefits from the open assessment.

Reviewers can also gain from conducting open preprint peer review. Based on 5 million articles published in 2022, there was an estimated 100 million hours of peer review conducted. This enormous amount of scholarly work is not in the public domain. These reviews could be used to provide more context to research articles, used to train reviewers, and be used in research assessment. PeerRef publishes signed peer reviews and assigns DOIs to them. This enables reviewers to share their work and add it to their CVs and allows others to cite their reviews. Funders and institutions are beginning to signal that they will consider published peer reviews in grant proposals and promotion and tenure decisions. Services such as Reviewer Credits, a partner of PeerRef, help with this. Reviewer Credits enables reviewers to keep track of all their open peer review activity in one place and easily share their peer review contribution with funders and institutions.

Future Role of Publishers

In this new workflow where authors can freely publish their research on preprint platforms and request peer review from platforms such as PeerRef, we believe there remains a role for publishers. Publishers have existed for centuries and are deeply entrenched in scholarly communication. We do

not believe that peer review is the core value proposition of a publisher; rather, publishers create most of the value for the author after publication. This value can be high-quality article production, community building, or helping research to be as discoverable and societally impactful as possible. Publishers can influence discovery and impact in a variety of ways. The primary tools to discover research are Google and Google scholar, so it is important for journals to have strong SEO. In some communities, expert human curation is essential. For specific types of research, the impact may depend on the publisher getting that research to policymakers, journalists, or patient groups. As peer review is decoupled from journals, publishers can focus on these roles where they add the most value.

A New Ecosystem

Several platforms are innovating in the space of preprint peer review, each offering its unique service. Review Commons, Peer Community in, and Biophysics Colab organise peer review of preprints for specific research communities. PREreview allows authors to request peer review for their preprint from the PREreview community. It also offers resources and training on how to write a high-quality peer review. eLife has also recently transitioned from a selective journal to a publisher of peer-reviewed preprints.

Other platforms help the preprint review ecosystem to grow and thrive. Sciety, an eLife product, aggregates peer reviewed preprints so users can discover and curate lists of evaluated preprints. JMIR, a PeerRef partner journal, created Plan P. This initiative supports certified preprint peer review services and allows authors to publish a Version of Record of peer reviewed preprints.

Funders are also beginning to recognise the utility of preprint peer review. In 2022, cOAlition S announced that they consider peer reviewed preprints to be of equivalent merit to peer-reviewed journal publications. Several research funders have also individually committed to including peer-reviewed preprints in their evaluation processes.

The preprint peer review ecosystem is in its infancy. Over the next decade, we expect preprint peer review to become the primary way research is evaluated. As PeerRef develops, we will drive progress towards an ecosystem of scholarly communication in which open peer review is embraced and waste is reduced, allowing researchers and publishers to focus on where they create real value for their community and society.

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“By putting the research at the centre of the assessment, the reviewer can provide constructive feedback from a collegial, rather than adversarial, position.”

Preprints Mean Peer Review Can Be Reimagined as it Should Always Have Been

By Stuart RF King (Research Culture Manager, eLife) <s.king@elifesciences.org> ORCID: 0000-0003-4374-3587

There are perhaps few topics in scholarly publishing that elicit such mixed opinions as peer review. Academics and publishers alike will recognize it as both an essential yet imperfect part of the scientific process, while some acknowledge it as the “least worst” option that we have when it comes to evaluating research (Smith, 2010). Preprints, versions of scholarly works that are shared prior to being peer reviewed, are another subject that can divide opinion (Teixeira da Silva, 2018). The recent boom in preprints, however — particularly within the life and medical sciences — may now present an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine peer review for the better.

The most commonly listed shortcomings of peer review include it being slow, opaque, inconsistent and biased. It has also been criticised for being wasteful — in that it requires much time and effort frequently with little to show in return (Heeson and Bright, 2021) — and for perpetuating a power imbalance that disproportionately impacts those already most systemically disadvantaged by academia, including early-career researchers and scholars from historically underrepresented groups (Silbiger and Stubler, 2019).

Preprints provide both impetus and opportunity to rethink how peer review should be done. They have uncoupled and effectively inverted the review and dissemination stages that occur in most traditional journal publishing. No longer needed to determine whether and when a piece of scholarly work can be published, peer review is instead free to be reimagined into a more open, efficient and equitable process.

Fortunately, this change is not just possible but is already happening. Over recent decades, multiple journals started to make their peer review more transparent by posting the reviewers’ comments alongside the articles they publish (Polka et al., 2018). This approach, adopted by eLife since its inception over ten years ago (Schekman et al., 2012) and in part pioneered by BioMed Central, is also used at Biology Direct, The EMBO Journal , F1000 Research , PeerJ and several Nature-branded journals, among others (Nature, 2020). Now, an increasing number of organisations and initiatives — like Review Commons and PREreview — are building upon this foundation of open reviews, the wider Open Scholarship movement, and the growing momentum around preprints to reform peer review even further (see PREreview’s contribution “Tackling bias and inequity in the peer review process with PREreview” in this issue of Against the Grain).

eLife, for example, has focused on only reviewing articles that are first published as preprints since July 2021 (Eisen et al., 2020). In October 2022, we announced that, as of last month, we will be eliminating “accept/reject” decisions after peer review and instead instructing our reviewers and editors to prepare public reviews and a concise assessment for every preprint we review. These will then be published alongside it to transform it into a “Reviewed Preprint” (Eisen et al., 2022). Every “eLife assessment” will use a common vocabulary to summarise the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence reported in the preprint; the hope is that providing a more nuanced appraisal of the work in a clear and consistent manner

will help academia to move away from its obsession with journal titles. A group of nine funders and other research organisations have since committed to including reviewed preprints from eLife and others involved in preprint review in their evaluation processes.

This is a call for other publishers to seriously consider open review, particularly of preprints, to overcome the shortcomings of the closed, pre-publication peer review that has been the norm for the last fifty years or so. Adopting such a model of peer review could benefit almost all stakeholders across the research ecosystem: from the wider research community to those who fund research and researchers, and from the reviewers who assess research articles to the authors who publish them.

Publishing reviewers’ comments in general means that the wider community can benefit from them, too. During peer review, reviewers spend time reading, thinking carefully about, and then commenting on the work of another. In the process, they typically generate rich, in-depth, detailed appraisals of the work. Too often, however, all of that time and effort is largely used to reach a binary decision of accept or reject, after which it is effectively lost. By instead making reviewers’ reports public, either alongside published articles or reviewed preprints, readers may gain a more nuanced understanding of the work’s specific strengths and weaknesses. They would also be less reliant on crude proxies to determine its quality, such as assuming every work reviewed and published by a particular journal shares identical qualities.

This reimagined approach would also offer pedagogical benefits. With access to a wider sample of reviewers’ reports, early-career researchers would have additional opportunities to learn how to write their own peer reviews and, if the authors’ responses are published too, how to effectively respond to reviewers’ comments about their work. Both are essential skills that are rarely taught to budding academics. These skills instead form part of a hidden curriculum that is not taught and where unequal access to this knowledge serves to perpetuate inequalities in research communities (Goodman, 2022).

Importantly, publishing reviews openly for all articles would not preclude journals from helping readers identify works of interest to them. This is often cited as a valuable service provided by journals (Kelly et al., 2014) and could easily continue in a more sophisticated way than simply deciding whether a study can be published in a specific journal or not. For example, journal editors could curate lists or collections of reviewed preprints that they feel are exemplary of particular qualities, such as rigour or reproducibility, while the accompanying reviews could include prominent recommendations for which groups of researchers might be most interested in the article.

Publishing reviews would also help stop the work of peer reviewers from being invisible and thus easily undervalued. While peer review is often regarded as a community service, there is nothing to say that individual reviewers cannot also be

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recognised and rewarded for the skill and effort involved. For example, if made publicly available, a researcher’s peer reviews could provide evidence of their broader contributions to their field. This would mean, in turn, that funders and institutions could assess a more complete range of activities undertaken by researchers, beyond merely their publication records (which is also a key recommendation in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment). Additionally, as those who are in large part financing peer review by paying researchers’ salaries (because peer review remains a largely unpaid activity (Aczel et al., 2021)), funders and institutions would see more return on their investment if their researchers’ peer reviews were made visible.

This kind of recognition would require that reviewers publish their reviews under their names. However, reviewer anonymity can be important under certain circumstances and should probably always be given as an option. That said, even if published anonymously, making reviews public demonstrates more respect for reviewers’ time and efforts. For example, in traditional journal peer review where valid criticisms lead to a rejection, there is nothing that prevents the rejected authors from simply ignoring the reviewer’s concerns and resubmitting their manuscript unchanged to another journal with the hopes that other reviewers will not identify its flaws. In this situation, the first reviewer’s time has largely been wasted, possibly serving only to delay publication and bump the paper down the perceived hierarchy of journals. This behaviour could also potentially waste the time of future reviewers by making them unknowingly assess a manuscript that has already been thoroughly reviewed. If instead, the authors knew that the reviewer’s comments were going to be added to the preprinted version of their article, they would be incentivised to ensure that valid concerns are addressed. And if the authors still opt to ignore the concerns, the public reviews would nevertheless serve to alert anyone reading the preprint to its potential flaws.

Finally, making peer review more transparent has the potential to improve the experience of authors too. The immediate benefits for those who publish preprints have already been discussed by others (Berg et al., 2016, McKiernan et al., 2016, Sarabipour et al., 2019). If open peer review of preprints were to become the norm, authors may also benefit from reviews that are more constructive. There would be little reason for reviewers to write superficial reviews that merely serve as a brief justification for their opinion that an article should be rejected. Instead, when peer review is no longer used to gatekeep publications and when the publication of reviewers’ reports becomes commonplace, there should be a greater incentive for reviewers and publishers alike to make sure that the reviews they produce are fair and balanced. Additionally, with more transparency, there should also be more accountability for publishers to make sure that their reviewers’ reports, which they will then publish, treat authors with civility and respect, lest they be judged by their community and potential future authors.

The remaining barrier to the wider adoption of this “preprintfirst” model of transparent peer review is not technological but cultural. The organisations already carrying out this type of review are evidence of this. As such, what is now needed is for more publishers to join them, capitalise on the opportunities presented by preprints and reimagine how they conduct peer review. A good first step could involve publishers simply publishing the peer reviews that are already being written alongside the related manuscripts, while also encouraging authors to post preprints. In time, with this direction of travel, it

will become easier for further changes to transform peer review from the “least worst” option to the open, efficient and equitable process that it should always have been.

References

Smith R. Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Res 12 (Suppl 4), S13 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/bcr2742

Teixeira da Silva JA. The preprint debate: What are the issues? Med J Armed Forces India. 2018 Apr;74(2):162-164. doi: 10.1016/j.mjafi.2017.08.002

Heesen R, Bright LK. Is Peer Review a Good Idea? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Volume 72, Number 3 (2021) doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029

Silbiger NJ, Stubler AD. Unprofessional peer reviews disproportionately harm underrepresented groups in STEM. PeerJ. 2019 Dec 12;7:e8247. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8247.

Polka JK, Kiley R, Konforti B, Stern B, Vale RD. Publish peer reviews. Nature. (2018). 560:545-547. https://www.nature.com/ articles/d41586-018-06032-w#correction-0

Schekman R, Patterson M, Watt F, Weigel D. (2012). Scientific Publishing: Launching eLife, Part 1 eLife 1:e00270. https://doi. org/10.7554/eLife.00270

Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial. Nature 2020 Feb;578(7793):8. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00309-9

Michael B Eisen, Anna Akhmanova, Timothy E Behrens, Diane M Harper, Detlef Weigel, Mone Zaidi (2020) Peer Review: Implementing a “publish, then review” model of publishing eLife 9:e64910. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64910

Michael B Eisen, Anna Akhmanova, Timothy E Behrens, Jörn Diedrichsen, Diane M Harper, Mihaela D Iordanova, Detlef Weigel, Mone Zaidi (2022) Scientific Publishing: Peer review without gatekeeping eLife 11:e83889. https://doi.org/10.7554/ eLife.83889

Goodman S. (2022). The Scholarly Skill Amost No One Is Teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education https://www. chronicle.com/article/the-scholarly-skill-almost-no-one-isteaching

Kelly J, Sadeghieh T, Adeli K. Peer Review in Scientific Publications: Benefits, Critiques, & A Survival Guide. EJIFCC. 2014 Oct 24;25(3):227-43. PMID: 27683470; PMCID: PMC4975196.

Aczel, B., Szaszi, B. & Holcombe, A.O. A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review. Res Integr Peer Rev 6, 14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/ s41073-021-00118-2

Berg JM, Bhalla N, Bourne PE, Chalfie M, Drubin DG, Fraser JS, Greider CW, Hendricks M, Jones C, Kiley R, King S. Preprints for the life sciences. Science. 2016 May 20;352(6288):899-901.

Erin C McKiernan, Philip E Bourne, C Titus Brown, Stuart Buck, Amye Kenall, Jennifer Lin, Damon McDougall, Brian A Nosek, Karthik Ram, Courtney K Soderberg, Jeffrey R Spies, Kaitlin Thaney, Andrew Updegrove, Kara H Woo, Tal Yarkoni (2016) Point of View: How open science helps researchers succeed eLife 5:e16800. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800

Sarabipour S, Debat HJ, Emmott E, Burgess SJ, Schwessinger B, et al. (2019). On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective. PLOS Biology 17(2): e3000151. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000151

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Tackling Bias and Inequity in the Peer Review Process with PREreview

By Daniela Saderi, Ph.D. (Co-founder and Director of PREreview, PREreview / fiscally sponsored by Code for Science & Society) <daniela@prereview.org> <contact@prereview.org>

Preprints — versions of scholarly manuscripts that are freely published online by the authors before journal publication1 — offer the unprecedented opportunity to challenge and reform the way the research community engages with the evaluation of each other’s work. Traditional peer review is an opaque, biased, and antiquated process that for too long has remained in the hands of a few, for-profit publishers that have used it to effectively control the fate of knowledge production and dissemination for centuries.2 Some have (understandably) argued that peer review is a failure that cannot be repaired.3 At PREreview, a community-focused organization using preprints to improve peer review, we see a way forward, an alternative future for peer review that centers around openness, collaboration, and equity. In this short article we summarize our approach towards making that vision a reality.

The Long-standing Problems

Academic journal publication originated in Europe and North America, where both producers and publication gatekeepers were disproportionately white and male, typically from wellfunded, prestigious institutions. 4 Despite efforts to open scientific publication and make it more accessible, inclusive, and welcoming to diverse communities of researchers, much remains unchanged.

Traditionally, research is evaluated by a handful of reviewers hand-picked by a relatively homogenous group of journal editors.5, 6, 7 Behind closed doors, these editors and reviewers decide the fate of each article, free to make their decisions based on subjective criteria. Rarely is research assessed by a diverse pool of reviewers who can provide multiple, disparate viewpoints to check one another’s biases and provide a more comprehensive and context-appropriate evaluation of the work.

This lack of diversity in editorial boards and reviewer pools often makes it more difficult for journals to find reviewers from different backgrounds with the relevant expertise and experience even when they want to do so. This overburdens academics who receive multiple requests for peer review and prevents others from ever being asked to review.

Being asked to conduct peer review is seen as a mark of expertise and can open doors to opportunities for career progression.8 By not engaging researchers from marginalized groups and diverse geographic backgrounds, editors and journals perpetuate the existing system and disadvantage both themselves and the communities they serve.

Existing inequities, lack of diversity, and exclusionary practices within peer review are a manifestation of much larger structural and cultural problems maintained by traditional peer review practices. These oppressive systems include, but are not limited to, patriarchal systems, white supremacy culture, heteronormativity, and the practice of colonialism. All of these systems connect and overlap with one another. Because they are all human endeavors, they are part of who we are collectively and are embedded into everything we create.9 It is therefore imperative that we, as part of the community dedicated to

improving the accessibility, inclusivity, and openness of the scholarly publication process, spend time and effort in understanding and recognizing the roots of these issues in order to offer solutions that are more likely to bring transformative change.

The PREreview Approach

PREreview was founded in 2017 by three women, early career academics who shared both frustrations with the current research system and a belief that research evaluation could be made more equitable, transparent, and collaborative.10

PREreview’s mission is to bring more equity and openness to the scholarly evaluation process, centering the needs and expectations of researchers who have been traditionally excluded.11 To us, equity and openness are two inextricable ingredients needed to bring positive change to how research is shared and evaluated. Without centering equity, approaches that solely focus on openness risk recapitulating the same oppressive systems and practices that have dominated scholarship for centuries.

Our approach can be framed around what we often refer to as the three “pillars” of PREreview: training, community, and the technological infrastructure needed to hold it all together.

• Training: PREreview has developed multiple preprint review training formats that can be tailored to participants’ needs.12 We have run everything from cohort-based programming — for those taking a deep dive into equitable review practices — to half-day workshops that stress the importance of understanding the root causes of biased scholarly evaluation processes stemming from centuries of systemic oppression. While we most often partner with journals, funders, and research institutions to facilitate trainings tailored to their communities, we are excited to explore programming for individual researchers in 2023.

• Community: PREreview also helps facilitate livestreamed preprint journal clubs13 in partnership with journals, labs and research groups who are starting their preprint review journeys. These events offer researchers from around the world the opportunity to collaborate on providing constructive feedback to improve preprints, whilst also connecting with peers and honing their peer review skills. In 2023, we plan to overhaul our community features to make it easier than ever to organize, schedule, and facilitate preprint journal clubs on PREreview.org.

• Infrastructure: PREreview.org also hosts an intuitive, welcoming platform for publishing preprint reviews onsite. Reviewers can either copy and paste their review or compose one on the website itself, and then publish it using either a pseudonym — to preserve their privacy and safety — or their real name, which can be linked to their ORCID iD for attribution. We are looking

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forward to further improving our review platform based on feedback and input collected from our communities. Through this multifaceted approach, we hope to foster a community of belonging for researchers who are interested in participating in peer review, shaping and owning the process, and maximizing the value it brings to their lives.

Next Challenges and Opportunities

Influencing culture change takes time; however, the shift is already well underway. The publication of preprints has rocketed in recent years, and the conversation has now moved on to not only getting research results out quickly, but gathering feedback quickly, openly, and from a global community of reviewers.14

Influencing culture change also takes a coordinated effort driven by globally distributed communities. We recognize that our work is limited by the perspectives, expertise, and experiences we have as a team and that our ideas are influenced by the communities with which we are most closely connected. We therefore value partnership building and try to approach collaborations from an opportunity perspective, offering our support, knowledge and resources to individuals, groups, and organizations who need it to advance goals and missions that align with ours.

In the upcoming months, we hope to build on some pioneering work done in collaboration with AfricArXiv, Eider Africa, eLife, and Training Centre in Communication Africa where we worked together to adapt our existing training to a Train-of-Trainer model that has the potential to scale beyond what we can do as individual organizations and empower the next generation of African peer reviewers.15

Looking forward to the next couple of years, we also aim at implementing engagement and technological strategies to more effectively connect preprint authors and reviewers at the point when that feedback is most needed. In collaboration with eLife and with the support of a recent award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,16 we will implement new technological standards for authors to solicit constructive feedback on their preprint at the time of its publication on a preprint server (see eLife’s contribution “Preprints mean peer review can be reimagined as it should always have been” in this issue of Against the Grain). Furthermore, as a way to incentivize early sharing of preprints and facilitate public community feedback, in collaboration with ASAPbio, we will run a series of live-streamed journal clubs specifically on early preprints, i.e., preprints shared by authors well in advance of journal submission.

These are just a few examples of goals and activities that we are planning to pursue in the near future. Our work is our attempt at a single approach. It is imperfect and incomplete. And that is okay. We believe a future in which knowledge is shared and evaluated openly and equitably exists, but no one knows what that future looks like because we have never seen it. All we can do is to allow for mistakes, work together, and be open to feedback and change.

Calls to Action and Ways to Stay Connected

If you are a researcher interested in providing your input and feedback to our preprint review platform and programming, contact us at community@prereview.org

If you are the author of an early preprint and are interested in having your work showcased and constructively reviewed by your peers, you can learn more and request to be part of this pilot here

If you are a publisher or an organization sharing our vision of a more participatory and open peer-review process and are interested in working together, reach out to us at contact@ prereview.org. We offer ways to incorporate community-driven preprint reviews into journal-organized review processes, as well as tailored peer review training.

If you are a funder interested in learning more about our ideas and potentially supporting us, contact us at contact@ prereview.org.

For bimonthly updates from our team, sign up to our newsletter.

Follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

Endnotes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprint

2. https://lps.library.cmu.edu/ETHOS/article/id/38/

3. https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-riseand-fall-of-peer-review

4. Alperin, Juan Pablo (2018): World scaled by number of documents with authors from each country in Web of Science: 2016. figshare. Figure. https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.7064771.v1

5. Salazar JW, Claytor JD, Habib AR, Guduguntla V, Redberg RF. Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexual Orientation of Editors at Leading Medical and Scientific Journals: A Crosssectional Survey. JAMA Intern Med. 2021;181(9):1248–1251. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2363

6. Dada S, van Daalen KR, Barrios-Ruiz A, Wu K-T, Desjardins A, Bryce-Alberti M, et al. (2022) Challenging the “old boys club” in academia: Gender and geographic representation in editorial boards of journals publishing in environmental sciences and public health. PLOS Glob Public Health 2(6): e0000541. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pgph.0000541

7. Altman, M., & Cohen, P. N. (2021, June 29). Openness and Diversity in Journal Editorial Boards. https://doi. org/10.31235/osf.io/4nq97

8. Squazzoni F, Bravo G, Farjam M, Marusic A, Mehmani B, Willis M, Birukou A, Dondio P, Grimaldo F. Peer review and gender bias: A study on 145 scholarly journals. Sci Adv. 2021 Jan 6;7(2):eabd0299. doi: 10.1126/sciadv. abd0299. PMID: 33523967; PMCID: PMC7787493.

9. PREreview Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Statemen. https://content.prereview.org/edi

10. https://osaos.codeforscience.org/personal-perspectivethe-origin-story-of-prereview

11. https://content.prereview.org/mission

12. https://content.prereview.org/openreviewers

13. https://content.prereview.org/liveprejcs

14. https://www.science.org/content/article/researcherspush-preprint-reviews-improve-scientificcommunications

15. https://content.prereview.org/open-peer-reviewers-inafrica-a-train-of-trainer-program

16. https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/35695590/ prereview-and-elife-welcome-chan-zuckerberginitiative-s-support-to-boost-community-engagementin-public-preprint-review

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ChemRxiv: Boiling Down Preprints in Chemistry

By Ben Mudrak (Senior Product Manager, ChemRxiv) <curator@chemrxiv.org>

The rapid sharing of research results before peer review, pioneered by arXiv decades ago, leads to an acceleration of progress by the global research community. While this acceleration grabs headlines more frequently in fields such as epidemiology, the same principles apply to chemistry and adjacent fields of study. Even with similar goals, ChemRxiv users’ viewpoints and needs do not always exactly reflect those of the broader preprint community, especially as the field of chemistry has not yet caught up with other fields that have been exploring preprints for longer.

ChemRxiv was launched over five years ago, on August 15, 2017, with this accelerated progress in mind, aiming to build on the success of arXiv and bioRxiv in other scientific disciplines. Specifically, ChemRxiv sought (and still seeks) to provide researchers the opportunity to gather feedback, rapidly disseminate their work, establish priority for their discoveries, document their research output, and stay up to date in their field, all at no charge. In keeping with the site’s goals of fostering connection and collaboration, the service is jointly managed by five chemical societies: the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), the German Chemical Society (GDCh), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Input from a Scientific Advisory Board of 29 active researchers from 17 countries also helps guide operations and policies.

options included:

• Feedback from peers on new results

• Staking the first claim to new research

• Rapid sharing of results to the community

• Public record of research activity

• Transparency into the evolution of a research paper before publication

Data from ChemRxiv community survey (n=834). Divided based on whether the respondent self reported having posted preprints before (“Posted preprints”; n=425) or not (“No preprints”; n=409). The percentage of all respondents ranking the option highly beneficial (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) is noted.

ChemRxiv has now posted more than 16,000 preprints from researchers around the world, covering fields from basic organic chemistry research to medicinal chemistry and chemical education. You can find more details on the growth and usage of ChemRxiv in its five years since launch in a recent editorial posted to the site

Last summer, we surveyed authors and readers from the ChemRxiv community to better understand their views on preprints. One particular aim behind the community survey was to gain a better understanding of how our audience may differ from researchers in fields with a longer history of posting preprints.

One important question asked authors what they saw as the top benefit(s) of preprints, with the ability to rank a few of the benefits derived from ChemRxiv’s launch goals. In this case, the

There was general consensus among the community that establishing priority was a driving focus, with rapid sharing following closely (i.e., by posting results before the potentially lengthy peer review process takes place at one or more journals). A public record of research results and feedback were also rated highly by about half the survey takers. These are not new observations (similar benefits to preprints are articulated nicely by Saribipour, et al.), falling in line with viewpoints from researchers in other areas of study.

We also asked the survey takers to rank some concerns about preprints from the following items brought up in our conversations with ChemRxiv users, potential users, and Board members:

• Preprints can be misinterpreted by readers

• Preprints can jeopardize publication in a journal

• Preprints create confusion for readers

• Preprints can be used to spread misinformation

• Preprints do not receive many citations

Data from ChemRxiv community survey (n=834). Divided based on whether the respondent self reported having posted preprints before (“Posted preprints”; n=425) or not (“No preprints”; n=409). The percentage of all respondents ranking the option highly concerning (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) is noted.

These concerns, likewise, are not unique. There is more variability based on breaking down responses by prior experience with preprints, with those who have not yet posted a preprint focusing more heavily on the potential to jeopardize publication (which is not typically a hurdle with publisher policies widely accepting preprints nowadays). Overall, these concerns were also not rated as strongly, reaching the top of our scale at nearly half the rate of the benefits.

Of note, prior preprint authors’ most highly cited reason for not preprinting more was “Confidentiality concerns or other reasons that preclude public posting of early drafts.” ChemRxiv does not accept clinical data, so anonymization is rarely a concern, but some chemistry fields involve new intellectual property that will be subject to patents or institutional oversight. In general, people in the field exhibit some hesitation to post certain results: for example, instructions on synthesizing a new compound. Overcoming this hesitation and providing appropriate safeguards is an ongoing effort to help ChemRxiv grow.

Preprints and journals are increasingly connected, and the boundaries and system flows have been a major topic of discussion recently. ChemRxiv, like many preprints, places a link to the peer-reviewed article when available, and we offer Direct Journal Transfer to allow authors to export their manuscript and relevant metadata to over 150 participating journals. One potential new feature would be the ability to post a preprint on ChemRxiv after submission to a journal, much like Research Square or bioRxiv/medRxiv receive preprints from certain journals. Such a path would represent a way to grow the number of preprints on the site although, at the moment, our authors largely look to transfer to a journal.

A number of services are now offering a system to provide peer review on preprints, often with the reviews themselves

shared. Early discussions with the chemistry community haven’t uncovered much appetite for this, but it’s an area we’ll be watching closely. In our survey, over 95% of ChemRxiv authors indicated having a destination journal in mind most or all of the time. They see ChemRxiv as a place to read the latest research and stake a claim to their results while the peer review process plays out in the context of a journal.

As ChemRxiv looks to the next five years and beyond, we’re hoping to continue strengthening the connections between our content and metadata and the broader scholarly publishing space. We’re delighted to be helping develop a preprint dashboard with CHORUS, which will tie preprint metadata to funder, institution, and publisher data. ChemRxiv has also participated in a wide-ranging advisory group organized by Crossref to document best practices for preprint metadata. We will also look to expand the destination journals available through our Direct Journal Transfer program (over 150 titles are available for automated transfer currently). Such expansion will support our authors, who overwhelmingly use ChemRxiv as a step toward peer-reviewed publication.

Finally, we look forward to many more collaborations within the preprint community, which is a vibrant, friendly, and creative space to solve the challenges we face in helping researchers share their findings. ChemRxiv’s community is unique but fits well alongside others who are pushing to solidify the place of preprints in research communication.

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“Over the next decade, we expect preprint peer review to become the primary way research is evaluated.”

Preprint Peer Review: An Indexer’s Perspective

By Michael Parkin (Data Scientist, Content, EMBL-EBI) <parkinm@ebi.ac.uk>

Europe PMC is an open database of life science literature from trusted sources around the globe. The resource is developed by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBLEBI) and provides free access to journal abstracts and fulltext articles mirrored from PubMed and PubMed Central, respectively, as well as related content such as preprints, book chapters, clinical guidelines, and patents.

As a strong supporter of open science practices, Europe PMC began indexing preprint abstracts in 2018, collating from several preprint platforms, including bioRxiv, ChemRxiv and PeerJ Preprints. This provided a single site from which to search for life sciences preprints from multiple platforms alongside the journal article literature, improving their discoverability. 1 Europe PMC has also converted over 42,000 preprints to full text and made this content available in multiple formats: HTML for reading on the website; bulk download for manuscript files, figures and supplementary data; and metadata through the API. Further, by taking advantage of the existing infrastructure developed for journal content, Europe PMC facilitates preprint inclusion into workflows such as literature reviews, article citation, and credit and attribution and enriches the preprint abstract records with links to related data and other useful resources. Over the past few years Europe PMC has been regularly adding to the list of preprint platforms indexed , and at the time of writing in January 2023, includes over 530,000 preprints from 28 platforms (Fig. 1).

The inclusion of preprints within Europe PMC has not been without challenges. While Europe PMC considers several criteria when deciding to index content from a preprint platform, the aim is to be inclusive, and this often necessitates working with different systems, formats, and approaches. For example, platforms often have different approaches to versioning and withdrawal policies and some have multilingual content. Europe PMC retrieves the bulk of its preprint metadata and abstracts from Crossref.2 This metadata is supplied by the preprint platforms to Crossref when creating DOIs for their preprints and is used to generate a preprint abstract record in Europe PMC (Fig. 2).

There are some important metadata elements that are not available in Crossref that would be greatly beneficial to indexing services. Of particular note is the omission of a defined preprint version number, which Europe PMC infers based on a common practice of adding, e.g., “.v2” to the end of a version 2 DOI. It would also help to have a machine-readable way to indicate whether a preprint has been withdrawn or removed; the usual approach taken by preprint platforms is to indicate this in the abstract text. Europe PMC has recently participated in a Crossref working group providing recommendations around these concerns.3

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Fig. 1: The cumulative number of preprints indexed in Europe PMC by platform.

Fig. 2: Europe PMC uses metadata from Crossref to index preprint abstracts and makes this content available to communities such as researchers and text-miners.

Over the years, Europe PMC has also grappled with accurately indexing “open research platforms,” such as Wellcome Open Research powered by F1000 and, more recently, Access Microbiology, a journal that re-launched as an open research platform. Such platforms sit within an ever-broadening continuum between preprint platforms and journals. On these platforms, articles are made publicly available prior to peer review, and peer review reports are solicited directly by the platform and published alongside the manuscript as each report is received. Europe PMC indexes the manuscripts as preprints prior to peer review and links to the “version of record” available in PubMed for those articles that complete the peer-review process. The recent announcement from eLife of their new publishing model4 represents another challenge for indexing services like Europe PMC, in how to accurately reflect the various versions of the article that are generated in this novel workflow. Key to this will be the clear indication of what peer review is available for a particular version.

While a well-recognised benefit of preprints is speed, the omission of editorial peer review has raised concerns around scientific quality. To counter this, platforms such as Peer Community In, PREreview, and Review Commons have emerged to facilitate peer review of preprints by experts in the field outside of the traditional journal peer-review process. This was particularly important during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when the rapid dissemination of research findings was so critical. The existing approach at Europe PMC is to link to such platforms when possible through the use of its External Links mechanism, with “Peer Community In” being the first peer review platform to join in September 2018. This mechanism relies on the peer review platform providing Europe PMC with preprint DOIs and corresponding URLs that direct the user to the peer review(s) on the platform’s website. Following a website redesign in 2019, these are displayed in a dedicated review section on the preprint page on Europe PMC (Fig. 3). Unfortunately, this approach generates a technical burden on the platform and is difficult to scale up and maintain, particularly as preprint peer review platforms and practices continuously evolve.

scales, adding DocMap metadata into the Crossref metadata will provide us with a single source to access this information. To start, Europe PMC will work with Review Commons, which is also producing DocMaps for their evaluations, as a proof of concept for this workflow.7

Europe PMC recently conducted user research with the aim of identifying what its users would expect to see on the website in terms of preprint peer review, based on metadata expected to be available in DocMaps. Participants liked the fact that Europe PMC is making this information available and easy to discover, and the study participants appreciated both a timeline approach with dates and linked peer review events as well as inclusion of platform logos that clearly indicate where the reviews come from (Fig. 4).

An ideal situation would be to have a single source for preprint peer review, similar to utilising Crossref as a single source of preprint metadata. Happily, this challenge has been taken up by Sciety, which has been aggregating preprint evaluations from a wide variety of sources since 2020.5 The initial ambition is to leverage this significant effort from Sciety and utilise the DocMap format6 to greatly improve the visibility of peer review of preprints indexed in Europe PMC. As this

the peer review material and includes a link to the material on the platform’s website.

Care needs to be taken in how this is conveyed to the reader, because making the presence of review synonymous with good scientific quality should be avoided. While the existence of a journal publication signifies that the peer reviews were ultimately favourable (often after rounds of reviews and revisions), evaluations of a preprint may well be negative. Accordingly, we consider it essential that the reader has easy access to the content of the reviews.

One of the key questions to address, and one that frequently arises in discussions with collaborators, is what exactly qualifies as “preprint peer review”? Or, in other words, what is required for Europe PMC to label a preprint as having been

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Fig. 4: A mock-up of a new design for a preprint review section in Europe PMC. Entries show the logo of the provider and information such as the date, type and author of

Fig. 3: An example of a COVID-19 preprint indexed from medRxiv showing the “Reviews” section with a link to peer review reports hosted on the PREreview platform.

NOW PUBLISHED BY ANNUAL REVIEWS

Founded in July 1999, The Charleston Advisor publishes detailed product reviews of proprietary and freely available web-based resources for the library market. Reviewed product types include databases, pricing tools, scholarly journals, and collections. More than 1,130 searchable expert reviews, peer-reviewed by the library community, are currently available to help optimize library services.

BENEFITS OF SUBSCRIBING to TCA:

• Access to more than 1,130 reviews published

• Online edition includes full backfile database

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peer reviewed? For example, the ScreenIT pipeline has been used to assess medRxiv and bioRxiv COVID-19 preprints.8 This pipeline combines several automated screening tools to check issues around statistical reporting errors and omission of ethics statements and data availability, and it posts a public report on the outcome. Although these reports play a valuable role in assessing the quality of a preprint, our user testing suggests that such reports should be considered distinct from “preprint peer review.” Clearly care is needed to determine how a broad range of evaluations should be categorised.

The opportunity that preprints in the life sciences offer has become increasingly evident in recent years, allowing for the rapid communication of research results and the potential for a more transparent, inclusive, and responsive peer review structure. In line with its mission and objectives, Europe PMC will continue to work to support this evolving workflow.

Endnotes

1. Levchenko, M. Preprints in Europe PMC: reducing friction for discoverability. http://blog.europepmc.org/2018/07/ preprints.html (2018).

2. Wood, C. C. & Parkin, M. Using the crossref REST API. Part 12 (with Europe PMC). Crossref. https://www. crossref.org/blog/using-the-crossref-rest-api.-part-12with-europe-pmc/

3. Rittman, M. Better preprint metadata through community participation. Crossref. https://www.crossref.org/ blog/better-preprint-metadata-through-communityparticipation/

4. Urban, L. et al. eLife’s new model and its impact on science communication. Elife 11, (2022).

5. Let Sciety help you navigate the preprint landscape. Sciety https://sciety.org/

6. DocMaps to expand to increase the visibility and machine-readability of preprint evaluations. DocMaps Implementation Group. https://docmaps. knowledgefutures.org/pub/eyp3ckeo/release/1 (2022).

7. Changing the plumbing of scientific publishing. Review Commons. https://www.reviewcommons.org/blog/ changing-the-plumbing-of-scientific-publishing/

8. Weissgerber, T. et al. Automated screening of COVID-19 preprints: can we help authors to improve transparency and reproducibility? Nat. Med. 27, 6–7 (2021).

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and Editorials

Op Ed — To Err is Human: Part 1

Errata in Scholarly Journals?

By Daniel S. Dotson (Professor, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210) <dotson.77@osu.edu>

Introduction

Mistakes happen. We all make them from time to time. But what does it say when our most respected sources — peer reviewed journals — publish mistakes? This is the first in a series of three articles on issues related to errata and retractions in scholarly journals. This article will focus on the frequency of errata.

Methodology

Scopus assigns a document type of “Erratum” to documents which are information about errors in a previous publication. This document type in Scopus thus allows database users to identify items with errors and in the case for this article, see what journals, disciplines, and publishers tend to have higher numbers of errata. Scopus was chosen for its wider title coverage than Web of Science and its ability to export data for analysis.

In order to find these errata, all that needs to be done is to enter Scopus and conduct search for the source title and then limit to the document type Erratum. Finding all errata is a bit more work, but a search for all fields using the following search should get every document indexed:

a* OR b* OR c* OR d* OR e* OR f* OR g* OR h* OR i* OR j* OR k* OR l* OR m* OR n* OR o* OR p* OR q* OR r* OR s* OR t* OR u* OR v* OR w* OR x* OR y* OR z*

For the purposes of this study, the items were limited to 2012-2021 content prior to search. After the search, to examine top titles:

1. The source type was limited to Journal and data about the categories of document types was recorded.

2. The Erratum document type was chosen, and the results refined. Note Erratum is used for all erratum categories (e.g., corrigendum), but not for retractions.

3. The journals with the highest quantities of errata were selected. Thus, 99 titles were selected to review further (100 and 101 were a tie, otherwise 100 would have been chosen).

4. A separate search was conducted to obtain total document counts for each journal. The totals were used to identify the percentage of documents from each journal that were errata.

5. Journal Citation Reports was examined to determine each journal’s impact factor and its highest listed rank. Some journals were ranked in multiple fields, the highest ranking from these was recorded.

6. The current publisher for each journal was identified and recorded.

7. I assigned broad discipline (e.g., medicine, physics) based upon the journal’s content coverage.

Results

After the source type was limited to journal (Step 1 in methodology), the document types breakdown as shown in Figure 1.

By far, most items in journal articles are unsurprisingly of the Article document type, followed by Review, Note, Editorial, and so on. Erratum is in seventh place, with only 0.92% of the titles being of this type. There was a total of over 229,000 errata for this time period for all journals (compared to over 20 million articles). So overall, most journals should not have more than about 1% of their content, on average, being of this type. So does this reflect reality and how far beyond this number are some journals?

Once the Erratum document type was selected and results refined (Step 2 in Methodology), the 99 journals with the most errata were examined closer. I then took these titles through the steps in the Methodology section.

In terms of disciplines, most titles were in the sciences. This is at least partially due to both the high number of science journals and Scopus’s strength in this area. Then, the 99 titles with the highest number of errata were examined closer. As seen in Figure 2, Medicine by far outpaced all disciplines for these 99 titles, followed distantly by biology, chemistry, and physics.

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Figure 1: All document types found in journals indexed in Scopus 2012-22

A direct comparison to overall distribution would not be perfect as Scopus assigns some titles to multiple subjects. However, examining raw numbers using the Source area in Scopus, medicine titles comprise 15,421 of the 40,878 journals indexed in Scopus . So medicine titles being the most common subject area of the 99 makes sense as over a third of the journals indexed in Scopus cover medicine topics.

Looking at individual titles, 20 journals out of these 99 have over 5% of their indexed titles being errata. Four titles have over 10% of their indexed titles be errata. Table 1 shares the ten journals from this group with the highest percentage of indexed errata. As can be seen, most of these titles were in medicine.

Table 2 includes publishers with higher errata percentages across all of their journals from these 99 titles (publishers with just one title in the list were excluded). As can be seen, this list includes a mix of publisher types, with commercial publishers not dominating. Commercial, university presses, and society publishers are all represented.

Some may wonder if the quality of the journals may be a part of the equation. Impact factors were used as a proxy for journal quality due to being well known and easily discoverable. This of course comes with flaws, as there are many potential metrics that can speak to journal quality in diverse ways. Impact factor focuses on how well a journal is cited, but does not take into account disciplinary differences in the way in which the literature is used. Comparing impact factors thus can be spotty for some disciplines or inappropriate to compare items from different disciplines.

As seen in Figure 3, the 99 examined journals often had high impact factors and ranking. In fact, several journals had the highest ranking in at least one area. So many of these journals are of top quality per these criteria. (See Figure 3 located on the next page.)

So finally, what are the errata rates for the highest impact journals from this group? Table 3 listed the examined titles with the ten highest impact factors (again, with the caveat that impact factors from different disciplines is not a great comparison). This list has titles that many will readily recognize. (See Table 3 located on the next page.)

Takeaways

In summary, examining the data for these 99 journals with the most errata published 2012-2021 revealed:

• Many reputable journals have a higher percentage of errata than the overall journal errata rate.

• Publishers of all types are publishing errata.

• Medicine has a lot of journals with higher errata rates, but also medicine has a lot of journals.

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Figure 2: Top 99 Errata Journals: Number of Titles Per Discipline

Table 1: Ten Journals Highest Errata Percentage

Table 2: Publisher Errata Percentages

Below are some questions to ponder that either I could not explore with the existing data or due to time limits. Some may not even have straightforward answers.

• Why are these errors happening?

• Are there differences between the errata? For example, Scopus puts all errata together and does not distinguish between types in the document types (e.g., corrigendum not separate).

• Why do some journals have less errata?

— Are other journals doing a better job at catching errors prior to publication?

— Do they have errors that get published and never issue a correction?

— Are they correcting errors in the published version without notifying of a correction?

— Are they just getting submissions without errors in the first place?

— Is nobody noticing errors when they do occur?

— Do they have errata, but they do not get indexed in databases?

— Do the way disciplines handle errors vary?

• Could the editorial or peer review process do anything to lower the rate of errors?

• Are there journals with even larger percentage of errata (but with lower overall errata counts)?

• How does this compare to books and conference papers?

• Is labeling a problem that affects the data?

— Did Scopus mislabel items as errata? Mislabel errata as other types?

— How do publishers present errors and corrections on their own platforms?

° How does that affect the visibility of errata in indexing?

— Do publishers do a bad job of labeling errata when publishing them?

° Does how these are published affect indexing?

• Are publishers handling errata differently than they previously handled them?

— Are some correcting without making a notation?

— Are some not putting errata as a separate “publication” as it was traditionally done in print titles?

• How (well) are other databases handling errata?

• Why does medicine seem to dominate the errata so much? Is it simply due to the number of journals?

On the last point, it’s likely due to the number of medical titles. Some may point out correcting medical journals errors is vital to prevent harm to patients. But errors in physics, engineering, or chemistry can also have quite catastrophic potential. Regardless, the ideal is to always correct errors.

Next time, I will be sharing content related to the next level of “problems” facing journals — retractions.

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Figure 3: Impact & Best Rank for the 99 Errata Journals

Table 3: Ten Highest Impact Factors for Examined Journals

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

Column Editor’s Note: This is the exact reason why I cannot stand new year’s resolutions. Did not make it out of February without breaking my only resolution that I dared write down. For those keeping score, this is what I shared:

To that end, I will share one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2023. It is directed to my faithful and generous editor who often waits days, if not weeks, for my columns to arrive. Toni Nix is a fantastic collaborator who has helped with this column in ways that I likely cannot fully capture. So, it is to her that I set out my resolution to be a better column editor in 2023. I will get reviews back to my reviewers in a timely manner. I will get my columns in on time. I will get reviews out to the publishers when they are available. And while I will likely be distracted this year, I will keep this site up to date with all the information on this column — https:// www.squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup . While I am starting out a bit late, I do want to have some room to improve, right?

Well that streak is over. I almost made it to zero consecutive on-time columns. But alas, isn’t the entire dynamic of a new year’s resolution just a convenient opportunity to make a change that, quite honestly, you could implement any time? Why don’t we have a March 1st Resolution? Or any day for that matter. For many of us, we would have a better chance dropping a proton torpedo right down the reactor core of the Death Star (like Luke Skywalker did in that movie that all old people know as Star Wars) than actually following through with a resolution. For that matter, maybe the Empire should have their own resolution not to make weaknesses in their giant ships so darn easy to find.

The notion of a new year’s resolution (whether followed or forgotten) is a cultural one. And that is a good segue to talk about the four books in this column. These are all reference works. Two of them are from Bloomsbury Academic Publishing’s Cultural History series focusing on plants and shopping. Both of these works seem like exciting new entries for libraries that are covering everyday life and the role that plants and shopping play in them. We are only a few weeks away from the intersection of these two subjects, when people all over will run to nurseries to pick up annuals, vegetables, and perennials to continually perfect their gardens. Additionally, there are two reference works covering careers in writing and facts about presidents. I was going to make a comment about the latter subject, but I think I will let it pass.

I very much appreciate the work of the reviewers who really dig into the work and provide context that may be missing elsewhere. Thank you to my reviewers for this issue: Carolyn Filippelli (University of Arkansas – Fort Smith), Julie Huskey (Tennessee State University), Steve Sowards (Michigan State University) and my colleague Jared VanDyke (University of Michigan’s Kresge Library Services). As always, thank you very much for your work in bringing this column together.

If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here (new site name) — https://www. squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup.

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Giesecke, Annette and David Mabberley, eds. A Cultural History of Plants. 6 vols., London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2022. ISBN 978-1474273596, 1744 pages. $550 print. Also available in electronic version and by subscription or perpetual access.

Reviewed by Carolyn Filippelli (Reference Librarian, Boreham Library, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith)

<Carolyn.Filippelli@uafs.edu>

A Cultural History of Plants is one of the titles in the new Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series. The chief focus of the Cultural History of Plants is to show how plants are vital to and how they have impacted different cultures over time. Using a vast amount of detail, examples, and correlations, the work illustrates man’s dependence on plants for food, shelter, and clothing throughout historical periods and in many geographical locations. For example, much emphasis was placed on gardens in Roman times. The therapeutic mental health and wellness value of gardens, gardening, and forests has again been highlighted during the recent pandemic.

The only resolution worth keeping is taking more squirrel pictures. Working through that at the University of Michigan on February 3rd, 2023. A momma enjoying lunch and her not-so-little one waiting for her to finish.

The ambitious work consists of six volumes: One – Antiquity (10,000 BCE to 500 CE), Two –Post-Classical Era, (500 to 1400), Three – Early Modern Era (1400 to 1650), Four – Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (1650 to 1800), Five – The Nineteenth Century (1800 to 1920), and Six – Modern Era (1920 to present).

The strong organizational features contribute to the

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usefulness of the work. For example, the same general themes are repeated in each volume. These include: Plants as Staple Foods, Plants as Luxury Foods, Trade and Exploration, Plant Technology and Science, Plants and Medicine, Plants in Culture, Plants as Natural Ornament, and Representation of Plants. Use of consistent themes shows how plants have affected all aspects of culture throughout time. Repetition of topics also makes it easy to focus on and trace one specific influence over time. Other helpful features include the preface to each volume, the extensive bibliographies, notes, and exquisite plant illustrations.

The coverage for Volume 6 continues through the last few years, but there will definitely be a need for updates. New materials will be needed to incorporate technological changes, developments in agriculture, space exploration, environmental crises, advances in healthcare, uses of new plants considered for medicinal and therapeutic uses such as marijuana, and issues of food security for growing populations. Our very survival depends on plants. In part, this is shown by the many titles that have been published on the influences of individual plants such as tobacco, cotton, corn, and silk.

The Cultural History of Plants is a unique work that fills a real need as a reference source. The wealth of details and the interweaving of historical events with plant life is outstanding. Historical time periods, ethnic and cultural groups, and varied aspects of culture — architecture, literature, medicine, food customs — are accounted for. From the description of plants in early gardens, the intensive efforts devoted to description and identification of plants, and the events showing how plants affected trade and exploration, the progress of civilization and its survival is seen as intertwined with plants. In university libraries, this work would have applications in the social sciences, humanities, and biological sciences. Editors Annette Giesecke, a professor of classics, and David Mabberley, a professor of botany have created a real treasure.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings

The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to classify the importance of these books.

• I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.)

• I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

• I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

• I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

• I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.)

Stobart, Jon, ed. A Cultural History of Shopping. 6 vols., London: Bloomsbury Academic 2022. ISBN 978-1350027060 (set), 6 volumes. $550 print. Also available in electronic version and by subscription or perpetual access.

Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging, Tennessee State University, Brown-Daniel Library, Nashville)

<jhuskey@tnstate.edu>

“Shopping has a long and varied history,” (2) says volume editor Erika Rappaport (University of California, Santa Barbara) in the introduction to Volume 5 (In the Age of Revolution and Empire) of this six-volume set For most of human history, and certainly for the past three thousand or so years covered by this title, obtaining supplies needed or wanted for household and personal use has been a major task of everyday life.

However, the editors argue, few writers have addressed the complexity of shopping, an activity that is seen through the lens of the consumer, and, to a lesser extent, the retailer; earlier works have focused on larger-scale forces, such as manufacturing and shipping.

Each approximately two-hundred-page volume consists of a separate introduction, followed by eight chapters: “Practices and Processes,” “Spaces and Places,” “Shoppers and Identities,” “Luxury and Everyday,” “Home and Family,” “Visual and Literary Representations,” “Reputation, Trust and Credit,” and “Governance, Regulation, and the State.” The format works well, despite the span of time periods and locations. The examples are mostly from Europe (primarily Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy) and North America, with a few mentions of China and India. Series editor Jon Stobart, (Professor of Social History at Manchester Metropolitan University, England) authors the Series Preface and the “Home and Family” chapter in Volume 4 (The Age of the Enlightenment); the remaining chapters are authored by scholars (almost entirely PhDs, including a few independent scholars) representing a dozen countries.

Throughout the six volumes, the authors discuss the difficulty of pinning down the term “shopping”: how, they ask, does it differ from “provisioning,” “buying,” and “consuming”? Moreover, how one obtains even the most prosaic household items reveals a lot about social status; it can affect who does the shopping (servants, children, men, or women), where one shops, and the availability of credit. The term itself, according to James Davis and Richard Britnell (Vol. 2: 2) did not enter English until the eighteenth century. Moreover, the modern sense of the word — a means of self-expression, influenced by both individual and social forces — has its roots in the twentieth century, with the rise of the middle class, an increase in disposable income, and the explosion of advertising.

From Volume 1, Antiquity, where shopping takes place in Greek agora and Italian forums, to Volume 6, Modern Age, with its supermarkets, shopping malls, and e-commerce, the contributors discuss the evidence for the places and processes of shopping. Shopping is intertwined with a surprising range of topics, such as the status of shopkeepers, how governments raised revenue, and the ongoing perception of women as frivolous. The authors are careful to limit themselves to available evidence, to the extent that the set often reads like a literature review, but the text is engaging nevertheless. Well-selected illustrations (some color) and diagrams, extensive bibliographies, and volume-level indexes add to the polish and scholarship of the set.

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A Cultural History of Shopping is a significant contribution to an often-overlooked aspect of social history, especially in its coverage of women, non-whites, and lower socioeconomic classes as consumers. It is most likely to appeal to upper-division undergraduates and graduate students, but if budgets permit, it would be a welcome addition to public libraries as well.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Mars, Laura, & Allison Blake. Careers in Writing & Editing. Grey House Publishing, Inc., 2020. 9781642653953, 580 pages. $125.00

Reviewed by Jared VanDyke (Collections Assistant, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) <jaredpv@umich.edu>

The toolsets for editing and writing careers are as wide in variety as the field itself. Gone are the days when a student — of high school or collegiate level — could count on a communications degree to ferry them from one career goal and to the next. Students are now expected to remain versed and flexible in their skillset while working through this shifting, tech-driven landscape. The

problem soon arises: how does a student fit their collection of unique platform experiences, style practices, and/or program knowledge into one career path? This is the central question Careers in Writing & Editing hopes to address.

This work selects a blanket approach as a reference resource. The title divides into the two sections of Industry Profiles and Career Profiles, and further breaks down possible communication fields within those sections. For example: the Industry section gives generalized profiles on groups, like legal services, while the Career Profiles section covers how paralegals use writing and editing tools. A librarian can find baseline information on most any field in question, whether it’s average salary figures or a listing of what training an aspirant would need. These factoids are often supplemented with testimonies from active career professionals, as well as what brands of education and training would benefit you the most on a particular path.

The most useful portion of this resource is the contact listings at the end of each industry and career profile. The workplace summations and professional interviews throughout are better supported by these listings, as they’re thorough rundowns for major industry organizations. This information can provide a useful launching point for those curious about the exemplars of their field and what their own place in those organizations might look like. As such, I see this resource as less of a career development tool and more of a historical and inspirational reference — not

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“ Things always go smoothly with Emery-Pratt. Their people are knowledgeable, and always provide friendly, rapid service.”

Cameron University Lawton, OK

something a patron should live or die by, but something the reader can launch from.

Beyond the contact information, hard data is difficult to come by in this resource as all statistics are attached to a generalized bibliography at the book’s end. There are few instances of direct citation throughout the text, and much of the historical and professional context for these career paths is presented without a title or author to directly attribute. As an example, the text may list the number of court reporters working in 2018, with percentage breakdowns of responsibilities, but there’s no citation or reference showing how these statistics were generated or gathered. Checking the validity of the generalized information is critical since it’s a career guidebook … but the effort outweighs the usefulness of the information, leaving readers in a “Huh, that’s neat” cycle.

As a reference material, Careers can be summed up as aggregated Google results for those with nebulous, writing-based career goals. At best it is a guiding star for wishful highschoolers and unfocused college freshmen. At worst this resource is a second or third step between the reference question and what the patron requested.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

O’Neal, Michael J. (ed.). Facts About the Presidents: Insights, Intrigues, Personalities & Impacts from George Washington to Joseph R. Biden. 9th ed. Amenia, N.Y.: Grey House Publishing / Ipswich, Mass.: H. W. Wilson Co., 2022. 978-1-64265-895-8. vii + 1,085 pages. $195.00.

Reviewed by Steven W. Sowards (Associate Dean for Collection Strategies and Preservation, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing MI) <sowards@msu.edu>

This is a quintessential reference book on those who have held the office of United States Presidents. It’s made up of concise notes and statements, as well as chronologies and browsable lists. The 9th edition in this series covers events into the middle of 2021: it reports on the full length of the Donald Trump presidency, the election of 2020 and its aftermath, and the opening months of the Joseph Biden presidency.

Many of the “facts” here involve dates: birth, death, marriage, and landmark events, including elections and inaugurations. The founding editor of the series, Joseph Nathan Kane, brought a journalist’s zeal for “fact checking” to his work, here and in similar titles such as Famous First Facts (1st edition in 1933).

This kind of publication exemplifies the function of “authority” in reference work, and the contrast between untested internet tools and tested library resources. Authority is fundamental to much of what takes place in libraries. The Library of Congress maintains “name authority records”; our collections include “authoritative texts”; and librarians teach our users to identify “authoritative sources.” Implicit in authority is the existence of true and accurate information — facts — and pursuit of those facts is to some extent a 19th century aspiration coping today with 21st century relativism. Regardless of what we think about

competing interpretations, there are times when it is useful to simply (and confidently) read that Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President, who began his term of office on September 14, 1901, at the age of 42 years and 322 days.

Sadly, the concepts of expertise, authority and facts are held in diminished esteem in 2022. We live in an era of “alternative facts,” a phrase coined by White House Press Secretary Kellyanne Conway in 2017, in contrast to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s earlier observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” When it comes to recent presidential history, “to each his or her own” is part of the political landscape.

Positioned as an authoritative source, Facts About the Presidents does not directly attach evidence to factual statements: there are no footnotes. It is assumed that librarians and readers can and will rely on the expertise and integrity of editors and publishers. For contested topics, after all, a footnote merely begs the question: any cited source itself can be challenged, and also the source behind that source, ad infinitum … “turtles all the way down” in the words of the well-known phrase (for which Wikipedia does supply footnotes, by the way). Kane (founding editor for the series) carefully mined primary sources even if he did not put them on the printed page: his 2002 Newsday obituary credits him with saying, “I’m stupid enough not to believe anything until I see the proof” — and so a vast project of notetaking preceded his publications. Chapters do end with suggested lists for further reading, largely biographies.

When Facts About the Presidents presents those facts, it does so without noting contested matters. Barack Obama’s place of birth is stated to be Honolulu (page 697), without reference to derogatory and unfounded rumors or his birth taking place outside of the United States. We find the estimated attendance at Barack Obama’s inauguration on page 708, and at Donald Trump’s inauguration on page 733, without reference to arguments about which event drew a bigger crowd. Reporting on Electoral College voting in 2016, there is a careful tabulation of “faithless electors” without comment (page 732). On page 736, one can identify three cabinet officers who resigned from the Trump administration prior to the end of the term, but those dates of resignation are not explicitly linked to dismay after the Capitol Hill Riot of January 6th, 2020. Facts About the Presidents is willing to identify “the most contested election in history” (page 266) but is speaking not about 2020 but about 1876, when a special electoral commission had to step in after a deadlock in Congress. Reporting on events during 2020 and 2021, Facts About the Presidents does not shirk from describing January 6, 2021, as the “Capitol Hill Riot” (pages 747-748); among the entries for Important Dates in the Trump presidency we read that “Pro-Trump rioters storm the U.S. Capitol…” (page 743). The delayed Electoral College vote that day is recorded without comment.

In library work and reference publishing, there is an underlying assumption that facts exist, and that accuracy is available to us with due diligence. That assumption is rarely obvious, but it is an obvious issue today about aspects of the presidency. Facts About the Presidents speaks to that situation.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

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Booklover — Dreaming

Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

Has it really been two months since the season when Clement Clark Moore tells us about the night before Christmas and that children “were nestled all snug in their beds; while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads?”

Dreaming. In Moore’s classic poem dreaming is a pleasantry about a magical season. In the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street”…. well nightmare is the operative word and thus self explanatory. And yet dreams in all forms captivate us. Henri Bergson explored the dimensions of dreams and the effects of and on the human psyche in his book simply entitled Dreams. In the Introduction presented by the translator, Edwin E Slosson, the reader learns: “To use Professor Bergson’s striking metaphor, our memories are packed away under pressure like steam in a boiler and the dream is their escape valve.” Let’s escape for a minute into Bergson’s world of dreams.

Henri-Louis Bergson was an influential French philosopher when he was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.” A disclaimer on the Nobel Prize website states that: “During the selection process in 1927, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Henri Bergson therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1927 one year later, in 1928.”

Pedigree, a crisis of faith, and an award winning proficiency in mathematics led Bergson to choose academic studies in the humanities, particularly philosophy, over a career in the sciences. (Maybe this was his dream?) The pedigree is intriguing. His father, Michael Bergson (Bereksohn), was of Polish Jewish descent. His mother, Katherine Levison, was of English/Irish Jewish descent. The Bereksohns were a prominent Polish family and known for their entrepreneurial spirit with Bergson’s greatgreat-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, serving as a protégé to Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski (Stanislaus II Augustus) the King of Poland. The crisis of faith is reported to have been associated with his discovery of the theory of evolution. His award and science publication came during his education time at Lycée Fontanes. However, this choice of humanities led to a doctoral degree and the publication of his thesis:

“Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” in 1889.

Now one can only imagine how a philosopher with a proficiency in the sciences, an intriguing pedigree and impacted

by religious influences will tackle an understanding of dreams, how we dream and what we dream about. His essay on the matter is short and opens with a disclaimer essentially saying that on this complex matter involving multi perspectives he is going to cut to the chase. And in the next paragraph that is exactly what the reader gets: “A dream is this. I perceive objects and there is nothing there.” To which the philosopher in him asks: “But, first, is it true that there is nothing there? I mean, is there not presented a certain sense material to our eyes, to our ears, to our touch, etc., during sleep as well as during waking?” Bergson talks us through how visual, auditory, and tactile sensations mix with the cocktail of our memories to manifest into our dreams. “When this union is effected between the memory and the sensation, we have a dream.”

We have all had that dream where we are flying. Enjoy Bergson’s explanation on this dream state phenomenon: “I have had before now in a dream the illusion of flying or floating, but this time it is the real thing. It has certainly proved to me that we may free ourselves from the law of gravitation. Now, if you wake abruptly from this dream, you can analyze it without difficulty, if you undertake it immediately. You will see that you feel very clearly that your feet are not touching the earth. And, nevertheless, not believing yourself asleep, you have lost sight of the fact that you are lying down. Therefore, since you are not lying down and yet your feet do not feel the resistance of the ground, the conclusion is natural that you are floating in space. Notice this also: when levitation accompanies the flight, it is on one side only that you make an effort to fly. And if you woke at that moment you would find that this side is the one on which you are lying, and that the sensation of effort for flight coincides with the real sensation given you by the pressure of your body against the bed. This sensation of pressure, dissociated from its cause, becomes a pure and simple sensation of effort and, joined to the illusion of floating in space, is sufficient to produce the dream.”

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“Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.”

— Henri Bergson

LEGAL ISSUES

Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>

Legally Speaking — Blockchain Bonanza

Column Editor: Ashley Krenelka Chase (Assistant Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law) <akrenelk@law.stetson.edu>

This issue’s column is about blockchain technology, a topic that is wholly outside of my wheelhouse and required a lot of research so I could even think about what to write, let alone put it on the page. But lawyers have been inundated with talk of blockchain for years — will it impact our jobs, our clients, our lives — and so research I did, because I do believe that in some ways, the blockchain bonanza will come to impact libraries.

I became interested in blockchain after watching too many seasons of HBO’s Silicon Valley. The protagonists on that show were building a decentralized Internet which, while they never said it, would rely on blockchain to function. And since I’m notoriously obsessed with the idea of a free, open, and truly neutral Internet, I was very interested in what this work of fiction was discussing with regard to decentralization.

Blockchain is a digital database or ledger that is distributed among the pieces of a peer-to-peer network. Investopedia offers an excellent description of how blockchain functions:

A blockchain collects information together in groups, known as blocks, that hold sets of information. Blocks have certain storage capacities and, when filled, are closed and linked to the previously filled block, forming a chain of data known as the blockchain. All new information that follows that freshly added block is compiled into a newly formed block that will then also be added to the chain once filled ... Decentralized blockchains are immutable, which means that the data entered is irreversible.1

Confusing, right? Especially if we think about implications for a decentralized Internet, it’s hard to imagine what this looks like, how it would work, and who would benefit. But for libraries that rely heavily on databases to maintain collections, patron data, and connection to the world at large, a decentralized storage system for our information would be ideal.

Typically, databases are built in tables. Nothing about those tables is set in stone, and a bad actor can weasel their way in, edit the table, and sneak out leaving the users of the database at the mercy of the editor. In a blockchain situation, once the block is set it can’t be edited, and the rest of the chain stays intact, which means a single bad actor or bad edit can’t corrupt an entire database or gain information from an entire database.

Now, imagine a world where partial or fully governmentfunded libraries are being interrogated about collections, use of materials, and availability of certain types of materials to certain types of patrons (why yes I do live in Florida, why do you ask?). In a secure, decentralized catalog, for instance, a single bad actor

(or government)

wouldn’t be able to get in and check records, regulate use, or remove information it found unsavory. Because that information would be decentralized and collected in blockchain, it’s much more secure and less likely to be corrupted or infringed upon.

Blockchain is capable of holding things like inventories, contact information, and histories of transactions in a way that is secure and private, while using technology that is, by its nature, completely transparent because it is owned by so many people. Blockchain technology can also eliminate the need for libraries to rely on outdated technology — and I hate to say it but we’re guilty of doing that in almost all of our libraries — and can keep us from having to create cumbersome workarounds for the technology we continue to use because there aren’t better options available.

The best and most recent example of the power of blockchain technology to decentralize and preserve information is demonstrated through the partnership between Filecoin Foundation and the Internet Archive. In October of 2022, they announced that they would be teaming up to support the Archive’s Democracy’s Library project which creates a free, open collection of government data that will ensure government research and publications from around the world remain open and permanently accessible.2 Filecoin is going to work with the Internet Archive to help store these collections of government data on decentralized technologies like the Fielcoin network, accessible to anyone and not put behind a paywall, to make datasets “more resilient, permanent, and cost-effective.”

Given the difficulty of keeping track of any information, let alone government information, this is an admirable first step in not only opening access to information for people around the world, but also in ensuring that people are not beholden to the whims of private publishers to gain access to their information. If libraries could commit to incorporating small amounts of blockchain technology to store collections, it would demonstrate a commitment to moving away from big publishers, problematic paywalls and embargoes, and electronic information that can be pulled out of any database on a whim. It would demonstrate a true commitment to providing free and open access to information in a way that best serves our patrons while also using library budgets to pay for information that cannot be changed.

There are difficulties, of course, in incorporating any blockchain technology, whether in libraries or otherwise.

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First, blockchain technology is expensive. Where libraries are sometimes struggling to provide the basics, it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect libraries to cough up the money that would be required to implement blockchain technology in a reasonable way. There’s also the issue of incorporation. Libraries are constantly being asked to do more with less, to make use of new technology, to incorporate the latest and greatest bright shiny object for the benefit of the patrons. But libraries don’t, necessarily, employ people who could easily set up blockchain and make it function for the institution. And even if our broader communities do have someone with the expertise to make this technology function, the likelihood that the best use of that person’s time would be to incorporate blockchain for a local library is slim to none.

I believe that libraries will have to face the reality of blockchain technology in the next 5-10 years and it would behoove us to start thinking about it now, so we’re not caught off guard. Libraries should continue to be on the forefront of

technology incorporation, while prioritizing the privacy and access rights of our patrons. We should be prepared to safeguard our collections and our patrons’ information from individuals or institutions that seek to censor or punish, and blockchain may be the best way to do that. In the meantime, keep fighting the good fight and happy new year!

Endnotes

1. Investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp

2. https://filecoinfoundation.medium.com/filecoinfoundation-and-ffdw-team-up-with-the-internetarchive-to-preserve-government-datasets-ina7508aade531

ATG is Excited to Announce a New Columnist for Our Questions & Answers — Copyright Column!

Kyle K. Courtney, both lawyer and librarian, is the Copyright Advisor for Harvard University, working out of the Harvard Library. He works closely with the Harvard community to establish a culture of shared understanding of copyright issues among staff, faculty, and students. His “Copyright First Responders” initiative is in its 9th year at Harvard, and he runs a parallel national network that has spread the program to libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions in Alaska, Arizona, California, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington. He is also an advisor to the American Law Institute, helping to write the “Restatement of Copyright, First.” In 2014, he co-founded Fair Use Week, now an international celebration sponsored annually by over 100+ universities, libraries, and other institutions. He also currently teaches research sessions at Harvard Law School, training first year law students on the fundamentals of legal research as part of the Legal Research and Writing program.

He also currently maintains a dual appointment at Northeastern University: teaching “Cyberlaw: Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights” for the interdisciplinary Cybersecurity program at the Khoury College of Computer Science and teaching both “Legal Research and Writing for LLM’s” and the “Advanced Legal Writing Workshop” at the Northeastern University School of Law.

In 2020 he co-founded a new non-profit organization called “Library Futures” which empowers libraries to take control of their digital futures. He is an internationally recognized speaker on the topic of copyright, technology, libraries, and the law. He holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and an MSLIS. His writing has appeared in Politico, The Hill, Law Library Journal, and other publications. He co-authored the controversial “White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books” and his latest forthcoming work is “Copyright & Censorship: Historical Dangers of Licensing Regimes in the Digital Age” by Cornell University Press.

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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2022 Charleston Conference

Column Editor: Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Charleston Conference attendees, both those who attended on-site and virtually, who agreed to write brief reports highlighting and spotlighting their 2022 Charleston Conference experience. In 2022, the conference moved to an asynchronous format: the inperson conference (November 1-4) was followed two weeks later by a virtual week (November 14-18) that included online-only sessions and presentations as well. Conference registrants had the opportunity to view recordings and see slides (if available), to re-visit sessions they saw “live,” or to visit sessions they missed. Without a doubt, there were more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot. In 2022, reporters were invited to either provide general impressions on what caught their attention, or to select individual sessions on which they would report.

There are many ways to learn more about the 2022 conference. Please visit the Charleston Conference YouTube site, https://www.youtube.com/user/CharlestonConference/ videos?app=desktop, for selected interviews and videos, and the conference site, http://www.charleston-hub.com/thecharleston-conference/ for links to conference information and blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, http://www.charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/ chsconfnotes/. The 2022 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2023, in partnership with University of Michigan Press. — RKK

GENERAL REPORTS

VENDOR SHOWCASE — What I Learned After Visiting the 2022 Charleston Conference Vendor Showcase

Reported by James Rhoades (Virginia Tech) <jrhoadesjr@vt.edu>

This year I had the distinct privilege to experience my first in-person Vendor Showcase. Believing the early bird gets the worm, I arrived an hour before the start time of 10a.m. In those preceding moments, and all day, I could sense an excitement outside and inside the Gaillard Center Ballroom. I could see vendors hurriedly making finishing touches and freshening up their tables, as attendees excitedly made their way around the 140 booths. The moments leading up to the showcase kickoff were strikingly like a countdown to a big game, for you could feel and know something super was getting ready to happen.

Then something super did happen, something absent due to the pandemic. I began to see familiar faces and people, but not from a monitor. Moments that can’t be replicated online. I saw, spoke, and laughed with vendors, Erin from Readex and Tim from Newsbank in neighboring booths. Like so many, I had forgotten how sharp both were. I heard Colleen from OUP call

out to me from across the ballroom sounding like a nightingale singing my name. I blushed as Steve proudly told a colleague my successful effort in bringing Hein to my prior institute. After these and many more wonderful encounters, it was then that I realized, what my dear friend Rob Tench always claimed, that the Charleston Vendor Showcase is a special day unlike any other at any other conference. How true those sage words were in 2022, as I got to see my vendor friends whom I haven’t seen in person for quite some time. And like a cherry on top, I also got to meet many I’d only known through a monitor or phone. Oh, how nothing quite compares with the human touch, people make great organizations just like they make great showcases!

Don Hawkins wrote a blog report about the vendor showcase: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2022/11/the-2022-vendorshowcase/

TOP THREE THINGS I LEARNED

Top Three Things I Learned at the 2022 Charleston Conference

Keynote or Neapolitan Sessions

Reported by Kristin Meyer (Grand Valley State University) <meyerkr@gvsu.edu>

1: Research and scholarly communication are meant to have a global impact on the crises we face.

The keynote We Will Get There, Together touched on our most pressing global issues: diseases, pandemics, climate change, the energy crisis, political conflict, and mis- and disinformation. The session served as a reminder that research and scholarly communication play a critical role in how humanity addresses these issues, and Mbambo-Thata suggested that the knowledge sector has opportunities for intervention by removing historical barriers to access, decolonizing knowledge, supporting open science, and preserving information by digitizing for digital equity.

Opening Keynote: We Will Get There, Together — Presented by Buhle Mbambo-Thata (University Librarian, National University of Lesotho) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/87649e9d-777f-431e-9d2c-51e344613213

2: We are in the midst of an open access publishing transformation.

In Thriving in an OA Future, Flynn stated that “We are in a design moment.” Flynn shared that one in three papers published this year will be open, the era of Big Deals between publishers and libraries has passed, and “OA is an overnight game-changer, twenty-five years in the making.” While there are clearly societal benefits to removing barriers to access, there are also unintended consequences of OA models that include

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author publishing costs because researchers, particularly from institutions in the global south, may not be able to afford to publish. In this “design moment,” we must not simply shift where the barriers exist in the publishing process.

Thriving in an OA future: A Conversation with Wiley’s Jay Flynn — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/c76f4d0808a9-4a55-9b92-4b68d793dd9e

3: To some degree, the OSTP memo will accelerate open access publishing.

Because the memo calls for public access to publications resulting from federally funded research and stipulates that research data should also be accessible, panelists from the OSTP Public Access Guidance Neapolitan session were confident that the mandate will accelerate OA publishing. However, to what extent is unknown. “Public access” is not necessarily “open access,” and the memo gives latitude to funding agencies to develop specific guidelines.

The OSTP Public Access Guidance: Headlines, Details, and Impact — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/49949dc653a4-4eee-b71d-0deb5cbbc604

Top Three Things I Learned at the 2022 Charleston Conference

Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

It could probably more accurately be stated that there were three things (at least) that were not necessarily learned, but rather confirmed at the conference, spurred by presentations and people met...

1: Collaborations are alive and well, as are pilots.

Sessions titles and abstracts in the program often included title and abstract phrases, and speakers’ words such as “better together.” Through her remarks, the conference keynote speaker, Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata, University Librarian, National University of Lesotho, set the stage. Conference panel sessions featuring speakers from the same side of the “fence” (e.g., university publishers) as well as mixed groups (e.g., consortia and publishers, or libraries and publishers) who partnered and implemented pilots and working groups, or who are working on creating shared collections (e.g., BTAA’s BIG Collection).

Don Hawkins wrote a blog report about the opening keynote: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2022/11/opening-keynote/

2: Technical services is a public service.

This phrase, heard during a stopwatch session, resonates for any librarian who works in collection development, management, acquisitions, cataloging & metadata... Those who work in “technical services” (or other permutations of department names) in libraries may not be the most visible team or department to those who use the resources they acquire and manage. But they are the ones who interact directly with publishers and vendors, and may be at the licensing table for transformational and other agreements. Resources are not acquired and managed in a silo. Whether the folks “behind the curtain” interact directly with their public or not, the work they do matters. As evidenced by conference presentations, they also continue to strive for (and share their findings) about improving access, discoverability, tools, assessment...

3: Think and act globally.

This may be too simplistic a concept. But “global” is a reality at a conference such as Charleston, with attendance figures of 300 international attendees. Those of us who were among the 2100 on-site 2022 conference attendees at the very least had the opportunity to network with visitors from abroad. Presentations included various global experiences, perspectives, and collaborations. The vendor showcase was sprinkled with products that are created or produced in other countries, or that focus on global or region-specific information, images, films, news, etc. “Charleston Premiers” featured 8 products, several global. One of the “best new products” voted by the audience (Platino Educa) proves the point about the world coming to our libraries (or classrooms, or our screens)

Don Hawkins wrote a blog report on “Conference Attendance Data”: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2022/11/conferenceattendance-data/ and “Charleston Premiers”: https://www. charleston-hub.com/2022/11/charleston-premiers-5/

MY THREE FAVORITES

My Three Favorite Concurrent Sessions/Presentations from the 2022 Charleston Conference (and why)

Reported by Laura Spradlin (Illinois Wesleyan University) <lspradli@iwu.edu> [virtual week attendee]

Into the Streaming Verse: Where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going. — Presented by Brian Edwards (Swank Motion Pictures), Winifred Metz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University Library), Danette Pachtner (Duke University Libraries) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/745ac0db-c749-4e78-a75e-ab1100c43388

The session brought together librarians Metz and Pachtner with Swank representative Edwards for a discussion on the licensing, evaluation, pricing, and future of streaming media. This was a top session for me because the engaging conversation offered library and vendor perspectives on many of the goals, needs, and challenges that are juggled in this area — increasing requests for streaming with decreasing library budgets, greater representation of diverse voices, open access streaming, and equity to institutions.

Very Practical Accessibility Tasks for Acquisitions and Collections Teams — Presented by Tina Buck (University of Central Florida), Sara Duff (University of Central Florida), Athena Hoeppner (University of Central Florida) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/77247f18-8f80-4c26-a8813d09636aa914

The speakers presented projects they implemented to help ensure e-resource accessibility. I appreciated that each speaker outlined the practicalities of their projects and were frank about the challenges faced. Buck inventoried vendor VPATs but noted the ongoing tasks of maintaining and sharing that information. Performing a license audit illustrates how existing agreements address compliance, reported Hoeppner, though it takes considerable time and may depend on institutional license management. If an e-resource is found to be noncompliant, how will the library be notified, and then what happens? Having a workflow in place before the situation arises is key, Duff discussed. This motivating session provided actionable recommendations for institutions to adopt.

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When Libraries and Faculty Converge (or Fail To) — Presented by Marc Cormier (ProQuest), Carrie Cruce (University of California Riverside), Jessie Ransom (ExLibris), Rachel Scott (Illinois State University) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/51085629-75dc-4386-b117-c3b179a1d06c

During the session, Cruce, Ransom, Scott, and Cormier gave thoughtful, research-centered insights on ever-present questions about how faculty are using library resources. The conversation ranged from the obstacles and opportunities of open educational resources to practical opportunities to promote library resources as well as thoughts on the barriers faculty may encounter with library collections. I walked away from this session with action items for encouraging and understanding faculty use of library resources.

My Three Favorite Concurrent Sessions/Presentations from the 2022 Charleston Conference (and why)

Reported by Jennifer Sterling (University of North Texas) <Jennifer.Sterling@unt.edu>

Why Should We Care About Bibliodiversity in Academic Book Publishing? The Implications of Regional Identity for American University Presses — Presented by Charles Watkinson (University of Michigan & 2022-2023 President of the Association of University Presses), Lisa Bayer (University of Georgia Press & Past-president of the AAUP), Jane Bunker (Cornell University Press, President-elect of the AAUP), Jason Fikes (Abilene Christian University Press) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/bb35637e-8582-4e7f-b03e5ae699067256

This session highlighted university presses’ role in publishing books of regional interest such as gardening books, continuing academic series, and books by local authors. A favorite point for me was when Fikes detailed the editing support Abilene Christian University’s Press provides local authors who contribute work sharing their experiences with disabilities and mental health. I also enjoyed hearing Bunker describe one of her favorite publications, Rosie the Tarantula: A True Adventure in Chicago’s Field Museum, from Northwestern Press. The bibliodiversity of our university presses is a vital resource for scholarship and local authors.

Bridging to the BIG Collection: Putting a Collective Collection into Practice at the BTAA — Presented by Maurice York (BTAA), Kate McCready (BTAA), Lee Konrad (University of WisconsinMadison), Emily Campbell (University of Michigan) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/9498defc-6131-4f0e-9a33af1c673590ce

During this session, members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Libraries Initiatives shared several of their projects that all contribute to the BIG Collection. It was fascinating to hear about all the data these large institutions collect, their different goals, and yet how they can all work together. Trust among the institutions is one of the underlying principles that make this alliance work. I was especially interested in their open licensing project, as of now, 70% of their portfolio of licenses is shared. The libraries also harmonized their resource-sharing policies to create Uborrow. Now their users have access to materials much more quickly than through traditional ILL. I’m looking forward to what else we can all learn from the Big Ten collaborations.

The Psychology of Metrics — Presented by Daniel Hook (Digital Science), Violeta Ilik (Adelphi University) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/9b66be50-cae2-4947-9a2fc777a9706bcb

As academics, we enjoy putting things in order and we are primed to respond to metrics. As a librarian, I feel very driven to make decisions based on metrics and it’s easy to conflate use with quality, so I was very interested in this session. Prompted by questions from Ilik, Hook explained how metrics appeal to us and how they are failing us and our institutions. Our brains desire metrics that are understandable, look scientific, and are verbable (Zoom, Google). University rankings and the impact factor were two examples of these metrics Daniel referenced. AI has the potential to create a feedback loop that convinces us that popular research is good research.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM POSTERS

What I Learned After Viewing the 2022 Charleston Conference Posters

Reported by Marion C. Archer (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) <archerm@uwm.edu>

This year, in the absence of live poster Q&A sessions, virtual attendees were able to watch short (all under ten minutes, most around five) videos explaining or elaborating on the content of their posters. I found these videos a good substitute for a live Q&A session, although I would have appreciated the networking opportunity to virtually “meet” colleagues working on similar initiatives and ask specific questions. About half of the posters included these videos. However, even those posters without videos were engaging and informative. I will highlight two posters which I found especially relevant to my work.

Measuring Cost Effectiveness of E-Resources — Presented by Christian Lear (Kennesaw State University) — https://chsconf. cadmore.media/Title/a10a83b3-96c4-4ee7-bf94-bbad2a3dbbbb

Measuring the value of e-resources using cost-per-use has been a tried-and-true method for quantifying the return on investment for resources for some time. However, this method misses some nuance to the data. For instance, some resources with a high cost-per-use might be a core resource for a program with fewer students than others. Christian suggests a method where resources are divided by subject matter and ranked by cost-per-use. Then those with a high cost-per-use within that discipline can be further investigated as to their usefulness.

“Where did all the books go?” Or, how to survive dismantling a Reference collection — Presented by C. Derrik Hiatt (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Title/ffb8f4e7-6c18-4a9f-b8db-650b93763579

When Derrik embarked on a project to convert print reference to electronic reference and use the space to build a Learning Commons, decisions had to be made on what print reference should be integrated into the circulating collection and which items should be withdrawn altogether. About a third of the items were replaced with online equivalents with the print added to the circulating collection and two-thirds were withdrawn because of their outdatedness and/or lack of use. The result was space for a new Learning Commons to serve students’ study needs.

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What I Learned After Viewing the 2022 Charleston Conference Posters

Reported by Dana Laird (SUNY Brockport) <dlaird@brockport.edu>

As a first-time attendee, I was excited about the virtual poster session at Charleston Conference. Posters provide insight into projects and share best practices from practitioners. They demonstrate how libraries solved problems or developed improvements. About half of the posters were accompanied by short videos from the presenters. Attending the virtual poster session provided an opportunity to discuss the posters with many of the presenters. The posters covered a wide variety of topics from libraries of various sizes. I will focus on a few posters discussing aspects of collection development.

Expanding Patron-Driven Acquisitions Beyond the Website Form — Presented by Daniel Huang (Lehigh University); Maccabee Levine (Lehigh University) — https://chsconf. cadmore.media/Title/add6e1c8-e758-42ea-88e6-b1d38dfd0725

The Purchase Request Platform, a new centralized workflow system at Lehigh University Libraries, uses Jira and open source code to collect explicit and implicit book purchase requests in one place while also automatically providing supporting information including list prices and consortium holdings. For libraries who receive requests via various systems and sources, this streamlined workflow provides the potential to increase efficiency and reduce the risk of requests being overlooked for review.

A Path Towards Understanding Streaming Video Licensing And Acquisitions In Academic Libraries: A Discussion Of Survey Results — Presented by Bonnie Thornton (Mississippi State University); Cathy Austin (Mississippi State University) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Title/72952d3a-3745-45ab879e-f2ae501eb96a

With the demand for streaming videos increasing, this poster provides survey results from US academic libraries regarding streaming video acquisition. While some results are unsurprising (e.g., the purpose of streaming video use being the most important factor influencing purchasing a license), it provides insight into the current state of streaming video acquisitions and can serve as a useful baseline for future comparisons.

Paint By Numbers?: A Compare & Contrast Of Academic Library Licensing Workflows — Presented by Tessa Minchew (North Carolina State University); Whitney Bates-Gomez (Georgia State University) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Title/dbd9c9e5-089b-4226-869d-0148a566a444

Two librarians with responsibilities in electronic resources at different large, R1 public institutions compare their institutional approach to license negotiation, finding that different high level workflows and state requirements create variances in specific license terms and the importance of each term in licenses. This dialogue offers the opportunity to view license practices through another viewpoint and to revisit institutional license terms with a fresh perspective.

PRECONFERENCE REPORT

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2022

An Introduction to Copyright in Scholarly Communication

Reported by Shannon Tennant (Elon University) <stennant@elon.edu>

Presented by Kyle K. Courtney (Harvard University); Todd Carpenter (NISO); Marcie Kaufman (Ithaka) — https:// charleston-hub2022.exordo.com/programme/session/5 Note: This session required separate registration.

Courtney, the Copyright Advisor for Harvard, gave a very informative presentation about the basics of copyright with many examples of how libraries, publishers, and creators are impacted. He began with the history of United States copyright law from its British origins to the first fair use case in 1841 and the 1976 Copyright Act, which is still in force today. He defined copyright as not just one right but a “bundle of rights” that can be retained or assigned to others. Courtney listed the conditions that determine whether something can be copyrighted. He defined the concept of “public domain” and how that definition has changed over time. Finally, Courtney addressed the concept of “fair use” and the four factors that determine when and whether a work can be used without permission of the rightsholder. One memorable takeaway was how changes to the copyright laws have been driven by new technologies, such as player pianos in a 1908 case or VCRs in the 1980s. And there are many complicating factors about the format of the original work and any reproductions that can impact copyright. The presentation included interactive quizzes where participants were asked to interpret copyright law in various challenging scenarios.

LECTURE AND TOUR THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Robert Jordan/Wheel of Time Special Collection Lecture and Tour

Reported by LeAnne Rumler (Hillsdale College)

<lrumler@hillsdale.edu>

Presented by Dr. Michael Livingston (The Citadel) — https:// www.tor.com/2022/09/27/working-with-robert-jordans-papers/ Charleston Robert Jordan/Wheel of Time Special Collection Lecture and Tour (cadmore.media)

Note: This session required separate registration.

The Special Collections and Archives at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library houses the papers of Robert Jordan (a native of Charleston, born James O. Rigney, Jr.) and many other artifacts from the Wheel of Time fantasy series written by Jordan. Ms. Kelly Kerbow-Hudson, the director of the Special Collections and Archives introduced Dr. Livingston. Dr. Livingston told the audience how he became a fan of the Wheel of Time series and Robert Jordan, and eventually authored a book about the two, Origins of the Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan (Tor, 2022). Livingston continued on page 43

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Learning Belongs in the Library — Developing and Delivering Identity Metadata: Authors and Publisher

Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Founder, Lived Places Publishing; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@livedplacespublishing.com>

We want to work in organizations, institutions, and businesses that acknowledges the diversity and richness that encompasses society. As consumers of information and entertainment, we want to know that this same diversity and richness is being represented in media. As publishers, librarians, and faculty, we want to ensure that our catalogs, our collections, and our courses are representing all voices and all perspectives. This is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement that has gained tremendous momentum over the past decade.

I have observed, from many vantage points,1 the research and learning, publishing, aggregation, and distribution industries grapple with the demand to improve representation in the catalog, curation, and metadata. Significant transitions are occurring in the subject and call number classification areas of metadata led by the cataloguing and metadata community. However, where publishers are concerned, there has been more discussion than action. And where efforts have been implemented, the results have not gone much deeper than capturing, for example, gender diversity or a publisher or aggregator creating a DEI Reading List. I suspect this is so for very good reasons. First, there is a very real concern about author privacy and rights regarding what personal information can be disclosed. Second, for many publishers with large catalogs, how might they retroactively capture detailed identity about their many authors? Third, what do we want to report, what do our readers want to know and need to know about the author’s identity and the publisher’s aggregated author identity data (as a measure of the publisher’s commitment to diversity in its author community)?

We founded Lived Places Publishing in July 2021; thus, we are in a unique position to engage with these questions in a substantive manner as our author and collection editor community is presently just below 100. This is our proposed, phased approach to implementation, following the critical first step of forming a working group: 1. Establish comprehensive identity metadata to capture, 2. Articulate as completely as possible the risks and rewards of capturing this level of identity metadata, 3. Design and implement methodology to capture the identity metadata from our current and future authors and collection editors, and 4. Develop practices and approaches for delivering and supporting search across the identity metadata.

The Working Group: To kick off what is sure to be a multi-year effort, we have formed an initial working group of faculty and librarian advisers. We hope to expand this group as we progress and, in particular, we welcome librarians and publishers committed to pushing forward and accepting that there is risk, but also much reward in the effort.

Step 1 Identity Metadata to Represent: The working group will establish an “identity metadata set” to begin evaluating and assessing with a wider group to include all LPP authors and editors, librarian and faculty advisers, and other interested parties. We will use a mixed methods approach, inclusive of focus groups, individual interviews, and surveys. We recognize that achieving consensus will be a major challenge and, in many ways, is likely the single greatest challenge to this effort. Establishing a process to resolve disagreements as to what should be in or out will be a critical action point with the working group. What follows is an initial list of identity metadata fields that will initiate our process:

• Gender spectrum

• Age

• Race/Ethnicity

• Religion

• Country of birth

• Country of residence

• Sexual orientation

• Level of Education

• Income Level

• First Generation Professional (FGP)

• Disability Status

• Refugee status

Step 2 Develop a Public Statement Regarding Risks & Benefits: After we have finalized, though not concretized, our identity metadata set, we will produce and publish a public statement regarding the risks and benefits of providing such metadata. This statement will be developed collectively by our working group and will be a public and visible statement. It will detail our process in developing the identity metadata criteria, the collection process, the author opt in/opt out process, the data on compliance, etc.

Step 3 Implementation of Data Collection and Maintenance Practices: Following completion of steps one and two, we will formalize data collection across our author and collection editor community and establish a process for collecting this data with each new book signing. How this data will be collected, maintained, secured, and accessed will require compliance with the highest legal and ethical standards.

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“The working group will establish an ‘identity metadata set’ to begin evaluating and assessing with a wider group to include all LPP authors and editors, librarian and faculty advisers, and other interested parties.”

Step 4 Develop Data Sharing, Catalogue Records Enhancement, and Platform Search Features: The utility and benefit of capturing author and editor identity metadata across the entire LPP catalogue will, of course, need to be actualized in practices. This will entail three distinct tracks of action:

1. Enhancement to the LPP catalog and discovery data shared across the library discovery ecosystem, which will require working with existing metadata schemes

2. Improved search experience across the Lived Places Publishing platforms: consumer and institutional

3. Publishing, presenting, and sharing our experiences and learning across the entire process

Lived Places Publishing was formed to be much more than a commercial enterprise. The founders, a career faculty member and a career publisher, want to provide a publishing platform for authors to share their lived experience of identities. And our goal

is, above all else, to enhance the mix of course reading material available to faculty. But we also want to push up against the boundaries of tradition in the publishing industry. The LPP team is developing new practices in support of open access publishing, interlibrary loan practices, pricing, revenue sharing with authors, and, yes, the collection and sharing of deeply important and meaningful information about author identity.

Endnotes

1. I led product management for ProQuest Ebooks in 2020, I have consulted with Vital Source a textbook aggregation solution, and I have been a book publisher in several different businesses, including my current role as Founder and Publisher at Lived Places Publishing.

And They Were There continued from page 41

discussed Robert Jordan’s early life in Charleston, how he was enrolled briefly at Clemson University, and volunteered to go to Vietnam. When he returned from Vietnam, he attended The Citadel, studied physics, and eventually took up writing. In 1967, he published the first book in the Conan the Barbarian series for Tor Publishing, following up with several more books in the Conan series. In 1990, Jordan pitched the idea for Wheel of Time to Tor with encouragement from his editor and wife, Harriet McDougal. The envisioned six-volume series ended up being twelve. Livingston presented several artifacts from Jordan’s papers which highlighted how Jordan drew from mythology and history for the series. He also showed one of the lists Jordan made, a list of names he intended to use. Livingston also found lists of ancient song titles, the normal speed of boats, people

and horses, and types of bark on trees among Jordan’s papers, giving further insight into the depth of his research methods. After the presentation, the attendees were invited to look at all the materials on display and ask questions.

This concludes the General Reports we received from the 2022 Charleston Conference, however, watch for Session Reports from the 2022 Charleston Conference to begin appearing in upcoming issues of Against the Grain. In the meantime, you can visit the Charleston Conference YouTube site for selected interviews and videos, and the Charleston Conference site for links to conference information and blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger Donald Hawkins.

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Let’s Get Technical — Did the Academic Library Reach its Peak Effectiveness in the Late 1990s?

Part 1: Introduction and the Primacy of the Local Collection

By Mark Dahl (Director of the Aubrey Watzek Library, Lewis and Clark College) <dahl@lclark.edu>

Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation

Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org

and Susan J.

Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>

Column Editors’ Note: In this issue we’re pleased to submit part one of a three part article series. Part two and three will appear in the April and June issues of ATG. — KB & SM

Using one college library as a case study, this three-article series discusses the evolution of the academic library in the 1980s and 1990s. This was an exciting age of continual improvement in the delivery of academic library services that still exerts a major influence on academic library practices of today.

In the two decades preceding the millennium, academic libraries built up and circulated their physical collections. They also progressively improved access to information for the communities that they served through technology, particularly integrated library systems and online public access catalogs. New technologies accelerated resource sharing among libraries and public services professionals guided library users as they navigated new tools and resources. In the late twentieth century, the library building worked in concert with technological advances, acting as both a physical repository and an “on-ramp” to the information superhighway.

By 2010, the major role that academic libraries played in providing information had radically changed. A college student doing a research paper could hop on their laptop in their dorm or apartment, pull up Google Scholar, do a search and click through to an electronic journal with only a brief, almost invisible, interaction with library-mediated services.

In 2022, academic libraries remain, but their role as an essential repository of information has undeniably diminished. The turn of the century library occupied a sweet spot where it wielded networked technology while still managing and controlling the collections needed to satisfy information needs. The millennial academic library exists today in a rump state with many twentieth century practices continuing at a much lower level of activity. If we define “effectiveness” as the impact that the library has on the academic mission of the college or university, we can thus ask, did the academic library reach its peak effectiveness in the late twentieth century? We will come back to that question in the last article of the series.

I started out in academic libraries in 1998 and have been the director of Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College since 2012. I recently took it upon myself to clean out about six file cabinets in our library storage closet that contained documents from

approximately 1980 to 2000. These papers included meeting minutes, memos, planning documents, and publicity materials for the routine operations of that library as well as major projects that included a new integrated library system and a building renovation. I reference them in these articles to illustrate how the trends of the late twentieth century library played out in one particular case.

Parsing through the working documents of a late twentieth library century yields one clear impression: the collection was paramount. Both from the perspective of those charged with seeking out books to build the collection and those managing and circulating them, local information assets were the major way that the library provided value to its community.

In the late twentieth century, librarians often attended painstakingly to collection development decisions, even down to the level of particular book titles. For example, I came across a six-page annual report from Watzek Library’s Resource Development Librarian in 1987. It begins with a conceptual overview of the collection development process, likening the intersecting interests that come together when selecting books to a “Foucaultian grid.” The report then discusses particular areas of the collection and the actions taken to augment those areas, even getting down to the level of particular faculty consulted and individual titles added.

The report also references National Endowment for the Humanities funding that supported collection building in the field of Women’s Studies (Bonner, 1987). Grant support for book buying, almost unheard of today, illustrates how a major scholarly organization like the NEH saw a local collection of books as a foundational building block for humanities education.

Watzek Library also actively sought donations to augment its print collection. For example, in December 1986, a Lewis & Clark professor and a college administrator rented a Ryder truck and drove from Portland to Los Angeles to retrieve the 3,200 volume personal collection of the retired historian John Walton Caughy, significantly bolstering the library’s holdings in Western History and Americana (Charnquist, 1987).

These practices align with what Lorcan Dempsey has called a “print logic” that prevailed in libraries of an earlier era.

“Library collections were strongly shaped by a print logic.

This required the distribution of print copies to multiple local destinations. In this way, materials could be closer to the user, to allow immediate access. This had two consequences. First, collections were assembled on a ‘just

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in case’ basis. And, second, the size of the collection was strongly associated with the goodness of the collection. The larger the local collection, the more potential local requirements could be met. The library collection was an owned collection.” (Dempsey, 2016)

At Watzek Library, we still depend on “just in case” book purchases for a sizable portion of our print collection building. But increasingly, we provide access to books through less librarian-mediated means that include demand-driven eBook acquisitions and comprehensive eBook packages.

In our era of information abundance, taking donations of print materials is also a waning practice. In 2022, Watzek Library revised its collection development policy to reject unsolicited donations to the general book collection by default. Given shelf space constraints and the extensive resources available via electronic means and interlibrary loan, donations that do not fill a very specific need just do not make sense anymore.

The annual reports published about Watzek Library in the 1980s and 1990s go into extensive detail about circulation of materials. They discuss overall circulation trends and then parse out the differences in each format and subject area of the collection. Sometimes the reports boast of increased circulation activity. Other times, the reports lament a year or two of declines. They also look carefully at interlibrary loan transactions, which rose as the means of finding and acquiring external resources advanced over the eighties and nineties.

In general, the documentation gives the impression that Lewis & Clark’s library was successful at finding the materials patrons wanted and delivering them efficiently. Overall library circulation rose through the 1990s and topped out around 2010. Since then, circulation of physical books at Watzek Library has been on a slow and steady decline while use of digital resources has been on the rise.

There has been considerable discussion regarding the general decline in circulation of physical books at academic libraries and what the library reaction to it should be (Anderson, 2019; Cohen, 2019). When libraries have moved lesser-circulated collections off site, in some cases their user populations have reacted with alarm.

I tend to agree with Dan Cohen (2019), who optimistically sees a “Great Sorting” happening within academic libraries. In the new order, books that benefit from physical manifestations, such as art books or rare manuscripts, remain close at hand while those that patrons consult less frequently can be accessed digitally or by request from another location.

Today’s academic library offers what Lorcan Dempsey calls the “facilitated collection,” which is a way of describing the wide range of information resources to which libraries direct their patrons. It includes the physical library collection, licensed digital resources, remote physical and digital collections, and sources independent of the library on the open web.

The contemporary library of the facilitated collection still can refer to metrics about collection size and usage. But they span a variety of print and digital resources and often, in the case of digital resources, say little about the effectiveness of the library as a whole. Is a library with thousands of downloads from JSTOR an especially effective one?

Circulation figures had an elegant simplicity about them. They reflected the end product of a multidepartmental workflow within an academic library: from selection to acquisition to cataloging to reference/public service and finally circulation. With robust circulation, a library could, with some confidence, know that its processes were getting information into the hands of patrons.

For today’s academic library, with its diffuse array of resources and services, there is no such single metric to use anymore. However, the depth of information resources available is much greater and the possibilities for library services are much wider. More on that in the next two articles in the series.

Works Cited

Anderson, Rick. 2017. “Less Than Meets the Eye: Print Book Use Is Falling Faster in Research Libraries.” The Scholarly Kitchen. August 21, 2017. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2017/08/21/less-meets-eye-print-book-use-falling-fasterresearch-libraries/

Bonner, Gina. 1987. Resource Development Librarian. Library Resource Development Annual Report, 1986-7. May 29, 1987. In Folder: Annual Reports 1980s. Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Charnquist, Chuck. 1986. Chuck Charnquist to Executive Council, Institutional Advancement. Memorandum. RE: John Walton Caughey Collection. 5 December 1986. In Folder: Caughy Collection. Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Cohen, Dan. 2019. “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper.” The Atlantic. May 26, 2019. https:// www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/college-studentsarent-checking-out-books/590305/

Dempsey, Lorcan. 2016. “The Facilitated Collection.” LorcanDempsey.Net. January 31, 2016. https://www. lorcandempsey.net/towards-the-facilitated-collection/

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“Circulation figures had an elegant simplicity about them. They reflected the end product of a multidepartmental workflow within an academic library.”

Biz of Digital — Playing Matchmaker: Connecting Subvention-Funded Authors With Our Institutional Repository

By Chelsee Dickson (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Kennesaw State University, 385 Cobb Avenue NW, Room 322, MD 1701, Kennesaw, GA 30144; Phone: 470-578-7639) <cdickso5@kennesaw.edu>

and Rachel Schrauben Yeates (Institutional Repository Specialist, Kennesaw State University, 385 Cobb Avenue NW, Room 242, MD 1701, Kennesaw, GA 30144; Phone: 470-578-2741) <rschraub@kennesaw.edu>

Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Chelsee: In academia, money moves like water, giving life to departmental budgets, trickling down to student resources, and flowing into puddles and pockets of miscellaneous projects. At Kennesaw State University (KSU), an R2 institution in the metro Atlanta area, our Faculty Subvention Fund is one such pocket: small, yet surprisingly deep. The fund finances production costs and article processing charges for faculty authors publishing their work and research in an eligible open access venue.

Money for the subvention fund is provided by KSU’s Office of Research, filling our coffers with $20,000 annually. Faculty apply and submit a fillable form through a webpage located on the Library System’s website. In 2020, I inherited the fund as the incoming scholarly communications librarian and, in 2021, was given full managerial responsibility. The fund’s website and its language had been untouched and unchanged for over a year.

Throughout this year, I noticed confusion from faculty members applying for funding. Questions arose such as: Can I apply multiple times in one fiscal year? Are hybrid open access journals permitted? Will the funds be sent directly to the author, much like a grant? My initial reaction to this litany of questions was uncharitable, as I felt this information was clearly stated on our webpage. I decided to take another look and, with fresh eyes, reread our language and realized the criteria and guidelines were murky.

This realization led me to reach across departments and discuss the shortcomings of our language with Institutional Repository Specialist Rachel Schrauben Yeates. Her copy-editing expertise aided in a complete rewrite of the webpage in the summer of 2022. As we searched for inspiration from different institutions, we noticed a key difference between our funding stipulations and those of our peers. But for an application and the opportunity to vet the faculty member’s journal selection (to determine its status as predatory or legitimate), we asked nothing of our authors.

Other institutions require a version of subvention-funded work to be deposited into the institutional repository. Not only does this requirement heighten awareness of the repository, it also creates a tether between the library system and faculty. Outreach possibilities and potential collaborations were

tantalizing, prompting us to incorporate a similar condition into our own guidelines. The result is a mutually beneficial transaction which leverages faculty need for funding and our want for engagement.

Rachel: Our institutional repository, the Digital Commons @ Kennesaw State University, holds nearly 30,000 works from past and present KSU community members. The Digital Commons team gives anyone at KSU the opportunity to spotlight their research and creative work as well as access to a range of tools to track their work’s global impact. Unfortunately, faculty members are largely passive users, their publication metadata only entered into our system after publication when I run a biannual harvest of major academic databases. With a university our size, we’re often playing catch-up. Following up with faculty to ask for author copies of their research (to provide an open access supplement to the often paywalled links) is always on the wish list, but we can’t reach them all with a team of two.

When Chelsee approached me with the idea for a subvention fund collection, it seemed like an exciting and proactive way to engage a targeted group of faculty in the Digital Commons and expand our open access offerings. Chelsee and I added language to the fund stipulating that authors must “deposit an appropriate version of the funded article in the Digital Commons @ Kennesaw State University institutional repository” in the Faculty Subvention Fund Collection

Setting up a digital space for the collection was simple. Inspired by open publishing funds at peer institutions, Chelsee and I decided that, while the initial collection name will mirror the existing Faculty Subvention Fund, the not-so-easily-editable URL path should be “oa_fund” so as not to limit the collection’s future growth. I opted for the same metadata fields as our Faculty Publications series and hid the submission button. We decided that it would be simpler for all parties if I upload fund awardee’s work into the system during our rollout of the new guidelines.

Initially, I was concerned about being unable to accurately capture certain metadata. The existing Digital Commons’ template submission form includes a collapsible discipline selection tool which seemed daunting to replicate over email. Our support contact at the Digital Commons supplied me with

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the full list of academic disciplines from their selection tool. I email this list to our authors, and so far, they’ve all navigated it successfully.

For each submission, per our open-oriented goals and digital repository best practices, I include the DOI and their provided metadata, note any applicable Creative Commons licenses from the original journal, mark the work as “previously published” to create an OpenURL link, and deposit a PDF version of the article. Our workflow goes like this:

1. If Chelsee accepts the application, she includes me in the decision email, where she confirms the open access policies of the journal with a screenshot from Sherpa Romeo and notifies faculty author(s) that I will provide instructions for deposit into the institutional repository.

2. I reply to the faculty member requesting 1) a PDF of the published version of the article OR a link to the article, 2) a list of keywords, and 3) their article’s academic discipline(s), which faculty select from the provided Digital Commons Academic Discipline list

3. I input a PDF version of their published open access article along with metadata into the Faculty Subvention Fund series.

4. The system will send an automated email to me and the authors confirming that their work has been posted.

5. Faculty members will receive periodic system email updates on the download count and global reach of their scholarship.

Of course, it’s not always a smooth process. The world of academic publishing is not known for its speed. Some authors come to us with published or very nearly published work. Others still have months left in the process. We make sure to follow up after several weeks of radio silence.

I’ve also run into some familiar problems. The Digital Commons repository platform looks similar to BePress’s sister service SelectedWorks. Faculty, staff, and students will upload work to their SelectedWorks author profile and think they’ve submitted to a series on the Digital Commons. It’s an issue I see often enough that I wasn’t surprised when a fund awardee came to us having done just that. The solution to this problem is a work in progress and will require broader marketing and education efforts.

Looking to the future, Chelsee and I have discussed streamlining our processes by hosting the fund application on the Faculty Subvention Fund Collection page. Using the Digital Commons’ content management system, we could house records of our decisions and author communications in one place. For example, system-generated emails would update faculty authors as their application progresses through the stages of review. This transition would also enable authors, if funded, to take a more active role in depositing their work.

Chelsee: Now that our burgeoning collection is live and active, we reflect upon our workflows, successes, and snags. Updating the fund’s guidelines to incorporate clear, concise sentences and bulleted lists has resulted in far fewer questions about the application process. Faculty now know that they must have three items in hand when applying: proof

of manuscript acceptance, an invoice from the publisher, and confirmation that their work will be published immediately as open access.

The questions which initially prompted this reorganization have been answered. Since top journals in certain disciplines have adopted a hybrid open access publishing model, we have relaxed our criteria to accept this type of journal on a case-bycase basis. And faculty understand that the stream of funding flows directly from the Library System to the publisher, as this is prominently stated on our newly reorganized and restructured webpage.

I have approved 11 total applications from July to November 2022, and our growing collection now contains six deposited subvention-funded works. We worried faculty might be reluctant to deposit in the Digital Commons. However, they are far less reluctant than expected as our new requirement mimics that of a grant, and most research conducted with federal funds must be published open access or in specific open repositories.

Our work is not yet done. We aspire to house a strong collection like Clemson University’s Open Access Publishing Fund, located in their TigerPrints institutional repository; we hope to include graduate student works like the University of Georgia Libraries Graduate Student Open Access Publishing Fund; and we strive to write language as tightly crafted as that of Emory University’s Open Access Publishing Fund

Instead of running after faculty and crossing our fingers in the hopes that they will independently deposit their work into our institutional repository, we are now holding their hands. It is a mediated process, and we provide support, instruction, and a wealth of patience. Building this connection increases faculty authors’ readership beyond basic publication and sustains open access to the work for future use. It is our hope that these new procedures set a precedent for prospective faculty deposits, causing a campus-wide ripple effect.

Referenced Open Access Publishing Funds

Clemson University Libraries. “Open Access Publishing Fund.” TigerPrints. Accessed December 15, 2022. https:// tigerprints.clemson.edu/oa_fund/

Emory Libraries Scholarly Communications Office. “Emory’s Open Access Publishing Fund.” Emory University. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://sco.library.emory.edu/open-accesspublishing/oa-funding-support/emory-oa-fund.html

Kennesaw State University Library System. “Faculty Subvention Fund Collection.” Digital Commons@Kennesaw State University. Accessed December 15, 2022. https:// digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/oa_fund/

Kennesaw State University Library System. “Faculty subvention fund.” Kennesaw State University. https://www. kennesaw.edu/library/faculty-subvention-fund.php

University of Georgia Libraries. “University of Georgia Libraries Graduate Student Open Access Publishing Fund.” University of Georgia. Accessed December 15, 2022. https:// www.libs.uga.edu/openaccessfund

Images created with Bitmoji, Snap. Inc. 2022.

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Optimizing Library Services — Charleston Conference Recap – A Year of Progress: Publishers and Libraries Collaborating in the Future of the Open Access Frontier

Column Editors: Ms. Cheyenne Heckermann (Marketer, IGI Global) <checkermann@igi-global.com>

and Ms. Genevieve Robinson (Director of Content Solutions, IGI Global) <grobinson@igi-global.com>

Featuring: Sarah Norris (Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of Central Florida), Christopher Vidas (Electronic Resources Coordinator, Clemson University), Rachel Erb (Director of e-Resources, FLVC), Jesse Holden (Program Manager, Shared Content, Orbis Cascade Alliance), Michele Ruth (Head of Technical Services, The Citadel), Nick Newcomer (Vice President of Sales and Marketing, IGI Global), and Brittany Haynes (Director of e-Collections, IGI Global)

Column Editors’ Note: Following up on the presentations at the Charleston Conference in November 2022 featuring Sarah Norris (Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of Central Florida), Christopher Vidas (Electronic Resources Coordinator, Clemson University), and Nick Newcomer (Vice President of Sales and Marketing, IGI Global) titled “How Open Is Open?: A Conversation about Open Access Publishing, Transformative Agreements, and DEIA;” Rachel Erb (Director of e-Resources, FLVC), Jesse Holden (Program Manager, Shared Content, Orbis Cascade Alliance) and Nick Newcomer (Vice President of Sales and Marketing, IGI Global) titled “Oh, the Places We Can’t Go… Considering the Dynamics of Consortia-Publisher “Comfort Zones” in Open Access Solutions;” and Michele Ruth (Head of Technical Services, The Citadel) and Brittany Haynes (Director of e-Collections, IGI Global) titled “Libraries, and Researchers, and Publishers, Oh My! Improving Collaborations and Understanding of Credible Publishing Opportunities,” please find below a recap of some of the topics covered and feedback presented during the presentation. Each presentation is available to watch on the conference’s 2022 site. — CH & GR

Navigating Researcher-Library-Publisher Relationships for Credible Open Access Publishing Opportunities

Recognizing the ongoing changes to the publishing industry within the Open Access (OA) landscape, libraries need to be able to guide researchers on credible publishing opportunities and faculty’s ability to access their published research. This requires clear communication between the library and publisher for librarians to be able to inform their faculty seeking to publish. Michele Ruth, Head of Technical Services at The Citadel, said “It was apparent there was a need for the library to help faculty with publishing. Honestly, I felt so inadequate to offer this help and knew I had to do something about it” to further collaborations and guide faculty on informed publishing opportunities. She also shared that “because Brittany has always been great about reaching out to talk to me and keeping me informed about IGI Global, I knew that they offered Open Access solutions, so that was my initial response back to my faculty’s questions” with better understanding of different OA opportunities that vary publisher to publisher. From this, Ruth was able to connect with The Citadel’s faculty on their publishing needs, including

creating a libguide with a list of resources and a survey of her institution’s faculty to better understand their publishing and research questions and needs. The involvement of both library and publisher interaction enabled more needs to be met across The Citadel and share awareness of available opportunities and next steps to continue these vital connections.

Consortia-Publisher Dynamics in Open Access Solutions

With inflation increasing costs while dealing with flat or declining collection budgets, consortia and their members struggle to find sustainable options to do more with fewer resources. The OA Initiatives move the industry toward more sustainable solutions, the current models may not suit some consortia and many libraries, ranging from pure OA agreements being unsuitable for individual consortium, having dominantly read institutions over research institutions, the lack of aggressive cost reductions, doubts about cost neutrality, and inclusion of read institutions.

With “institutions of various sizes and research output, ... it can really impact these all-in type agreements versus the opt-in offers we’ve received this far,” resulting in the need for greater flexibility than one-size-fits-all options, which can be provided when “working with smaller publishers,” says Rachel Erb, the Director of e-Resources at FLVC. Creative, flexible solutions smaller publishers can provide are more inclusive of the needs of many institutions in a way that is more inclusive for institutions that would have varying budgets or smaller publishing appetites. Some of the flexibility opportunities that can be provided are Subscribe to Open, Read & Publish, Publish & Read models, and more, which not all publishers can commit to. The ability to provide equitable OA opportunities for institutions in a consortia has been key.

These challenges can be further compounded by consortia with no OA budget, or limitations in distribution of funding from monographs to OA funds, impacting institutions that rely on their consortia for monograph access. Interest in shifting toward OA funds can limit smaller institutions’ ability to access electronic content under current budget challenges. Flexible publishers can provide unique ways to utilize money being spent on content to shift over and transform into OA with content acquisitions. Even though some small and medium-sized publishers like IGI Global are working towards fully shifting

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to OA models, with the opt-in agreements that calculate an institution’s appetite for this model of publishing and what methods would best fit these institutions’ needs, an ideal solution is available.

Innovative solutions that consortia and their members are working to implement into their budget include the seeking of sources and approval for additional funding. Some also collaborate with publishers on transparency of participants and OA publications publishing under their agreements. These can help reflect more accurate metrics of increases and decreases in the OA agreement for the following year and empowers them to maintain author rights to still provide Green OA to institutions. These subscriptions prices would fluctuate based on researcher publishing appetite, measured in yearly reports. Concerns may still include future limitations from publishers converting to pure OA agreements instead while institutions may not be able to enter full OA agreements and keep pace with publishers, or subscription models that excluded institutions that had not published with the publisher. Journal offsets are aiding some institutions’ budgets, to the extent that institutions are crediting back OA. Meanwhile, Jesse Holden, Program Manager, Shared Content at the Orbis Cascade Alliance, says that “Journal offsets help with the budget to the extent that publishers are crediting back OA ... while it’s not direct support for OA, it does free up some funds for members to explore options if they’re doing a lot of publishing” while determining the sustainability of these opportunities. Some membership opportunities of large groups supporting OA can allow members to support international OA publishing and provide these new resources all libraries can benefit from.

Program types that are feasible are a challenge, as there are questions of pricing model transparency, cost-neutrality, and that the starting point of Read & Publish models are based off institution’s past investments in subscriptions, and whether or not this is a reasonable switch based on amounts of content available via subscription versus OA. Consortia like FLVC also do not make isolated decisions on which models to initiate for member institutions, as their universities will have to determine if it is fit for them, or if they have a different method that is desired. This has involved investigation by different branches of consortia to determine the opportunities OA options can provide, and if these options are suitable both budgetarily and for the needs of read-institutions that wish to participate, but do not align with agreement expectations enough to provide ease of access to OA agreements.

Nick Newcomer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at IGI Global, says, “There really is no comfort zone” within OA, both for institutions and publishers. IGI Global, while shifting their 170+ journals to Open Access, eliminated their e-Journal Collection and subscriptions as a product. While Subscribeto-Open models still exist to help support switching to OA publishing, current e-Journal customers can invest instead into OA journals as a similar product to support OA goals. For monographs, it remains possible to partially or fully shift publications into OA, on both the chapter and book levels, with possibilities for gaining read access.

Ultimately, “The options are really just limitless right now, and the conversation has to be had about Open Access, but we just got to be flexible about everything we do,” says Newcomer, because the needs of every institution will vary on content acquisition and OA publishing. This requires publishers’ willingness to be flexible and converse with institutions to understand their separate needs and goals.

Conclusion

To overcome the challenges of making Open Access capable of meeting different libraries’ needs, publishers must be willing to discuss and really listen to these concerns and limitations. Having multiple transparent, flexible options, such as opportunities that allow both gaining content and OA publishing opportunities, pure OA agreements, and opportunities that allow for full publication support are key. Without these options, publishers are limiting libraries that want to be involved in OA by strictly catering to Publish or Read institutions that have different appetites for content and publishing. As a result, librarypublisher partnerships are key to achieve Plan S mandates. These evolving challenges can only be resolved with healthy collaborations and relationships between libraries, consortia, and university systems with their publishers to not only provide much-needed support, but also to explore the OA frontier. Small and medium-sized publishers need to be involved in these discussions as groups who can understand and accommodate library needs with greater flexibility and specialized solutions, as they recognize the necessary cooperation and symbiosis that library systems need. There are steps being taken, such as IGI Global’s efforts, to provide open resources across the globe, as well as products enabling affordable access to research and OA opportunities for marginalized communities. These actions create hope and accountability of the western world to adopt these strategies and models to provide affordable and accessible research for everyone.

Recommended Readings

Alemneh, Daniel Gelaw, editor. Handbook of Research on the Global View of Open Access and Scholarly Communications. IGI Global, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-9805-4 Jain, Priti,et al., editors. Open Access Implications for Sustainable Social, Political, and Economic Development. IGI Global, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-5018-2

Khan, Nadim Akhtar and S. M. Shafi. “Open Educational Resources Repositories: Current Status and Emerging Trends.” IJDLDC vol.12, no.1 2021: pp.30-44. http://doi.org/10.4018/ IJDLDC.2021010103

García, Ana María Fermoso,et al. “Integration and Open Access System Based on Semantic Technologies: A Use Case Applied to University Research Facet.” IJSWIS vol.18, no.1 2022: pp.1-19. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJSWIS.309422

Brower, Aaron M. and Ryan J. Specht-Boardman, editors. New Models of Higher Education: Unbundled, Rebundled, Customized, and DIY. IGI Global, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-66843809-1

Column Editors’ End Note: Understanding the growth in Open Access publishing and research, IGI Global is working to innovate Open Access, creating and fostering an inclusive approach to accessibility in comprehensive, transparent offerings including their Open Access Agreement Options. Additionally, IGI Global’s Open Access e-Collection can be integrated into libraries’ discovery layer, providing all of IGI Global’s Open Access content in one convenient location and user-friendly interface.

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The Digital Toolbox — Academic Libraries Embrace Comics & Graphic Novels for Curriculum and Recreational Reading Support

Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Academic, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

In 2022, North American academic libraries experienced skyrocketing increases in the popularity of comics, graphic novels and manga. Across the hundreds of colleges and universities OverDrive Academic serves, circulation of these genres in digital format was up more than 126 percent yearover-year.

“In addition to providing eBooks and audiobooks that support classes, we’re seeing leisure reading on the rise on campuses across the country,” said Steve Rosato, General Manager of OverDrive Academic. “Colleges are adding digital books at a record pace, and students are reading a variety of subjects including a particular spike in comics and graphic novels.”

To better understand how publishers are working to meet the demand for comics, graphic novels and manga at academic libraries, we spoke with Chloe Ramos, Book Market & Library Sales Manager for Image Comics.

OverDrive Academic: As a publisher, college-age students are a key demographic that you want to continue reaching as fans and consumers of your catalog become adult consumers. What do you do to make your catalog more accessible to college students?

Chloe Ramos: Our catalog has always showcased standout titles naturally suited to a deeper level of intellectual engagement. Titles such as Monstress , Saga and a backlist gem called The Nightly News come to mind, to name just a few. Combining the growing willingness to include comics and graphic novels in college collections — a willingness that was not as widespread in the past — with an overall growth in the number of socially aware titles we release, means that we pay extra attention to making sure our titles stay front of mind for the professionals making collection development and acquisitions decisions on behalf of their institutions and classrooms. We do that by focusing on outreach through disseminating seasonal and theme-specific title presentations, digital ARCs and programming assistance generally, by request, and, of course, at industry conferences like ALA, AASL, NCTE and more. We also make sure that anyone who will listen knows we’re always here to help!

OD/A: Sales of comics, anime, manga and graphic novels as a category continue to see huge growth — both print and digital formats — from $700 million in 2011 to nearly three times that in 2021 with more than $2 billion. What is your prediction going forward? Is there a saturation point or will “kids” who grew up on this type of content continue to engage with it?

CR: I think that, rather than reaching a saturation point, we are headed toward a scenario much more in line with the manga market in Japan, where graphic literature is a ubiquitous mode of storytelling in demand for readers of all ages. As your question suggests, we are reaching a point where multiple generations of adults have grown up in a world where comics are not as stigmatized as they once were. We’re already seeing a dramatic rise in the number of cross-genre releases finding widespread popularity, which, all-in-all, points to a very exciting future for comics!

OD/A: These formats lend themselves to fiction, fantasy, sci-fi and so on. What about nonfiction, with history, politics, etc. being brought to these formats? Is that something that will grow, and how do you handle nonfiction in your catalog?

CR: Absolutely. We’ve seen a growth in titles that spark conversations on social commentary, history, politics and the human condition — in addition to being just plain entertaining — such as Monkey Meat, Golden Rage, The Dead Lucky, The Good Asian , Junkyard Joe , New Masters and others. Based on the enthusiastic reader response, we have every expectation that that growth will continue. We had high hopes, for example, that It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, a harrowing and deeply affecting graphic memoir from author and artist Zoe Thorogood, would find success, but the earth-shattering response we’ve received from audiences and institutions alike has exceeded even our wildest expectations. Evergreen titles like Age of Bronze, Bitter Root, La Voz De M.A.Y.O. and Home have been incorporated into curricula at multiple academic institutions across the country at multiple levels. We hope to build on these first steps to bring a variety of graphic literature — both in fiction and nonfiction — to college and university readers.

OD/A: How does the academic market fit into your distribution channels? What is the difference in you reaching the college market, not in terms of retail sales but for institutions?

CR: There is a lot of curation involved in serving the academic market, since each institution has unique needs to take into account. We rely on the relationships we’ve fostered throughout the years and keep in regular correspondence with academic professionals about their goals and needs when building out their curriculum, and how our various titles can best support those endeavors. We take care to highlight titles that have the potential to ignite deeper exploration of themes for educating and enlightening the reader.

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Most popular digital comic books borrowed from academic libraries in the OverDrive network in 2022:

1. Heartstopper series by Alice Oseman

2. White Sand series by Brandon Sanderson

3. Renegades by Marissa Meyer

4. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

5. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Image Comics’ Chloe Ramos shares additional highlights from their catalog:

New titles

1. It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

2. The Department of Truth

3. Bone Orchard Mythos: The Passageway

4. Bone Orchard Mythos: Ten Thousand Black Feathers

5. I Hate Fairyland 2022

6. Two Graves

7. The Good Asian

8. New Masters

9. Rogues’ Gallery

Perpetually popular titles

1. Saga

2. Bitter Root

3. Norroway

4. Dracula, Motherf*cker!

5. Beowulf

6. Monstress

7. Self-Obsessed

8. Home

9. Black History in its Own Words

10. Prince of Cats

11. La Voz de M.A.Y.O.: Tata Rambo

12. Age of Bronze

13. ODY-C

To get perspective on collection development practices for comics, graphic novels and manga at academic libraries, we spoke with David S. Carter, Video Game Archivist & Comics Librarian at University of Michigan Library, and Ellen Neufeld, Deputy Director of the Library at Oxford College of Emory University (Georgia).

OD/A: Which is a bigger driver in adding alternative formats like comics, anime, manga and graphic novels to your collection: Meeting student demand and interest or faculty requests?

David S. Carter: We really have two collections of comics and graphic novels at the U-M Library; I just so happen at the present to manage both of them! Our main comics collection is the research collection, which is oriented toward supporting student and faculty instruction and research needs. It was created 18 years ago at the request of faculty at the School of Art & Design but has since broadened to support comics needs across campus. The other is part of the browsing and recreational reading collection in the Undergraduate Library, and it primarily serves the recreational and pleasure reading needs of campus, primarily students. Our OverDrive collection is a digital extension of this recreational reading collection.

Ellen Neufeld: Originally it was our librarians who wanted to start a graphic novel collection, and this was nearly 15 years ago. Several of us had come to an academic library from public libraries, and knew how popular graphic novels were to patrons, especially young adults. Our library serves undergraduates, specifically students in their first and second years. So, once our collection was established, it definitely continued to grow and was driven by student demand and interest.

OD/A: How do you source materials that are not necessarily “traditional” academic content? First in terms of vendors, what options do you have? Secondly, how is the collections development done? Is this something that staff readily handles, or do you need support in curating things like manga and anime that are very atypical for an academic library?

DC: Our primary source for the main comics collection is a local comics store, Vault of Midnight. As a comics specialty retailer, they have access to numerous smaller publishers that the big library vendors do not. We also source some graphic novels through our regular vendors, and also place online orders from all over for small press, indie and mini-comics. For comics from other countries, we usually source from our vendors that service those countries and regions. For our recreational reading collection, we source all of our print books — including the graphic novels — from a local bookseller — Schuler Books, formerly Nicola’s Books – and digitally through OverDrive.

EN : Since we are one of the smaller of the Emory libraries, we do spend more time hand selecting titles because of our lack of space. We rely on staff recommendations both in and out of the library, as well as content requested by faculty. In fact, we have a faculty member in our English division who teaches a comics course and who has been instrumental in helping us with our graphic novel collection development. Our academic book vendor has recently added graphic novels to their selections, so we have purchased from them as well as from online retailers and, due to the pandemic, we began collecting graphic novels via OverDrive for our eBook collections. One of the biggest challenges for us is keeping up with the latest series releases! And to help us with staying aware of student interest, we have recently started a student collection development team comprised of library student employees who are proposing YA, graphic novel and eBook collection suggestions to our team.

OD/A: What subjects or areas of curriculum have a stronger affinity for comics, graphic novels and manga? Politics, art, literature, sociology, history and even psychology make sense, but what about areas like computer sciences and engineering?

DC: Probably the most surprising curricular area that uses the comics collection — but not really if you think about it — are the language departments. There are 200-level classes in French, Italian and German that are based around comics in those languages. It turns out that comics are excellent for learning a language. Not only are they interesting for the students to read, but the visual nature of comics reinforces the language learning and the use of vernacular in the comics is also a plus.

EN: We haven’t had many requests in the STEM curriculum other than (The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer) graphic novel. But certainly all of our collection development efforts related to diversity, equity and inclusion are well represented in our graphic novel collection. One of our English professors has utilized graphic novels in his crime fiction course and has used graphic novels to explore visual literacy.

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OD/A: There are so many groundbreaking graphic titles like John Lewis’ “March,” “Watchman,” “Fun Home” and “Saga.” Is having content like that in your collection driven by faculty and curriculum needs or is that something that is reflective of a library’s effort to support the academic mission of a school, acknowledging that budgets are naturally limiting in what any library can ultimately provide?

EN: Emory recently introduced a “Student Flourishing” initiative with the goal of providing opportunities for purpose, meaning, community and wellbeing to our students in addition to the traditional academic experience and professional pathways. We believe that part of student wellbeing is access to a variety of modes and subjects of leisure reading material. So, yes, some of our graphic novels are in response to faculty member curriculum needs, but we are also responding to the societal and life challenges faced by today’s students by providing materials that will hopefully offer insights and viewpoints to help with these challenges, many of which are addressed in graphic novel form. We want to be able to provide materials that address these issues and concerns in a relatable format. Currently we have more than 1,000 graphic novels in our collection as well as a robust board game collection of about 200 games.

OD/A: It is a growing issue that specific topics are politically charged. Is that limited to the hot-button topics or are nontraditional formats like we are discussing here subject to more scrutiny?

EN: Our collection development policy is curriculum driven: We purchase materials that support the courses taught at our institution, so no, the non-traditional formats don’t generate more scrutiny due to hot-button topics but by how they support the curriculum. And I wouldn’t say it’s scrutiny as much as balance. Our leisure reading material budget is just always less robust than our curriculum-based budget. We just want to be good stewards of our budget so that we can offer our students and faculty the best resources relevant for both research and student wellbeing.

OD/A: As schools become increasingly more competitive in attracting a smaller pool of students, what role does providing resources that may be considered an amenity like comics, anime, manga and graphic novels play? We know from user stats that these types of content are extremely popular.

DC: While the comics collection at U-M is not as extensive as some of the others in the Midwest that have dedicated popular culture collections and archives — for example, the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University, the Billy Ireland collection at Ohio State University or the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University — we differentiate ourselves as a mostly browsing and circulating collection, with a focus on non-English language comics and also a sizable small-press, indie and mini-comics collection. And because our collection circulates, it is available to support ILL and MelCat requests from libraries in the state of Michigan and elsewhere.

EN: I don’t know any stats about how our non-traditional collections of graphic novels and board games have had an impact on attracting students to our institution. However, I know that when our student admissions tour guides give tours to potential incoming students, when they stop in the library, we often overhear them highlight these collections and give anecdotes about how they’ve borrowed many graphic novels and games from the library! So, we know that to our existing students, it’s an important incentive that they make sure future students are aware of!

Conclusion

Comics, graphic novels and manga are enjoying amazing growth among young adult and adult readers. In fact, media reports cite retail sales of adult graphic novels more than doubled in 2021. Whether it’s to support curriculum or recreational reading, it’s clear that these formats have also found a place at academic libraries. And, as they always do, academic libraries are working to find the best ways to deliver this content and support their campus communities evolving reading interests and needs.

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“Once our collection was established, it definitely continued to grow and was driven by student demand and interest.”

Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Jeff Israely

Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com>

DARRELL: I am so happy to have Mr. Jeff Israely, who is the co-founder and editor of worldcrunch.com, as our guest for this edition of the Innovator’s Saga.

JEFF ISRAELY: Thanks for having me, Darrell.

DG: So, let’s get started. Before we jump into Worldcrunch, let’s talk about your education, background, and experience, and how you came about to launch Worldcrunch.

JI: Well, I’m American born and raised, and have been in the news business my whole career. The first part of it in Oakland, California and Alameda County, California, and ended up abroad. Love brought me abroad. I met my future wife in California, and she’s from Rome, Italy. And so, I ended up leaving my job at the newspaper in Oakland, California — the Oakland Tribune — and set up shop in Rome. And worked for American news organizations in Rome, and then Paris for the Associated Press, and then for Time magazine for 10 years in Rome and Paris. And worked as a correspondent, a bureau chief, and did what foreign correspondents have done for decades, for a century, writing stories about foreign lands and foreign topics and foreign people, for the American audience, for the global audience. And yeah, a reporter for about 20 years, and then started up Worldcrunch in 2011. So, it’s been more than 11 years now. And happy to tell you that story, too.

DG: Absolutely. So, what prompted you to leave the comfort of being a foreign correspondent to launch a new aggregated service such as Worldcrunch?

JI: Well, back then at the end of the first decade of this century was a time then, as it is now, where our industry — the news industry — was in full transformation, and the good and the bad and in between, because of the big factor that is changing so much of our lives — because of the Internet — that the way news was delivered and the business models around it. When we were in the analog days of... for me as a print reporter, it was newspapers and print magazines. And then with the arrival of the Internet, by 2010, it was clear that the news industry was in full transformation and crisis. And the idea of Worldcrunch was actually taken from print magazines, originally in France and in Italy, that I got to know being here. I’m in Paris now. I’ve been over here in Europe for more than 20 years. And these magazines are weekly news magazines that for the past 20 years or so have... the way they deliver the news is by finding stories in all different languages, and then translating them and adapting them into the language of their readers. So, into Italian for the magazine Internazionale in Rome and into French for Courrier International, which is this French weekly. And so, I had gotten to know this model for delivering news, and it seemed like an opportunity to do the same but in English. And what was different at the time we launched, compared to when they launched, was that we were going to do it just online. And so Worldcrunch is digital. We call it a digital magazine, a digital news outlet that essentially selects stories, finds news in all different languages, and brings it into English for an English readership.

DG: And the significance of what Worldcrunch does, it takes content in its native language and translates it into English without losing the local cultural flavors. Is that correct?

JI: Exactly. Well, we think that there’s real value in getting stories, first of all, just reported stories that are being reported and written for newspapers all around the world. That report the news, that tell stories, that analyze events. And it’s an efficient way to get stories from all over the world. But it’s also unique because, as you say, we get the local, the national point of view on a particular story happening in that country, or it could be that country’s point of view on something happening in the world in general. And we translate, and what we say is we also adapt the story for an international reader. So that means maybe explaining certain things that for a local reader are understood, and so we smooth out all the rough edges and make it accessible for a global reader while maintaining the voice and the point of view of the place, and the person who wrote it.

DG: Wow, that’s excellent. And so, how would you describe the mission of Worldcrunch?

JI: Well, I think the mission to start with a mission similar to other news organizations. We want to tell stories, from around the world, get our facts straight, teach things, open people’s eyes to what’s happening around the world, and keep people informed. Also, entertain, tell interesting stories, news stories. But what’s unique about us is that we think that there’s a real value and a real appetite in the audience for a news service that thinks internationally. And that covers the world in an international way. And it’s not just, if you’re an American, it’s not your American correspondent parachuting in and telling the story for the Americans and in the American interests. We think that there are more and more readers all around the world who look at the world and at themselves in a more international way because the world is evermore connected, because their own experiences may have brought them to or from another country. And so, we really want to tell the story of the world as it’s happening in real time, but with an international point of view.

DG: Wow. And how many countries are you gathering articles or news stories from?

JI: Well, we’re looking all around the world, all the countries in the world, where we tap into partnerships that we have with newspapers, and directly with journalists who are covering the whole world. So, it can be any country. And we have partnerships with newspapers here in Europe, and in Asia, and in Africa, in Latin America. And so, we’re working where we potentially can work with any newspaper or any journalist around the world with whom we have obtained the licensing rights to be able to translate their stories. And then, we have our own team of translators and editors and journalists, who select the stories, who find the stories, and then translate them and edit them for an English audience.

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DG: And so, I’m very curious as to the editorial philosophy and how do you choose what stories for Worldcrunch, which stories you don’t choose?

JI: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, in some ways, we’re driven by the news. So, it’s what’s happening in the world. You can imagine, over the past almost nine months now, I have had a lot of coverage of the war in Ukraine, where we’re finding stories from Ukrainian news outlets, from Russian news outlets, but also from news outlets here in Europe who have their war correspondents on the ground there. But more generally, what we’re looking for are interesting stories, no matter where they are. But we’re also looking for stories that cross borders, that sort of connect the dots and tell the story of a smaller and smaller world where things have relevance. Something happening in a small town in Bulgaria could be interesting for someone in Argentina, or in Chicago, or in Alaska, because the story is relevant to them. And so, we’re looking to have that mix. And we do stories across all topics. We’re a general news outlet. But yeah, we’re looking for those stories that describe the global world in which we live.

DG: And how does someone become a ... I don’t know if correspondent is the right word, or contributor. What is that process like? Because there’s a lot of folks out there who, unfortunately, over the years have been laid off because of what was going on in the industry.

JI: Well, we work with people with all different kinds of backgrounds and skill sets. Obviously, journalists. Typically, journalists who have at least one other language besides English, so that they can find stories in other languages, and translate them or edit them or rewrite them. Because, in addition to the direct translation stories that we do, we also write our own stories where the information is pulled in from different languages. So again, our starting point is to look at what’s being written and what’s being reported in all the languages in all the credible news outlets around the world. And so, journalists who have language skills, multiple languages, editors, translators. We work with some people who really come from a translation background. And so, it may be that our editorial team finds the stories and then ships them out to a translator, who will translate it and send it back. So, yeah, we work with freelancers. We have a core team here in Paris, but we work with freelancers all around the world. So, I’m always happy to receive inquiries from prospective contributors. Happy if you want to share my contacts because our team is growing and happy to be in touch with others.

DG: And to that point, I believe your email address is jeff@ worldcrunch.com, correct?

JI: That’s right. J-E-F-F, <jeff@worldcrunch.com>. Yep.

DG: Nice and easy. All right! And so, you mentioned a few of the very nice news organizations that you work with. Can you give us a feel for the great organizations that Worldcrunch is working with?

JI: Sure, sure. Well, we have ongoing partnerships with about 40 news organizations around the world. For example, here in Europe, here in France, we work with Les Echos, and we’ve worked with Le Monde and Le Figaro in the past. And we’re working with Die Welt in Germany and La Stampa in Italy. And in Asia, we work with the Initium, which is a Mandarin language news outlet that operates freely around the world, doing stories about China and the Chinese diaspora around the world, a very interesting news organization, covering China. We work with Kommersant and Proekt in Russia, and Livy Bereg in Ukraine.

In Latin America, we work with El Espectador in Colombia and Clarín in Argentina. And just Jeune Afrique, which covers Africa, a French language magazine. And, yeah, work with ... more and more we contact journalists directly when we find their stories, and get the okay from them to be able to get their stories into English. And so, yeah, to work–

DG: I’m sure they love that, right?

JI: Oh, yeah. I think, journalists in some cases have to sweat and struggle to make a living, and so we’re aware of that. But they, first and foremost, want to get their stories out there, read by as wide an audience as possible, and their stories are limited by the readership and the language in which they publish. And so, when we get into English, it multiplies the readership exponentially. Not only for Americans and British and Canadians and people in English-speaking countries, but so many more people around the world have English as a second language and get a lot of their news in English. And so, yeah, the journalists are happy to get their stories out there to a wider audience.

DG: Very nice. And so, when you think about Worldcrunch started back in 2011, how large is the corpus of articles in the whole corpus of Worldcrunch?

JI: Well, our archives, we recently dug back and counted and tallied up our archives, were around 20,000 articles that we’ve produced over those years, and it’s a weekly rhythm of about 45 features each week. We’ve recently actually launched a digital PDF formatted weekly magazine as well, which features some of our top stories put together into a weekly digital magazine. But yeah, we’re not chasing after the latest breaking news all the time. That’s not our approach. We’re more of a magazine which has analysis and reportage and feature stories.

DG: Very nice. And this magazine, this is part of the subscription. You have a B2B subscription. But you also have a B2C subscription model as well, right?

JI: Yes, we’re integrating the digital magazine into our paid subscription offer. And that will arrive on Thursday nights or, I guess, U.S. time Thursday afternoon is when it hits the digital presses.

DG: Very nice, very nice. Who do you think is the best audience for Worldcrunch?

JI: I really think that it’s anyone who sees themselves as... you hear the term “a global citizen” or a citizen of the world, which doesn’t necessarily mean that you live in a different country, or that you’re from a binational family, or that you travel, that you’re a business traveler. You could have even never yet left your country, but you want to, and you know that your life and your experience and your future is connected with the rest of the world. And if you have that awareness and that curiosity, then I think you’d find Worldcrunch interesting.

DG: You know, interesting. I teach Professional Sales at Seton Hall, and I’ve been teaching there since 2009. And I’ve always stressed the importance of understanding what’s going on in other countries, from a corporate standpoint, from a business standpoint. And I attended a webinar the other day — someone was trying to sell professors a new service — but that was the main thing that they had for the sales professional, to truly understand the international scope of the business and the culture and all that’s going on. And that’s where I think that Worldcrunch brings so much value. So, I guess it’s screams that the public libraries and the academic libraries would be prime customers for Worldcrunch.

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JI: I think so. I remember my university experience and it was the first time I really encountered people from other countries. Universities are necessarily international places. Libraries, public libraries are international place where you go to discover the world. It’s where people discover that there is a world out there. And so, I think that it’s really a natural fit for what we’ve been doing for the past 11 years. That we’re a way in to what’s happening elsewhere, and I think more and more people understand, as you said, in whatever context you’re in. If you’re a business person, and you don’t even have clients elsewhere in the world, you need to know what’s happening in your industry elsewhere in the world. What customers are looking for, what factors, what supply chains, and all those sorts of things. There’s an understanding that the future is only going to get more and more global. And we’ve seen in politics, we’ve seen a sort of a backlash over the past even decade, let’s say, to globalization. That word has come to take on this kind of negative connotation. And there’s plenty of discussions to have about that, and how this process should take place in a way that’s just and smart. And in the general interest of any country or town or the world in general, we need to think hard about how it happens. But it’s going to keep happening. There’s really no unwinding that. I mean, the only scenarios for truly unwinding it aren’t pretty scenarios. So, I think the conversation about globalization in all its forms is one that’s changing, and rightly so, has a critical eye as well. But I don’t think that in any way changes the reality that the world, because of communication, because of technology, because of the opportunity to travel, is only going to get more and more connected. We can look back on these past few years with the pandemic, and when the world was suddenly shut down. And I don’t think anyone thought it meant that borders were literally shut down, and it was shocking, and we couldn’t imagine something like that happening. And because of technology, the world was able to still stay connected, because of digital technology, Internet technology. And frankly, once the borders opened up, business resumed, supply chains resumed, tourism resumed. Things will change, but that desire to go out and seek out in the rest of the world is probably innate to us humans and now made more and more possible by all of the progress that we’ve talked about.

DG: So, Worldcrunch is really bringing the world together by educating the world community about what’s going on in each individual country. Recently, you also have this great video service, “what happened today in history.”

JI: Yeah.

DG: Tell us, how does that fit with into the Worldcrunch vision.

JI: Sure, well, this year we’ve just launched it at the beginning of this month, and it’s a one-video-per-day, a short video, less than one minute where we’ve selected one event that happened on that day in history and an iconic photograph that captures that event. And make a video. We’ve created this format, where we explore the details of the photograph, and tell the story of what happened on that day in history through this single photograph. And when we had mapped out the 365 days of the year and the 365 historical events and the photos that go with them, for us it was global history. It was what happened in history around the world that had an impact on the whole world. And so, it’s a way to remind us that the world is connected, and to tap into the interest that people have to learn new things about what’s happening today and in the past.

DG: Recently, you presented a video at the Charleston Premieres, the Charleston Conference in Charleston, South Carolina. You were in Paris. I was the emcee for the event. And unfortunately, you couldn’t see the reaction of the audience. And one of my good friends Judy Luther, who is a consultant, she didn’t know that Worldcrunch was a client of mine. But she looked over at me and she goes ..., and I saw the heads in the audience like bobbing, as a nod of approval. Recently the Charleston Conference Premiers Virtual audience voted Worldcrunch with the award of “Most Impactful.” Has Worldcrunch won any awards for any articles that you might have done over the last 11 years?

JI: We are very appreciative of the Charleston Conference Premiers’ award. It validates our editorial mission. Well, a few years back we won a Digital Innovation Award for the website and for the new model, the way we cover the world. For better or for worse, since we’re translating ... most of our best pieces are these translated stories, so all the glory goes to the writers in the original language, who are award winning journalists in their own countries. And so, what we’re after really is finding the best that’s out there around the world and making it accessible. So much great journalism is produced every day in so many different languages. There’s also plenty of not great journalism being produced in all languages every day. And so, I don’t know if there are awards for that, but part of our job is selecting the good from the bad. And so, that’s what we’re busy doing every day.

DG: Beautiful, beautiful. Well, we’re coming down to the wire, to the end of our interview. And I’d like to give you the last word. What would you like to share with our audience that you want them to know about Worldcrunch and what might be next?

JI: Well, we’re really excited about the possibility of really multiplying our readership with the students and the professors at universities and with the members of public libraries. Because we really think that it’s a natural fit. And so, really, our mission is to make great journalism accessible. And our job is to do it by finding these stories and getting them into English. And then, maybe the harder part is getting it out there, making sure then our product reaches the people. And so, we’re busy on that. We’ve got a great team also on the business side, who’s expanding our reach and our audience, and we’re growing. And so, it’s an exciting time for us now. And yeah, happy to share the progress as it comes.

DG: Well, we’re going to have to have you back on the Innovators Saga. Jeff, thank you for the interview.

JI: Thank you, Darrell.

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Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly — A Conversation with Author & Scholar Emily West

By Nancy K. Herther (Writer, Consultant and former Librarian with the University of Minnesota Libraries) <herther@umn.edu>

Emily West is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published research on consumer culture and media audiences. Her research on the commodification of sentiment and national branding has appeared in numerous journals. Her book, Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly was published by MIT Press earlier this year. Please Note: This interview was conducted in July 2022.

NKH: Your analysis focuses on the company’s power and influence, becoming “ubiquitous in our daily lives — [as] we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, and receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our pending order.” This wide range of services and products that Amazon offers is unique, even in this web-based global marketplace. Were you able to get any cooperation from Amazon in your study?

EW: Yes, the focus of my book is how Amazon has, in essence, branded its own ubiquity. Whereas many of the powerful, successful brands that we think about — like Disney, Nike, and McDonalds — have very prominent marketing campaigns with memorable images, stories, and lifestyles, Amazon’s marketing is quite low key in terms of its representational aspects, but is intensive in terms of relationship marketing.

For a while, Amazon even diverted its marketing dollars away from conventional ads to things that would enhance the customer experience, like fulfilling its rapid shipping promises, and improving the returns process. Today, Amazon does have advertising for some of its products and services, but it remains very focused on all the touchpoints that we have with it as a brand, optimizing those and making the consumption experience very seamless, while expanding into new products and services that make us more connected to Amazon throughout different parts of our lives.

Because the focus of the book is how Amazon builds relationships with customers, I focused on the company’s consumer-facing products, services, and marketing, rather than on the “behind-the-scenes.” When I started this project, I felt that Amazon’s ubiquity in our lives had been somewhat understudied, at least in my fields of Communication and Media Studies, and I concluded that a great place to start would be the absolute wealth of publicly available information about Amazon and how it presents its brand and builds relationships with consumers in ways that discourage us from noticing its power as a platform.

NKH: One of the most important contributions that you make is in teasing apart some of the complex components of Amazon’s reach (from content creation to end-user sales and service) and providing readers with approaches that adjust or expand existing “theories that were developed for norms of limited choice and mass audiences,” to the current expansive environment. You carefully built your case. Was this easy to do with such a huge company and one that doesn’t normally provide much openness or support for analysis of their operations?

EW: A challenging task with studying a company as large and wide-ranging as Amazon was deciding what the scope should be. I decided to focus on the brand-consumer relationship, and therefore on the products and services that most define our everyday interactions with the company. This led me first to Amazon’s focus on distribution of products — what material and infrastructural elements it has in place to deliver goods to us in record times, and how it promotes the speed and seamlessness of consumption. From an initial focus on distribution, I then focused on the various cultural products and services Amazon provides, from its initial product of books, to its various media streaming services, to the ways it offers a personalized experience to its users, exemplified by its digital voice assistant Alexa.

Then the book turns to the ways Amazon presents itself as a brand more generally — to the public and regulators through its brand image and rhetorical choices, and the ways it has had to adjust its brand image as it enters markets around the world. Across all these areas of inquiry, I note the various strategies that Amazon uses to make its size, the scope of its products and services, its market dominance, and its integration into our daily life seem normal, natural, and non-threatening. Amazon seeks to “fade into the woodwork,” so that it can become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.

NKH: One of your themes focuses on the “bigness” that marks today’s entire digital economy for books, entertainment and ideas. Through their publishing activities, Amazon now impacts the very creation and distribution of ideas, stories and knowledge. You talk about this in terms of their role in the “democratization of culture” that has allowed writers to reach readers without traditional publishing houses as gatekeepers. Amazon’s own imprints are doing very well, as well as their sales of third-party merchandise across the globe. Can it ever become “too big?”

EW: While Amazon is now largely conceptualized as an ecommerce “everything store,” we should recall that it began as an online bookseller, and its dominance in the distribution and now production of media content has only grown. While other major platforms like Facebook and Google are routinely scrutinized in terms of how they shape our information environment, it’s important not to forget the role that Amazon

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plays in the distribution of information and culture, as it controls an estimated 50% of the U.S. book market and at least threequarters of eBook sales. One way of thinking about this is that Amazon isn’t just in the books marketplace; to a meaningful extent, it is the marketplace for books. Add to that now its role as a distributor and producer of video and audio content (both audiobooks on Audible and podcasts and music on the Amazon Music platform).

When we’re thinking about Amazon’s dominance in the information and entertainment businesses, there are a few issues I would point to.

NKH: The outsized influence Amazon has, particularly in the books business by both being the marketplace and competing in that marketplace, is a stark example of the “self-preferencing” and inherent unfair advantages enjoyed by digital platforms

EW: As you point out, Amazon is no longer just a retailer and distributor of books, but has expanded into an almost completely vertically integrated books business. It actually prints physical books with its print-on-demand business, it has numerous publishing imprints, and Amazon’s Kindle is the leading e-reader. The books business is a great place to notice how Amazon both provides a marketplace for book sales and marketing, and then participates in that very marketplace, but with the benefit of in-depth market intelligence about both consumers and competitors. Because so many people search for book titles, read reviews, and buy books on Amazon, it is almost essential that publishers buy Amazon’s advertising and marketing services in order to achieve visibility on the platform. These marketing fees have grown precipitously in recent years and publishers have made official complaints to federal regulators about the ways that Amazon links its marketing services to accessing retail distribution on the platform. But then, in addition, these publishers have to compete for reader attention with Amazon itself. There are credible allegations that Amazon advantages its own imprints in various ways on the site, in terms of search results, sales, and promotions. It is this kind of activity that legislation currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress — the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — seeks to prevent. Unsurprisingly, Amazon is vigorously lobbying against the passage of this bill.

NKH: While Amazon’s hands-off approach to media sales and distribution can be “democratizing” by eliminating the discretion of “middle-men,” it also contributes to its media distribution platforms being weaponized for disinformation.

EW: As you mentioned, I do argue in Buy Now that there are aspects of Amazon’s approach to bookselling that are “democratizing.” An online store with almost unlimited selection, where not just Amazon itself but third-party sellers sell books new and used? Online reviews where anyone can post their honest opinion about the book, good or bad? Amazon’s own focus on consumer behavior and engagement — through book purchases, clicks on the site, and details about how much and how quickly they read eBooks — all of which informs Amazon’s own publishing and marketing decisions? A userfriendly self-publishing platform where anyone can publish and sell their books, and even hope to earn a living if they find eager audiences? These are all surely signs of a more open, responsive bookselling and publishing space, where gatekeepers such as book buyers, publishing house editors, and critics enjoy less influence.

However, this is only part of the story. The openness of Amazon’s publishing and distribution platforms also illustrate what was actually good about gatekeeping, which was to prevent

or at least limit the reach and amplification of books or other forms of media rife with disinformation, manipulation, and hate. Amazon has been relatively hands-off about the ways in which its platforms, be it Prime Video, Kindle Direct Publishing, the ecommerce website, or its consumer reviews, are all routinely taken advantage of by bad actors who seek to misinform or manipulate the public. Just last Fall, lawmakers chastised Amazon when the number one bestselling book on Amazon about Covid-19 was an anti-vaccine publication.

NKH: Amazon’s media subscriptions are a tool for collecting ongoing data about consumer interests and preferences, and building up the “moat” around the Amazon Prime membership.

EW: The final point I’d like to make about the sheer scale of Amazon’s media production and distribution businesses is that they play a key role in cementing Amazon’s market dominance in ecommerce and in consumer data more broadly. Prime Video, and to a certain extent Prime Reading, have played a significant role in recruiting people to the Prime Membership and then making it “sticky” — people are loathe to cancel their membership once they’ve become accustomed to these services. In my book, I argue that Amazon increasingly offering media “asa-service,” rather than selling discrete products or experiences like a book or a movie rental, cements the ongoing nature of the relationship between consumer and brand that is so valuable to Amazon. It’s valuable because Prime members spend so much more on the platform compared to non-members, and because Amazon can collect priceless data about what media we consume and how we consume it when we buy it “as-a-service.”

NKH: Certainly Jeff Bezos (as with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg) were at the right place at the right time, and clearly they all had the imagination, tools and ability to create disruptive, yet highly profitable, companies. They also have done a good job in keeping ahead of any potentially serious competition. Do we have parallels to this in past history during times of major technological or other change?

EW: There’s no doubt that the “tech titans” you’ve mentioned had a combination of luck, energy, skill, and tremendous insight into the opportunities afforded by computing and digital networked communication. (By all reports, ruthlessness has also been a key ingredient for their success). But all the major tech giants (I think some are now calling this group MAMAA — Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet) have benefited not just from the insight of their founders but from contextual factors and factors specifics to the logics of digital platforms:

1) First mover advantage is particularly pronounced with digital platform companies. Once the initial capital investment has been made (to produce the search engine, to create the ecommerce website, to design the software) then you can add users without as much additional capital investment as would be needed with an offline business.

2) Network effects — the value of many of these services actually increases for users as more people use it. Many of us are on Facebook because so many other people we know are on it. Amazon sellers use the marketplace because so many shoppers look for products there; so many shoppers search Amazon for products because so many sellers are there. Network effects feed monopoly conditions.

3) Investment capital is particularly enthusiastic about anything that is a “tech” company as opposed to a more offline, familiar kind of business. Wall Street assumes that a “tech” company has more scope for growth and

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ability to move nimbly into more kinds of businesses than a more conventional business. So Amazon has been able to attract so much more investment capital than competitors in its various businesses, and also been able to undercut competition with lower prices or more expensive customer service for extended periods because investors were willing to tolerate lack of profitability for so long, in the interest of longerterm growth potential.

4) The data is the real product. While the big tech platforms appear on the surface to operate in somewhat different business areas, they all harvest unfathomable amounts of data in the course of doing those businesses, and that data in turn can be monetized (through digital ad businesses for example) or used to identify new business areas and enjoy competitive business advantage.

The clearest parallel we might reflect on is the rise of the so-called “robber barons” or the monopolies in oil and the railroads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Technological innovation and new markets exploded opportunities, and the legal and regulatory lag allowed for very rapid concentration in industries which in turn facilitated sky-high profits. This state of affairs inspired the wave of anti-trust lawmaking and enforcement that occurred in the early 20th century, and many observers are hoping that we are on the cusp of a similar wave now in the 21st century.

U.S. lawmakers have been slow compared to other places, particularly the European Union, to recognize the anticompetitive practices of the “big five,” particularly because these companies seem like U.S. business success stories and there has been a lot of user enthusiasm and satisfaction with many of these services. Lawmakers have been particularly leery about scrutinizing Amazon which has consistently been rated one of the most trusted and loved brands in America. But now regulators are becoming more aware of the drawbacks of such market concentration in ecommerce and some of Amazon’s other businesses, and we’re starting to see more attention to issues of self-preferencing and other anti-competitive behaviors, more call for scrutiny of corporate acquisitions that further cement market dominance and discourage competition, and questions about the ways that the platforms and digital advertising markets engage in surveillance and monetize user data.

NKH: The Internet afforded Amazon’s easy ability to quickly disrupt, respond and innovate in the early days of Internet commerce. Your publisher (MIT Press) calls your book “a cautionary tale of bigness in today’s digital economy.” Throughout history, size and power have always mattered. Once we have these dominate/controlling behemoths, how do you see the opportunities for adjustment/change/challenges — even as issues of common good or larger societal benefit arise?

EW: My book is not against digital platforms, or ecommerce, per se. Rather, I use the case of Amazon to illustrate how entangled our lives have become with digital platforms and to highlight the extent and nature of platform power. I think there are important conversations to be had, not just by lawmakers but society-wide, about how we can strike a reasonable balance between the convenience, efficiency, and innovations that digital platforms can provide with the need to promote competition, low barriers to entry in the digital economy, privacy, and good corporate citizenship. I don’t necessarily take issue with any particular product or service that Amazon provides (although I do have some reservations about its surveillance products and

services like facial recognition and video doorbells). Rather, the integrated nature of its products and services, and the resulting market dominance that results, shifts Amazon’s influence from merely “a company in the marketplace,” to that of governance — an entity that sets standards, provides infrastructure, and dictates terms to market actors and governments. That’s the type of corporate power that can become anti-democratic, and that doesn’t serve us in the long run.

Currently in Congress there is legislation being considered that would put in place common-sense checks on the power of platforms, including rules against self-preferencing, and more scrutiny of corporate acquisitions. Beyond that, an organized consumer movement might advocate for limits on the degree of market share and integration of products and services that a single company should have. For example, should Amazon be able to dominate both ecommerce and last-mile delivery? Should it be able to dominate both ecommerce and cloud services?

Some readers may conclude that boycotting Amazon is the way to go, and that’s certainly a valid response. However, it’s good to keep in mind that this is not necessarily what Amazon worker activists have called for, in terms of solidarity from consumers. Also, I am skeptical that individualized consumer decision-making will have a meaningful effect on Amazon’s fortunes or business practices. Given Amazon’s size and the scope of its businesses (such as Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing service that undergirds a great deal of the Internet that we use), I don’t think it’s realistic to suggest that individual consumers can serve as the primary check on Amazon through their day-to-day purchasing decisions.

Rather, individual-level consumer activism must be paired with some kind of collective organizing and demands from consumers for more transparency in the logic of how platforms like Amazon work, how they use and profit from our data, and support for regulatory efforts.

Given Amazon’s focus on personalized service, and the way most of us interact with its services online, from home, there are few opportunities for us to gather as Amazon customers or be able to imagine ourselves as a bloc with shared interests. But unless Amazon customers can find a way to organize, Amazon will continue to speak on our behalf, and justify its size, market dominance, and business practices through its focus on our customer convenience and delight.

NKH: Earlier this year, Amazon opened and then quickly shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores in North America, excluding their Whole Foods franchise — including two here in Minnesota — without much notice or explanation. This approach certainly is a different approach than growth through acquisition, which is so popular in most other industries. Was this another learning/experimental effort or an example of the shifting sands of a trial balloon? Typically, there has been no clear signal from Amazon.

EW: Yes, in March it was revealed that Amazon would start shutting a few of its brick-and-mortar store concepts, including Amazon Books, a national chain of bookstores which started in 2015. I visited a couple of these stores as well as another store concept that will be closed, Amazon 4-Star, which featured products available on Amazon rated 4 stars and above.

Amazon has so much investment capital and profit to work with, as you indicate; it tries all kinds of things that don’t work out and it then abandons after a little while. I would put these store concepts into that category, and add that the timing — with the pandemic hurting brick-and-mortar retail and

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super-charging e-commerce, and then labor becoming harder to find and more expensive also due to the pandemic, likely played a role. These store concepts were meant to be engines for “discovery” — where you go find products you weren’t necessarily aware of or looking for — rather than for “search,” which is the strength of the ecommerce site.

They also functioned as showrooms for Amazon’s everexpanding personal electronics selection (Amazon has more than 50% of the ecommerce market in computers and consumer electronics, which includes many of their own devices, such as the Kindle and Echo Smart Speakers).

But this doesn’t mean that Amazon is done with brick-andmortar store concepts by any means. It still has its high-end convenience store format Amazon Go, owns Whole Foods Market, and is developing a department store concept that will likely emphasize its fashion lines and again, consumer electronics showrooming. Amazon has been developing its “Just Walk Out” technology in Amazon Go, and is now testing it in Whole Foods Market locations — this is where cameras, weights, and other surveillance technologies allow Amazon account holders to just pick goods up and “walk out” with them and be automatically billed.

I believe Amazon will continue pursuing brick-and-mortar because it allows the company to round out the valuable consumer data it has, adding fresh foods and grocery to the wealth of intelligence it has about the things people typically buy on its ecommerce site. Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retailing integrates the personalization and tracking of online shopping into offline space, completing the circle of visibility it has on consumer habits and preferences.

Amazon also, to my mind, promotes retail space that is less public and democratic than how we have traditionally understood retail spaces to be. For example, in the Amazon Books stores, prime members paid lower prices than nonmembers. In most Amazon Go locations, you can’t enter or buy anything unless you have an account with Amazon and have downloaded the app — “Scan to Enter.” Amazon is promoting these kinds of cashless, “members only” models, which shift the way that retail space has been open to all who may enter, offering at least formally a kind of equal footing to all customers.

NKH: In your co-edited The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, some of the authors examined how the role of critics and reviews are described as “fading in an environment where ‘spin’ is more important than critics or other traditional means of assessment.” How do you see the future for independent critique in this age of “promotional culture?”

EW: Amazon, of course, has a lot of resources to devote to lobbying lawmakers and regulators to promote its own interests. It’s no accident, many people think, that one of its new headquarters is being built in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington DC, that Jeff Bezos bought the largest private home in DC and has hosted generously there, or that he bought the Washington Post.

But I argue in my book that one of the most powerful tools that Amazon has to discourage consumer activism and regulatory scrutiny is the relationship that it has built with its customers, which have made many people feel that they depend on Amazon almost as a utility. When I conceptualize Amazon as the “ultimate service brand,” the corollary is that it’s shifting what it means to be a consumer in the digital economy from a “choosing subject” to a “served self.” The ongoing, familiar, even intimate nature of the relationship that many people have with Amazon — happy to have the company “get to know us” so it can provide ever-more personalized and convenient service — simultaneously makes it less likely that consumers will be as critical and discerning about the company as they might be with other product and service providers.

Through personalization, subscriptions, provision of so many things “as-a-service,” the bundled nature of the Prime membership, and an increasing amount of streamlined voicebased interaction, Amazon steadily makes more choices for the consumer, taking on that effort or labor as part of the service it offers. While our power in the marketplace may be circumscribed and limited, choice is nevertheless key to that power, and so this shift from the choosing subject to the served self is one that concerns me, in that it makes consumers less likely to “shop around,” likely to do more and more within Amazon’s platforms (thereby contributing to its market dominance), and less likely to be critical and engage in activism.

As I discuss in the Conclusion to Buy Now, Amazon workers, both in the warehouses and its corporate offices, have been the most vocal and impactful in critiquing Amazon’s business practices. But they also have the most to lose. I wrote this book because I think consumers must be more engaged with the ways that a company like Amazon infiltrates our lives and then uses our delight and convenience as a reason to justify its monopolistic control of markets, its ruthless extraction of productivity from workers, and its poor treatment of many third-party sellers on its platform.

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John Thompson and the Ongoing Digital Revolution in Publishing

By Nancy K. Herther (Writer, Consultant and former Librarian with the University of Minnesota Libraries) <herther@umn.edu>

Sociologist John Brookshire Thompson is a professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. An award-winning researcher and teacher, his recent focus is on impact of the digital revolution on social and political life, social organization of the media industries and the changing structure of the book publishing industry. His recent research, focusing on reading in modern culture, include Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); the Second edition,2012; and Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). The global reach of his influence is clearly apparent in that his works have been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Russian. Please Note: This interview was conducted in July 2022 via the Internet.

NKH: Your research and works have laid bare the reality that the foundation on which the book publishing industry has been based for 500 years — the printed page — is now facing critical challenges in the form of eBooks, BookTok and other new technology applications. New players arose, many coming from technology or Internet services. Your book title says it well, we are in the midst of the “book wars.”

In your earlier 2010 book, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, you provided an excellent overview of these turbulent times for book publishing. After five decades of comparative calm, today’s combination of both and technological change is changing the industry. Your book’s jacket calling this “the first major study of trade publishing for more than thirty years,” providing “fascinating insight into the high-risk culture on both sides of the Atlantic.” The title “merchants of culture” is interesting and I think explains the way in which so many in the publishing industry see their role — as a cultural institution rather than a publishing business.

The last ten years in particular have been rough ones due to global economic challenges, enormous technological changes to publishing itself, the contraction of the industry into fewer major publishers as well as the continuing role of smaller, independent presses. The pressures on publishers have been enormous, yet for most agents I’ve been speaking with, there is more a sense of needing a course change rather than something far more

potentially catastrophic. Is this more bravado or, for at least the “big five or four” commercial presses, there is still solid ground.

How concerned are you about the current state of publishing today — as an industry? What do you see for commercial presses in the next five or ten years?

JT: I’ve been studying the book publishing industry intensively for more than 20 years and throughout this time period, I’ve heard many people predict that the industry was facing its Armageddon. They looked over their shoulders at what was happening in the music industry and they thought: this is our future too. But I’ve always been of the view that, when it comes to thinking through the implications of the digital revolution for the media industries, it is dangerous and misleading to extrapolate from one industry, or even one sector of an industry, to another.

Each industry and each sector has specific conditions that shape the ways that the digital transformation occurs within that industry and sector. The world of Anglo-American trade publishing remains more vibrant and robust than many people thought it would be 10 or 20 years ago: sales and revenues have not collapsed, and digitization has enabled firms to take some costs out of the supply chain, improving their profitability. But the industry faces huge challenges — not least because the retail sector has become far more concentrated than it was a few decades ago, with one tech giant, Amazon, accounting for a high proportion of publishers’ sales. Moreover, thanks to the digital revolution, the information environment within which publishing exists is changing in profound ways, and people are getting more information online.

Publishers need to think creatively about how they can remain relevant in this changing environment, and how the cultural form that they produce — books — can continue to be made relevant to people’s lives. Unlike some prophets of doom, I do think books and publishers have a future in what will, in all likelihood, be a mixed economy of print and digital, where printed books, eBooks and audiobooks co-exist sideby-side. But there are no grounds for complacency: our world is changing fast and publishers must constantly re-invent themselves if they want to remain relevant to the cultural, social and political conversations of our times.

NKH: eBooks are certainly a major technological change that is creating potential for new models of publishing. University, library and other

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publishing ventures have arisen as options to more traditional scholarly publishing from the academy. Libraries across the U.S. and beyond have developed collaborative and independent presses that are growing in popularity and acceptance for both commercial and scholarly titles. The latest version of the Library Publishing Directory now covers the formal publishing activities of 145 academic and research libraries, not only in North America but across the globe. How do you see the impact and role of these various inhouse efforts of research institutions themselves?

JT: As I argue in Book Wars, the focus on eBooks per se is an overly narrow way to think about the impact of the digital revolution on the book publishing industry: eBooks are important, but they are only one aspect of a much broader and more complicated series of changes that are transforming the publishing world. Among other things, the digital revolution has made it much easier and cheaper to make symbolic content, including extended texts, available for others to access and read, and this has blurred the boundaries of publishing fields and given rise to new spheres of activity that have taken on a life of their own.

With regard to the field of Anglo-American trade publishing, which is the focus of Book Wars, these new spheres of activity include the rapidly expanding world of self-publishing as well as the rich and varied world of online storytelling: these worlds are themselves immensely complex, like parallel universes that exist alongside the world of traditional publishing, sometimes overlapping with it but, for the most part, developing according to their own dynamics.

The world to which you’re calling attention here — the publishing activities of academic and research libraries as documented by the Library Publishing Directory — is another world of this kind, in this case existing alongside what I call the field of academic publishing (a field that I analysed in my earlier book, Books in the Digital Age). I would see these activities as a welcome development, complementary to the publishing activities of the university presses and other academic publishers. They are making available various kinds of scholarly content — including journals, monographs, conference papers and proceedings, dissertations, research reports, data sets and educational materials of various kinds — that university presses and other commercial academic publishers might be reluctant or unable to publish.

Scholars and students can only benefit from the fact that this content is being made available, usually as open access, by library-based publishing initiatives, and since it would probably be difficult for university presses and other academic publishers to publish most of this material in commercially viable ways, these initiatives are probably best seen as complementary to the work of the university presses and other academic publishers rather than in direct competition with them.

NKH: In your Book Wars, it is clear that you still see great value in the “print-on-paper book” as a “remarkably resilient cultural form.” Still the growth in new players — independent sources, nonprofits, Amazon and so on — are showing strong growth and often online and not in print. The power of the Internet itself as a finding tool is key, it would seem, to allowing these new players to find audiences and develop new types of publishing products. And, the Internet itself has become a source for finding information/entertainment broadly even beyond the printed page.

There is also the growth of social media and alternative ways to share stories, and ideas. BookTok is one key example that is

clearly impacting the book trade, and shows the potential for a whole new type of publicity/recommendation: The influencer. How do you see this evolving system of not just publication but it finding/identifying “books” of interest to today’s younger audiences?

JT: This is a key point: the ways in which people find out about books, or “discover” them, are changing today in fundamental ways. The traditional methods of bringing books to the attention of readers — displaying them in bookstores, placing ads and getting reviews in mainstream media, getting authors talking about their books on radio and TV, etc. — have not disappeared and remain important, but they are being increasingly supplemented by, and in some respects displaced by, other ways of making books visible to potential readers via an array of digtital tools and platforms, from email to social media.

I analyse a variety of these digital tools and platforms in Book Wars; there are many and they’re constantly changing. The relevance of each form and platform varies from one book and category of book to another: what is relevant and effective for scholarly nonfiction books will be very different from what is relevant and effective for fiction aimed at young adults, for example. I think we should expect to see these tools and platforms continue to evolve in the coming years, as individuals and entrepreneurs experiment with new media and use platforms in innovative ways to talk about books and engage with readers and writers.

The challenge for publishers is to try to keep up with these developments, which change very quickly, and to find creative ways of embedding books into the cultural conversations that are increasingly taking place online.

NKH: In your book, you describe today’s situation for the book publishing industry as facing “its greatest challenge since Gutenberg.” In your 200+ interviews with key publishing executives and others in the industry for your book Merchants of Culture (2010), how do they see their evolving role and the state of book publishers?

JT: There is not a single view that would sum up how senior publishing executives see their evolving role in the changing ecology of book publishing: you will hear many different views depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them. I interviewed many of the senior figures in Anglo-American trade publishing for Book Wars and Merchants of Culture over a period of some 15 years, and I weave their views into the account of the transformation of the industry that I offer in these books: my account is deeply informed by the 180+ interviews I did for Book Wars and the 280+ interviews I did for Merchants of Culture

I won’t try to summarize these views here. But let me just highlight one view, expressed by the CEO of a large trade house, that resonated with the views of others and had a strong impact on my way of thinking about the impact of the digital revolution. He expressed the view that the essence of the digital transformation in the publishing industry is not really the rise of the eBook — that is important but nowhere near as important as many people thought and feared in the early 2000s; rather, the essence of the digital transformation is that it has forced publishers to take readers more seriously and to become more reader-centric in their way of thinking about their role as publishers, and at the same time it provided them with the tools to do this at scale.

This CEO’s organization, and many other publishing houses, are working hard to restructure their businesses so that they are oriented not just to authors and retailers but to readers too, whether this is by building databases of information about

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the individuals who are interested in their books — what I call “information capital” — or by becoming more active on social media platforms and other spaces where readers hang out. Given that for most of the history of the book business, publishers thought of themselves primarily as B2B businesses, selling books to bookstores and other retailers and leaving them to deal with consumers, this is a fundamental change in the mind-set of publishers.

NKH: In interviews I’ve done with independent authors, some who have chosen to publish with Amazon or other newer outlets, they see the newer Internet-based finding and publishing options better equipped to reach readers with traditional gatekeepers and have described their choices as a more open effort toward “democratization of culture.”

JT: There are many indie authors who are strongly committed to the ethos of self-publishing and would not choose to publish now in any other way: they like the control that it gives them as well as the significantly higher royalty share. Self-publishing suits them and they see themselves as part of a broader cultural movement in which individuals reclaim for themselves the tools to publish their own work and make it available for others to read. But this is not true of all indie authors: there are also many authors who end up self-publishing their books because they don’t have other options. They may have tried to find a traditional publisher but were unsuccessful, and they ended up self-publishing because it was the only realistic option left to them.

There are other authors who choose to publish in both ways, depending on what they are publishing: for example, one author I interviewed was an academic and she publishes her academic books with a good university press, but she has another persona as a thriller writer and she self-publishes her thrillers under a pseudonym: this dual arrangement works very well for her. Self-publishing platforms open up new pathways to publication, and different individuals avail themselves of these pathways for different reasons at different stages of their lives and careers. For some it is a strong commitment to a set of values they passionately believe in, for others it is a pragmatic solution to a problem they face at a particular point in time.

The rapid growth of self-publishing since the early 2000s has led many to speculate that traditional publishers would be “disintermediated” as authors would migrate to self-publishing platforms, but in practice it hasn’t worked out like that. The migration has been both ways: some authors have migrated to self-publishing, but some indie authors have also been happy to be published by mainstream publishers when the opportunity arose.

In Book Wars, I use the example of Andy Weir’s book The Martian, which began life as a blog on Andy’s website and was then self-published by him as a Kindle on Amazon, and then it was snapped up by Random House who turned it into an international bestseller, but there are many other examples of this kind of cross-over from self-publishing to mainstream publishing. What’s happened in practice is that these two worlds, traditional publishing and self-publishing, have developed alongside one another, like two parallel universes, and authors move back and forth depending on what they want to achieve and the options available to them at different points of time.

And it’s important to remember that while self-publishing works well for some authors, especially those who have built up a significant following of readers, it works less well for many others, who find it difficult and costly to try to market and sell

their books. Uploading the book and “publishing” it on a selfpublishing platform is the easy bit; it’s much harder to get anyone to notice that your book is published, let alone to buy it and read it. In the world of self-publishing, the task of getting your book noticed, making it visible, falls heavily on the author, and many indie authors find that the book into which they’ve poured their heart and soul remains largely invisible when it is finally launched into the world.

The rise of self-publishing has created new pathways to publication for authors and has altered the traditional power structures of the publishing world, but we shouldn’t romanticize the world of self-publishing: for most indie authors, getting your book noticed is a huge challenge, and the vast majority of self-published books sell in tiny numbers.

NKH: Another interesting feature of all of this is the selfpublishing opportunities and services, crowdfunding from sites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and social media platforms such as Wattpad, where “readers and writers interact around the shared activity of writing and reading stories,” have opened up new access points for authors.

JT: This is more a comment than a question — and I agree with the comment.

NKH: Amazon opened some brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. — including two here in Minnesota where I live. They were busy stores….until Amazon rather quickly shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores in North America….without much notice or explanation. Was this another experiment or did they consider this a failure? What lessons did they learn in this very limited endeavor? Or was it potentially more of an effort to test the waters, before deciding it wasn’t the direction they wanted to take on?

JT: For Amazon, opening physical bookstores was always viewed as a retail experiment. They wanted to use physical bookstores as a way to test certain retail ideas, like checkoutfree shopping and algorithm-driven displays, to showcase new technology products and to recruit more customers to Amazon Prime; selling books was important but it was never the only, or perhaps even the most important, part of the physical bookstore experiment.

However, with the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon acquired more than 430 physical stores in prime locations where it could experiment with and flesh out its retail methods and ideas on a much larger scale. There was no longer any need for Amazon to open and run an array of boutique physical bookstores in expensive inner-city locations: it could shift its retail experimentation to its Whole Foods stores and its Go convenience stores. I wouldn’t see this so much as a failure but rather as a retail experiment that ran its course and was eclipsed by the decision to acquire Whole Foods, which enabled Amazon to move its retail experimentation into the much larger retail space of food and groceries.

NKH: My last question: What should a “book” be in the 21st century? Created in other ways, integrating audio, video, and other technological experiments? T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land — which allowed people to listen to the story being read, watch it performed, with rich experience and background info failed in the marketplace. In the early days of CD-ROM, these types of multimedia products were created as well, yet they never really succeeded beyond the life of the CD-ROM format. Perhaps the companies weren’t able to sustain needed growth or perhaps the audience just wasn’t there due to all of the freely available multimedia types of storytelling available on the web freely. What are your thoughts?

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JT: As part of the digital revolution in publishing, there has been a great deal of experimentation with the “form” of the book, using digital technologies to try to create new kinds of books in digital media that are no longer constrained by the physical properties of the print-on-paper book. From digital shorts and books-as-apps to online storytelling, a great deal of effort and ingenuity has been invested in these creative endeavours — I devote a couple of chapters of Book Wars to exploring these initiatives.

Some of these initiatives resulted in some exceptionally attractive multi-media products which could only be realized on a screen — The Waste Land app, developed by Touch Press, is a very good example of this kind of creativity. By exploiting the new medium of the app and the technical affordances of the iPad to the full, Touch Press and other organizations were able to breathe new life into texts that had previously existed only on the printed page and were able to create entirely new works that stretched the boundaries of what we have come to think of as “the book.”

But I also show that the act of creation was only part of the story: it is one thing to create new kinds of “books,” it is quite another to do this in a way that is sustainable over time, and if you can’t do this in a sustainable way, then the form will die. This is exactly what happened to most of the new ventures that set out to use digital technologies to re-invent the book: the excitement of creating something new soon gave way to the harsh realities of the marketplace, and many of the organizations that had been set up to pioneer new forms of the book ran out of cash and were closed down. It turned out to be a false dawn.

To the surprise of many people, the digital revolution has not swept away or dissolved the traditional form of the book, understood as a way of organizing textual content in accordance

with certain norms and conventions, even if it has separated this form from a particular medium: it is no longer necessary to embed this form in a print-on-paper book, as the same content can now be delivered to the reader as a digital file or eBook. In my terminology, the eBook is not a new form of the book but rather another format — that is, another way of packaging the book and making it available to readers. The content of the eBook and the printed book is essentially the same, even if the format and the medium of delivery are different. The eBook revolution, such as it was, was much less radical than many people thought it would be.

Looking forward, I suspect that what we’re likely to see in the book publishing sphere is what I would call co-existent cultures of print and digital: the form of the book will not change greatly, but books will be part of a hybrid culture where print and digital co-exist side by side, a culture in which the traditional printed book continues to play an important role in the lives of many people but where eBooks are also a common form of content delivery, especially for certain categories of books like romance and other categories of genre fiction; a culture, moreover, where new worlds are constantly proliferating online, creating spaces where people can create and consume textual and other forms of content digitally, in some cases freely and in other cases at a cost, sometimes in conjunction with the printed word but in many cases without any connection to print, whether to the printed book or to other forms of print culture.

These worlds will continue to exist side by side and to crisscross and overlap in multiple ways, without the proliferation of online spaces leading to the demise of the book as we’ve known it or of the industry that has, for some five hundred years, cultivated the skills, expertise and talent needed to publish books well.

ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Darrell W Gunter President & CEO Gunter Media Group, Inc.

<d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com>

https://guntermediagroup.com

BORN AND LIVED: Born — Atlantic City, NJ and Lived Newark, NJ, Los Angeles, CA, Chicago, IL, South Orange, NJ and Ambler, PA.

EARLY LIFE: Lettered in Football and Track (high jump record 6’6”) in High School. Seton Hall University Captain and MVP, Fencing team, BS Business Administration/Marketing, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, MBA.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: National Sales Director, Dow Jones Financial News Services, SVP Americas Elsevier launched ScienceDirect and Scopus and many other products, EVP/CMO Collexis launched BioMedExperts.com, Expert Profiling, Reviewer Finder, Chief Commercial Officer, American Institute of Physics. Non-Profit Boards, Women’s Venture Fun, US Amateur Boxing Foundation, Global DARE Foundation and Wissahickon Trails. SSP member and mentor to many professionals.

FAMILY: Married to Deb 30 years and Daughter Bailee.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I enjoy time with my family, walks in the nature preserves, and my non-profit board activities.

FAVORITE BOOKS: The Bible, Sun Tzu Art of War, any Tom Clancy book, Transforming Scholarly Research with Blockchain Technologies and AI

PET PEEVES: Meetings with no agenda, old technology and cold food.

PHILOSOPHY: If you try to learn a thousand techniques, you can’t learn one technique. If you can learn one technique, you can learn a thousand techniques.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: My mom saw me receive the Seton Hall University Library Community Award.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: Publish a great novel!

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: The scholarly publishing industry will begin the evolution from the current legacy systems from the initial launch of the digital transformation to the new technologies such as semantic search, AI and Blockchain. Expanding data and data sets will create new products, services, and opportunities. The productivity tools for authors will allow them to conduct research more efficiently and effectively.

Stuart RF King Research Culture Manager

eLife

Cambridge, UK

<s.king@elifesciences.org>

EARLY LIFE: I grew up in the South East of England in a former port town on the River Thames. For university, I essentially moved “upriver” to Oxford where I studied Biological Sciences. After three years in the “City of Dreaming Spires,” I moved back east to the self-styled “fine city” of Norwich. There I did a PhD at the John Innes Centre and Sainsbury Laboratory. Always keenly interested in gardening, at university I’d become fascinated with how plants protect themselves from pests and disease. As such, for my

PhD, I researched how Late Blight — the cause of the Irish Potato Famine and a major pathogen of potato crops today — subverts the plant immune system to infect its hosts.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Following completing my PhD in 2013, I moved to Cambridge to start a role at eLife. Initially I worked as an editor in eLife’s Features team, where on a weekly basis I commissioned, wrote and edited content for a scientifically interested general audience. In time, I took on additional responsibilities for eLife’s social media presence too and in 2019, I took over as eLife’s representative on the Steering Committee for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). In 2020, in the midst of UK lockdowns and the switch to working from home, I started my current role as Research Culture Manager. This role sees me help eLife to deliver on its ambitious agenda to improve how research is practised, communicated and assessed, and to promote openness, integrity, and equity, diversity and inclusion in research.

WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us is how difficult it can be to predict the future. Five years ago, I feel no one would have foretold the shifts — in particular in science publishing — that have happened in the wake of COVID-19. I also believe that — given scholarly publishing’s reputation for being an industry that’s “set in its ways” — the pace of those changes in response to urgent needs would have also been a pleasant surprise. As such, while I do not know how much closer five years will bring us to the more open and equitable vision of the future that many of us are working toward, I hope that looking back we’ll be pleased with our progress.

Elliott Lumb Founder CEO PeerRef <elliott@peerref.com>

www.peerref.com

BORN AND LIVED: London, UK

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: In 2018, Elliott completed a PhD in medicinal chemistry at Monash University and the University of Nottingham. Following this, he held several roles at the publisher, Frontiers. He managed a team of commissioning specialists and then moved to the Strategy and Planning team. Elliott launched PeerRef in 2021.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Norwegian Wood by Murakami; Stoner by John Williams; Fooled by Randomness, Taleb.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: The vast majority of scholarly output will be open access and approximately 50% of research articles will be posted as preprints. The industry will be adopting open peer review and the use of journal-independent peer review platforms. The industry will be facing the challenge of fake research articles generated by AI.

Ben Mudrak Senior Product Manager ChemRxiv

1155 Sixteenth Street, NW Washington, DC 20036

Phone: (202) 805-5713

<curator@chemrxiv.org>

https://chemrxiv.org/

BORN AND LIVED: United States

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: In addition to my work with ChemRxiv, I oversee a portfolio of researcher resources and services at the American Chemical Society in the Publications division. Prior to my time at ACS, I worked at Research Square, where I held roles in author education and business development. I hold a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology from Duke University.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: Scholarly publishing moves slowly but in five years we’ll see a whole new level of author focus, as open access publishing continues to grow. I also expect acceleration in the trend of interconnected metadata and systems, if only to keep up with the growing research output.

Michael Parkin Data Scientist, Content

EMBL-EBI

Hinxton, Cambridgeshire UK

Phone: +44 (0)1223 494436

<parkinm@ebi.ac.uk>

https://europepmc.org/

BORN AND LIVED: July 1989, Manchester, UK

IN MY SPARE TIME: I very much enjoy playing racket sports, long weekend walks in the Cambridgeshire countryside, and playing acoustic guitar.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Working alongside collegues to develop the pipelines at Europe PMC to index the full text of COVID-19 preprints. This kept me nice and busy working from home during the early months of the pandemic, and personally felt like a very worthwhile contribution.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: With the ever-increasing volume of life science publications, and proliferation of new venues and models for disseminating research findings, I see the role of indexers such as Europe PMC becoming increasingly important as a discovery tool. The challenge we face is to be adaptable, both strategically and technically, to this shifting publishing landscape in order to best serve our user communities.

Daniela Saderi, Ph.D.

Co-founder and Director of PREreview

PREreview / fiscally sponsored by Code for Science & Society

Code for Science and Society

3439 SE Hawthorne Blvd. No. 247 Portland, OR 97214 US

<daniela@prereview.org>

<contact@prereview.org>

https://prereview.org

BORN AND LIVED: Born and raised in Oristano, Italy. Currently living in Portland, OR, USA.

EARLY LIFE: I was born and raised in a small town in Sardinia, a beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea. Sardinia is a magical place, where ancient history and traditions blend with a unique natural beauty that attracts people from all over the world. I grew up taking a lot of what Sardinia had to offer for granted, and I now dream about going back and experiencing it from a more mature lens together with my family.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: My grandparents from my dad’s side immigrated to Canada to work in the coal mine business, hoping for a future outside farming and shepherding. Education was not

an option for them, but they understood its importance and worked hard to make sure that their grandchildrens had the opportunity to get it. I was the first person in my family to obtain a college degree and the first woman in my family to have a job outside of the house and family duties. My interest in science and fascination for the brain led me to continue my studies and obtain a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. During my Ph.D. at Oregon Health & Science University I discovered the world of open scholarship, a global movement driven by passionate professionals determined to make science and scholarship a better place. In my last year as a student I became a Mozilla Fellow for Science 2018-2019, which allowed me to explore what it would be like to live the academic path and fully dedicate my efforts to developing and growing PREreview — which until then was just a side project. One week after I graduated in March 2019 I officially became the Director of PREreview, leading alongside wonderful women Dr. Sam Hindle and Dr. Monica Granados.

FAMILY: Wife to a wonderful man who is dedicating his life to make it possible to support the planet on renewable energy, proud mom of an almost 3yo daughter and soon-to-be mom of a baby boy. Also, mom to two beautiful lap cats!

IN MY SPARE TIME: What spare time? If I had it, I’d be rock climbing, reading for pleasure, and hosting parties with friends and family giving everyone a taste of my homeland’s cuisine!

FAVORITE BOOKS: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, Siddartha by Herman Hesse, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

PET PEEVES: Condescending tones of hardware store employees when I’m looking for a piece of equipment they assume is for my husband.

PHILOSOPHY: Eternal learner striving for equity

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Founding PREreview.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: I hope to have contributed significantly to a more equitable and open landscape of knowledge production and dissemination.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: When I look at the world today I see opportunities to use collective intelligence in ways never possible before. To me, opening up science goes beyond freeing access to research outputs and implementing policies that prioritize and reward sharing of data and analyses. It means rethinking the whole modus operandi of research production, dissemination, and evaluation through the lens of equity and inclusive participation.

Science shouldn’t have only white male gatekeepers. I want to see traditional definitions of expertise that qualify a researcher to be an editor, a reviewer, a mentor challenged from an equity perspective, with a clear plan for the inclusion and empowerment of researchers who have been systematically excluded.

Science should be more collaborative. I want to see opportunities for researchers to learn from one another in ways that de-emphasise vertical power dynamics in favor of peer-to-peer support.

Science should be open to anyone with a good idea. I want to see experts who are not affiliated with the academy presented with the opportunity to engage in research evaluation and problem solving. Science should be accessible to the public. I want to see journalists access the expertise they need, in order to share with the world accurate summaries of the latest research.

For these changes to happen, we must make a concerted effort to both dismantle the current biases and build a new cultural ethos around research dissemination and evaluation.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

ChemRxiv

1155 Sixteenth Street NW Washington, DC 20036 https://chemrxiv.org/

AFFILIATED COMPANIES: ChemRxiv is jointly owned and operated by the American Chemical Society, The Chemical Society of Japane, the Chinese Chemical Society, the German Chemical Society (GDCh), and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Posting preprints.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Researchers in chemistry and related fields.

eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

Westbrook Centre, Milton Road Cambridge CB4 1YG UK https://elifesciences.org/ https://sciety.org/

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: eLife open-access journal and Sciety preprint-curation platform.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Researchers, science-interested public, academic societies and preprint-reviewing organisations

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: ~50

NUMBER OF JOURNALS PUBLISHED ANNUALLY (PRINT, ELECTRONIC, OPEN ACCESS, ETC.): 1

TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS ON YOUR BACKLIST (PRINT, ELECTRONIC, ETC.): 0

TOTAL NUMBER OF JOURNALS CURRENTLY PUBLISHED: 1

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: eLife was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a workshop held in 2010 at the Janelia Farm Research Campus.

Set up as a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open-access, scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences, eLife has a history of innovating and experimenting with peer review — including championing consultative review and transparent reporting of peer reviews.

eLife welcomed the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation as an additional funder-partner in 2017, and introduced a publication fee in the same year.

In October 2022, eLife announced that at the end of January 2023 it would eliminate “accept/reject” decisions after peer review and instead focus on preprint review and assessment. For all preprints peer-reviewed by eLife, reviewers and editors will prepare a public assessment of the work to accompany the preprint and transform it into a Reviewed Preprint.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS? eLife is a non-profit organisation inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Our mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. We have worked on several significant opensource technologies over the last 10 years, and are working today on building the “publish, review, curate” ecosystem of the future.

EMBL-EBI

Wellcome Genome Campus

Hinxton, Cambridgeshire

CB10 1SD UK

Phone: +44 (0) 1223 494118

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Data resources and data analysis tools for supporting life science research

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Researchers, Students, General public

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: ~850

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBLEBI) is an Intergovernmental Organization which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. EMBL-EBI was established in 1992, and is situated on Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK. One of the roles of the EMBL-EBI is to index and maintain biological data in a set of databases, one of which is Europe PMC, launched in 2007, which provides free access to life science research articles, including peer reviewed full text articles and abstracts, and preprints.

PeerRef

www.peerref.com

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: PeerRef is a journal-independent open peer review platform. It helps researchers verify and improve research by organising peer review of preprints and publishing peer review reports. It also provides journal editors with verified research that can be published immediately.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Academic researchers in any field, and open access publishers.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 1 full-time / 3 team members

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: PeerRef launched in 2021, it is a journalindependent open peer review platform. We help researchers to verify, improve and expand research by organising peer review for their preprints. We are reducing the barriers to accessing peer review, using tools to select referees, and publishing signed peer review reports on our platform. This new concept, a single point of peer review, will provide publishers with verified preprints. Editors can assess these for journal fit and then publish immediately. This will accelerate research by reducing peer review at multiple journals. PeerRef is increasing trust in research with open peer review and revolutionising the publishing process by creating a single point of peer review.

PREreview

Code for Science and Society

3439 SE Hawthorne Boulevard

No. 247,Portland, OR 97214

https://prereview.org

AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science and Society

OFFICERS: Leadership team: Dr. Daniela Saderi (Director), Dr. Monica Granados and Dr. Samantha Hindle.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: PREreview offers a free, opensource review platform for anyone with an ORCID iD to constructively contribute to the scholarly evaluation of preprints. We also build a community of belonging by providing equity-focused training in peer review and opportunities for researchers from all over the world to come together and collaborate on the open review of preprints.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Our primary target audiences are early-career researchers and researchers who have been traditionally marginalized in scholarly communication and academic spaces.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 3 FTs, 1PT.

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: PREreview’s mission is to bring more equity and transparency to scholarly peer review by supporting and empowering communities of researchers, particularly those at early stages of their career and historically excluded, to review preprints in a process that is rewarding to them. PREreview was founded in 2018 by Dr. Daniela Saderi and Dr. Samantha Hindle, soon joined by Dr. Monica Granados. We are fiscally sponsored by the 501(c)(3) Code for Science and Society, and are supported primarily via grant funding and partnership contracts with like-minded organizations.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS? We are a small organization operated by a small team but we do a lot. If you are interested in partnering with us and/or supporting our work please get in touch with us by emailing us at contact@prereview.org. We also accept donations and sponsorship which can help us support our operations and better serve all communities around the world.

Follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon: @prereview@ mas.to) and stay connected via our Newsletter

MAIN PREMISE: Preprints — versions of scholarly manuscripts that are freely published online by the authors before journal publication — offer the unprecedented opportunity to question and reform the way the research community engages with the evaluation of each other’s work. Traditional peer review is an opaque, biased, and antiquated process that for too long has remained in the hands of a few, for-profit publishers that have used it to effectively control the fate of knowledge production and dissemination for centuries. Some have (understandably) argued that peer review is an unfixable failure that cannot be repaired. At PREreview we see a way forward, an alternative future for peer review that centers around openness, collaboration, and equity. In this short article we summarize our approach towards making that vision a reality.

Back Talk continued from page 68

to resources they were afraid they would have to pay for. And once again, access to R4L was important and had to be realized. We were able to gain cost-free access for them more recently to JSTOR (an initial challenge to overcome there was that AUK doesn’t operate with IP address access). In this case, the American-style administration has been very ready to take advantage of the availability we could help them to identify, but they had begun in a place still — to me — surprisingly innocent of the possibilities. The most recent questions from Kyiv have to do with learning management platforms that can aggregate content their faculty think may be useful. They are feeling their way as ASU’s technology experts help them make choices.

AUK hopes, of course, to be able to begin face-to-face work before too much longer, but the possibility is in the hands of the gods of war and peace at this point. My experience with these two institutions has shown me possibilities (access to content), ordinary difficulties (last mile problems), and also the extra stress and tension put on education and research — systems we rightly think of as critical to a culture’s success — by the disruption and anxiety of warfare. As you may imagine, I will continue paying close attention.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Back Talk — Bridges Over Troubled Waters: Ukraine Reprise

Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Director, Offline Internet Consortium) <aokerson@gmail.com>

In the course of the past year, we’ve all been getting an education we hadn’t expected or wanted about what it’s like to keep on with normal life in the midst of wartime. Americans watch the Ukrainian conflict from afar with enough unsettled feelings, but I’ve had additional reasons to be engaged and attentive. In an earlier Back Talk posting, I described a little of the personal impact of the war on my family whom I’ve visited over the years, mainly in Kyiv. This time, I thought I’d report a little of what I’ve learned over the past year about the world of science and education there.

When the war in Ukraine broke out in February 2022, academic and research sympathy from around the world was quick to manifest itself. In particular, our colleagues at Research4Life, with whom I’ve worked since its early days (2003), took immediate notice. R4L makes quality science journals and books available to researchers in developing nations either at low cost or at no cost, depending on their country’s ranking for economic development according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Ukraine, as a nation beginning to be fairly successful in making its transition from Soviet domination, was in the low cost tier. Given the circumstances of wartime, R4L moved quickly to shift Ukraine into the no cost tier (until such time as....), a most welcome step.

My cousin Jaroslava is my closest relative (in the world), and she is a senior maxillofacial surgeon and professor of surgery at the largest medical school and medical center in Kyiv and Ukraine. She has also been a consultant and has done surgery in several major European countries, with a good sense of how the world of medical practice and science works. While she was with us in the U.S. last year, she was usually up in the middle of the night teaching Zoom classes to her medical students. She’s back in Kyiv now, listening to air raid warnings in her flat in the center of the city, because her dean issued an ultimatum to all faculty who had gone abroad, or simply to safer districts, when war broke out. Come back to your jobs by mid-summer or totally

lose your jobs and pensions.

I have some opinions about that dean’s edict, but I also understand that if a country is attempting to run a serious medical school to train doctors in wartime, there are reasons to maintain as much of a normal operation as possible, terrifying as it may be to do so.

When Slava was in the U.S. for the several months’ respite from war last year (see the previous Back Talk column, June 2022, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”), I told her of the advantages of R4L and was struck to learn that she knew almost nothing of them. In her university before and early into the war, access to research articles was something people expected to pay for at the price-per-article or subscription level, which put the content out of reach for medical school researchers. (She and two colleagues also pooled their money to pay a “reduced” APC fee to publish one of their articles, which used up their entire content budget for the year.) The still somewhat Sovietstyle leadership bureaucracy at that institution appeared to offer no support in reaching out for what was — to our western eyes — either cheaply or freely available. I don’t have good insight into why this was — was even “cheap” too expensive? Were these institutions too bureaucratized and authoritarian? I encouraged her to press the authorities to take advantage of this uniquely important resource, and she has since reported some progress. Later this spring, I’ll be speaking via Zoom at a conference my cousin is organizing for her surgical colleagues to raise awareness and improve usage of vital research and clinical resources.

My lesson from that discovery is that her rather advanced university nonetheless has the classic “last mile” problem. Simply making content available doesn’t solve all the problems. Institutions must take advantage of the opportunity, and even then faculty and researchers need awareness, encouragement, training, and experience before they can really make the riches of this and other donated resources part of their workflow.

Meanwhile, colleagues at Arizona State University asked me to consult with the librarian — the one and only librarian — of the brand new American University Kyiv (AUK) that ASU supports (“powered by ASU” is their slogan) and that began teaching in the fall of 2022, hoping to move soon to their small campus in a renovated building in the center of Kyiv. AUK has a small cohort of its first students, led by a rector who is Ukrainian with excellent recent academic leadership and research experience in a U.S. Research I university, and a faculty/staff that expected to be working together in a building in Ukraine’s capital city. Instead they began their first classes, all remotely, not in spring 2022 as expected, but later last fall. I’m glad to use my experience and knowledge of the scientific publishing world, of the world of international cooperation, and of course of Ukraine, to whatever advantage is possible.

The opening approaches from these Ukrainian colleagues were initially about getting someone to help them gain access continued on page 67

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