Transcript: A Common Lot: Publishers & Researchers

A Common Lot & A Lot in Common

with

•Kathryn Sharples, John Wiley & Sons
•Pablo Palmeiro, Editage/Cactus Communications
•Ros Pyne, Springer Nature

For podcast release Monday, March 23, 2020

KENNEALLY: Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. I’m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book.

Earlier this month, London Book Fair organizers announced cancellation of the 2020 program schedule for March 10-12. The news was disappointing, of course, though not unexpected at a time when the world is confronting the pandemic spread of the COVID-19 corona virus.

At CCC, we recognize the difficulty in making the decision not to go ahead with this year’s London Book Fair given global health concerns. We also believe in the strength of the content we had prepared to present as well as the importance of information sharing for the publishing community.

Throughout March, CCC is delivering a series of virtual programming planned for London Book Fair presentations. For a complete schedule, please visit copyright.com/lbf2020

This is a podcast edition for “A Common Lot and Lot in Common,” originally scheduled for the second day of London Book Fair 2020.

Researchers and publishers have much in common. Dr. Milka Kostic recently told the Scholarly Kitchen blog that both “want to make a difference – they want to advance human health and wellbeing, the health of our planet, and of our society.”

Spurred by the movement toward Open Access and Open Science, transformative agreements prescribe educational programs on open access publishing for scholars. On their own and with third-party vendors, publishers also provide editorial assistance, social media services and career development guidance.

Panelists Kathryn Sharples of Wiley, Pablo Palmeiro at Editage, and Ros Pyne with Springer Nature share with me how scholarly publishers have taken up a range of new approaches to strengthen relationships with researchers.

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KENNEALLY: Kathryn Sharples is senior director for open access at Wiley. Kathryn has worked in a variety of editorial roles across a number of physical sciences subject disciplines, and now she leads on Wiley’s global open access policy and growth strategies. Kathryn Sharples has also worked with colleagues on the early development and introduction of data sharing policies across the Wiley journal portfolio. Kathryn Sharples, welcome to the program.

SHARPLES: Hi, Chris, it’s great to be here with you.

KENNEALLY: We are talking about the movement toward open access and open science, and how it is shaping and changing and indeed, possibly strengthening the relationship that publishers like Wiley have with the researchers who are their contributors. I thought we might start, Kathryn, because you are senior director for open access, by sharing with us – or asking you to share with us how open access is an important piece of this. How is the movement towards open access driving that change and that new engagement with authors?

SHARPLES: Well, I think at Wiley we like to talk and to think about the researcher as our north star. Open access really puts the researcher and the work of the researcher at the center of everything. By choosing to publish and to make their work open access, a researcher is getting greater visibility and greater usage of their research, which understandably sometimes they’ve spent months or even years working on. So choosing the open access publishing option gives them a greater global visibility for the work that they’ve spent time on, and that’s really important to us.

KENNEALLY: And those choices, though, shape how the rest of the workflow happens for the authors. They may choose open access, but then this opens up a further range of choices. It’s part of Wiley’s mantra, I think, that publishing for contributors, for researchers should be a rewarding experience, not a frustrating one.

SHARPLES: That’s absolutely right, and Wiley, like many other publishers, is doing a huge amount of work to try to take as much of the pain out of the publishing experience for our authors and researchers. So from an open access perspective, we know that sometimes it can be confusing to understand the different licenses that are available for open access publishing, the different types of CC BY or copyright – sorry, the different types of licenses, the different types of creative commons by attribution licenses. It can be confusing to understand the policies that journals have in place with regards to licensing. It can be confusing to understand or difficult to understand the policies that funders mandate in terms of licensing. So we’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of effort trying to make that particular part of the publishing process as streamlined and as easy for authors to understand as possible.

So our author services system works really successfully to identify the insurance where an author resides, and to match the mandate – sorry (coughs) (inaudible), excuse me. Our author services infrastructure has been developed in order to take a lot of the pain out of that previously quite complicated process, and to match institutions and mandates with authors, and to make sure they are offered the most appropriate license for that piece of work.

KENNEALLY: It’s important for all of us to remember that at university they teach those researchers all sorts of things about the physical sciences, about life sciences, and the variety of other subjects, but they don’t necessarily teach about publishing. What is changing in this new environment of open access and open science is that these authors are really having to learn about publishing. You’re talking about the ways that Wiley helps to educate them, tries to take out of some of the pain from the process. But indeed, some of the transformative agreements that Wiley is entering into, particularly in Germany with Projekt DEAL, these requires various seminars and workshops and other programs where Wiley publishers, editors, and other staff are educating the researchers who will be benefitting from that deal. This is an interesting new part of the job.

SHARPLES: That’s a really good point, Chris, and I’m glad that you brought it up. Our agreement with Projekt DEAL was a real landmark agreement for us last year. It’s an agreement whereby researchers in Germany are able to publish open access without needing to go in search of the funds to cover it, their article publication charges. And as you mentioned, a significant element of our agreement with Projekt DEAL has been to develop and to deliver a series of workshops at institutions across Germany over the past few months, and continuing throughout the course of this year and beyond. And those workshops are very much focused on helping authors to understand the publishing process, to see under the hood, if you like, or see under the bonnet of the publishing process, and to understand the benefits that publishing open access can bring to them and their research in terms of visibility, and in terms, potentially, of the reuse of their work by others in order to expedite future research.

KENNEALLY: And are these workshops also an opportunity for Wiley to learn about researchers and what they are looking for from you?

SHARPLES: Yeah, they’re absolutely a fantastic opportunity for us to do that. So it’s very much a two-way street. We’re helping researchers to understand publishing process, to make the best of the publishing process, and to understand the benefits of open access whilst we are also taking the opportunity to understand some of the pain points that they experience, to understand some of their frustrations, and to use that learning, to use that feedback to help us develop new processes and new systems in order to help them more in the future.

KENNEALLY: And one of these new approaches at Wiley is the so-called free formatting. Tell me what that is.

SHARPLES: Free formatting is a sort of a – as it sort of does what it says on the tin, it’s format-free approach to the submission of articles. We know, and we have known for some time, as many of our fellow publishers have experienced, that one of the big pain points for authors can be the article preparation and the submission process. If journals have very rigid or very specific guidelines for the submission of articles, if they request very particular types of formatting and they want figures to be supplied separately, references to be listed in a very specific way, that can be very time consuming for authors. And if you have spent a lot of time preparing to submit to a journal that has very specific guidelines and then you find that your article, unfortunately, hasn’t been accepted, and you have to start the submission and the review process all over again, it can be incredibly frustrating if you have to then format in an entirely different way for the next journal that you choose to submit to. So free format removes that particular barrier and allows the author to submit their article for review in any format that they choose.

KENNEALLY: And beyond the workshops associated with the Projekt DEAL agreement, Wiley has also conducted early career researchers workshops around North America, Europe, and even Beijing. Share with us what you’ve learned from those sessions. I suppose on the one hand you’re hearing about what these early career researchers are hoping for, what they’re excited about, but you also hear about what makes them a little bit anxious.

SHARPLES: Yeah, but I can’t take the credit for the incredible work that my colleagues have done and continue to do around the development and delivery of early career experience workshops. But as I referenced earlier with regards to DEAL, those sessions are really all about trying to understand the pressures and the pain points that postdoctoral researchers, who are maybe only four to five years post their Ph.D., the pressures that they experience is the challenges and frustrations that they have when it comes to publishing, and they can range from frustration at understanding the best journal or understanding how to find the best possible journal to submit their article to. They can range from that through to the frustrations around the preparation of the article, which links back to the free format piece that we’ve just been discussing. Understanding the review process can be a black box for early career researchers. And then knowing how best to, and getting help with, the sharing and promotion of your work, once you’ve spent all that time producing your article, getting the feedback or finding it, and having it accepted by a journal, understanding best how to shout about it and get the message of your work out there and out there as widely as possible.

KENNEALLY: As you say, shouting about the work is something that particularly early career researchers are probably very keen to do. One of the ways they can do that now is with these video abstracts that your partner, Editage, helps to create for them. Tell us what those are.

SHARPLES: Video abstracts are, again, something that sort of does what it says on the tin. They allow authors to produce or to outsource the production of little bite size videos to explain the content and the concept of their article for a broader, possibly less scientifically literate audience. They’re really useful in generating interest, awareness, and reach for an individual article. We’ve seen some really nice upticks in article usage for the authors who have chosen to develop video abstracts.

KENNEALLY: I would imagine, Kathryn Sharples at Wiley, that the relationship with authors has always been an important one, but through these workshops, through these new services that you offer, you must see more clearly than ever what kind of shared mission each of the two stakeholders has in the whole scholarly ecosystem.

SHARPLES: Yeah, Chris, I think it’s really fair to say that our mission at Wiley is to ensure that the work that we publish reaches the widest possible audience, and that the authors who have invested the time, the hours, the blood, sweat, and tears and energy in generating and working on their research and their resultant research articles get the exposure, the visibility, and the widest possible dissemination. So our goals in that respect are extremely closely aligned.

KENNEALLY: Kathryn Sharples, senior director for open access at Wiley, thanks for joining me today on the program, and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s virtual book fair.

SHARPLES: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s been great talking to you.

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KENNEALLY: Pablo Palmeiro is vice president, publisher and society partnerships, with Editage, a division of Cactus Communications. Editage provides English-language editing and author support services to the academic and scholarly communities worldwide and has helped more than 47,000 authors and researchers in 100 countries to produce publication-ready documents. Pablo is a native Spanish speaker based in Amsterdam. He oversees relationships with many publishing partners in Europe, the US, and Latin America. Pablo Palmeiro, welcome to the program.

PALMEIRO: Hello, Chris. Thanks for inviting me.

KENNEALLY: We’re looking forward to discussing with you how Editage provides the kind of services to authors and publishers that are really facilitating more success for the authors and perhaps a higher quality of publication for the publishers. Tell us briefly about those services.

PALMEIRO: Yes, so basically at Editage, we understand the author very well, and basically we’ve been working with authors, societies, and publishers for the last 12 – 15 years, depending on the market. And it’s all been about developing a portfolio of pre- and post-publication services.

Regarding the services, you will see always technology around it as an overarching layer. And regarding pre-publication, you can think about language editing, which is the most demanded and popular, especially among authors in Asia, but also in Europe and the US. And post-publication services – because the journey is not just finishing with your article getting published. I think the key priority for authors is dissemination, creating impact, and of course, career advancement. For that, they need to be able to showcase their research, and they also expect their published journals to showcase their research for them.

KENNEALLY: It’s very interesting how dynamic the publishing space has been over the last 10 years, much of it influenced by the open access movement and as well the globalization of research and the globalization of publications for that research. You referred to authors in Asia. Tell us a bit more about that particular group and the kinds of services that they come to Editage for.

PALMEIRO: Yes. So the globalization of research is something that is here to stay and is something that all publishers and societies saw coming early in advance. That changed and that helped a lot this portfolio of services growing and developing. These are researchers from China, Korea, Japan, Latin America, even Africa that are producing high quality of research, right? That’s not a discussion anymore. It’s about quantity and quality.

Now, they have their own challenges, and their own challenges can be around communicating that research post-publication, republication getting support, because I would say 90% or plus 90% of the research is published in English. So long story short, most of, for instance, Asian authors will be coming and looking for advice and help with the language editing of the paper so that it’s ready for publication, being able to understand reviewer comments. These are the pre-publication type of portfolio that we at Editage have been working extensively for the last years, and publishers are now understanding – now more than ever are understanding the author, reviewer, and editor pain points and recognizing the value these services have in their own workflows, supporting their own author communities.

KENNEALLY: What’s interesting about it is you’re responding to the author’s expectations and needs. And what is necessary, and you briefly alluded to it, is the publishers have to have an infrastructure in place. Tell us about that. What is necessary on the publisher end for success with these kinds of services?

PALMEIRO: Well, yeah, that’s a great question and a great comment. That’s actually what I find in my role fascinating, that every publisher has a different vision, mission, different resources at hand and infrastructure set up. So not every solution is the same for every publisher or society, and that’s actually my key role and the key thing we believe at Editage we’ve been doing really well – collaborating with many publishers and societies. We understand, we adapt to them. We embed our services in the way and the pricing, the portfolio type of services that’s going to be helping that specific publisher, society, or even journal. And that’s actually – basically, I believe has been the recipe for success within Editage and the same within my role in the last two or three years.

KENNEALLY: It’s a challenge on the technology side, but I imagine there’s also a mindset that publishers need to adopt.

PALMEIRO: Of course, yes. They need a mindset. They need to understand that – I always say that every player within the scholarly publishing community needs to understand what they are very good at and where they could receive help from. It applies to authors, reviewers, editors, editorial services and publication promotion companies like Editage, publishers, societies, and journals specific. That’s where I feel they have been recognizing leading publishers and they have been recognizing in the last three, five years that they can really tap into Editage or any other editorial service company with the credibility and the recognition in the market to access these services and support their own author communities.

KENNEALLY: And the relationship of author and publisher is an evolving one. The expectations that authors have are changing very rapidly. How have you seen the publisher/author relationship change over the last three years in your work at Editage?

PALMEIRO: Well, now knowledge is global. Awareness is global. Authors are expecting publishers to go the extra mile for them, the same way journals are expecting to publish higher and higher quality and novelty of content. So I think it’s a mutually demanding relation where both of them have to up their game – as simple as that.

KENNEALLY: At Editage, you’ve created a business around that need on the publisher end as well as the author end. But it’s true as well, isn’t it, Pablo, that there are others out there who are also taking advantage of this opportunity, but they’re taking advantage of it in a predatory way? In fact, there are a number of predatory author services out there that you want to tell us about. And I guess to coin a phrase, it’s the difference between Editage and preditage.

PALMEIRO: Yes. That was a funny way of using the wording. Yes, it’s exactly like that. There’s no difference to any other industry. In every industry, you have serious, leading, and employee or society-committed companies and some others that are just trying to take shortcuts or cut corners. I’m not saying Editage is the only company. I would say within the editorial services and post-publication market, you will find between three and seven, you could say, serious, respected, and committed companies delivering quality both to authors or to the publishers and societies. But you also find a lot of predatory vendors.

The same way you have predatory journals, the same way you can have predatory conferences, you also have predatory vendors – vendors leveraging on their publishers’ friends through Google advertising or misleading Google advertising, newsletters, developing services they have not been authorized to do, or actually what is most concerning to me is overpromising and underdelivering – raising expectations for things that are actually not within the scope or should not be within the scope of the services you offer.

KENNEALLY: In a world that is full of these predatory services, as you describe them, Pablo, how is it possible for authors to distinguish the real from the fake? I suppose one way would be to go directly to their own publication’s website and work through the particular publisher who may be contracting with you. They may be also susceptible, though, to solicitations online and in emails and so forth that may come to them. So how do they keep the two separate? How do they know who’s predatory, who’s not?

PALMEIRO: Yes, very, very good point. First of all, not all authors are the same. Not all markets are the same. So you could – or we should segment this by market. We should also segment this dividing among senior researchers and maybe early-career researchers. Senior researchers, they have the experience. They’ve been publishing, they’ve been leading groups. They know who to tap into, which services work, which services are overpromising.

Now, early-career researchers may not have the experience, but they are technology-savvy. They can go online. They can look at reputation. They can look into brands that are aspirational. And yes, there’s always a risk of trying a service for the first time and not working.

But the key thing for publishers, for societies, for vendors – let’s say, like Editage – and the scholarly publishing industry in general is the stickiness of the author – or you could say the repeat rate. So yes, you can cut corners, but that’s not really going to deliver for you as an editorial or post-publication company in the long term. Because what you want is these authors to stay within your author community of your journal – come back, resubmit, reuse your services, stay connected to you as a publisher, a journal, a society, or as a company like Editage.

KENNEALLY: And finally, Pablo Palmeiro at Editage, tell us about something that goes beyond technology – these kinds of services you’re talking about, human beings with aspirations and ambitions, there’s a requirement for a human touch here, too, I would imagine.

PALMEIRO: Absolutely, yes. And that’s where I believe that technology can always catch up. Technology can always try to develop and deliver services that kind of look like what you could deliver from the human point of view.

But I’ll give you an example – as a publisher, you need your customer support. You need your online help for answering questions. You need the human subject matter expert that is really going to be looking into the paper, into the manuscript, thinking how to improve the language or how to showcase that paper, that manuscript, accepted manuscript to the journal public or to a network of experts. And if you really want to meet the price point, if you really want to deliver quality, you must rely on the human touch, at least for now.

KENNEALLY: Pablo Palmeiro, vice president, publisher and society partnerships, with Editage, a division of Cactus Communications, thanks for joining me today on the program and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s virtual book fair.

PALMEIRO: Thank you very much, Chris, for inviting me, and I wish you all a great day.

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KENNEALLY: Ros Pyne is director, open access books, at Springer Nature. She started her career as a journals publishing editor at Palgrave MacMillan and has since worked at Nature Publishing Group and Springer Nature in project management, policy, and strategy roles with a focus on open access. She sits on the Universities UK OA Monographs group and is co-author of several reports on open access. Ros Pyne, welcome to the program.

PYNE: Hi, Chris. Thanks so much for having me on.

KENNEALLY: We want to talk to you about this very dynamic relationship of publishers and authors in the world of open access. It’s good to chat with you, because in 2012, Springer Nature became one of the first open access book publishers. And just last year, you conducted a survey of scholarly authors to share their reviews on the quality and impact of OA books. A white paper that Springer Nature published last year on the future of open access books details those survey findings.

I suppose I should start, Ros Pyne, by asking you, why did Springer Nature conduct this survey in the first place? What were you hoping to achieve?

PYNE: Well, the answer in some ways is very simple. We wanted to understand what the community of scholars that write books think about open access for books. Stepping back a bit, as an academic publisher, our role is to validate and communicate scholarly research. And understanding what our authors think about scholarly communications and about developments such as open access helps us to do our job better and ensure we’re best serving the community.

In particular for the open access book survey, we knew that a lot of research and author surveys had been conducted into OA for scholarly journals, but there had never been a survey dedicated to understanding the views of book authors on OA for books. It might sound obvious, but books are quite different from scholarly journals. They are much more important to the humanities and social sciences communities. We see very different usage trends, with the usage for books continuing for many years after publication. Books continue to sell in print. Ebooks are on the rise, but we haven’t seen that almost complete flip that we’ve seen on the journals side. And alongside that, while OA is now very well established for journals, it’s still in relative infancy for books. So this is really a case of checking in, validating what we thought was the case about authors, making sure we’re relying on hard data rather than anecdotes or received understanding, so that we had a great basis on which to continue the development of our publishing programs.

KENNEALLY: Tell us a bit about some of the particular learnings you’ve received from this survey. I suppose we could start with this notion of the benefits of open access for book authors as well as their possible misconceptions about it.

PYNE: We found there was work to be done to reduce skepticism and concerns about OA books. For example, some authors worried about quality. Some worried about whether print would still be available. And we also found that we could do much more to communicate the benefits, such as the increased reach of OA books. I think there was a perception amongst authors that those benefits existed and that that was a good reason to choose OA. So if we could really confirm that point, we could help make more authors make that choice.

I should note we actually started out – in order to communicate those benefits, we started out by working out what those benefits were. So we’d earlier done some work which showed that OA books had significant usage and citation and alt metric benefits compared to non-OA books. We’re actually in the process of wrapping up a follow-up study which looks at how OA affects where books are downloaded, so the geographic usage.

We really want everything that we’re communicating that goes out to authors also to be based in good research. Once we’ve got that research, we’re using a wide variety of channels to help communicate the benefits of open access. Some of the things we’ve done recently include releasing two videos which introduce our OA books program, but also, I think, just introduce the idea of OA for books and some of those key concepts. We released a blog last year explaining Creative Commons licenses. I think we have to remember that some of these things which are now pretty standard in the journals world might still be new to authors who are primarily focused on writing books, so particularly looking at the humanities. And then for this year’s Academic Book Week here in the UK, we’ve just released author testimonials talking about some OA books on environmental topics. I think that can be a really powerful way of communicating the benefits to hear from your peers, and we’ve had a really positive response to that on social media.

Finally, I would say our book editors are one of our greatest assets. So we have several hundred editors all around the world. We aim to ensure they’re all well informed about open access so they can go out and talk to potential authors. And personal relationships can, of course, be hugely powerful in helping to change attitudes.

KENNEALLY: You mentioned the book editors, and I was going to ask you, Ros Pyne, about – one of the interesting key findings of the survey was that a previous OA experience was a positive indicator. In other words, people sort of got over any concerns they might have had because they had such a good experience working with editors, working with a publisher. Talk about that relationship that changes and develops as an author decides to publish a work open access.

PYNE: Yeah, we really found across everything we asked – how positive authors were about open access, how likely they were to do it again, how pro-immediate OA they were, how into other forms of open access, like self-archiving – on every metric, authors who had published OA already were more favorable towards those things. And I should note also that our survey wasn’t just Springer Nature authors. We wanted to make sure we were reaching a broad swath of authors, and many others in the community, including other publishers, helped out by sharing the survey. So this isn’t just us. This actually reflects a broad trend that authors are having a great experience with open access.

But I do think that there’s a lot that book editors have to do along the way to help reassure and inform authors. There are a lot more choices you might have to make – for example, about Creative Commons licenses. You have to work out where you’re getting your funding from, perhaps go through some additional administrative hoops.

Actually, once you’ve published your book open access, there’s so much more you can do to help promote it. We find authors are much more willing to share their work on social media, because they know that everyone can download it immediately. But at every step of the way, you need a book editor or a book editorial assistant to help inform authors about what their options are, ensure they’re making the right choices for them, and ensure they know all the benefits and how they can maximize those.

KENNEALLY: And open access, of course, changes the business model. It changes the business model for journals, which were primarily driven by subscription. For open access books, of course they are also under a different funding model. What did the Springer Nature survey find that was relevant for funders and also revealed the thinking of authors about the funding challenges they face?

PYNE: I think there are two key things we looked at that are relevant for funders. One is about the availability of funding across the board. Both authors who had published OA and those who hadn’t said that they wanted to see more funding for open access books. Authors also told us that they were interested to see more different approaches to OA for books. I would say most publishers so far have gone down the book processing charge route, so we invoice authors or their funders or institutions for a sum which essentially allows us to recoup all of our costs. But there are a lot of other models out there – for example, exploring library consortium models, crowdfunding, freemium – and I think authors are interested to see what else might work, especially as costs can be high. So they’re interested in having a diversity of routes.

The other thing we learned from the survey relates to the type of open access that might be offered. We found that overall, a majority of authors were interested in seeing immediate open access policies. They felt that that would bring the most benefits to their books. And although they were open to sharing books via self-archiving routes, overall, fewer of them felt that that would be the ideal route for an OA book policy. I think there’s lots for funders to pick through there.

KENNEALLY: Indeed. I’m sure they will also value the work you did, as you said, to try to reach as many authors and as widely as possible. What are some of the challenges of conducting a survey like this?

PYNE: I think one problem is jargon, to be honest. There’s so much jargon in scholarly communications, and I think OA is particularly at fault here – green and gold and different types of Creative Commons licenses, ND, NC, self-archiving. Unless you’re in the loop and you’ve reading about this stuff for years, then it can be pretty confusing. You might think you know what it means, but actually the definitions are contested. So a lot of it is about trying to unpick that and explain the concepts in a way that is less ambiguous or that will still be meaningful to somebody who hasn’t engaged that much with the terms so far.

I think also just framing of questions in general to try and keep things as neutral as possible and not bias people towards one answer or the other is of course always really important for surveys.

KENNEALLY: It’s an interesting point. For publishers, the relationship that publishers have with authors changes in open access models. So explaining to an author what the open access choice really means is critical. And as you say, trying to do so in a way that is easy to understand, that is relevant information to the particular author – that just seems extremely important.

PYNE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think for authors in particular, it’s quite a concerning topic. If you’re seeing the way that books are being published and shared change dramatically, if you’re in the humanities and that is your primary way of sharing your research with the world, and you’re worried, well, will I be able to afford this, or what does this actually mean for the protection of how I’ve phrased my thoughts? Could somebody plagiarize that because it’s open access? There are a lot of misconceptions, and it goes right to the heart of what’s most precious to many of our authors. So we have to do a good job to explain that and reassure people.

KENNEALLY: So tell us, Ros, does it make a difference in addressing the concerns of early-career researchers than, say, tenured professors who’ve been longstanding published authors?

PYNE: We certainly find that attitudes are different. If you look at our survey, you’ll find that senior researchers – that is, those with 25 years or more experience – were more conservative in their attitudes to open access. They were less likely to say that they would publish OA in the future. They were more skeptical as to its benefits. And I do think it’s really important that we persuade senior researchers of the benefits, because they have so much influence over the decisions that are made by junior faculty.

Conversely, we found that junior scholars are more likely to be supportive of open access, but you also find that there are, as I’ve said, a lot of concerns there. Junior scholars are much less likely to be in receipt of a large grant that would help to support publication costs. They are very concerned about getting tenure or getting onto a permanent job, and the book is often the key way or one of the key things they need to have done in order to achieve that. So they want to make sure that, for example, the quality is assured – that they won’t be disadvantaged because they chose OA and, for example, it’s not fully understood or respected by their senior counterparts. So different concerns amongst the two groups.

KENNEALLY: What’s interesting, finally, Ros Pyne, is that open access when it comes to books is a challenge for publishers, a challenge for authors, but it comes down to communication. You were telling me about the influence that established authors may have in working with their younger colleagues. It still is about communication, about addressing those concerns, about making sure that lines are open so that people can learn from each other.

PYNE: Yeah, absolutely. I think there can be a lot of preconceptions, sometimes some misconceptions, and it’s all about having a personal relationship and establishing the trust that is necessary in order to be able to have an open conversation about these issues.

KENNEALLY: Ros Pyne, director, open access books, at Springer Nature, thanks for speaking with me and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s virtual book fair.

PYNE: Thanks so much, Chris. It’s been a pleasure.

KENNEALLY: For a complete schedule of virtual programming from Copyright Clearance Center originally intended for London Book Fair presentations. please visit copyright.com/lbf2020.

Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center. Our co-producer and recording engineer is Jeremy Brieske of Burst Marketing.

Subscribe to the program wherever you go for podcasts and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. The complete Beyond the Book podcast archive is available at beyondthebook.com.

I’m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on CCC’s Beyond the Book.

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