by Leah Hinds, Executive Director, Charleston Hub

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 45th annual meeting took place May 31 – June 2 in Portland, OR. See the report on Day One and Day Two here.

Friday, June 2

The last day of the conference dawned sunny and bright, with warmer temperatures than we’d seen earlier in the week in Portland. Another great day of programs!

Previews Session–New and Noteworthy Product Presentations

These “lightning round” plenary sessions offer attendees the chance to learn more about the industry’s newest and most innovative products, platforms, and/or content in 5-minute, back to back presentations. There were 10 presentations from different companies, and the session was moderated by Erin Foley (CCC) and Latoya Flagler (ACS).

1. Ryan Walker, Aries Systems: LiXuid Manuscript Suite – used together with production management system. All stages of production and publication end to end. Automatic XML production transforms unstructured Word or PDF docs into XML.

2. Sharon Ahmad, Cambridge University Press: Research Directions – Traditional journal doesn’t reflect the research lifecycle. Each Research Directions journal tackles fundamental questions in the field and publishes results, analyses, and impact reviews. Instead of submitting one fully formed research paper, authors submit incremental results. Authors can also share early research output, preprints, posters, etc. Link connections between them on the site – connections map.

3. Chuck Hemenway, CCC: Powering Interoperability through API based Solutions – Informing authors of funding support (Poor font choice) Rightslink Shared Data Driven Infrastructure – telegraph funding to authors earlier in the process. How can we improve awareness of OA funding?

4. Heather Staines, Delta Think: Developing DEI Benchmarks – Baseline of the current demographic makeup of authors and contributors to their portfolio. Use the data to inform goals and policies. Collecting opt-in data from your community is the best way to go, but very slow. Client needed a short term solution. Used a software to analyze likely gender and ethnicity based on names. Cleaned up and de-duped the data, produced final anonymized reports. None traced back to individuals. Baseline showed DEI makeup of each group, compare to current industry trends, data needed to set goals. Comparisons – journal to journal, discipline to discipline, etc. Identify strengths and weaknesses, develop strategies, reports to your community to show transparency around your DEI efforts.

5. Zoe Wake Hyde, Humanities Commons: Federated Open Commons Infrastructure – Growing move towards decentralization and federalization. Humanities Commons provides an alternative pathway for scholars to share their work using open technologies, OA repository with DOIs. Fedaverse – expanding ecosystem of interconnected social media sites that allow people to interact with each other regardless of which social media platform they’re using. Allows individual instances to have their own community space. institutional group could launch their own commons with our without our support. Retain control of data and decision making.

6. Kevin Mitchell, Modio Information Group: Challenge – audience doesn’t have time to read all the work/outputs in their field. Modio combines the superior substance of text with the convenience of audio. Allows audience to consume exact same information while driving, etc. Text converted to timely, word for word, human narrated, smartphone enabled, audio format. Not a podcast, most analogous to an audio book, but materials that change over time. Fastest growing segment in publishing. Engage students in the area of specialty to do the narrations, essentially paying the next generation of your audience to read your material. Optimized for multi-tasking consumption. Custom branded app based. Monetize content yourself, keep all the data, maintain a direct relationship with your audience.

7. Jignesh Bhate, Molecular Connections: Ortho Search – Go-to site for all orthopedics in Britain. Unified portal, FAIR and SEO compliant. Podcasts, videos, journal articles, etc., all in one place. Synonym compatible, such as stress fracture and hairline fracture. Filters to find results by type, altmetric score of each article. Natural language search enabled.

8. Othman Altalib, Morressier: 360 Research Integrity Suite – Pressures and barriers- attempts to flag fraudulent material, publish more OA, avoid retractions, publish faster. Barriers – multiple vendors to solve each individual problem, manual processes when you can’t find a vendor solution, legacy workflows. For Authors – submission checks, For Publishers, integrity checks. “The mother of all API’s” merge them together. Integrity Dashboards – can review all journals at once. Make it as easy as Facebook or Netflix. Trial period, 50 submissions, try it risk free.

9. Rodney Elder, Virtusales Publishing Solutions: BiblioSuite – Central place where you can store all of your content and view contract information, cost data, licensing, and reporting for everything else associated with that content. End to end solution that’s an alternative to developing in-house systems. Goal is to help publishers be more productive so they can focus on their content. Streamlining inefficiencies in publishing workflows.

10. Florian Kirschner and Brian Trombley, XPublisher: XEditor – Presented in a Q&A/conversation format between the two presenters. Create scientific content and publish it in a highly automated way to multiple channels, digital and print. Intutive, online XML editor with a Word-like interface. Schema valid, supports every default schema. Why XML? Machine readable, enables automation. Integrated – system integrates with other formats, tool, through APIs. Highly efficient and cost effective. Access content everywhere, on mobile app. Cloud based, integrated workflow for collaboration.

The audience was asked to vote through the Whova app by answering the question: Which product, platform, service, or content will likely have the most positive impact in scholarly communications? The winner of the audience vote was Morressier’s 360 Research Integrity Suite. Congratulations!

Working Together to Preserve the Integrity of the Scholarly Record in a Transparent and Trustworthy Way

Presenters: Amanda Bartell, CrossRef; Patrick Franzen, SPIE; Hylke Koers, STM Solutions; Nandita Quaderi, Clarivate; Cheol-Heui Yun, Korean Society of Science Editors (KCSE).

This panel presentation brought together different parts of the scholcomm community to discuss how their organizations are working together to tackle integrity challenges. First was Cheol-Heui Yun who spoke about Korean Council of Science Editors (KCSE)’ work with journal editorial boards. Next, Amanda Baretll discussed Crossref’s role in collecting and openly disseminating metadata that can be used as “trust signals”, followed by Nandita Quaderi presenting how Web of Science uses rigorous selection as a foundation for trustworthy datasets & metrics. Hylke Koers spoke about STM’s support for publishers to preserve scholarly integrity, and finally Patrick Franzen discussed COPE’s work bringing together publishers and institutions. The session was rounded out by a panel discussion on how we can work together and audience Q&A. 

During the Networking Lunch break, I took a walk with a friend to a nearby dedicated gluten free bakery. It was lovely to get out in the sunshine and enjoy some delicious goodies!

Licensing Privacy: What Librarians Want

Speakers: Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Amanda Ferrante, EBSCO Information Services; Cody Hanson, University of Minnesota Libraries; Athena Hoeppner, University of Central Florida.

The Licensing Privacy project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, has developed a set of resources to help librarians understand these issues and to support librarians and providers working together to better align platform and publisher practices with library values of privacy, confidentiality, and respect for user control over their own data. Lisa presented an overview of privacy issues as viewed by the library community, and then chaired a panel discussion with the other three presenters.

Moderated Debate on Trust in Scholarly Publishing: Artificial Intelligence will Fatally Undermine the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing

The closing plenary session was a formal, Oxford-style debate moderated by Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University). The resolution was “Artificial Intelligence will Fatally Undermine the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing.” Arguing in favor of the resolution was Tim Vines (DataSeer), and against was Jessica Miles (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group). The audience was asked to submit an opening vote of whether or not they agreed with the resolution. Results were 77% “disagree”, and 23% “agree.” Each presenter then had a timed opening statement, followed by a response, and then the floor was opened for audience comments and questions. At the end of the session, the audience was asked to vote again (only those who had voted in the first preliminary round), and the results were 68% disagree, 32% agreed. Tim Vines was declared the winner of the debate since he moved the most votes to his side of the argument.

Session recordings, photos, and more are now available for registered attendees through the conference event app. The 2024 annual meeting will be held May 28 – 31 in Boston, MA. Looking forward to it already!