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Interview


“The degree of cooperation and coordination is also significantly lower than I expected, leaving many opportunities untapped”


available to researchers, rising citations and exploding usage, are all testament to how publishers’ investment is resulting in increased value to the core academic process.


that publishers are not seen as partners by some of our stakeholders, but as ‘the enemy’. This is extremely concerning given that there are many fundamental improvements that would create value for the research ecosystem and for which I can see no alternative, other than for big publishers to be leading their implementation and playing a pivotal role in their delivery.


The existing business model in academic publishing is different to just about any other industry. Do you think it’s sustainable, long-term? I most certainly do and wouldn’t have joined if I thought anything else. But there are things we can and should be leading and implementing, both individually within our publishing houses and collectively, as the academic publishing industry to create more value for the research ecosystem as a whole. These include but are not limited to:


• Helping researchers make their data, protocols and methods open and access the datasets of others. This has the potential to instigate a fundamental step change in enabling researchers to make use of existing information and build on it for the benefit of scientific advancement;


• Improving peer review quality and improved process to save time for all involved, including a vastly reduced time between submission and publication; • Driving change in the reputation and


www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo


recognition models and metrics, for authors, researchers, members of our editorial boards and peer reviewers;


• Publishing negative results and reproducibility studies at scale; and


• Making usage easy: rather than fighting illegal use, we should create common standards and user-friendly interfaces that make it easy for every legally entitled user to search, discover and consume the research information they need to advance discoveries.


What is the biggest challenge facing scholarly publishers in the next 10 years? Without a doubt, the biggest challenge facing scholarly publishers over the next 10 years is the need to rebuild trust between the research community (authors, researchers, funders, librarians) and publishers – to win back a seat at the table. I’ve heard the same comments made in


many forms and from many constituents over the past year. Comments like ‘publishers are accused of being too profitable and charging too much’. But profit is merely how the impact of our contribution is measured, and crucially provides us with the means to invest in new products, services and tools for the benefit of the research community. Other stakeholders also enjoy ‘profit’ but this is measured differently and therefore is not as concretely visible. The ‘Big Deal’, digital content distribution, sharing tools, etc. alongside increasing the amount of content


Another comment that I’ve heard is that publishers are viewed as the only for-profit companies in a not-for-profit space. But only one per cent of research spend in the world is spent on content licensing and getting research quality assured, published, and disseminated with the remaining 99 per cent going on (apart from salaries) other commercial companies including catering, stationary, lab equipment, office infrastructure, connectivity and increasingly on software licenses. Although neither of these comments is correct, we have to acknowledge the emotion around these topics and take them seriously. A further sentiment I’ve picked up is the negative feeling of dependency; researchers feel they are too dependent on publishers and they don’t like that. With so much at stake at this very last


step of their research process, with usually many years of energy and scarce grant money invested, this lack of transparency in peer review and the feeling of a power imbalance is creating tension. The fact is, however, that as long as there is a need for an independent party judging the work of research, and as long as there is no consensus about whether these peer reviews should be transparent or not, the majority of peer reviewers will continue to be anonymous. As these two things are true, then


we must do everything we can to be as transparent as publishers as we can.


Interview by Tim Gillett


December 2018/January 2019 Research Information 15


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