CISPC 2020 report g


researchers to think about when they have data, that should deposit it somewhere and perhaps publish it, even if it’s under embargo. There’s an interesting role, at the point at which something is going to go public, about enforcing editorial standards – publishers need to be explicit and researchers need to work to those standards.


How would you go about dealing with the recent explosion in different types of content and bringing all the different aspects of research back together?


Phil Gooch: In some ways we are doing it in reverse, by taking an entire article and deconstructing it. There are some new platforms that encourage people to write in a more modular way, such as publishing the methods section as an object, writing a literature review separately. The challenge is getting authors to think that way; you don’t write papers in the order that it appears at the end. In humanities the research output is the scholarship, so it’s hard to split something like that into


different chunks that you can write and publish separately. But from a technology angle its very interesting and there is a lot of value in making different parts of research available individually.


Michelle Urberg: If we could decouple our dataset from our writing, that would be fabulous. Phil’s right, the writing is the object; the book is still the hallmark in terms of humanities publishing, but there is a lot of work behind the scenes and none of that is valued. If credit could be given to that work, and it could be organised in a way that makes whatever you are studying more accessible, I am all for that. Let’s start the revolution!


Danielle Apfelbaum: You need to bring a community with you when implementing an OA policy or trying to change the research cycle, it’s just a question of figuring out what that incentive should be. What speaks to people, what brings them along – it’s definitely not the same in every community.


Martin Jagerhorn: We have to look at things in context. We shouldn’t be trying to drive things from the top-down, there are a lot of forces in place: the publishers want to retain their revenue and have a sustainable way forward, not every country wants to go along with Plan S – a fact that we cannot neglect. From a technical point of view we are trying to see that if we want to reduce unnecessary costs and the friction that we have in the whole system, then we quickly get into technical areas like PIDs, and establishing where possible standards that work across the industry – things that are essential but unfortunately are still some way away.


Has Covid changed your strategic planning?


Ian Bruno: A lot of the market that we serve is the pharma sector, which is exactly who you turn to in a pandemic, so in terms of that there is still a lot of value in our services. We are being cautious because we are still not sure the longer-term economic impact; of course we perceive that there will be


Reigning cats and dogs


A chief consequence of the pandemic on industry events has been the move to online conferencing, and all the associated issues it throws up. CISPC 2020 was no different, with a


couple of small technical hiccups that passed off without any long-lasting trauma, a presenter’s child walking past her computer while playing a recorder, a loud public announcement during a presentation from a university in the Netherlands – and a pet invasion that nearly brought chaos to the end of day one during a workshop feedback session.


At the precise moment conference host Tim Gillett uttered the words: ’That brings us to the end of the first day,’ Helen Clare’s seven-year-old tortoiseshell cat Trixie slinked onto her desk, while just seconds later fellow moderator Kirsty Merrett’s German Shepherd Dog Chachi followed suit and barged her way into shot – causing hilarity among the rest of the panel: Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Ian Bruno, Faye Holst and Lou Peck. ‘They know it’s time to go,’ quipped


Kirsty. ‘They are saying goodbye – hurray!’


“Publishers have also realised that they are going to need to have a stronger digital transformation”


g 34 Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing 2020/2021


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