19 April 2024
Varina Jones-Reid, University of Aberdeen
Plenary Session 1: Moving Research Integrity Conversations Upstream
My main takeaway from this session is how much of the system of research and academic communications is based on trust, making it incredibly vulnerable to bad actors. Daniel Hook explained very well how our system has grown out of a time when everyone in a field knew and regularly communicated with each and Inke Nathke spoke described how research ethics are taught to new researchers largely through mentorship and community norms rather than formal guidance and training. As research communities become larger and more global, we can’t expect these norms to hold (in as much as they ever did). As Ivan Oransky pointed out, retractions catalogue the failures of systems of trust to prevent bad research from being published. As I work in scholarly comms, the main thing I am taking from this session is that scholars, especially older scholars or ones from more traditional institutions are not used to considering the need to demonstrate their own research integrity, and to looking for signs of fraud from collaborators or potential publishers (combatting predatory publishers is tied in to this issue). They may be offended by the suggestion they need to open their data in part to prove it’s authenticity. We need to engage with our researchers on this issue with an understanding of the cultural norms of academia and specific disciplines.
Breakout Session A: Making it Possible and Making it Easy: Research Culture and Open Access Monographs
After a high-level plenary discussing major issues in the publishing industry as a whole, it’s very useful to get into these sessions by someone working in a very similar role to mine about how they have worked in their institution to improve the publishing landscape. Instead of coming away from it with big ideas, I leave with concrete action plans to take back to my institution. One thing I found really inspirational was the idea that when a new mandate for open access comes in, a new group of researchers are grappling with open access that may not have previously given it much thought, so there is a real opportunity to embed practices into their disciplines as a norm.
Breakout Session B: Demystifying AI and Evaluating Future Uses and Limitations in Library Collections
I was impressed with how well Siobhan Haimé was able to explain the technology underlying generative AI and how it differs from previous predictive text applications. My major takeaway from this session is that, while these technologies are quite powerful and the underlying technology of transformers will forever change computing, it’s not clear is LLMs are actually sustainable and deeply useful. There are considerable ethical and environmental concerns and ways these models risk further entrenching systemic inequalities, but they have significant potential and are important to keep an eye on.
Breakout Session 3: Shine Bright Like a Diamond: What can Library Hosting Services offer in the Academic Publishing Market.
Coming from an institution that already had a University press hosted out of the library system, it was interesting hearing about how other institutions have started these and are working through these issues. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in this session I found relevant due to the difference in where my institution and these ones are. However, it prompted productive discussions with colleagues in between sessions.
Lightning Session 1
I regretted these being lightning sessions, as there was a lot of very interesting ideas presented here that I wished had gone in to more depth. In this session, the team from Sheffield described their process for promoting FAIR Data principles, and I thought some of their initiatives would work really well at my institution. I especially like the idea of creating discipline-specific checklists we can distribute to our researchers, to try to model how FAIR data can be created. I think that’s a great idea. I found the other session, on how open access publishers can address UNSDGs interesting, but less directly relevant.
Tuesday
Plenary 2
This plenary was probably the single session that had the most impact on how I am thinking about Open Access. I was very excited to hear a more extensive discussion of Green open access as a route to achieve greater publication equity. JISC presented their recent report’s findings on transitional agreements, and how they led to more Gold open access, but also deepened inequity in scholarly publishing and largely contributed to converting green open articles into gold, instead of making closed articles open. Green may not have much impact on easing the strain of subscriptions on library budgets (although TAs have also not done that), but it has much more potential to decrease inequity and increase global access to the scholarly conversation.
Workshop 2: Tools that support research workflows
My main takeaway from this session was the idea that, we often recommend tools to our scholars, especially open research tools like figshare, github, and OSF, but we don’t actually use them ourselves or have much familiarity with the difficulty or ease of use. In this workshop we evaluated some of these tools and tried to consider their value from the researcher’s point of view. Working in scholarly communications, we sometimes don’t put ourselves in the position of researchers enough, and don’t appreciate the workload pressures they experience, so this was quite valuable.
Plenary 3: There is no List: How can we combat ‘Predatory’ Publishers.
This was an excellent session, because many researchers do want to just be given a list, but while non-exhaustive lists of good actors (such as DOAJ) may be possible to create, a list of bad actors would be an impossible to manage, constantly moving target. I also really appreciated Rachel Stephan’s point that it isn’t the business of librarians to tell author’s where to publish. We need to create tools that help them do their own due diligence and choose where they would like to publish. By creating lists of predatory publishers we are to some extent telling authors where to publish, instead of helping them make their own best choices.
Breakout Session B: You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
This session provided a perspective we don’t hear much from in these types of events: small scholarly presses that provide the income needed to run learned societies. These societies can’t necessarily afford to a fully diamond open model because they need income from the press to survive, and they don’t want to engage with predatory APC models that decrease equity in their fields. They are left out of read and publish big deals making their survival precarious. I’m not sure there was much actionable for me in this presentation, mostly because presenters did not have solutions to the problem they raise, but it was an interesting perspective.
Breakout Session D: Getting Out From the Back of the Sofa
This was a fantastic session on how libraries and publishers can work together to try and make long-term funding of open access monographs a priority. Too often, libraries can only fund these things if they have a bit left at the end of the budget, or if it directly benefits the institution, but if we want to make sustainable change to the publication landscape, it requires long-term strategic thinking. This session really made me think about how our press can position itself as a priority for capturing institutional strategic funding without compromising our main mission of expanding access in a sustainable and equitable way. Also, they had some really good cat pictures.
Wednesday
Plenary Session 4
As a self-described AI sceptic this session was quite interesting to me because it showcased some ways generative AI can potentially be used that are more useful and less harmful than the standard model we’re often presented with. By restricting the training data to a specific database, Proquest was able to create a system that was both more accurate and less resource intensive than something like ChatGPT or Gemini. CORE took a similar approach, but built their tool on top of ChatGPT, so many of the environmental concerns remain in tact. By forcing the tools to be more transparent about how they are generating answers, and to provide citations from a curated dataset, the tools become much more valuable to researchers. This also demonstrates, that as much as AI is claiming to be a revolutionary tool that will eliminate the need for knowledge intercessors, such as librarians, curation of accurate date remains extremely important.
Breakout Session C: Looking at the Cliff’s Edge
This session focused on how we can evaluate the value of the Read and Publish deals we are asked to sign, in a landscape where budgets are shrinking. The main takeaway from this session is that most academic librarians feel that the big deals are not sustainable in the long term. Costs keep increasing as library budgets shrink, and, also it is a huge problem that without funding for open access publishing aside from these deals, we push authors away from smaller more mission driven presses. It’s not yet clear what alternatives we have, but it’s important libraries work together and try to start working towards alternatives.
Breakout Session D: Author Identity Metadata
This is another session I attended because I am sceptical of the central project being discussed and wanted to be challenged to think more deeply about that issue. The session delivered that very well. Dr. Pow presented a compelling argument for how embedding information about the marginalised identities of an author can allow academia to more deeply consider the expertise of lived experience, and also to allow us to diversify the perspectives available on our shelves (so to speak). I remain very concerned about how embedding identity information in a work’s metadata impacts the privacy and safety of marginalised authors, but I can see the value of it. I can see how that might be a problem worth working on, rather than making author identity metadata something to be avoided.
Plenary 5 (Shereen Thor, closing session)
If I had to identify one session which was truly Not For Me… I’m sure some people enjoyed it.
Social Events:
So, here’s where I confess that I minorly injured my foot on Sunday night and was hobbling around the rest of the conference. As a result, I ultimately chose to skip the social events, as I knew I couldn’t manage the sessions and the evening events. I did go to the opening night reception. It was very nice to meet up with the other first-time attendees. It was essentially a mechanism to filter people early in their careers, which meant we had a lot to talk about. My only complaint would be the room ended up being quite loud and I struggled to hear the person next to me.
General comments:
I really appreciated that Breakout Sessions were divided in to repeating groups. It made it easier to see everything that was of interest, and it meant that if you heard about a session that was very good but hadn’t initially caught your eye, you could try and catch it the next time around.
It was really useful being able to meet with so many publishers. Even when I made it clear that I don’t have access to the acquisitions budget, I was only interested in learning about their open access policies, they were very interested and I was able to get a lot of answers to sort of burning questions.
The days could feel a bit overstuffed at times. I think having at least ten minutes between every session should be a standard. Especially with somewhat limited mobility, It could be a struggle to get from session to session sometimes.
Finally, overall it was a really valuable opportunity, and I truly appreciate UKSG’s sponsorship of my attendance.