Listen to industry perspectives

Audio transcript

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[00:00:00] Jude: And today we'll be sitting down with guests Hong Zhou and Josh Nicholson to discuss some of the benefits and pain points around AI becoming increasingly integrated into the academic publishing space. We'll explore how AI can help to scale accessibility to knowledge, as well as the importance of policies, standards, and practices in maintaining research integrity and shaping fair and safe AI use. We hope you'll enjoy the bite sized insights from this episode. Hong, Josh, thanks for joining us on the Research Impact Podcast.

[00:00:59] Jude: Now to start us off, please tell us about yourselves, including how your professional paths have led you to do what you do now.

[00:01:06] Josh: Yeah. So, thanks for having me. And, thanks everyone for listening in. So I have a background as a scientist, as a researcher. So I finished a PhD about eight years ago. and my experience as a researcher, has really kind of led me down the path of realizing the processes that we do from funding to publishing are as important as the experiments that we do on the bench.

[00:01:28] Josh: Right. And so I've long cared about how we publish, how we communicate, how we fund and how we do science, even back to an undergrad. And I think my experiences as a researcher are really kind of what led me, here. and so personally, you know, interested in how people do science, because at the end of the day, there is this kind of.

[00:01:48] Josh: Vision of what a scientist is with the wild hair and white lab coat, but we're all people. And then, I think that's not so true. And so I think understanding the people behind science and the processes behind science is important. and I've realized there's a lot of inefficiencies in that.

[00:02:04] Josh: And so, through realizing these inefficiencies, I've tried to develop various solutions with various companies To improve how we do research and how we do our work.

[00:02:13] Jude: Hong?

[00:02:14] Hong: Hello. I'm the leading the intelligence service group in the widely patented solution now, which we design and develop and promote the intelligence service product. To enable the automated, intelligent and efficient to the research and the publishing journey, for example, the modernized publishing workflow, enhanced content, audience discovery and monetization and the help the publisher move from the content provider to knowledge provider by leveraging AI, big data and the cloud technologies, which is all my passion is. so before I joined the article. now's part of the pattern solution. In 2017, I was, a CTO of the startup in the, insurance industry. We applied the AI machine learning technology to understand the users and applicants, et cetera. So, and also before that I was, served as a senior software engineer and development manager at schlumberger, which global and also service companies.

[00:03:15] Hong: I mainly use, you know, my experience knowledge to create the 3d model in the reservoir. And, before that, actually I did my PhD in the 3d modeling, with,artificial, intelligence algorithm from the University of Wales. And, after many years work in the R and D and the commercial software development, I know what's my interests, my passion, my interests. And also I think my strengths, one of the strengths is to the combine the both technology and the business together to develop something, some cool, you know, the products, et cetera. And so that's why I did my MBA in the Oxford university, which I want to further develop my business skill under the, I did my MBA in the digital transformation and strategy. So I was a researcher. I knew the, the pain point and the challenges which the researcher are facing, which sometime is a high pressure and frustrating. And that's why, my personal research passion, and especially now I'm working in the scholar publishing industry.

[00:04:23] Hong: So one of the, my personal research passion is to support the publisher success in their transition to the open access and open sets. And also help the global researchers to know more, do more, achieve more, because this is what I was a researcher. This is what I want to do. I want to achieve.

[00:04:44] Jude: Thank you. And I think I am quite happy to be interviewing two people who have such experience. I mean, AI is a very recent, it's recently been talked about a lot, but it's of course existed for quite some time. so I'm really happy to have two people who are very well versed with the topic, especially when it comes into publishing.

[00:05:07] Jude: So now jumping right in, what pressures is AI placing on academic publishing currently?

[00:05:14] Josh: Yeah, so I think AI and that's, a large term can mean many things. I think there's a lot of different pressures, right? there's also a lot of strengths and so there's, really kind of this double edged sword. but the immediate ones that, , stick out to me are how do we tell if this is AI generated or not?

[00:05:30] Josh: Right? Is this something that we should,accept? Is this something that we should try to detect and ban? what are the policies around all of this? And so we have such a powerful tool now, that goes from images to voice to text, how do we deal with all these things? And so, because this new powerful tool has been opened up into the world, , most industries, including scholarly publishing, are still trying to figure out what do we do with it?

[00:05:54] Josh: Right. do we try to like leverage the strengths of it? do we, ban it? Do we change our minds week over week? And so I think it's just a big question mark and that's really kind of, the pressure is that we just don't know. of course there are more, immediate concerns and some of these are around like paper mills and things like this.

[00:06:14] Josh: it It was a challenge to publishers before, this really advanced generative AI. to look at, images and see, has there been any manipulations there? And so now you can, tell AI to produce any image you want, whether that is a Western blot or, a cartoon really kind of imagination is the limit.

[00:06:35] Josh: And so I think it's going to be harder to detect these manipulations, which, Hong talked about pressures, you know, come from. and so I think that's an immediate one is. we as publishers and we as librarians and researchers and all everyone in this community. Work to produce this very, curated and trusted source of truth, this record that we can build, therapies on technologies on policies on.

[00:06:58] Josh: And if we start to, let in, unreliable work or potentially fraudulent and fabricated work. , that erodes the trust. And so I think that's one,, immediate pressure , that, we as a publishing community should be looking out for.

[00:07:11] Hong: for me. I think, there's this many, pressures and also opportunities. Joe said. And also challenges, which the AI bring to the academic publishing, I just went, I'm not sure whether we have enough time to talk about all of this. So, I think there's several things in my mind. I mean, the pressure 1st is about, the IP and authorship. Today with the AI and the blockchains the user have the greater the ownership and the control over their the data, and they can engage in the peer-to-peer interactions. So with ai, with the blockchains, etc and ownership of the research outcome. So should we accept AI as a author, should we redefine the meaning of contributions? And the co-authorship and to what extent we can leverage AI to help us to write the papers. And should we review the copyright IP laws, which currently is mainly focused on the human so far. And also the business model is changed is actually is not only the open access is changing our business models. AI itself can also change it because aI can help to extract knowledge, the valuable information from the content, text-based content, image-based content, etc So the more knowledge and the best services appearing to replace the existing text based content based model.

[00:08:40] Hong: So for me, the new business model I needed for this knowledge services. So, and also not only the, for example, human is the main consumer of this content and the knowledge, but actually the machine is becoming the main consumer as well, especially because of the AI.

[00:08:59] Hong: So this is a, another things and also infrastructure change. Because now the, the more and more AI, the product services and come out from the lab and becomes more commercialized, applies in the real business case, the scenario.

[00:09:15] Hong: So do we have the enough, the good and the solid infrastructure to support this, to automatically build the model based on the update newly incoming the data and apply this directly. and also integrity issues. This is a, one of the biggest issues under the pressure, which Josh also mentioned. AI is a double edged sword. Yeah, it has the power to boost the research quality and collaboration, but also can bring the challenges, especially like what Josh just mentioned, image manipulation, the paper mail, plagiarism, et cetera. So I think this is a kind of the endless battle. I mean, the between us, between the publish and the paper mail, et cetera.

[00:09:58] Hong: And also for me, two things, either pay particular, attention, pay more attention. One is, you know, I think the, is more AI generate content in the future. I'm just thinking there's be the more AI generate content than the human generated.

[00:10:15] Hong: Because AI can generate a content in second, in minutes, but a human can generate all over hours, days, et cetera. So maybe in the future, the AI can generate content. But we can see in more and more, the AI generated content appeared eventually. I hope not, but will be the majority of content market. So it means the human, I don't want to scare the people, , but the human created content actually is become more and more valuable, but with less market share. So another thing's challenge, which AI bring is a natural conflict between the transparent. Terms. Open, which is the open sense, we want to emphasize, but the AI today, especially in the deep learning in the larger model is more like the black box. I know there's a many, research, R& D work, research work, trying to make the AI is more explainable and the more transparent, but it's a still in many cases is still a black box. So, it's how can we know that it generates this? it will impact the human, the trust and understanding for AI, especially in the academic population.

[00:11:30] I think this is not only for academic, the publishing, but for the, all the industry, because, the people worry about, is a put pressure on the people worry about, the people that will be replaced by AI.

[00:11:45] Jude: Thank you so much, Josh and Hong. So now going into what's already happening, how is AI already? helping publishers deliver knowledge at scale.

[00:11:56] Josh: Yeah. So think, AI again is such a broad term and I think publishers have used machine learning for many different things for years, right? And that's processing articles, you know, to display this, to enhance recommendations, things like this. And so I think as the tools become powerful, there's new cases that emerge. you're starting to see various tools where you can have chat like interfaces with articles. You can have these quick summaries built on top of articles, and they're getting better and better. And so I think, AI is certainly enhancing, the distribution and kind of the understanding, and synthesis of articles as well.

[00:12:32] Josh: And I think that'll continue, and not just with the publishers, but with partnerships through, technology providers and others. And I think that's, something we'll probably talk about a bit later is,what are the opportunities kind of around AI? And I think actually, publishers shouldn't be fearing everything because there's a ton of opportunities that AI, brings with it and both from a business, perspective, but also a technical perspective. and I think that's an interesting thing to consider.

[00:12:57] Hong: for me is, I think the AI , have published in many different, you know, areas, for example, the enhanced, Content discovery. So actually this is not only help the publisher to disseminate their content, but mainly is to help the researchers, individual researchers to discover the information, get answers in the, especially in the area of the information overloading. , so currently we've been moving from the traditional keywords based search to a small semantic conversational based search. So user can just ask a natural language questions and get answers directly. Straight away, instead of, you return the hundred of the links result with each of us. We still go have to go through the each of them to find the answer by ourselves. And also the personalized recommendations, newsfeeds, which we already use the everyday.

[00:13:47] Hong: And also for publisher. I think one of the AI in the application is enable the author centric publishing. AI can help the publisher better understand the author and audience, and providing the more personalized user experience based on their behaviors, we can identify their interests, their intentions, who they are, etc. And also modernize the publisher's operations workflow to increase efficiency and accuracy, so while the reduced cost from authoring to submission. And the review, for example, the one we just mentioned automated the screening integrity detections, et cetera, and the suggested relevant to reviewers relevant to journals to submit. And also, the reference quality analysis and automatically might, extract the metadata from the manuscript. And then the user, the author don't have to the manually enter this information. So this is improve the user experience. And also the better the content audience management and monetization. Because today, publishers want to increase their revenue, special commercial publisher want to diversify their revenue.

[00:14:59] Hong: So how can we monetize the existing content? And then, so AI can help to get, create the richer content, which is not just limited to text, but also video, image, even virtual reality, et cetera, and also mine is a valuable and hidden knowledge from the text content. So this is, this is very, and the last one is a help the publisher to make the quick and insight for the business decision with intelligent, the AI powered,business insight to BI tools. So this is also is a very in, in the future actually is happen now. So the insight for the research analytics, I mean, , the business, the decision maker, they can ask, , the BI tools. With the natural language question. So tell me the why the last 3 months, the revenue , has dropped. And is there any reason which department or which the product line has caused this? So they can answer this immediately with the evidence. So now coming back to something that has come exploded in popularity in recent past,

[00:16:36] Jude: ChatGPT. so what is the role of scholarly publishers in the world of large language models like ChatGPT?

[00:16:44] Josh: Yeah. So think publishers have a pretty unique role here and that is, you know, they're kind of the closest thing to the ground source of truth, right? And if you think about scholarly publications. You know, there are peer review, there is evidence, there's data, there's analysis. There's not much other written content out there that, you know, provides that.

[00:17:04] Josh: And so, ChatGPT is,extremely powerful, exceedingly easy to use, but very hard to trust and validate. Right? And so, I think what scholarly publishers offer are You know, this way to kind of contain this beast, right, to ground ChatGBT in the literature. and so, you know, citations, and it's kind of funny, has been such a niche thing for scholarly communications.

[00:17:27] Josh: But if you look at it, now Google has this, you know, everyone is starting to add footnotes and citations to their answers. And so, , the challenges with chat GPT is that they don't have access to every single full text article in the world. And so chat GPT and other systems, are grounding their answers in the wider web, right?

[00:17:46] Josh: In the wider web will be of mixed quality type content. And so I think publishers serve a really important role to kind of constrain and validate, you know, answers from these generative models. And that's something that we're doing at site. through partnership with publishers is starting to provide real references, and to, you know, limit hallucinations that can happen,with large language models by matching it against content from the literature, right?

[00:18:11] Josh: Here's what the machine says. Here's what the research article says. Okay, you can validate that. And then beyond that, is that the correct article, right? How is that article been cited? So publishers hold a lot of opportunity here. from a perspective of, you know, providing more trust and reliability. And I think that's been true of, , publishers for the longest time, but now it can really integrate directly with, a very powerful tool and system, whether that's chat, GBT or any large language model.

[00:18:38] Josh: In addition to that, I think, you know, there's also this opportunity for licensing. And so again, you know, I already kind of mentioned this very briefly in passing. Groups, these large technology companies, they don't have access to every single full text article. And so publishers are sitting on kind of a gold mine of content, if you will, right?

[00:18:57] Josh: It's exceedingly valuable information, and it covers almost every single topic from Peppa Pig to particle physics to prostate cancer. There is a research article on that. And so, you know, the cooperation of publishers with , what is arguably the closest thing to truth that we have out there, you know, I think can be a really big help with large language models like chat GPT.

[00:19:18] Hong: Yeah, I just want to add, some extra point. I tried to think, not only from the publish perspective, what's the role of the scholarly publisher, but also I think the, what's the role of the open science and to the large language models. So for me, you know, the Open science means, you know, open access, open the data, open source, et cetera. So this is also a publisher is, of course, is a part of this movement. So always allow the most accessible content to train the better and more powerful AI solutions. So data is very important, as Josh said. And the publisher can provide the full text content and also the reviewed high quality content and open data can provide the richer and more the machine readable content, not only text, but also the video image code data, etc. This is a today's a large number model need because they are building, they are moving from the, you know, the single, you know, the modality model to the multi modality model, which the AI model not only understand text. But also understand the videos, you know, image, et cetera, like the, ,gPT, you know, the vision, which is, you know, the very powerful to further more ways and also open source movement is actually is, one of the key element to speed up AI development today.

[00:20:41] Hong: Without the open source, you know, the AI cannot be developed so fast, so quick, , since people and the vendor can learn from each other, they don't have to build from scratch. So this is a very, and also in the open science intelligent age, there'll be more requests and the publisher can provide more requests, requirements, and the needs for AI and to boost the more AI applications and then provide the more use cases and the requirements. To develop better AI applications. This is also important but on the other hand, actually AI itself can be used to improve efficiency and the productivity of research and the publishing to boost the volume and the quality of OA publications and also create the more richer content and the publisher itself can because many publishers especially big publishers they have you know the domain subject matter expert they can provide you know the very Valuable, you know, the instruction to help the technology companies to train their AI model large language models , in the specific domains. So this is also one, one of the reason why the chat GPT is so successful, so powerful because, you know, they. Embedded the human instruction, so this human where this human instruction come from is come from the subject expert, which is a publisher can help.

[00:22:08] Jude: Brilliant. so now coming into policy. So what AI policy standards. And practices should be enacted to create fair, safe and responsible AI and to ensure research integrity in scholarly publishing.

[00:22:24] Josh: Yeah, so I think it's, this is a big open question and obviously very difficult, you know, because there's so many different things to consider. But the two kind of key tenets to me are transparency. We need to know if AI has been used. And kind of auditability, how has it been used, right? And I think if we can put those at the center of any policy, we can start to use these powerful tools in a responsible and fair way.

[00:22:48] Josh: of course, you know, the devil's in the details. and so that will, you know, be things that are negotiated and debated upon. But I think those are the key things that stand out to me is how can we be as transparent, as possible with their use? And how can we audit their use, right? How has this been used in this instance?

[00:23:03] Hong: So I just I totally agree with josh, you know, the transparency and also, you know, the accountability is very important. I just want to add 1 more. Is about, the fairness and the bias, so especially, you know, the be careful because how I perform is really depend on the data, which, you know, the provided to train the model.

[00:23:25] Hong: So, we want to, you know, the make sure. You know, the, we have, , , a model of balance data. And then when we use the AI models to support our research, to support , our, , work, we need to understand , how this be trained and what's data set is be trained. Is either have any obvious bias or it's, you know, something. We also need to have the more evaluation provided the most standard evaluation standard. Under the data standard to make sure, you know, the full for people for customer to easy to select the suitable, you know, the AI services, aI models, because today now. There is already is a many evaluation standard. I mean, it's coming out to have many leaderboards. To show, you know, the, which the model is good at, which area or domain, et cetera. I think, you know, the AI policy. I don't think aI policy , can solve the research integrity issues. I think, the fundamental things is about, how the research integrity issues come from. Is it because , the existing, you know, the career, the promotion system, et cetera, and the , push the, you know, the pressure to the researchers. That's why, , they have to, , do a lot of these things. And then in a short time, so if this whole system cannot change, I think this issue is still there. the, what we are doing is just thepassive protection.

[00:24:52] Jude: So I couldn't end this podcast without asking this, about scite. Because it's just so fascinating to me. So I really want to know, how is scite working on reducing hallucinations?

[00:25:06] Josh: Yeah, so, so thanks for that question. So scite has been at its core, you know, trying to improve how we discover, understand and evaluate research articles, right? So we've been focused on trying to develop the next generation of citations so you can see how and why, you know, anything's been cited as opposed to just how many times.

[00:25:24] Josh: And so we do that primarily by showing the context of citations, so giving more rich information. Beyond a traditional citation, and so we've been focused for five years on this challenge in publishing, right? How do we know if this article is trustworthy? It's been cited 100 times out of those 100 citations.

[00:25:42] Josh: How many say they support it? How many say they? Disagree with it. How many have evidence against these claims? Do they sign a method section, the results section, all these different types of challenges, what we've been focused on,with research articles. And so these problems are much more pronounced, you know, with large language models.

[00:25:59] Josh: You can ask any single question you can think of, you can give it a prompt to write a poem or rap, you know, is this stuff completely made up, right? And so you need citations. You need a way to. Validate and trust the output from generative AI. And so we already touched upon this a little bit, but I think, you know, what we're doing is bringing citations from arguably the closest thing we have to the ground truth of knowledge to these large language models.

[00:26:24] Josh: And so, you know, from mechanistic point of view, you know, we use large language models to develop search strategies that run across the full text of scholarly articles, you know, and then match semantically and validate. Is this what, you know, a research article says, yes, the large language model says that, but does the research say that, does that support it?

[00:26:44] Josh: And then built into that, you know, we're not just surfacing relevant articles to claims made from large language models. But you can see how those articles, they themselves have been cited, right? This article has been published in this journal. It's been cited 100 times. How many of those citations, you know, support refute this article itself?

[00:27:02] Josh: And so I think, you know, we are in this lucky, place where Citations are something that are increasingly important for generative AI, and that's been our focus for, you know, half a decade. and so that's how we're trying to reduce hallucinations and I think make knowledge more accessible as well because not everyone is going to run this Boolean search, right?

[00:27:21] Josh: Or this keyword based search, you know, as Hong said. Some people will simply want to ask a question in plain language and get an answer backed by evidence is as much as possible.

[00:27:31] Jude: Unfortunately, I mean, I'm so, sad to say this. That's all the time we have for today. I really want to extend you my thanks Hong and Josh for joining us for our AI episode and sharing your insights with us. So as we draw to a close, please, can you share with our listeners the best way to reach you with any thoughts or questions, perhaps LinkedIn, what would be the best way for them to reach you?

[00:27:58] Josh: Yeah, so I'm very easy to reach, josh at site. ai is my email. We're very happy to have, you know, feedback, not just positive feedback, but we really listen when things are not working and that makes it easy for us to figure out, you know, where to put our efforts. and so you can email me, I'm on Twitter, Josh M.

[00:28:14] Josh: Nicholson, also on LinkedIn. So, you know, all the various socials and my email directly as well.

[00:28:21] Hong: Yeah, I think so. You can reach me the, through the email, hou@wiley.com or the reach me in my linking, or you can, you know, the, go to the scholar kitchen to read the, , the articles you know, I'm regularly publish, you know, the articles in the pa you know, scholar education.

[00:28:39] Jude: Yes, and we're really happy. I mean, I'm quite looking forward to read those as they come out. and then finally for our listeners, please feel free to share any suggestions for topics and guests via the podcast page on our Wiley Partner Solutions website. There will also be links to any resources mentioned in today's show in the show notes. So thanks for tuning in and until our next episode, may your algorithms stay optimized and your curiosity never experience a runtime error.

Audio transcript

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[00:00:00] Jude Perera: Hi, I'm your host, Jude Pereira, and today we have two phenomenal guests joining us on the show, Christina Volpe and Stacey Scott. As experts in accessibility, they will be sharing their thoughts and experiences in some of the leading ways to effectively implement and support accessibility in the publishing industry.

[00:00:45] Jude Perera: They will also advise us about where they see the future of accessibility. Without further to do, let's dive right into our latest episode. Christina, Stacey, welcome to the Research Impact Podcast. So to start us off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:01:03] Christina Volpe: Sure. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Christina Volpe and I'm the Accessibility Solutions Lead. For Wiley research, and my job is to develop and 

[00:01:13] Christina Volpe: implement accessibility strategies 

[00:01:15] Christina Volpe: that cover a very wide range of topic areas, everything from product development to support to procurement

[00:01:23] Stacy Scott: So my name is Stacey Scott and I am the head of accessibility for Taylor and Francis Group Publishing. So my role is very similar to that of Christina. So I am responsible for devising and rolling out our accessibility strategy and that is across content, across our platforms, making sure that everything is accessible to everyone.

[00:01:45] Stacy Scott: It even includes our social media activity and our marketing efforts as well. I also sit on a number of Ancillary groups, related to accessibility and inclusion. And I'm the chair of the publishing accessibility action group for the UK. 

[00:01:59] Jude Perera: Thank you so much both. So I'm quite excited to dive right in to the topics we have today.

[00:02:05] Jude Perera: So the both of you work in roles that involve advocating for accessibility as everyone's job across the organization. What is challenging about the work you do and what is most rewarding? 

[00:02:18] Christina Volpe: So I would say without a doubt, the biggest challenge is really around training and awareness in general, because we need to be able to shift conversations left, meaning that accessibility is included at the very beginning of everything that we do. And it's picked up throughout the process, as opposed to leaving it to the very end. When you think about organizations that have, you know, 10,000 plus employees who are in many different countries and regions around the world, also with varying degrees of knowledge, that can be really hard to do because not only do you need to get support from your leadership teams so that, they're the folks who own the budgets and the resourcing, Everyone who's working on this on a day-to-day basis needs to not only understand what this is, but how to implement it successfully.

[00:03:09] Christina Volpe: And if you're unable to do that, you're not going to get very far. So changing that perception, and getting people to understand exactly what they need to do can be very hard, for that particular reason. 

[00:03:21] Christina Volpe: I would say the biggest rewards are, when you sit down at the beginning of the year and you decide that these are the goals I want to focus on. And if you're able to successfully achieve those goals, no matter how big or small they are, that is definitely the biggest reward for me, considering how hard it is to change perception within large organizations. 

[00:03:40] Jude Perera: Thank you so much, Christina. That's very insightful. And now, moving on to our second topic, this is more aimed towards Stacey. thinking about development and product teams, but also beyond those teams across the content lifecycle. What are some practical examples of why having users of accessibility tech on the team is so important?

[00:04:02] Jude Perera: What happens when you don't have those perspectives in the conversation? 

[00:04:06] Stacy Scott: it's such a great question and it's a topic so close to my heart. So I am somebody who was born blind. And so I use accessibility features and content on a daily basis. And for me, I see constantly why, it's necessary to have people who will be using your end product, using it from the very beginning and involved in the design.

[00:04:28] Stacy Scott: And I. Think that having , my personal experience of both the accessibility challenges, but also solutions has enabled Taylor Francis to, expand and develop a strategy , that really does put people's experience in the front and center of everything.

[00:04:45] Stacy Scott: it's so important. We want it to be good. We want it to be right. We need it to be. and the only way to do that is to have those living experiences. And so for me, I can bring living experience of sight loss, screen reader users, so that's text to speech technology, but there's such a broad range of different disabilities and conditions out there with a variety of accessibility requirements.

[00:05:10] Stacy Scott: And it's really important that we don't. Suggest that I would have all the answers to everybody's, accessibility needs because I certainly don't. And so to have as much involvement as possible is so important. for example, would we try and make a Michelin starred meal without involving a chef?

[00:05:26] Stacy Scott: Absolutely not. I certainly wouldn't. Some of the practical examples that I've seen where they haven't involved, people with lived experience of accessibility needs from the start. so we've seen products that are essentially not born accessible. And it goes back to what Christina said about the challenges.

[00:05:43] Stacy Scott: You then end up with a system or content that you're trying to retrofit accessibility into it's not accessible as it is. And so the time, the resources and the money. That it will then take to unscramble that egg and make it accessible. it's immense and it would have been so much better had it been done from beginning, born accessible with people who knew how to make it accessible.

[00:06:07] Stacy Scott: And so, for example, what do we mean by. skill set that you might need. What does that lived experience look like? So from my perspective, from a screen reader user's perspective, I quite often have a QA team say to me, Oh, well, we did some testing. We clicked on it and it spoke to us. It talked out loud, therefore it's accessible.

[00:06:27] Stacy Scott: And I'm sure Christina could tell you as much as me, that is not the definition of something being accessible. it's way more complicated than that. And so there's this constant left. examples and reminders of why we need to have people that use it in every stage of the process.

[00:06:43] Stacy Scott: I think also it's the right thing to do. And I see a lot of companies and businesses, asking for people to come and test. Their systems to check them for accessibility, but they never go for any remuneration and it's always temporary, one off sessions or maybe two or three, but I very rarely see it actually being embedded within a job description.

[00:07:05] Stacy Scott: And that's something I'd love to see change because. People with disabilities and conditions, their time isn't free. And that level of expertise that they bring is so important. And so it needs to be brought in and it's in a serious way that encompasses them right from the start, but also through the whole life cycle of whatever product or piece of content that we're looking at, because things change all the time.

[00:07:30] Stacy Scott: And so those accessibility features that people may have brought in at the start, how do you know if they're still going to work if you want to make some changes? And so the best way is to actually start involving disabled people in everything that we do and no matter what it is.

[00:07:44] Jude Perera: Thank you very much, Stacey. Now I have a bit of a follow up to you. Now you spoke a bit about, including accessibility as a very important topic in the beginning. Of the life cycle of a product or a project, do you have any advice for those who are trying to do it the other way around?

[00:08:05] Jude Perera: They've not thought about accessibility in the beginning, but they're a bit down the line now, and they want to look at implementing more accessible, products and more accessible practices within those products. 

[00:08:19] Stacy Scott: Sure. Absolutely. And of course I'm sure they'll all be learning from that lesson and bringing people in from the beginning for the next time.

[00:08:25] Stacy Scott: But, there's so many good resources out there. the group that I chair, the Publishing Accessibility Action Group, it is a group that meets every two months. And it is full of, accessibility professionals where we share experience, in the publishing sector. And it covers everything from how to make content accessible.

[00:08:45] Stacy Scott: There is no question too big or too small. And there are lots of groups like that. And there's so many great resources online. we could spend forever listing some great URLs. But for just to give an example, the DAISY Consortium, they have so many webinars and tool tips. On how do we make things accessible?

[00:09:04] Stacy Scott: And that's everything from content to looking at, platform access. And so even just Googling, how do I comply with European accessibility act or accessibility? 101 is going to find you some wonderful resources and it's never too late to start. 

[00:09:19] Christina Volpe: and I think a good starting off point is also having some type of corporate standard around. What you want to do and the difference in the different standards you want to work toward and practical approaches that you want the people in your company to take when they are trying to build accessibility into a project, or they're coming into it after the fact and trying to find out, find how they can go back and fix the things that might be wrong with particular product or service.

[00:09:47] Christina Volpe: And I also think it's important to recognize that. Accessibility can take a very long time to implement and sometimes people get overwhelmed very easily. So you also need to pick a starting off point and sometimes you need to start small and build upon that, cycle to cycle or year to year.

[00:10:04] Christina Volpe: So I think that's really important as well when you're trying to come back after the fact to retrofit a product so that it 

[00:10:11] Jude Perera: meets standards. 

[00:10:46] Jude Perera: Thank you so much for your insight. we really see how important it is to think about accessibility. It should have been important from a long time ago, but I personally feel that people are seeing the importance of it, but we still have a long way to go. as. products go and as companies go,

[00:11:05] Jude Perera: so now moving on to our third topic in our industry when we talk about accessibility, there seems to be two overwhelming areas of focus, making written and visual content accessible to people who can't see it and making audio content accessible to people who can't hear it. But there's a whole universe of accessibility needs out there.

[00:11:28] Jude Perera: Now, my question to both of you is, what else should we be focusing on? 

[00:11:33] Christina Volpe: That's a great question. So, I think you're right. A lot of people tend to focus on, those who may be blind or have limited vision or those who can't perceive color, who are deaf or may have limited hearing. But there's a very wide spectrum beyond this that you need to take into account.

[00:11:50] Christina Volpe: We're also talking about people who may have a physical disability, so this is maybe like a paraplegic or quadriplegic, as well as those who have a cognitive disability such as dyslexia. And it's also important to recognize that people may have more than one disability, so you're going to have intersections.

[00:12:09] Christina Volpe: But when you're trying to develop or design for some of those latter groups, you really want to take into account things like keyboard navigation. So, if I can't physically hold a mouse I may instead use a keyboard and keyboard only use is something that people who are blind also use who are using a screen reader.

[00:12:28] Christina Volpe: So it's keystrokes. Am I able to access content with,the enter the spacebar directional arrows how does this impact things like touch targets, for example, as well, if you are, developing for mobile. So it's how large are those touch targets and how far apart are those touch targets.

[00:12:45] Christina Volpe: And if we're talking about people who may have a cognitive disability, a lot of this comes down to consistency. So it's having multiple and Consistent means of navigating a web page or navigating a product. It's having a layout that is consistent and components that are consistent. If you've ever been in a situation where you need to learn how to use a product and that product may be very different from something else, it's hard to remember how things are organized.

[00:13:10] Christina Volpe: Just think about using, Teams versus Zoom. How do I record? How do I do this? so if you have similar experiences across product, you want to make sure that it's clear. How you do specific things and what specific elements are meant to do, because it makes it easier to understand those types of things.

[00:13:26] Christina Volpe: It's really about thinking for developing for a very wider range of people. And it comes back to the discussion around including people with disabilities in the development process, because that helps you to identify a lot of that work very early on so that you have set goals as you are going through and developing a product or service. 

[00:13:44] Stacy Scott: if I could just add to that, I think, absolutely. I agree with Christina. I think there is also a misperception perhaps that in order to accommodate somebody say with dyslexia, for example, that all the marketing font is gonna have to be something quite unusual and the coloring's gonna have to be unusual and the contrast.

[00:14:05] Stacy Scott: And actually what I've observed and we've noted a lot over the years in the user experience team is that when you look at what a good user experience looks like for somebody with dyslexia, somebody with color blindness or somebody who needs good contrast, that actually provides a really good user experience for everybody.

[00:14:26] Stacy Scott: I've sat with my team and had them looking at Let's say a webpage or some content before we've made it accessible. And then they're going, I can't see this. Now they don't have any disability or condition, but they're finding it really difficult to read.

[00:14:40] Stacy Scott: We then change it to make it accessible for people with visual impairments, but also people with dyslexia and a variety of other conditions. And all of a sudden it's a much better experience for everybody, including the people who didn't think they needed it to be altered for them in the first place.

[00:14:56] Stacy Scott: And so I think it's always important to think about universal design. we don't need to do it, especially for somebody with a certain condition or disability, sometimes universal design is exactly what we need to move forward in the most inclusive way. 

[00:15:12] Jude Perera: And on Universal Design, how would you tell, let's say a company who's creating a new product to approach Universal Design from day number one?

[00:15:22] Stacy Scott: So I would say to look at some of the standards that are out there that talk about how to make your content stand out, how to make it look clear. And so that talks about things like what are some of the really good fonts to use? What are fonts? That are easy to read. And so this encompasses, your people with dyslexia, people with visual impairments, but it also just makes it a user friendly experience for everybody.

[00:15:47] Stacy Scott: If you have a font that is pleasing to the eye, that makes it easy to read because, sometimes people could be reading pages upon pages, especially when we talk about research or scholarly publishing, some of those books are pretty hefty in terms of wording. And so the more gentle the font to anybody's eyes,the better experience that they're all going to have.

[00:16:09] Stacy Scott: And so I think from the very beginning, it's a case of looking at what standards meet the needs of not just, customer A, customer B. What works out there that can help guide your decision making in the design process. And I think that's always a good exercise for all of us to do. And then, we're making things born accessible and an inclusive for as many people as we can, right from the beginning.

[00:16:33] Stacy Scott: And it's going to benefit everyone. 

[00:16:35] Jude Perera: Thank you. And that's really important to know that something as. let's just not say quick, but something as simple as making sure that your font helps, in a way, for a lot more people to read it, it makes a big change and it's, and I would say that's not such a big, leap, am I correct when I say that?

[00:16:57] Jude Perera: it's quite a simplistic thing to do to start off with that makes a bigger change on the other end. 

[00:17:03] Stacy Scott: Yes, absolutely. It's, I think, again, it goes back to the misconceptions around, it's going to have to be something really special and really different, and it's not going to tie in with our branding.

[00:17:13] Stacy Scott: And actually you find out that it does tie in with the branding. And most often the font is very easy to change and it can actually look much better if you go for a dyslexia friendly font. And so I think there needs to be more understanding around. Universal design that helps encompass everything, in terms of accessibility and it doesn't need to be as complicated as it may first appear.

[00:17:37] Jude Perera: that's some amazing insight. Stacey and Christina, that's really important for even for me to hear as a marketer. And I think our listeners would also appreciate. Knowing that, especially people who are looking at creating products and looking at making products more accessible at different parts of the product journey.

[00:17:59] Jude Perera: So now coming back to the last topic of the day, how has the conversation about accessibility in scholarly publishing evolved since you started working in this space? Where do you see it going next? 

[00:18:12] Stacy Scott: Certainly from my perspective, it has come on leaps and bounds, and it may not feel like it to some people who are just starting the journey, but if I quickly flashback to my own experience, trying to scan a million scholarly journals when I was at university, and Then coming out upside down back to front, not having scanned at all to now where I can just log into a particular publishing server, or I can go on to the Bookshare UK or Bookshare US platform and on most platforms, we have over a million books on each platform.

[00:18:47] Stacy Scott: where I could just go search for what I need, download it in a format that's accessible to me. that would, that was just unthinkable 20 years ago. and we've seen such progress even since then. the fact that we are having this wonderful conversation is amazing. And I'm having these conversations all the time now, again, five years ago.

[00:19:07] Stacy Scott: Not so much 10 years ago, barely at all. 10 years ago, we just started looking at the Marrakesh treaty. And so if we think even about that, now we're seeing that in action and having books shared across borders, there's so much that we've achieved in the past 10 years alone and looking forward,it's still so exciting because we're seeing a lot more progress 

[00:19:28] Stacy Scott: And then I did a maths degree, and so I'm particularly excited about a lot of the stuff that's coming up in terms of being able to access STEM contents to your science, technology, engineering and math and medicine content, being able to actually interact with that online with a screen reader.

[00:19:45] Stacy Scott: That's something that we're right on the precipice of. I think even just in the next year or two, we're going to see some really exciting, innovation in that space. It's already happening and it's crucial because those are the subjects that are most difficult for people with visual impairments to get into.

[00:20:03] Stacy Scott: to even be able to study,is so difficult. And so I think we've got a lot of exciting things to see in terms of, more inclusion in education, but most importantly, more independence.

[00:20:14] Jude Perera: Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today, which is a shame because I could have spent much more time on this topic. So thank you so much to Christina and Stacey for joining us and sharing your insights with us on this really important topic. So as we draw to a close, can you share with our listeners the best way to reach you with any thoughts or questions?

[00:20:39] Jude Perera: So I guess

[00:20:40] Christina Volpe: the best way to reach me would be through 

[00:20:42] Stacy Scott: LinkedIn. It's the best way to reach me. If you have any comments or questions is either through LinkedIn or feel free to email me stacey. scott at 

[00:20:53] Jude Perera: pambersandf. com. Brilliant. Thank you so much. And then for our listeners, please feel free to share any suggestions for topics and guests via the podcast page on our Wiley partner solutions website.

[00:21:05] Jude Perera: We'll have all the links, about today's show and also any further links in the show notes. So thank you for listening and keep an eye out for the next episode. 

Audio transcript

===

[00:00:00] Jennifer: So the headline here is that associations have

[00:00:07] Jennifer: been actively contributing to shaping workforces since day one.

[00:00:12] Jennifer: That is pretty much a bread-and-butter

[00:00:15] Jennifer: activity for organizations and ensuring that skilled, adaptable workforce

[00:00:21] Jennifer: that meets. What is, as we know,

[00:00:24] Jennifer: ever more rapidly

[00:00:25] Jennifer: evolving workplace demands Hi, I'm your host Jude Pereira, and we're at our second episode now with none other than Rich Green

[00:00:37] Jude: and Jennifer Baker. Today

[00:00:39] Jude: we'll be discussing recruitment trends, the importance of inclusivity, and how best

[00:00:44] Jude: to shape

[00:00:45] Jude: your workforce in the publishing world.

[00:00:48] Jude: Without further to do, let's just dive right

[00:00:50] Jude: in.

[00:00:51] Jude: Jennifer, Rich, welcome to the Research Impact

[00:00:57] Jude: Podcast.

[00:00:58] Jennifer: Thank you so

[00:00:59] Jennifer: much, Jude. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today

[00:01:04] Jennifer: and Rich as

[00:01:05] Jennifer: well. We have known each other for a while and the opportunity to have this conversation on this topic is

[00:01:12] Jennifer: fantastic because Rich

[00:01:14] Jennifer: is

[00:01:14] Jennifer: a real expert

[00:01:15] Jennifer: and has a lot

[00:01:16] Jennifer: to contribute and

[00:01:17] Jennifer: I know we're going to have a good conversation.

[00:01:19] Jennifer: For those of you I

[00:01:20] Jennifer: don't know out there, I am Jennifer Baker. I am an association management professional.

[00:01:26] Jennifer: And my

[00:01:27] Jennifer: focus is helping organizations bridge the gap between strategy and

[00:01:31] Jennifer: execution. That's really been a

[00:01:33] Jennifer: theme throughout my career.

[00:01:35] Jennifer: And I've had

[00:01:36] Jennifer: the opportunity to work with both individuals and employers on various issues related to recruitment and workforce development. As part of my work

[00:01:46] Jennifer: at ASAE, which is the Center for Association Leadership, I ran Association Career HQ, and I will put in a plug. It's a great example of a niche. Job board

[00:01:56] Jennifer: that helps

[00:01:56] Jennifer: folks, both individuals and recruiters,

[00:02:00] Jennifer: and it's a one

[00:02:01] Jennifer: stop shop and provides talent management resources

[00:02:06] Jennifer: as well as

[00:02:06] Jennifer: career management resources.

[00:02:08] Jennifer: And I

[00:02:10] Jennifer: had that,

[00:02:10] Jennifer: experience and through that gained

[00:02:12] Jennifer: a real appreciation and understanding of recruitment.

[00:02:16] Jennifer: pain points, needs, as well as

[00:02:19] Jennifer: workforce issues

[00:02:21] Jennifer: and so recruitment

[00:02:22] Jennifer: and workforce development are two of my favorite conversational, focuses and topics.

[00:02:28] Jennifer: And I'm really looking forward

[00:02:29] Jennifer: to talking about those with you all today.

[00:02:31] Jennifer: Rich,

[00:02:32] Jennifer: can I throw it over to you?

[00:02:33] Rich: , it's wonderful to be here. This is a really. Thank you. Thank you. Exciting opportunity, a very cool format and,I've just enjoyed reconnecting with Jennifer and thinking about some of the discussion points that we want to go through today and how those impacts association leaders,

[00:02:49] Rich: again, for anyone

[00:02:49] Rich: that doesn't know me, my name's Rich Green.

[00:02:51] Rich: I run the business development team at Magix.

[00:02:55] Rich: Magix is a tricky spelling M A G I X.

[00:02:58] Rich: we are

[00:02:59] Rich: Wiley's. Career center solution. so it's a career center solution, specifically designed for associations, which is now offered by Wiley, the world's largest society publisher. I've been working at a little

[00:03:14] Rich: over a

[00:03:14] Rich: decade, coming up now on 11 years.

[00:03:17]

[00:03:17] Rich: I'm a complete recruitment advertising nerd, and I'm super stoked to be chatting a bit more about it today.

[00:03:25] Rich: As I

[00:03:25] Jude: said, I

[00:03:26] Jude: am super

[00:03:26] Jude: excited to have you both here. you're thought leaders in your own respect

[00:03:31] Jude: in the

[00:03:31] Jude: same industry. So that is

[00:03:33] Jude: actually, a catalyst for

[00:03:35] Jude: some great conversation. We're now in the last part of

[00:03:38] Jude: 2023. So

[00:03:40] Jude: can you comment on some of the

[00:03:42] Jude: recruitment trends we've seen recently?

[00:03:44] Jennifer: Yes, and I looked at my calendar today as I was

[00:03:49] Jennifer: getting ready for this and thought, wow, here we are in September.

[00:03:53] Jennifer: And September is always for me sort of a second new

[00:03:56] Jennifer: year back

[00:03:56] Jennifer: to school time.

[00:03:58] Jennifer: So it seems perfect to

[00:03:59] Jennifer: be

[00:03:59] Jennifer: talking about

[00:04:00] Jennifer: where we are and where we need look ahead to.

[00:04:03] Jennifer: What's really interesting to me in terms of trends

[00:04:07] Jennifer: are the pretty dramatic

[00:04:09] Jennifer: swings in power dynamics that we've seen between job seekers and

[00:04:13] Jennifer: employers.

[00:04:15] Jennifer: In a relatively

[00:04:15] Jennifer: short period of time

[00:04:17] Jennifer: and I think those power

[00:04:20] Jennifer: shifts really underlie

[00:04:22] Jennifer: and help drive some

[00:04:24] Jennifer: of the other trends related to good and bad recruitment practices as well as frankly good and bad job

[00:04:31] Jennifer: seeker behaviors

[00:04:32] Jennifer: because we know those exist

[00:04:33] Jennifer: as well out there.

[00:04:35] Jennifer: Our audience knows that for a while job seekers

[00:04:40] Jennifer: clearly held the upper hand. Great resignation, anybody? Ring, ring some bells. So, it struck me, I saw that this past July,

[00:04:51] Jennifer: the job openings

[00:04:52] Jennifer: and labor

[00:04:53] Jennifer: turnover survey data,

[00:04:55] Jennifer: that JOLTS report data, actually declared, announced, essentially, that the great resignation was over.

[00:05:02] Jennifer: That was a signal. in that report,

[00:05:05] Jennifer: because

[00:05:07] Jennifer: there was a

[00:05:07] Jennifer: return of

[00:05:08] Jennifer: the quits rate to its average

[00:05:10] Jennifer: rate during 2019, right, pre pandemic of 2. 3%. So that was that signal that great resignation was over. And now, and you all may be hearing it

[00:05:22] Jennifer: among your staff, among your colleagues, just

[00:05:25] Jennifer: looking out in

[00:05:26] Jennifer: the world,

[00:05:27] Jennifer: we're

[00:05:27] Jennifer: seeing that many employees are opting to sit tight.

[00:05:30] Jennifer: They're not so eager

[00:05:32] Jennifer: to leave and

[00:05:33] Jennifer: a lot of that I think are macro trends, economic uncertainty that's unfolding in the world

[00:05:38] Jennifer: for a lot of reasons. But when

[00:05:41] Jennifer: you combine

[00:05:42] Jennifer: that with

[00:05:43] Jennifer: what we're seeing among larger employers who certainly lead the way, what they do ends up trickling downstream.

[00:05:51] Jennifer: When

[00:05:51] Jennifer: they are leading the way and really starting to feel empowered enough to mandate return to work, either for a set number of days and in some cases completely back

[00:06:00] Jennifer: to the office.

[00:06:02] Jennifer: I would say it's pretty clear to me that the power is shifting back once again to

[00:06:07] Jennifer: employers in a way that we have not seen.

[00:06:10] Jennifer: There's one other

[00:06:11] Jennifer: interesting trend that I'll comment on

[00:06:13] Jennifer: and it's

[00:06:14] Jennifer: the rise and really rapid adoption of AI in

[00:06:18] Jennifer: the workplace. And I was

[00:06:22] Jennifer: thinking about this, John Connor, for any Terminator fans out there, commented that you know, this is the world

[00:06:29] Jennifer: now,

[00:06:30] Jennifer: long done, plugged in all the time.

[00:06:35] Jennifer: And that was a commentary

[00:06:37] Jennifer: on the overuse of technology in general in our world.

[00:06:40] Jennifer: What I'm thinking

[00:06:41] Jennifer: about and what I'm seeing is that what's plugged in all the time may not necessarily be us, but it's those algorithms. that

[00:06:49] Jennifer: are working in the background, it's when Alexa

[00:06:51] Jennifer: answers us

[00:06:52] Jennifer: to the question

[00:06:52] Jennifer: we didn't even know we have asked.

[00:06:54] Jennifer: And specifically for recruitment,

[00:06:56] Jennifer: just recently, I was in an HR, tech system in an

[00:07:01] Jennifer: application flow and right off the bat, there was a checkbox that said, a notification

[00:07:07] Jennifer: said,

[00:07:10] Jennifer: AI

[00:07:11] Jennifer: algorithms to match job seeker applications with job postings

[00:07:16] Jennifer: and scores them and

[00:07:18] Jennifer: provides

[00:07:18] Jennifer: that to the hiring manager.

[00:07:20] Jennifer: So they were disclosing that and then you

[00:07:23] Jennifer: could opt out. And it raised all kinds of questions in my mind. Does the employer, did they proactively do this? How many other systems will have this?

[00:07:32] Jennifer: What is the perception if a job seeker opts out?

[00:07:36] Jennifer: Do they get moved into a different category because they weren't willing

[00:07:39] Jennifer: to participate?

[00:07:40] Jennifer: Thank So, I think this

[00:07:41] Jennifer: is another emerging trend, it's not brand new, right? It's really starting to

[00:07:45] Jennifer: kick off

[00:07:46] Jennifer: though and accelerate, I think, through

[00:07:48] Jennifer: 2023 and it's only going to get faster in my mind. That really has real implications

[00:07:53] Jennifer: for, especially the topic we're going to

[00:07:55] Jennifer: be talking about in a

[00:07:56] Jennifer: little bit, that diversity,

[00:07:58] Jennifer: and inclusion piece.

[00:08:00] Jennifer: Brilliant. Now

[00:08:01] Jude: you talked a bit about the winding down of the great resignation and AI. What do you see happening in the

[00:08:09] Jude: next couple of years? I know you touched on that a little bit, but could you give us a look

[00:08:13] Jude: into your crystal ball and give us

[00:08:15] Jude: a little bit of a look of what you

[00:08:16] Jude: see happening in the next couple

[00:08:18] Jennifer: of years?

[00:08:18] Jennifer: Yes. I

[00:08:19] Jennifer: really think that, and

[00:08:21] Jennifer: we'll be talking about this in a little

[00:08:23] Jennifer: bit,

[00:08:23] Jennifer: This rise of

[00:08:25] Jennifer: diversity and inclusion is going to become something that employers

[00:08:28] Jennifer: increasingly will be, forced to reckon

[00:08:32] Jennifer: with.

[00:08:33] Jennifer: And, we're going to see, I think really, a push and a pull as,

[00:08:39] Jennifer:

[00:08:39] Jennifer: non digital,natives, which I know is probably

[00:08:42] Jennifer: not the right term to, use anymore, but they're going to be really starting to exit the workforce and you will have complete digital natives, you know,

[00:08:50] Jennifer: us digital

[00:08:51] Jennifer: immigrants will be leaving, the digital natives will be forward And it's a generation of folks who do not have the same view of work.

[00:08:59] Jennifer: And, those kinds of, cultural population lifespan trends I think are really

[00:09:06] Jennifer: going to be impacting

[00:09:08] Jennifer: recruitment, retention, and

[00:09:11] Jennifer: what is needed for an employer

[00:09:14] Jennifer: to keep an engaged, productive

[00:09:17] Jennifer: workforce.

[00:09:18] Jennifer: And I think With the rise

[00:09:21] Jennifer: of AI,

[00:09:23] Jennifer: with, the continued acceleration of tools, high volume employers, those managing large

[00:09:31] Jennifer: workforces are going to be the laboratories, of figuring out what's working, what's not working

[00:09:38] Jennifer: and smaller employers

[00:09:40] Jennifer: are going to be doing what they do today, which

[00:09:43] Jennifer: is really trying

[00:09:44] Jennifer: to compete, And,

[00:09:46] Jennifer: really trying to figure

[00:09:48] Jennifer: out how can they tack and turn in the face of what

[00:09:51] Jennifer: is changing in a

[00:09:53] Jennifer: way and I'll talk about this later.

[00:09:54] Jennifer: I feel like we're still in the sausage making,

[00:09:57] Jennifer: right? We're not

[00:09:57] Jennifer: sure where it's going to go and

[00:09:59] Jennifer: it is becoming, whereas HR

[00:10:02] Jennifer: might have been, especially for a small employer, something

[00:10:05] Jennifer: more

[00:10:05] Jennifer: transactional. Someone leaves, I hire, I plug the hole, I'm done.

[00:10:09] Jennifer: I think

[00:10:09] Jennifer: it's becoming really a

[00:10:11] Jennifer: strategic imperative for business

[00:10:13] Jennifer: success for

[00:10:14] Jennifer: small to medium

[00:10:15] Jennifer: businesses in a way that it's always been for large businesses,

[00:10:19] Jennifer: but it's becoming that way for smaller businesses and certainly for

[00:10:22] Jennifer: associations, as employers themselves and as they look at workforces that they represent in these spaces.

[00:10:29] Rich: your point there about

[00:10:30] Rich: HR becoming less transactional, I think is so unbelievably true. and sometimes it's really hard to see, when you're kind of focused on what's happened in the last six months, what's going to happen in the next.

[00:10:43] Rich: If you wind the clock back 20 years and think about how people look to work work in a, very jovial manner, someone picks up a print newspaper, they flip to the back pages. They get a big highlighter pen and they circle a job that's in the right location maybe is paying a little bit more money than they might be on now.

[00:11:03] Rich: The commute is a bit better . Maybe it's a slightly better job title . And that was kind of it. and. the opportunity for an organization to communicate the value of what that role will contribute to the organization or the values that the organization themselves hold was completely lost because you're paying per character and, and.

[00:11:23] Rich: It's

[00:11:23] Rich: really important, I think, to take a look at how far recruit advertising has come in that period of time. And 20 years is not a lot of time. I know a lot has changed in 20 years, but if you think about behaviors, attitudes , and even how many generations have entered and

[00:11:39] Rich: left the workforce it's not a big period of time in terms of economic development.

[00:11:43]

[00:11:43] Rich: I think it's important

[00:11:45] Rich: to be aware

[00:11:46] Rich: of the folks that are listening to this going to be a bit of a mix of think association leaders and also

[00:11:52] Rich: HR

[00:11:53] Rich: professionals, and they're going to

[00:11:54] Rich: have different lenses on this,

[00:11:57] Rich: but the big thing that we're seeing at magic and we're running about

[00:12:00] Rich: 200 job boards in all different industries

[00:12:03] Rich: for

[00:12:04] Rich: associations and also for other.

[00:12:06] Rich: B2B brands,

[00:12:08] Rich: is we're

[00:12:08] Rich: seeing that shift away from a transaction as Jennifer mentioned to talent acquisition . I had to be the first to use a buzzword

[00:12:19] Rich: in, in the Fox cast.but it is. Less

[00:12:23] Rich: about, Hey, I'm going to come along to a job board and I'm going to post a job for 300. I'm really hoping that the right person sees it.

[00:12:31] Rich: And I'm going to choose a niche job board because that gives me the best chance of a qualified person seeing it. We're seeing a shift away from that more towards a, working

[00:12:41] Rich: with

[00:12:41] Rich: a job boards that can expand the reach into other areas. and it's also expand the reach beyond just the job ads.

[00:12:50] Rich: So how do I, as an employer, communicate the values that I have as an organization and how does that help me to attract the next generation of talent

[00:12:59] Rich: and to cite another of Jennifer's points in the newer generation, it's always tricky when we talk about a new generation in the workforce, because.

[00:13:08] Rich: The question is always, is this a generational thing, or is this a life stage thing? Is this just the fact that low 20 year olds are coming into work, or is it the fact that these 20 year olds are different to the 20 year olds 20 years ago? That's always an important question to ask. but the one really important thing is particularly after, COVID.

[00:13:25] Rich: the attitude to work has changed and people can afford to be more selective that the idea of remote or hybrid working has really changed things. People can afford to work for an employer on the other side of the country now without relocating them or their whole family or. Entering into some God all commute.

[00:13:45] Rich: so I

[00:13:46] Rich: based in Toronto can now work for Amazon, a based out in Seattle, you know, from my home office here. And that's a real game changer. That means that I'm now picking an employer that I want to work with based on. Their values and is this work meaningful to me and

[00:14:02] Rich: so the opening

[00:14:04] Rich: up of so many more opportunities to job seekers means that things like communicating values have become a lot more important.

[00:14:12] Jude: Brilliant so moving on to one very

[00:14:45] Jude: important trend that's.

[00:14:47] Jude: Here to stay, which is more hiring

[00:14:50] Jude: efforts, which we touched on the DNI has been on the top of mind for at least the

[00:14:55] Jude: last three years

[00:14:57] Jude: in a way that it really had not been before. So as we think about recruitment, where are we and what are some

[00:15:04] Jude: tips and ideas and how do

[00:15:06] Jude: associations and

[00:15:07] Jude: industry employers approach

[00:15:08] Rich: this?

[00:15:10] Rich: yeah, think that this is an important question.

[00:15:12] Rich: One

[00:15:12] Rich: important thing to mention is that this isn't a trend, this is an emergence and, that's such an important point to get across. this is certainly not a fad

[00:15:22] Rich: so recruitment

[00:15:23] Rich: is a funny area because people don't.

[00:15:26] Rich: Tend to think about it when they think about diversity efforts.

[00:15:30] Rich: but Madgex did a huge study a couple of years ago, and you can head to diversity.madgex.com and magic is M A D G E X in case anyone needs to spell that out. So diversity dot magic xxx.com. We

[00:15:42] Rich: did a huge study about

[00:15:44] Rich: all of the and conscious biases that job seekers come across.

[00:15:48] Rich: when they're looking for work and it was completely mind-blowing just the amount of bias , that folks come across when they're looking to, progress their professional careers.

[00:15:58] Rich: one thing we're trying to do more of

[00:16:00] Rich: at Magix is education, which I think is always the answer this is better education on foundational things like unconscious bias.

[00:16:09] Rich: Now,

[00:16:09] Rich: some of the research that we did opened up my eyes to things I didn't even dream of thinking about.

[00:16:15] Rich: so

[00:16:15] Rich: the idea of using the word family in a job description, for example, we are looking for a new member to join our family is a pretty common thing that you might see in a job description.

[00:16:25] Rich: Now, if you go on that

[00:16:26] Rich: company's website and you look at the leadership team or you look at the staff and it's a bunch of white men

[00:16:32] Rich: and

[00:16:32] Rich: you're not a white man, you're a person of color or you're a person of, a different identity.

[00:16:38] Rich: You're really

[00:16:39] Rich: not going to feel like you belong in that family. So all of these kinds of things that

[00:16:43] Rich: are

[00:16:44] Rich: unconscious, I think a lot of people don't consider when they're writing a job ad can have a huge impact on the kind of candidates that they're going to be attracting.

[00:16:52] Jennifer: Yeah. Love that point,

[00:16:54] Jennifer: Rich, and I want to jump in with,

[00:16:56] Jennifer: two pieces here that really riff off of that,and what you've got me thinking about.

[00:17:02] Jennifer: First of all, I feel like this trend is

[00:17:04] Jennifer: hard to get a beat on in some ways.

[00:17:07] Jennifer: Because, over the summer, we saw news emerging about how DE& I positions, which had seen incredible growth in job

[00:17:15] Jennifer: postings, for people to actually fill a role

[00:17:18] Jennifer: where they were responsible

[00:17:19] Jennifer: for diversity, inclusion, belonging, creating these

[00:17:22] Jennifer: environments.

[00:17:24] Jennifer: I saw a stat that said between September 2019 and September 2020, job posting for these kinds of positions on

[00:17:32] Jennifer: Indeed rose by 56. 3%.

[00:17:36] Jennifer: That's their own reporting. LinkedIn study found that at the chief level, those chief, D and I officers grew

[00:17:44] Jennifer: by 169 percent

[00:17:47] Jennifer: from 2019 to 2022. Whoa. Right. That's crazy. Then we start to see

[00:17:51] Jennifer: it

[00:17:52] Jennifer: sort of fall apart and DE and I

[00:17:54] Jennifer: professionals are concerned as economic pressures, start pressing down.

[00:18:01] Jennifer: These are the kinds of positions that end up getting

[00:18:04] Jennifer: cut, especially

[00:18:05] Jennifer: at large companies and may never have

[00:18:08] Jennifer: truly existed as standalone positions at small companies or medium companies.

[00:18:14] Jennifer: And yet the key as. Rich has alluded to, and I think we're seeing, part of an employer's key to being

[00:18:22] Jennifer: successful going forward is going to be paying attention to DE and I

[00:18:27] Jennifer: think there's that, is

[00:18:29] Jennifer: the thing that seems most easy to cut and let

[00:18:33] Jennifer: go of,

[00:18:34] Jennifer: strategically stepping

[00:18:35] Jennifer: back

[00:18:36] Jennifer: for folks

[00:18:36] Jennifer: to really think about this.

[00:18:38] Jennifer: Ask careful questions and, go through your own processes. I

[00:18:45] Jennifer: have been amazed that, and this mirrors the point that Rich

[00:18:50] Jennifer: raised around

[00:18:53] Jennifer: you can

[00:18:53] Jennifer: talk a lot, but how are you walking the talk? And How deep

[00:18:58] Jennifer: does it really go?

[00:19:00] Jennifer: So you may put a really

[00:19:02] Jennifer: good updated job posting

[00:19:04] Jennifer: out there encouraging people

[00:19:06] Jennifer: of all kinds

[00:19:07] Jennifer: to apply.

[00:19:07] Jennifer: I have been steadily

[00:19:09] Jennifer: seeing changes in language that is really heartening,

[00:19:12] Jennifer: that really seems to be, opening up and embracing, this concept. And yet you push people

[00:19:20] Jennifer: into applicant tracking systems where, the

[00:19:24] Jennifer: idea of, you know, you might have said, we value diversity and

[00:19:27] Jennifer: pay transparency

[00:19:28] Jennifer: and all of this.

[00:19:29] Jennifer: And then the applicant tracking system forces people to put one number in, for their salary or to identify without the option of. identifying out, right? Not

[00:19:40] Jennifer: identifying pronouns or whatever those

[00:19:43] Jennifer: pieces may be. So especially for those

[00:19:46] Jennifer: smaller, SMBs and really micro companies,

[00:19:50] Jennifer: it's an investment of time, but go through your own

[00:19:52] Jennifer: process and see, is it really being

[00:19:56] Jennifer: supportive throughout?

[00:19:57] Jennifer: That would be a tip that I would suggest. And

[00:20:00] Jennifer: remember that

[00:20:01] Jennifer: It's not a destination,

[00:20:02] Jennifer: it's a journey that's very trite, I think, but it's incremental. And I will tell you, I have spoken,

[00:20:09] Jennifer: with

[00:20:09] Jennifer: leaders of organizations

[00:20:11] Jennifer: that say we are committed to this. But the reality

[00:20:14] Jennifer: is, if you go to our workforce today, this is who we are.

[00:20:18] Jennifer: We're trying to change. So what do we do?

[00:20:20] Jennifer: And we brainstorm some ideas that it's not that you

[00:20:23] Jennifer: just throw your hands up and say, well, all our pictures are,

[00:20:27] Jennifer: you know, of a one kind person. what you could

[00:20:30] Jennifer: do instead is maybe,

[00:20:32] Jennifer: have people,

[00:20:33] Jennifer: instead of using pictures,

[00:20:35] Jennifer: put up things that are meaningful to

[00:20:36] Jennifer: them or provide bios

[00:20:38] Jennifer: that make visible,

[00:20:40] Jennifer: invisible aspects of

[00:20:41] Jennifer: diversity.

[00:20:42] Jennifer: And I know we'll, be talking about

[00:20:44] Jennifer: this,

[00:20:44] Jennifer:

[00:20:44] Jennifer: Rich, about

[00:20:45] Jennifer: how it's more than just the color. That's certainly a piece

[00:20:49] Jennifer: of the visible,

[00:20:50] Jennifer: but there's a lot

[00:20:51] Jennifer: more and it's a lot more nuanced and we're going to have to all get pretty smart on that, I think, going forward. Thank you.

[00:20:57] Rich: I think you had mentioned the

[00:20:59] Rich: expansion

[00:20:59] Rich: of the acronym there to be D E I and A. And

[00:21:03] Rich: we're

[00:21:03] Rich: seeing that more frequently now with the A representing accessibility. and I think that's an

[00:21:09] Rich: important consideration is.

[00:21:11] Rich: Particularly

[00:21:11] Rich: when we're talking about digital resources

[00:21:14] Rich: that,

[00:21:15] Rich: I mean, certainly at Magix we believe access to the web is a human right.

[00:21:18] Rich: and when we talk about DE and I, I

[00:21:23] Rich: think

[00:21:23] Rich: we're talking about making things accessible to everyone.

[00:21:27] Rich: Magix we do an

[00:21:28] Rich: accessibility audit of our job board platform, our career center platform . And that involves having people who are, harder sites use our job board websites and use a screen reader to navigate them.

[00:21:42] Rich: And I distinctly remember in Magix HQ many years ago, witnessing, firsthand someone trying to navigate one of our job board websites to look for a job using a screen reader.

[00:21:54] Rich: And it blew my

[00:21:55] Rich: mind. Just,

[00:21:57] Rich: it

[00:21:58] Rich: was just a completely different way of someone consuming content online.

[00:22:03] Rich: And

[00:22:04] Rich: just a whole new world and it's just not something I'd ever considered and seeing how they struggled in some website instances to use a website navigation.

[00:22:13] Rich: So we think about all the tabs along the top of the website that you're going to click on. You don't think twice about it. You can click through them pretty easily. There's often like a categorization if you're on, You know craigslist or if you're on a job board website where you're looking to refine or even a retail website you're looking for a new pair of shoes and you're like refining your criteria on the left hand side and you're expanding a category then you get subcategory options and then some

[00:22:39] Rich: trying to navigate that

[00:22:40] Rich: with a screen reader is a whole different kettle of fish.

[00:22:43] Rich: And seeing that once I now it's in the back of my mind 10 years later, every time I try and navigate a website.

[00:22:52] Rich: So it's things like that, that

[00:22:54] Rich: there's twofold. I mean, frankly, you could end up in a lawsuit if you're not building accessible websites. I mean, Beyonce was a victim of that, within the last few years of her ticket website, I think it was, which wasn't accessible.

[00:23:05] Rich: But the reality

[00:23:08] Rich: is that, You know, about a third of all Americans are going to face a disability at some point in their life.

[00:23:13] Rich: I would

[00:23:13] Rich: say, you know, if you're creating websites, have it as a firm priority. If you're using third parties to develop, web applications for you, hold them to a higher standard when it comes to accessibility, ask them what their principles, standards and practices are.

[00:23:30]

[00:23:32] Rich: because, you know, it's really important. I broke my hands 10 weeks ago and couldn't type and had to navigate my computer with my voice.

[00:23:39] Rich: It was a whole world

[00:23:42] Rich: of pain do that. So, you know, Jennifer, to your point, when we spoke earlier, you know, walking a mile in someone else's shoes is just. So powerful, when thinking about that.

[00:23:53] Rich: So

[00:23:54] Rich: I'd encourage

[00:23:54] Rich: people to expand their thoughts when they're thinking about,

[00:23:57] Rich:

[00:23:57] Rich: diversity, equity, and inclusion, but just accessibility for everyone.

[00:24:02] Jude: Now, in order to tie this question up, I just want to ask for any scale, large, medium,

[00:24:10] Jude: small corporations.

[00:24:12] Jude: Who are on the fence to, you know, bettering

[00:24:15] Jude: their DNI practices or

[00:24:17] Jude: keeping to it.

[00:24:18] Jude: What is a piece of advice

[00:24:20] Jude: or something you can say

[00:24:21] Jude: to them for the future?

[00:24:23] Jennifer: what came to mind, Rich, as you were talking

[00:24:26] Jennifer: and as you've asked

[00:24:27] Jennifer: this question

[00:24:28] Jennifer: Jude, for me, and this may sound a bit of a tangent, so bear with me,

[00:24:31] Jennifer: but is the

[00:24:33] Jennifer: show The Voice.

[00:24:34] Jennifer: I don't know

[00:24:34] Jennifer: if you all have ever

[00:24:35] Jennifer: watched The Voice, for those of you familiar with it, it's a music show trying to discover

[00:24:40] Jennifer: talent.

[00:24:41] Jennifer: The judges begin with their backs

[00:24:43] Jennifer: turned to

[00:24:44] Jennifer: the performer.

[00:24:45] Jennifer: And, so

[00:24:47] Jennifer: people

[00:24:47] Jennifer: come out

[00:24:48] Jennifer: and they're not

[00:24:49] Jennifer: being initially judged as so often we all

[00:24:53] Jennifer: are in various ways on how we look, what we're wearing.

[00:24:59] Jennifer: Those kinds of things, it's really listening, it's really taking in

[00:25:04] Jennifer: somebody's talent.

[00:25:06] Jennifer: And when that happens

[00:25:09] Jennifer: and we've seen this.

[00:25:11] Jennifer: On this kind of show and other places, when you really

[00:25:14] Jennifer: take that opportunity to construct a process that allows you to hone in on the key things that you need to succeed and what someone can bring, you are going to

[00:25:28] Jennifer: discover

[00:25:29] Jennifer: amazing star

[00:25:30] Jennifer: performers, amazing

[00:25:33] Jennifer: specialists, managers, C suite

[00:25:36] Jennifer: leaders, and,

[00:25:38] Jennifer: If your processes are constructed in that way, that gives folks the

[00:25:42] Jennifer: ability to really shine with their talent

[00:25:45] Jennifer: and then you can make a good decision.

[00:25:46] Jennifer: So that's what keeps, perkling up for me

[00:25:50] Jennifer: is

[00:25:52] Jennifer: in the end, there's a really

[00:25:53] Jennifer: powerful business case,

[00:25:55] Jennifer: which

[00:25:56] Jennifer: is if you want your business to survive and thrive.

[00:25:59] Jennifer: And who doesn't? And if you are

[00:26:02] Jennifer: publicly owned, you have

[00:26:04] Jennifer: even more pressures, not just your own personal

[00:26:06] Jennifer: desires and pressures, but, even more pressures,

[00:26:10] Jennifer: and depending

[00:26:11] Jennifer: on where you're operating in the States or

[00:26:13] Jennifer: around the world, we are increasingly seeing

[00:26:16] Jennifer: regulatory pressures.

[00:26:17] Jennifer: So if you need the stick,

[00:26:20] Jennifer: I think those are growing,

[00:26:21] Jennifer: the sticks to

[00:26:22] Jennifer: make you comply.

[00:26:23] Jennifer: But I think that there is a carrot here that is really powerful, and it's

[00:26:29] Jennifer: almost to me like a user experience

[00:26:32] Jennifer: for both your

[00:26:33] Jennifer: internal stakeholders who are involved in hiring and the talent coming to you that is

[00:26:38] Jennifer: going to pay dividends for the reputation of your business, for the health of your

[00:26:43] Jennifer: workforce,

[00:26:45] Jennifer: In ways that, it's just, it's compelling.

[00:26:48] Jennifer: I think it's very compelling. So that's

[00:26:49] Jennifer: what I would say is, you can

[00:26:51] Jennifer: look at it both

[00:26:52] Jennifer: ways, but there are really good business reasons to stick to this and figure this out.

[00:26:57] Rich: Just echoing that final

[00:26:59] Rich: statement. The carrot is a delicious carrot here, because you operate a business

[00:27:06] Rich: or you represent an organization that in any way relies on engagement from people, which is pretty much every business, let's be honest, what's good for people is good for business

[00:27:16] Rich: with very

[00:27:16] Rich: fortunate to run, job boards, career centers, which are a Kind of like a marketplace, if you imagine the seesaw supply and demand where the demand is job seeking professionals and the supply is employers looking to fill vacant positions.

[00:27:31] Rich: It's a very

[00:27:32] Rich: straightforward marketplace in that sense.

[00:27:35] Rich: If we can

[00:27:36] Rich: make

[00:27:36] Rich: our

[00:27:36] Rich: websites more accessible to more people and increase that demand side of the seesaw, it's good for business.

[00:27:44] Rich: Now that's not

[00:27:45] Rich: our first and only priority when we're doing this, but I think it's often something that's lost is that.

[00:27:50] Rich: these aren't box ficking exercises, This is about making things more accessible to people, the people who are essentially the lifeblood of whatever business or organization you're running or representing.

[00:28:03] Jude: Thank you. I know for a fact that we can talk about that quite a bit more, but I'm just

[00:28:08] Jude: gonna go into the

[00:28:08] Jude: next question.

[00:28:09] Jude: so this is narrowing things down a bit. There are folks listening in today

[00:28:13] Jude: that are

[00:28:15] Jude: from the association sector as well as employers. So how can associations actively contribute to shaping the

[00:28:22] Jude: workforce

[00:28:23] Jude: within their respective industries?

[00:28:25] Jennifer: So the headline here is that associations have

[00:28:29] Jennifer: been actively contributing to shaping workforces since day one.

[00:28:34] Jennifer: That is

[00:28:35] Jennifer: pretty much a bread-and-butter activity for organizations and ensuring that skilled, adaptable workforce

[00:28:44] Jennifer: that meets.

[00:28:45] Jennifer: What is, as we know,

[00:28:47] Jennifer: ever more rapidly

[00:28:48] Jennifer: evolving workplace demands,is that key role for

[00:28:52] Jennifer: these organizations? So.

[00:28:55] Jennifer: It is, as I said earlier, a role

[00:28:58] Jennifer: that I think

[00:28:58] Jennifer: is going to be

[00:28:59] Jennifer: even more essential because we are in the middle of sausage making.

[00:29:03] Jennifer: We're not sure quite what's going to come out the other side, and I think where in the past we may have been able

[00:29:09] Jennifer: to see periods

[00:29:11] Jennifer: of stability, workplace stability, having

[00:29:14] Jennifer: an idea of what work is and

[00:29:16] Jennifer: what it looks like. I think that

[00:29:19] Jennifer: trajectory of long, periods is going to be much

[00:29:24] Jennifer: more shortened. And so, Associations can play a key role in figuring out what does

[00:29:29] Jennifer: that look like?

[00:29:30] Jennifer: And they should really double down

[00:29:33] Jennifer: on what I would argue

[00:29:34] Jennifer: is a unique ability as connectors. They're the ultimate platform

[00:29:38] Jennifer: business, right? They bring together all these

[00:29:40] Jennifer: internal and external stakeholders.

[00:29:42] Jennifer: They infuse ideas and help ideas

[00:29:45] Jennifer: move

[00:29:46] Jennifer: and practices

[00:29:47] Jennifer: move across

[00:29:48] Jennifer: a particular landscape

[00:29:49] Jennifer: of focus. A profession

[00:29:51] Jennifer: or an industry and so if

[00:29:54] Jennifer: they can double down on that role and really help both job seekers and employers as

[00:30:00] Jennifer: Richard provide that education for

[00:30:02] Jennifer: them on two things really the macro trends.

[00:30:06] Jennifer: What is out there now, what's coming,

[00:30:09] Jennifer: AI being a

[00:30:10] Jennifer: perfect example, generational change,

[00:30:13] Jennifer: and what does it really mean? Is it normal

[00:30:17] Jennifer: lifespan or is something really different happening here, as

[00:30:20] Jennifer: Rich highlighted? So those macro trends that they need

[00:30:23] Jennifer: to know to be successful in the world of work and in that realm.

[00:30:28] Jennifer: As

[00:30:28] Jennifer: well as best practices,

[00:30:30] Jennifer: they are uniquely

[00:30:31] Jennifer: positioned to convene people, surface current practices, evolve practices, and then prologate

[00:30:38] Jennifer: them pretty effectively to start

[00:30:41] Jennifer: moving the needle on getting people to where they need to be and helping them really tack and turn in this

[00:30:50] Jennifer: ever, faster pace of change.

[00:30:53] Jennifer: So that's really at the

[00:30:54] Jennifer: heart,

[00:30:55] Jennifer: I think,

[00:30:55] Jennifer: where associations unique abilities have,

[00:30:59] Jennifer: I would argue, always,

[00:31:00] Jennifer: lain

[00:31:01] Jennifer: and where

[00:31:02] Jennifer: they can really make a big difference going forward when

[00:31:05] Jennifer: it comes to the

[00:31:06] Jennifer: world of work and the workforce.

[00:31:08] Rich: Yeah. I think,

[00:31:09] Rich: Career development

[00:31:10] Rich: and workforce development is always a source of frustration for us because it's often pretty low down on the agenda at a society boardroom meeting.

[00:31:22] Rich: I was on

[00:31:22] Rich: a call yesterday here at Wiley with Dr. Jonathan Roscoe, who produces the Wiley Annual Society Member Survey, which

[00:31:31] Rich: we just got the findings in from our 9th iteration. If you Google Wiley Society member survey, you can see all the free to access reports from previous years.

[00:31:41] Rich: The report this year is showing

[00:31:43] Rich: that society membership level is at its lowest point since we started the survey.

[00:31:48] Rich: the emergence that's

[00:31:49] Rich: been coming

[00:31:49] Rich: out specifically over

[00:31:51] Rich: the last.

[00:31:52] Rich: Three or four years is how much more likely particularly young people are to join a society that they perceive to offer good quality career development. now, career development support can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Sometimes that can be. Certification it can be networking.

[00:32:11] Rich: It could be, professional development in an education sense. Sometimes it can be a really damn good career center. So it can look different to different organizations. but the analysis

[00:32:23] Rich: that Dr Roscoe discussed workflow is.

[00:32:29]

[00:32:29] Rich: good quality career development being that carrot that pulls people in, and then good networking opportunities, access to good content is really what makes people stick around. we've worked with

[00:32:40] Rich: very

[00:32:40] Rich: fortunate work with societies and lots of different industries. the 1 example of being a good.

[00:32:46] Rich: Shepard or members and professionals. Career development is from the American Society of civil engineers. so we've worked alongside them while they compiled a survey. I wouldn't even call it a survey. It's more of an analysis, really all, different macroeconomic factors in their industry. So, median pay in certain locations, number of job opportunities.

[00:33:09] Rich: and also cost of living indexes to produce a report that says, if you're a civil engineer and you're thinking about relocating, here are the top places to move to where you're going to have the best quality of life based on how much you're going to earn, how much it's going to cost you to live,

[00:33:25] Rich: the

[00:33:25] Rich: schools in the area.

[00:33:27] Rich: Now that is a superb example of being genuinely valuable

[00:33:35] Rich: and the

[00:33:35] Rich: difference of producing a piece of content like that, which requires money, requires investment, requires people expertise. Dedication

[00:33:42] Rich: requires a lot of things,

[00:33:44] Rich: but the difference of producing a piece of content like that versus a here's top 10 tips for what to expect in your interview

[00:33:52] Rich: that someone

[00:33:52] Rich: has read a hundred times and frankly could probably find a better example of that on a different website than yours, for free as well,

[00:34:00] Rich: just goes

[00:34:01] Rich: to show importance of value.

[00:34:03] Rich: And when we sweat pieces of content research like that with people like civil engineers. The organic traffic that's driven to a job for a career center is night and day when you produce something that's actually interesting and valuable, the difference in organic search traffic because people just hitting Google going, I had a really bad week at work and I'm really not enjoying New York City the building next door is going to be a 64 high rise next year.

[00:34:29] Rich: I want to move, where should I move to? People discovering your association by a search journey like that is so crucial. And those people might not have considered you as a professional resource before. They may not have engaged with you at that level. So my one piece of advice would be truly valuable, even if that requires a bit more elbow grease.

[00:34:49] Jude: Thank you so much. I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today. I wanna. Thank

[00:34:55] Jude: you personally and on behalf of the podcast,

[00:34:58] Jude: Rich, Jennifer, you've

[00:35:00] Jude: been amazing and thank you for joining us for this

[00:35:03] Jude: episode and sharing your insights with us. So as we draw to a close. can you let the listeners know if they can reach out to you via LinkedIn

[00:35:13] Jude: or would

[00:35:14] Jude: that be

[00:35:14] Jennifer: okay?

[00:35:15] Jennifer: Absolutely. you can find me on LinkedIn, Jennifer Baker CAE,

[00:35:20] Jennifer: and I would love

[00:35:22] Jennifer: to connect with you and learn more about you and

[00:35:26] Jennifer: your work. And I love talking about this topic and I'm happy to share and connect.

[00:35:33] Jennifer: Yeah, likewise, search

[00:35:34] Rich: me up. Richard Green. Green is in the color. Magex, M A G E X. yeah, search me up. Drop me a message. Same as Jennifer. I'm always delighted to talk on this topic.

[00:35:45] Jude: Brilliant. And of course, you can reach out to

[00:35:48] Jude: us, Wiley Partner Solutions,

[00:35:49] Jude: on our website as well. If you have any questions, and then for our listeners, please feel free to share any suggestions for topics and guests via the podcast page.

[00:36:00] Jude: on our Wiley Partner Solutions website, which will be linked. there will be also links, to any resources mentioned in today's

[00:36:07] Jude: show. and with

[00:36:09] Jude: that, I

[00:36:09] Jude: want to say that some of the topics that we touched on this episode

[00:36:13] Jude: will also be explored.

[00:36:15] Jude: It's like a bit of foreshadowing going on, in future episodes, like AI, accessibility, and diversity.

[00:36:21] Jude: So stay tuned. Thanks for listening, and keep an eye out for the next

[00:36:25] Jude: episode.

Audio transcript

===

[00:00:00] Sven: Pushing the limits, but not breaking the system, I think is the right way in the specific segment that we are working on.

[00:00:13] Jude: Hi, I'm your host Jude Pereira. And today we'll be sitting down with Sven Fund and Francis Pinter to discuss open access. As experts on this, they will be giving us great insights from their journeys up to this point.

[00:00:26] Jude: The ever evolving landscape of research and research access. And share with us some of their insights on where the future of research and publishing industries are headed. Okay, without further ado, let's dive right into our first ever episode.

[00:00:46] Jude: Sven, Francis, welcome to the research impact podcast. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your background? Let's start off with Francis.

[00:00:56] Frances: Well, thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. So I've got a very long history of publishing, academic publishing in particular, been around for half a century.

[00:01:09] Frances: And I've seen an awful lot change in those years, been to 80 countries and I've walked down mile after mile of aisles of libraries with empty bookshelves. I've seen more than one bombed out library and that has made me very interested in how we can disseminate knowledge. better than we have been in the past,

[00:01:36] Sven: Sven.

[00:01:37] Sven: I came a little bit later to the party. So I'm only around for a quarter of a century. And my Korean publishing was primarily around digitization, really. So I was just in time in the early two thousands to see. What was happening first to journal publishing, then to book publishing, and then to all of our processes in publishing.

[00:01:57] Sven: Since then, I've been working in publishing organizations, large and small, for profit and non for profit. And today I'm here and thinking about what's next in academic publishing. I'm sure we'll cover that in this conversation.

[00:02:12] Jude: Yes, certainly. And we're really grateful to have you here as well. So thank you again for joining us.

[00:02:17] Jude: I really want to dive right into the topic now, as I said. So the first question I have is for Frances. So you are one of the first innovators in open access. So what got you interested in free access to content and what was the focus of your work?

[00:02:35] Frances: I suppose I ought to give you a little bit more of my background to answer that question.

[00:02:40] Frances: I had my own publishing company for the first 20 years of my work, and then I was headhunted by George Soros to help develop the independent private publishing sectors in all 30 post communist countries. And that was a very exciting time in the 90s when absolutely everything was possible, or so it seemed.

[00:03:06] Frances: But I saw their Firsthand, the difficulties of digital distribution. We were just replicating the old models and access to knowledge was severely limited. People just didn't have access to the internet. Well, we've. Now, solved most of the connectivity issues, but we still have the problem of business models keeping content closed to those who can afford it.

[00:03:37] Frances: And so I just thought it has to be a better way. And that's what got me interested in open access.

[00:03:45] Jude: Amazing. So let's head right to the second question. It's a follow up question from the one before. It's safe to say you've done some really exciting things in your career. My goodness, 80 countries and what you've seen.

[00:04:00] Jude: So from a rather conventional HHS publishing to existing projects in the 1990s, please tell us a bit more about that.

[00:04:10] Frances: Yes, well, in the 1990s. We were trying to ensure that everyone had access to the internet, to the World Wide Web, which had only just begun. And there was a certain amount of success with this, but we also saw the need for conventional distribution of content as well.

[00:04:33] Frances: And it was a time when in the journals world, everything was changing and going digital, but not so much for books. That came much later. As far as exciting projects, oh my goodness, I could spend the whole day telling you about them. But for the moment, the one that is closest to my heart at the moment is not something from the 90s, but something I'm working on today, which is helping Ukrainian publishers And basically working with them to help them survive during the war and be ready for the recovery once the war is over.

[00:05:14] Jude: That is spectacular work. So what do you find most rewarding about that, both professionally and personally?

[00:05:22] Frances: I'm not sure that in this case it's rewarding, it will be rewarding when the war is won. At the moment I just see a lot of pain. I see people who are smiling all of the time, positive all of the time, Ukrainians are absolutely amazing people.

[00:05:41] Frances: But the heartache that they must be going through is extraordinary. And the blockages of getting content to where it needs to be for Ukrainian scholars, researchers, academics, teachers is formidable. So the job isn't complete yet. The rewards will come later. Brilliant.

[00:06:01] Jude: And we're all hopeful for those rewards.

[00:06:04] Jude: Now, going on to our third question, about 10 years ago, you conceptualized Knowledge Unlatched, which to me is very familiar, and I'm sure it is to some people, as a very innovative and collaborative model to fund OA books. So from today's perspective, what do you see as the biggest contributions KU which is the abbreviation for Knowledge Unlatched, just for reference, has made to scholarly publishing.

[00:06:33] Frances: Well, although it only started 10 years ago, and it's hard to remember that before that, there weren't quite so many collaborative models that were employed to fund content. Yes, we had library consortia, but the idea of a collaborative model that could Open up access to content was quite new and applying effectively a crowdfunding model, a Kickstarter model to open access was new.

[00:07:03] Frances: Now, upon that many variations on the theme have been constructed and it's been really good to see that there's more than one model that can get us to open access. And it also showed us that there were ways in which. These revolutionary. Potentials could be done. Wasn't all that threatening to the familiar ways of buying books that librarians had become very used to.

[00:07:37] Frances: So what we tried to do was to mirror the familiar methods of purchasing as much as possible. And that's something that KU still does.

[00:07:47] Sven: I completely agree, Francis. I think what you have founded at what we tried to carry on and really has. I think become part of the genetic code of Knowledge Unlatched is this idea of what we call today co creation.

[00:08:01] Sven: So not being out there alone, not having heroes sitting in a room coming up with great business models, but through constant exchange with publishers and with librarians really understand where their pain points are and then respond to that. At the same time, obviously there is a certain degree of.

[00:08:20] Sven: Competition basically in that field. So publishers have developed their own channels, but one of our first meetings, I remember that whenever you are alone and there is no competitor, you should rethink your idea, whether it's really a great one. And I think we are closely watching that really, because it is indeed true.

[00:08:39] Sven: We have made some mistakes obviously on our way and those mistakes usually have been picked up by competitors not following us. In other cases, we could see after a year or two, they would take certain ideas, develop them further or copy them, which is also fine, I guess. So in that respect, I think that's important.

[00:08:59] Sven: Another element, which I found really important in this Rather conservative field that we are in between publishers and librarians. And I think for some good reasons, it's a pretty conservative field because after all academic publishing works to quite a degree, right? We found it important to not be disruptive, which was really fashionable five or seven years ago.

[00:09:23] Sven: So first of all, break the system and then build something new and better. We have never done that. So we were always really happy and you know, all the team finances and you do as well, Jude. So we're also ideas to be a little bit more aggressive in the market approach. We haven't done that. And I think that has been very good advice so far.

[00:09:44] Sven: And. Yeah. Pushing the limits, but not breaking the system, I think is the right way in the specific segment that we are working on.

[00:09:52] Jude: Brilliant. A bit of a segue here. So you both have known each other for quite some time. And part of that was when you both were working on KU. So can you give us a little bit of insight on how you met and where and when, because personally I'd like to know a bit more.

[00:10:09] Sven: So I remember an email first and then a call with Francis almost exactly 11 years ago. When she started to put together a list of interested publishers for the first, what we call pledging round, so funding round for Knowledge Unleashed. And at that point I was CEO at a publisher here in Berlin. And Frances said, so could you imagine giving us three to five books participating in this package?

[00:10:36] Sven: And my colleagues in editorial were a little bit upset and said, you know, this is all unclear and does it really bring funding or is it just a big risk? And how do we look as a publisher? If we support something that doesn't work, all these reasons to not innovate in a rather conservative industry. At that point, I had one colleague who had just joined from another publisher a few months earlier.

[00:10:57] Sven: And she said, let's just try it and let's look at our list of titles. Not all of them are doing great. So what can we lose? And isn't there a great opportunity, a great upside in joining this and can't we reposition towards academics, our whole appearance as a company, our whole list. In a positive way. So we tried it and our, I think three titles made it at that point in time.

[00:11:25] Sven: And since then, the publisher is more or less continuously on board. So that's how we met. And then we met at a conference in Berlin and one thing happened after the other.

[00:11:35] Frances: But I'd like to tell a little story of the early days of knowledge unlatched. So I started talking about the concept in 2010. I went to a Tools of Change conference in New York.

[00:11:50] Frances: There were a thousand people there. I was speaking over the web for the first time ever. The worst of it all was that my husband was able to watch me at home and I was following Adriana Huffington as a speaker. I mean, it could not get worse, which is what a baptism of fire. But anyway, I didn't have a name for Knowledge Unlatched.

[00:12:17] Frances: And I spent two years going around conferences, telling people about the concept. They would kind of get it sometimes, sometimes not. And I would say, I don't have a name. So if anybody has a good name, I'm offering a bottle of champagne. If I adopt the name, well, after two years, my husband got very tired of this and he came up with the name Knowledge Unlatched.

[00:12:43] Frances: And so I bought him a bottle of champagne and I drank half of it. It's a story that I use to illustrate how hard it is in the early days of doing something new when something seems so obvious 12, 13 years later.

[00:13:01] Jude: Wow, that really does sound like a win win situation at the end. Nobody will turn down champagne.

[00:13:07] Jude: So, we'll jump right back into the next topic, going back into OA. As a focus, so I'll start off with Sven because I know I want him to start off. And of course, Francis, I want you to also answer this as well. So smaller publishers. have played a very important role in innovating publishing when it comes to OA.

[00:13:28] Jude: And at the same time, we see small UPs suffer a lot financially alongside their institutions in the present financial environment. So how do you exactly see this pan

[00:13:40] Sven: out? Yeah, it's true. So I would say that open access for books, mind you, has been really pushed by smaller publishers, by smaller presses.

[00:13:50] Sven: You probably know that many of continental Europe, we don't have a structure of university presses as we have in the U. S. or in the U. K., so it was a little bit different according to territories, so it could also be in Germany's case, for example, commercial publishers, but it's absolutely true that these small publishers have carried The burden of innovation, which is, I would say not normal and which has not happened in innovations around open access journals, obviously they have very, very different programs, very different lists, but I think this mission driven character of book publishers of university presses, also of commercial presses, by the way, have made them think early on.

[00:14:32] Sven: When Francis or later I came around the corner, this is probably not a bad idea. This increases distribution of content and knowledge basically. And at the same time, if there's a financial model behind that, that allows us to further grow our lists and develop our programs, that's a great thing. So in that respect, they have been really important.

[00:14:55] Sven: I would say that the pandemic and other developments have been an additional burden on institutions. Academic institutions in North America, in the UK, not so much in the state funded systems, I would say as in continental Europe. Yeah, but it's getting more and more difficult. And I think that's why there's also a need to really innovate and not just this curiosity.

[00:15:18] Sven: So innovation is never only in that respect, a positive thing where you sit down on a Friday afternoon. And take your Wiley Focus Friday and think about something great. That's one thing. The other element is also let's think about how we can keep the business that we have and basically rebuild it into the future.

[00:15:41] Sven: And I think that's what has happened here.

[00:15:44] Frances: Well, I'd like to comment on that too, and take a slightly different take simply because I'm looking at it from a much longer time span. Small scholarly presses, well, whether university presses or mission driven presses, they've always suffered financially. And they've always been a great source of innovative content.

[00:16:04] Frances: And ever since I've been in publishing, everyone has always been complaining that it's a bad time to enter into publishing. However, at the same time, small presses have regularly been bought by the larger presses. And then that leaves space for new entrants from the next generation of usually young mission driven presses and doing wonderful things.

[00:16:31] Frances: And at the same time now, we've got much lower barriers to entry for small presses. When you're talking about book publishing, you don't have to hold lots of stock, all sorts of costs that just fall away. So, more people are likely to throw their hats into this rink, I believe. And we now have the small library based publishing operations emerging too, and I suspect that this will actually continue to grow and add some kind of dynamism that we can't really anticipate just yet, particularly with some of the developments around AI, where the smaller presses will become more dependent on what the larger commercial companies do and where they might forge liaisons of one kind or another.

[00:17:18] Frances: And

[00:17:18] Sven: I think really, that is the interesting element that we have this innovation coming from one part of the spectrum, particularly because for whatever reason, smaller publishers were driving in the driver's seat here. And yet at the same time, we have also seen that within Knowledge unlatched, there's also a certain elements where you need the ability to scale to basically lower cost per item per book, per article or whatever, which is, I think, a big topic in open access and journal based open access right now.

[00:17:49] Sven: Everybody's talking about the cost per unit per article with good reasons. If we get it right, then we have a more attractive offer towards libraries, towards our customers. Yet at the same time, it challenges us as organizations to basically reduce cost without lowering the quality of what we do. And

[00:18:08] Jude: I'm just going to do a bit of a plug in here because Francis just bought in the topic of AI.

[00:18:15] Jude: That is another big topic when it comes to this. We will also have an episode dedicated to AI in the future as well. Plugging is finished, so I'll move on to the next topic. So. Where do you see OA developing? So how will the most important formats, which are OA books and journals, develop going forward? I

[00:18:35] Sven: just spoke to a common friend of Francis and myself, David Warlock lately.

[00:18:40] Sven: And he said that probably we have been talking about open access now for 20 years in one shape or form or the other. And it has become a reality that's here to stay. Obviously there is a lot of conversations right now where OA is linked to another topic, especially when it comes to journal publishing, which is research integrity.

[00:19:01] Sven: And the question also linked to AI and research integrity. So the question, how can we as publishers safeguard this process of publishing meaningful science and still knowing who the. Intellectual originator of that science is, and I guess that will be an important element for us going forward, not just for a, but also for the remaining paywalled content.

[00:19:26] Sven: In my view, there will never be a world where paywalled content completely is being eliminated from the market, from the face of the earth. And. I think that makes sense, both from an economic, but also from an intellectual perspective. There's always enough room for different business models, and it's the job of librarians and publishers to really manage that in a sensible way.

[00:19:49] Sven: That's something that we are doing with the latest offspring and knowledge unlatched with or able, where we are trying to help libraries really understand all of these very small granular transactions on an article level and keep the overview that they need to manage their funds. But I think then there's another element and I'm curious to hear what you think, Francis.

[00:20:09] Sven: There's another element which is about service. I think Open Access has shown us that publishing is not just about brands with all due respect. It's not just the great lighthouse brands that everybody knows when they think about. Science or humanities or whatever, it is also about convenience. These factors we need to take much more serious in the future and really pay more attention to them.

[00:20:32] Sven: How can we make sure that publication is fast, is easy, but the systems we are using towards researchers are not clunky from the 1990s systems, but something that everybody who is growing up now as a generation TikTok into science. Can deal with, and you don't need an extra driver's license basically to run these systems on your computer.

[00:21:00] Frances: This episode is brought to you by Wiley Partner Solutions. As the landscape of access

[00:21:05] Sven: continues to change throughout the research and publishing ecosystem, we

[00:21:09] Frances: seek to

[00:21:09] Sven: help our partners. And customers explore and adapt to these changes in ways that deliver sustainable growth and a better research experience throughout the researcher journey.

[00:21:18] Sven: Find out more at www.wiley.com/partner-solutions.

[00:21:29] Frances: Then you've touched on a point that I think is really interesting, which is that author's preferences are really important to take into account as well. not just their skills. And you can see it when you compare HSS and STEM subjects and the knowledge ecosystem in which those scholars work. I'm not going to comment about journals because my background is mainly in books, but I see this all the time that authors select publishers on a basis Seriously competing criteria.

[00:22:04] Frances: Some will select for purposes of prestige of a large press. Others like the coziness of the very personal relationship with an editor of a small press. They want to find people that are like them, with whom they can build a relationship. And that's kind of nice. That means we have lots of What is called bibliodiversity and lots of presses doing their own thing and accommodating the needs of authors.

[00:22:36] Frances: What I think is going to become increasingly important is the role of metrics and how they will become more and more important to authors and their institutions. And here, open access books do have an advantage over comparable closed titles. This will put positive pressure on making the new open access models work, because we have to.

[00:23:03] Frances: There isn't a choice anymore.

[00:23:06] Jude: With that, we will go on to the last topic. That we currently have. So the question is, how do you see the business models, APCs and BPCs, transformative agreements and subscribe to open develop?

[00:23:23] Sven: Well, that's a big one, right? So I would say both publishers and particularly also librarians are at a very interesting point right now.

[00:23:34] Sven: So what's the answer to the question? How does a library look like without the collection to be developed? Without physical product, which is the reality more and more already for librarians today. And I know that some large libraries and consortia are starting to discuss that right now. And that obviously will mean a lot of changing skill sets that are required from librarians.

[00:23:58] Sven: There are great library. Supporting companies like skill type, for example, supporting that where you within one generation have now the second major switch as an employee, as a librarian that you need to make. And I think the same in publishing. I think there's a constant pressure on that innovation. In my view, the transformative agreements that have helped a lot to make open access for journals, a very broad phenomenon where the majority of content now is open access.

[00:24:29] Sven: Will not be the last word. I think that's also true for the book funding. So first of all, I'm really waiting for the first consortium on the library side to say, let's include books into transformative agreements or book chapters, depending on what it is. And I hope that the UK I policy in the UK studying next year with open access books to be mandatory, more or less for a larger.

[00:24:55] Sven: Group of institutions for funded institutions will kickstart that as many developments have been kickstarted by government action, basically in the UK and in other markets. But also I think as Francis said earlier, we will see more and more a shift towards probably not just open access, not just publication of the artifact, which should be open, but also the services that it needs to get there.

[00:25:20] Sven: And I think that researchers should be involved in those choices that need to be made yet at the same time, it doesn't automatically mean that they have to understand each and every technical detail behind steps. So one example, I'm a non native speaker, obviously. So language editing is a great idea. If I write an article, Francis wouldn't need that.

[00:25:41] Sven: So why have a one size fits all approach in. Cost estimations in APCs or in Parfis while Francis creates less cost, Francis article and my, in this one dimension creates more costs. So I guess publishers and libraries will be challenged to find more agile ways and workflows to work together and really address that choice.

[00:26:05] Sven: And that will mean a lot of re plumbing. I think the systems that we work with right now are early digitization artifacts. Francis also mentioned that somebody who has started as a researcher 20 years ago, working with our publisher is not so likely to change the attitudes and the ways they work every five years as publishing systems require that.

[00:26:28] Sven: So we need a lot of sensitivity also. And in that respect, again, co creation to really understand how far we can push it. And how we make sure that we bring in innovation and at the same time don't have people dropping off at the height of their academic careers now because they're in their 50s, 60s, wherever.

[00:26:49] Frances: I agree with Sven on just about everything he said about this. And I would just like to add to the question, what's going to happen to BPCs? And I think in that area, There's been quite a healthy backlash against funding only through BPCs, because this does limit publishing OA to those authors that can find these author facing charges.

[00:27:17] Frances: And that actually is just a small minority of all the authors that are conducting excellent research and writing books and wanting. To get published and should be published, but personally, the area that I'd like to see more experimentation with is the adaptation of the S2O model for books. This was originally designed for journals.

[00:27:42] Frances: There's an S2O community online, and now it's just begun to be adapted and adopted for books. And it builds on the idea of collective purchasing. By libraries. So if all the respected brands were to adopt S2O models for either all or parts of their academic list, we would see funds being used much more efficiently and competitively at the same time.

[00:28:12] Frances: This would ultimately drive down costs and benefit everyone. But meanwhile, we have a lot to do in the area of infrastructure. Because the back office work that needs to be done for OA, Sven has said so eloquently, is still work in progress.

[00:28:32] Sven: And Francis, I want to pick up on your idea of cost control, right?

[00:28:36] Sven: So the broader adoption, bringing a better cost benefit ratio for customers. We have actually seen that in Knowledge Unleashed as well. So in the first rounds, you needed to make sure that publishers would participate and let them set their charges per title relatively freely. And we had a very broad spread there.

[00:28:55] Sven: Over the pledging rounds, the funding rounds. We have more and more standardized that and those publishers that had a very high title fee in the beginning, for example, didn't necessarily drop. But they understood that this is a market segment in the making more or less, and that they need to adjust and can't just say, Oh, in the old print ebook world, we made this revenue per title, and we need to make that in a new model as well.

[00:29:21] Sven: No, you need to adjust to customer demand to developments on the cost side as well. And I think that has worked well in that respect. And I would agree. It will also be a trend over the next years. We need to be cost conscious in academic publishing, and I think that's a big challenge still to really break it down to what it is there in terms of

[00:29:43] Frances: cost.

[00:29:44] Frances: Another area that still needs a lot of work on is how all of this is accounted for because the P& Ls that we did in the old world of print and even the closed world of digital. Just isn't working when you ask an editor to say, well, where's the income going to come from? Well, how are we going to apply it and how much of this is going to what?

[00:30:11] Frances: So

[00:30:11] Jude: can you tell us a little bit about Oable and its impact? I know you have been working quite a while with Oable as well. So would you be able to give us a little bit of perspective on that?

[00:30:23] Sven: Yeah, happy to do that. So Knowledge Unledged was always, as Frances said, a business model, a workflow basically, but also there was technological support for this.

[00:30:35] Sven: To exactly keep down cost and help publishers and librarians to better assess the impact of what they did. We had a system which we gave very early on the nice British name, Margaret, and Margaret was our back office system, really helping us to compile open access ebook packages, make sure that we could compile usage in open access.

[00:31:00] Sven: Think about it usage in different platforms that you need to consolidate with different metrics. So you need to come up with. Analytics and there's great work being done by former colleagues from Knowledge Unleashed, Lucy, for example, and others who were engaged very early on. I think we are only getting to a point now where we can say we have pretty solid.

[00:31:22] Sven: Analytics on how open access works for books and to really measure the impact. Or able was the next idea where we wanted to professionalize how we worked with journals. We had tried different approaches. Some of them work better, like subscribe to open, which Francis mentioned where we did funding rounds, others didn't really work so well.

[00:31:43] Sven: And the problem was always that we couldn't even demonstrate a library. How much they were involved with the journal in a 360 degrees approach, basically. So if you just tell the library, this is what you have spent for a subscription in the last year. That's one thing. But now you have to say this faculty member is.

[00:32:04] Sven: The editor in chief of the journal, five people have done peer reviews and two people have submitted papers to this that got accepted and published. So obviously you need a much better understanding. And that's when we started Oable a few years ago as a management tool for libraries, not for publishers.

[00:32:22] Sven: Usually KU is trying to find this middle ground between publishers and libraries. In this case, we said. Let's make sure that the library is the customer. The library gets the analytics they need as the driver of open access when it comes to funding and let the publisher just be a very important supplier of data.

[00:32:42] Sven: So that's what we are doing with OAPL. So university now has basically a dashboard helping them to understand. Where do they spend money? Where did they reject articles who is eligible to certain decisions and basically process that whole workflow from incoming metadata through decision making analytics, and then payment.

[00:33:04] Sven: That's the idea. It's a pretty tall order as a project. You can imagine that every institution, like every publisher. Have their own workflow systems, setups, and so on. And then you're not talking to the library, but also to the finance department and to the legal department for compliance reasons. Think of OSTP in the U S for example, suddenly compliance is becoming a library topic.

[00:33:28] Sven: And all of that together is the problem that Aebo tries to solve. Not looking at subscription or paywalled businesses. There are other great tools for that. But we try to build bridges and make sure that we exchange data, but just focusing on open access.

[00:33:45] Jude: And I believe OABL has already had a good substantial impact as well, right?

[00:33:50] Sven: That's what I hope. I mean, you always wish for more as an entrepreneur, right? But OABL is being used now by more than a thousand institutions worldwide. So it has really a big audience there. And we just came to an agreement with. The copyright clearance center so that we can plug in the publishers working with CCC.

[00:34:10] Sven: So yeah, we are moving forward and I'm surprised how. Much of a collaboration there is in open access still, even though it has become like the middle of the road business for academic publishers, how much we are still willing and able to collaborate and see the greater good for the library as a customer group and not so much the egoistic company decisions that some made in the past.

[00:34:36] Jude: Thank you so much. So unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. I want to extend my personal thanks to Sven and Francis for joining our premiere opening episode and of course sharing your amazing insights with us. I personally am really, really happy that you were able to join us and give us All this amazing insight.

[00:35:01] Jude: So as we draw to a close, I just wanted to tell all of our listeners that if you have any questions for Francis or Sven, please do send it across to us by going to the Partner Solutions website. And I will ask them as well, where would be the best place for them to connect with you online if they would like

[00:35:21] Frances: to?

[00:35:23] Frances: LinkedIn is fine with me. Same

[00:35:26] Jude: here. Brilliant. The age of LinkedIn. Finally, for our listeners, please feel free to share any suggestions for topics and guests via the podcast page on our Wiley Partner Solutions website. Thank you very much for joining us for our first ever episode. To close off, thank you so much for listening and keep an eye out for the next episode.

[00:35:47] Jude: Thanks for tuning in to the Research Impact Podcast, conversations with publishing leaders on trends and solutions for open research. You'll find links in the show notes to any resources mentioned on the show. If you're enjoying our podcast, please subscribe so you'll never miss an episode and leave us a five star review.