 get started. What a lovely dog. Anyway, thank you for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions during the first day of week three of our fall 2020 virtual member meeting. Just to refresh your memory, week three focuses on issues around infrastructure, technology, standards. And to my mind, this really fits in strongly with some of the infrastructure kind of themes. This is about, you know, how we organize ourselves as a as a community. A few logistical things. We are recording this and we will be making it public shortly after. There is close captioning. Please use it if it's helpful. We have got a chat and please feel free to use that as we go. There's also a Q&A tool and you can use that to pose questions at any time during the discussion. And after we hear from all of our panelists, Roger Schoenfeld and Sarah Rui will will help moderate a Q&A session to round out the panel. We have quite a wonderful set of folks with us today. Roger Schoenfeld from Ithaca SNR is going to be moderating this. And we have Sarah Rui from PLOS, Cameron Naim from CERN, Charlotte Lair from Lyrises and Emily Ferrell from the MIT Press are all with us. And I'm going to let Roger sort of frame this rather than wasting time trying to do it myself. But I think that you'll find this to be a very timely discussion. We really are in a period, I think, where library publisher partnerships are being reshaped in some quite extraordinary ways, at least with some publishers. And I think we have several publishers with us here who have been among those at the forefront of innovation. So I think this will be a very interesting discussion. I'd like to thank all of our panelists for being with us for this. And with that, let me turn it over to Roger. Super. Thanks. Thanks so much, Clifford. And I just, it's such an honor to be part of this, this really all star panel. My fellow panelists are going to share a little bit about about each of the models that they have developed and are developing with the community around various kinds of partnership models. What we're hoping to do here is so what we're planning to do is to hear from each of the four other panelists for about five minutes each, we've, we've rigidly restricted them to three slides each. And, and, and after about giving each of them a chance to speak to some of the issues that are specific to, to their, their program, to their businesses, as the case may be. And then what we're going to try to use most of our time for in about 20 minutes will reserve then about more than half of the remaining session to a discussion among the panelists and a set of questions that we hope will draw some really interesting linkages across these individual initiatives to try to explore the basis for as, as the title of our session is for how library spending power can result in collective action as we look at some of the new publishing and collaboration models that are, that are developing. I think I'm not really going to try to offer much more framing than that to get started. I want us to have our panelists chance to get started. Emily is going to kick us off and, and then we'll go around the group from there. And I'll come back in about 20 minutes to, to help with Q&A. Emily. Thanks so much, Roger. And thanks Clifford and CNI. I have already flouted the rules and I have four slides. So you'll have to forgive me, but I will move through them reasonably fast. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the open access books model that MIT Press is working on. We started to talk to libraries about it, but the, the model is still in development and we'll be working with libraries through next year with a plan to open academic books, monographs and edited book collection from 2022. Last year, early last year, we received funding from the Arcadia fund to, to work on developing a business model for open access books that would allow us to more comprehensively open our books rather than just finding funding for individual titles here and there. So the plan is to be able to open the 90 around 90 titles per year that we publish in our, in our front list academic books. The plan with this model direct to open is that it will be a library collective action model, where libraries will open the front list, and then also be provided with term access as an incentive to the corresponding backfile of the collection that they support. And one of the interesting features is that when libraries commit to the model, even if it's not successful, they will still get access to this backfile. The idea is that we are planning to cover partial direct costs from our current monograph sales, which we realize through conventional channels. So that's about $1.6 million. Next slide, please. And the, the model itself, the collections will be offering, we're offering two collections, an art and design and STEM collection, and a humanities and social sciences collection. And part of the reason that we've decided to do that is to allow partial funding for this model. So if we don't get all the funding to open the full model, the full collection, will at least be able to open potentially open one model if we only get one collection, if we only get half of the funding we need. But built into this is also the fact that the, if there's surplus support commitments for each collection, that will cascade into the next collection. So we'll still always be aiming to reach the 1.6 threshold, rather than trying to get greater revenue on top of that. And any excess commitments will then be put towards or applied towards future feeds in the, in future years. Next slide, please. So the model itself, in terms of trying to approach access and an equity in access to this content, there isn't currently a great comprehensive model that, that, that manages to provide access to books. Some of the models that we'll hear about today with journals have been more successful, but books are still something more of a challenge. So this model will allow us to more comprehensively open our academic books from 2022. And we'll be doing that annually. So we'll be able to reassess each year how the model is working, whether it's working and take into account library feedback. We also, in considering equity in the pricing structure, tried to take as much into account as we could. So we wanted to not just take FTE into account, but also institution type size, and as well as collection budget. So we have quite a number of tiering of tiers rather than just the sort of more, say, standard five tiers. To quickly answer Peter's question, I'm talking about, there's always something of a challenge when we're talking about books with monographs versus academic books broadly. We are looking at monographs as a very large category. So we're not excluding edited books in this way. We're looking at single authored books, monographs, but also edited academic books. In the free structure, we're also trying to, at the moment, draft pricing, specifically targeting research for life institutions, long middle income country pricing as well. And then the model itself as a collective model. Because we're looking to bring a large number of institutions on board to support this model, it brings the pricing down for everybody that's supporting the model. It avoids the burden of BPCs, processing costs or charges for authors. And it really brings the price per collection down drastically below market costs. So we're looking at the pricing being at about 37 cents to just over $2 per title in these collections with this model. And another feature of the model is that institutions can actually choose to buy in, buy more shares than just a single share to cover their own institution. And we're also in discussion with a couple of libraries to come in as major sponsors. So in the first year to help subsidize some of the other tiers, perhaps for smaller institutions. Next slide, please. So one of the challenges in considering how we're working with libraries on getting this model, moving this model forward is in some shifting approach. So far, we have been working on with our eBooks on our own platform that we launched last year. And it's a very much a standard model where we're presenting pricing, we're using consortia to put together discounting. And this model really is a shift in that there's a shift from market thinking towards a collective action approach. So we are really hoping that we can get beyond libraries asking for discounting and to really work with regional consortia to move beyond buying club type mentality. So really, it is about coming together to support this model collectively. And in thinking about that, we really have tried to build this into the model itself and to try to get past some of the challenges of business thinking in working with libraries. So that part of that is making sure we're working with the lowest pricing we can. The fact that we are going to offer access to the backlist regardless of if the model is successful, as long as libraries do commit. So it's a fantastic incentive. And we're also with the fixed financial target, we're really not asking for anything beyond the set amount that we have to cover partial debt costs. And we've also made it looked at the model, and we know that the value in the backlist will sustain for 20 years. So some of those features help us to move beyond some of the challenges that might be be there in terms of this shift from market thinking to a collective action model. And that's it from me for the moment until we get to the Q&A. I am now going to pass it on to Charlotte Lair from the RSS. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. So I'm going to start where we're inequitable. Most mechanisms to support funding of open access are inequitable. This is because many of the existing business and funding mechanisms that are implemented to sustain open access publishing often replicate the same systems built mostly by commercial entities, whereby it assumes only a small and better resource subset is interested or even able to invest. Because of this assumption, marketing education outreach about open access excludes a significant portion of the community that has been supporting skyway publication all of this time. So for an example, many of the current models and infrastructures that support open access funding assume that only large well resource research institutions want or are able to participate. The funding models built on this assumption leave out most teaching and learning institutions who have been participating and acquiring much of the same scholarly content under paywall models for decades. And although they do not typically have strong research output, these institutions still have a vested interest in providing access to scholarly content to support their missions for teaching and learning. Nothing has changed in an OA world. In fact, they value the content enough to continue the status quo of acquiring it through legacy subscription and purchase models, often because very few have been offered an open alternative that they can participate in. So these inequities do not just exclude libraries that represent teaching and learning institutions, other stakeholders in our community, such as provost and research offices and department chairs, as well as public libraries and museums who are positioned to serve the commons and general public are rarely considered as collaborators to sustain open access programs. By building models and funding mechanisms that exclude other agencies, institutions or organizations from collaboratively funding open scholarly content, then the financial burden falls on a very small subset of organizations with shrinking budgets to support the entire transition to open access. The continuation of the status quo systematizes acting in solitude, forcing those who do invest in or fund open access to focus on the local needs over the global due to smaller budgets, competing dollars and little opportunities to make their dollars go further. Focusing on one individual entity or subset at a time causes silos of action. This is the opposite direction from the coordinated action necessary to transition, sustain open scholarly publishing. The solitary form of action leads to a lack of diversity and content, publishers, authors, readers, learners and ultimately society. Open access is not sustainable in such a world and we need a radical new form of cooperation that facilitates the community we want to be. Next slide. Lyrisis, in cooperation with several librarians and mission aligned publishers, are developing a new values based program to do just that. This new program is a community driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders to efficiently and strategically evaluate and collectively fund open access content initiatives. We're calling it the Lyrisis open access community investment program. It will be designed to equitably connect multiple stakeholders in the scholarly publishing landscape, including funders, institutions, libraries, authors and editors. It will facilitate an experimental and incubation space for emerging open access funding and business models centralize the administration and funding of open access initiatives at multiple scales and make transparent to the community at large who is participating in each investment community. It will provide a funding hub for more bespoke programs output from smaller publishers and niche scholarly output in order to maintain diversity of scholarship. It will also enable investors to strategically fund individual programs or distribute funds to multiple programs that align with their missions all in one place increasing efficiencies and convenience and it will help investors put their money where their mission is by encouraging mission matching between the investor and their program in order to build and maintain trust and integrity. Before the end of the year, Lyrisis and partnership with transitioning society publications to open access will announce a pilot to test the viability, scalability and sustainability of the proposed program. We're beginning this pilot with a society OA journal published by a U.S. university press needing sustainability funding as well as another journal leaving a large commercial publisher seeking funding to flip to open access. We will explore a community vetted crowdfunding approach by having the publishers answer various criteria questions on behalf of the participating journal. The answers to these criteria will be the basis for investment decisions by investors such as libraries but also any other organizations who wish to participate. Next slide. So I think the biggest challenge for this is that we we have to meet people where they are and people are all over the place in this space, especially in the language we use to talk about open access and sustainable publishing. We communicate under the assumption that we all have a shared language and understanding. But I would argue that most people in this space either do not have a shared definition of these words and more folks than we realize do not even know what some of these words really mean like open access, publishing, how money flows through the supply chain, the supply chain and what is a supply chain? We talk about infrastructure, sustainability, principles, assessing value, profit, margin, tax status, is for profit or not for profit good. Being able to communicate with a shared understanding of the words we use provides a critical platform for facilitating problem-solving across our communities. Once we agree on the meaning of the words we all use then we can start asking better questions because right now the questions we are asking may not be helping us learn anything new. In many cases people form a solution in their mind and then ask questions that validate what they believe to be true. In other words, their questions are solutions masquerading as questions. And again, we're not learning anything new. One key is to pause and maybe ask ourselves what assumptions am I making? What do I believe to be true? Then start considering the possibility that our assumptions aren't true. We do not know what we do not know. Our questions can be powerful tools for learning but only if they challenge our assumptions rather than confirm our beliefs. Only at this point can we start making visible the invisible. By meeting people where they are, using community to level the playing field of understanding, we ask better questions and we start to make visible the invisible. We can make more clearly identify and name the systems that separate us. I fear that as we attempt to normalize open access, especially now when resources are dwindling, we are all in danger of replicating the legacies and broken systems that are just no longer sustainable in order to maintain convenience and efficiencies. It's humbling to realize that many of the challenge that we all face, we're actually due decisions that we made and to continue to make as a community. We have met the enemy and it is us. But I have hope. We must acknowledge the flaws in our current systems and admit that our current system isn't right or even best. It's just the system we're used to one preferred and advanced by a minority, not the majority. If this is indeed the case, then we have an opportunity to advance a different reality, one that requires a more effective connection infrastructure that facilitates sustainable funding of open access content by leveling the playing field so that the multiple stakeholders can equitably participate in our shared scholarly communication community. And so that's it for me. And I believe we're moving on to Sarah next. Yeah, thanks, Charlotte. I always get so fired up after you talk about this. It's such a great presentation. Thanks for the quick five minute version and I've been tweeting it as well. Hi everyone. I'm Sarah from PLOS. We've just launched our community action publishing model, which some of you may be aware of. The aims of this model, it feels pretty timely. I'm not sure if folks saw the recent article in Forbes that came out. I think it was yesterday around the exclusivity exclusionary practices of the highly selective journals. So there's a pop that into the chat when I when I finish here. But basically the aim of this model is an experiment on PLOS's side to find a way to sustainably cover the cost of our open access, highly selective journals, PLOS medicine and PLOS biology, the first two journals that we publish kind of our flagships to sustainably cover their costs with a capped margin by equitably distributing costs amongst the stakeholders that engage with the content the most. And for now the proxy we're using for those who engage the most are those who publish the most frequently in these journals, either as affiliated with the lead authors publishing in these journals or as affiliated with the co authors, the contributing authors. What has set this. I actually credit to Roger for coming up with this list, because I had to come up with it in response to a comment on a scholarly kitchen pose it was super helpful just to repurpose it. But what makes the model different is, I think if you were to reduce it down to a couple of things, it's really the transparency that we've tried to bring to the process in disclosing the amount of cost we want to cover in disclosing the operating margin of 10% that we want to reinvest in the journal in disclosing the process of coming to the fee structure making that fully available on our website. And then engaging over the past six or seven months with funders consortia libraries, many folks on this call on what was working and what wasn't with the way we had conceived of the model originally, and then getting it to where we find it now in terms of how we were publicly presenting it with, you know, a full commitment to transparency around what works to transparency when we change things or have to pull back on things because they're not working. I think kind of this good faith effort to collaborate with library partners and other stakeholders to try something new understanding that not all of it's going to work, but ideally hoping to get to the same collectively community driven outcome together for lack of a better way of describing it. And there's a lot more information on our site about how that's going to work. So really in terms of thinking about equity, my kind of remit at plus since I've joined has really been to be thinking about models that really facilitate a truly sort of open to read open to publish and I would ask, oh, I would add open to use, you know, in the kind of open science best practices, vernacular for lack of a better way of thinking about it, you know, whether you are a researcher, a practitioner, a reader, just just a user of any sort. When you come to a scholarly output, you should be able to read it. You should be able to use the content, whether it's the data, the code, supplemental information, and you should be able to publish when you need to as you need to assuming you meet the standards that your community requires without cost barriers. So as I'm thinking about new business and talking with folks like the people on this panel, I try to think around the questions of how to, you know, equity the communities we serve and sustainability. What does that Venn diagram look like such that we can make sure we're removing barriers that as Charlotte, you know, stated very eloquently, we ourselves have built plus particularly, you know, we were amongst the first to make APCs something that works. How are we bringing down those barriers while also being kind of prudent stewards of of our nonprofit mission and making sure, you know, we can we can be around to to fight another day. So those are kind of the three pieces that we think about when we use equity. And I credit to Roger again for pushing all of us on, you know, equity is getting thrown around so much. How do we make sure it's not a a throwaway line, but something that's really critical to how these models succeed in a big component of that is accepting that these models are not going to be about revenue maximization. They're going to be about cost recovery, transparency and collaboration with the entities that are willing to participate in them. Sorry, I keep moving the slides in the wrong direction. The person who is doing that is me on all these presentations. I'm sorry. In terms of the challenges, I really appreciate Charlotte's point on are we speaking the same language? It has been an eye-opener for me to sit down with with institutions that I consider extremely savvy and extremely knowledgeable in the scholarly communications kind of ecosystem and to share with them, you know, let me tell you how much a submissions platform costs to maintain. Let me tell you how much it takes for a publisher like Kloss with no historical infrastructure around tracking counter data. Let me tell you what that costs. Let me tell you what it costs to create a sales and partner support infrastructure when you don't have one. Those things are real. Those things cost money. And, you know, there's always the eternal debate of what publishers do anyway. You know, what does all this money go to? I had to have that conversation with every partner I've engaged with in the past year and a half. A, because Kloss has never had these things. So I had to I've witnessed us trying to build them and create them. But also, you know, when when you go to an institution in this climate asking for new money, you need to be able to answer those questions. And so, you know, exhortation to library partners and I can name a couple libraries that have been incredibly great at showing me how this is done. You can ask, you know, you can ask what is it? What does this APC pay for? Right. The whole plan as a price transparency effort was an effort to get publishers to ask that question. You can ask why they pay for certain services and not others. You can ask, you know, why is this service, for example, why won't Kloss do X, Y or Z service for me? And I can tell you, well, this is what it costs and we'd rather spend our money a different way unless you want to pay for it. Right. There's there's lifting the lid, I think, in the spirit of the assumptions that we make. Again, time back to Charlotte's points around this stuff doesn't need to be a secret. And the more that we're kind of willing to share, I think the more we build back the trust that's really been eroded in the course of library publisher engagement and then it really allows a fair conversation for when, you know, I have to turn to, you know, Charlotte or MIT or another institution and say, I can't give you that thing you want. It's because we've explained, you know, let me give you the whole picture of what our ecosystem looks like. And suddenly it becomes a lot more understandable. It's not a publisher just trying to pull a fast one on you. There's a legitimate. Disconnect there that the publisher as a partner is trying to to highlight. I want to flag consistency because I think that's really important. Emily alluded to this every Charlotte, you can jump in and tell me if I run on this. Every library wants like a sustainable community driven approach until it costs them more money than what they're paying now, right? And then suddenly I want to have a transactional relationship where you give me the best deal and it doesn't matter what other people pay. And the the reality that we're facing with particularly the plus cap is we are sticking to our guns on the transparency and the consistency. So, you know, for every library that has committed and we have had tremendous uptake on the model, there's a there's a whole bunch of other libraries saying, well, we want to participate, but can we just pay less? And the the answer, you know, from from our perspective has to be no, we need everyone to give the amount that that they're stipulated to give. If you don't, then other institutions pay more because it is a collective and accepting that we have to be consistent on our side. And ideally, you know, institutions have to have to bring that same consistency as well. So I think I'm going to stop there and I'll hand it over to Cameron. Cameron, I'll try not to mess up my slide advancing here. Sorry. No, not to worry. So I just want to start off by thanking Cliff and Diane from CNI for having us and for this excellent and most admirable group of fellow panelists. I'm so excited and inspired by the work that you guys do every day. And it's a pleasure to an honor to be included with you today. So I'm going to talk about something that isn't particularly all that innovative because it's been around for a while. And but my main role right now at at CERN and as the head of open science, particularly on the open access sphere is is managing the operations for scope three, which is the sponsoring consortium for open access publishing and particle physics. For those of you who don't know, I mean, I'm guessing most people are aware of this effort, but it's a collective action effort, which is pretty global. We have three thousand libraries and across 43 countries, it's been operational since 2014. And in that time, we've published now almost 39,000 articles open access covering 90 percent of the discipline in high energy physics and 11 of the most important journals. One of the really interesting things about about scope three and one of the reasons why I was delighted to take the job at CERN and to be working on it is that it really has aligned with values that I have espoused for many years and that you've heard on this panel about enabling open access that is barrier free for authors. So you want to you want to have we want to be able to create systems that don't exacerbate existing inequities and scholarly publishing. In the past, researchers in developing parts of the world were unable to access content was because it was just too expensive for them to subscribe to journals. And the the predominance of the APC model has led to, you know, with the exception of waiver systems have led to a potential for exclusion of authors who aren't able to afford to to publish their work. And so I've been really interested in developing and working on collective approaches and was worked with Rainn Crow and at annual reviews on the subscribe to open program, which espouses very similar values. I think what's what scope three demonstrates is that it's not only possible global collaboration can be achieved towards these goals. It's sustainable. So we're now in the seventh year of scope three that although there's only 43 countries participating, we're able to enable authorship from over 120 countries and we're able to also do it at a at a cost that's pretty darn effective. Now, scope three isn't isn't premised on on paying APC is per se, but our average cost per article, if you take the total budget and divided by the number of articles we publish is around, you know, 1100 years, about 1200 dollars per article. So you can move forward please. So now you may have seen this presentation about scope three, I was just going to talk about it very briefly. But at the outset of the program, the way that scope three worked was that CERN acting on behalf of the consortium entered into contracts with publishers to effectively underwrite the major journals in the discipline to publish higher and high energy physics content open access. So for researchers, they would submit their content to the publishers. It would be published away. And then the publishers were required to issue reductions. So a reduction on the subscription costs for the commensurate amount of those journals within their portfolios. And the idea was that that reduction that would then be issued to libraries would then be paid back to scope three in terms of membership fees. There was, you know, there's we also received support from a number of funding agencies and CERN puts in about 10 percent of the budget, but that these savings would become essentially part of the mechanism that scope three used to develop its budget and then use that to collectively negotiate with publishers to deliver open access. Now that was developed and has been operating since 2014, but effective now the content that is in scope three is open access. So now the question is, you know, the the subscription reductions have become this kind of artifact of history, right? It's been a number of years now. A lot of, you know, like people move on in libraries. People move on to publishers. A lot of this sense of, you know, this this savings that was issued in 2014 to libraries has kind of kind of been lost. So how do we now that we have a set of of open content? How do we continue to sustain this and to do it in in ways that are equitable for the institutions that participate? So if you could head to the next slide. Oh, there we go. So the way that scope three effectively works is that and I can talk a little bit more about the slide if anyone has any questions, but I'm just going to just state the general principle is that we work on a on the fraction of authorship in articles in our discipline. So what we do is we look at every single article that's published in our discipline over a two year period. Look at the author list. Determine from that author list what country are from and if they have affiliations in multiple countries, we take the country that has the highest GDP and we add up what we call article fractions and and then assign them per country. So for the total body of literature over over two year period in our discipline, we calculate the fraction of the research that belongs to that particular country. What we then do is once we have that total fraction for the country, we multiply that by the total budget of scope three and that becomes how much a country is then expected to pay. We also ask our participating countries to add an additional 10% on their budget to cover the publishing for countries can reasonably be expected to contribute to scope three places like Yemen or Niger where we do where we have supported authors from all over the world to publish their work for free. So this is the way that we kind of think about how we can develop a sustainable equitable model where people pay for the services that are delivered to them, which are effectively publishing services based on how much they use it. So so their authorship in the journals and so if we could just move to the final slide, the issues that that the scope has kind of associated with this model is that, you know, as I mentioned already, the journals were transitioned to OA in 2014. The savings are this kind of artifact of history. What what what some people necessarily consider is because we lock in pricing well, our contracts with publishers for various phases, we lock them in for for three year periods at a time. That means that a library's contribution into scope three remains steady for that phase. So content that may have otherwise been a subscription journal, which, you know, you libraries are very familiar with the fact that there are there are annual price increases that can be in the range of three plus percent. There's a savings that's also achieved in that way, but but isn't really thought of when when evaluating the value that something like scope three delivers. Demonstrating continued value to the community is challenging, particularly for non participants, because even obviously like I said, there's a hundred and twenty countries that have authors only forty four participate. So how do you convince non participants to join and in a way to what we do is we demonstrate the value by the number of authors that have contributed and been able to publish their work easy free. We're asked a lot for usage and download statistics by libraries to to justify payments to to the scope three fund. But because those are managed by the publishers and you know, we're in essence an intermediary, that's something that we don't really get. That's something I would like to see, though, in the future is you know, I do think that when it comes to away and collectively funded away this this notion of of expanded readership, particularly comparing to the subscription model is one that I think does have a lot of value and something that was noticed in in annual subscribed open program, which was the content that was originally pay walled was only available to to about 3000 subscribing institutions and then once it was opened, eight to 10,000 institutions around the world were suddenly using content. So attracting new participants and contributors is challenging. You know, a lot of people talk about when we get into collective funding models, they talk about the free writer problem and you know that that support will dwindle over time and people will will withdraw. And I think scope three really demonstrates the counterpoint to that that actually, you know, free writing has never been a problem for scope three and that in fact, our numbers are increasing. So just in the last week or so we had a new consortium join the the Irish Research Library IRL has just joined scope three. So we have a new a new member country, new member institutions who previously have always benefited from the free publishing services and are now and are now happy and willing to to fund this kind of a model. So I think collective approaches are are obviously viable. Scope three is demonstrating that we're able to continue to demonstrate the services of high quality publishing away, ABC free. And it's just really encouraging to see a range of different approaches that align with that set of values of delivering global equitable models that are not exclusionary. And I'll wrap it up there. That's that's just wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Cameron. And thank you. Thank you, everyone. So I I want to really encourage we have about 20 minutes for discussion. And I want to, you know, really encourage all the participants to put questions into the Q&A box. I'll be happy to ask them on your behalf. But I want to start with it with a couple of with a couple of questions. And maybe we can even take the slide down, Sarah. I think, you know, that that way we can really see the, you know, all the panelists that are thanks. And I'll ask just a series of questions to get us to get us started. But, you know, when we're looking at these new and I think, you know, even not so new models, all of which are innovative and trying to really build out openness, build build in openness into our practices and our assumptions. I think differently, explore new opportunities. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a tremendous amount of creativity and innovation that's represented in this panel. And I just want to sort of first of all, first off and most importantly, just take a moment to really recognize that. I think we're really looking at some innovators and leaders in this space here. And so, you know, even if I have questions about some of the specifics and I may ask some questions that are a little bit challenging, I just want to take a moment to really recognize at the highest level, like this is the leading edge of creativity and innovation. And we should really celebrate that and try to, you know, both respect it and, you know, for all of us, it's an opportunity to learn from some real leaders in the community. So now to dig into some questions. So I'd like to understand a little bit better. You know, one of the things that's really challenging and important about any business, any product is that you have to generate not just enough money to cover your costs of doing your business this year, but you have to generate the resource and you need to reinvest in the business itself, whether that be to make a major capital investment to rewrite to maintain and rewrite the code that's underneath some of your your systems, whether it be the need to, you know, acquire content next year, all of those things are things that require reinvestment in the business. And so I'd like to understand, how do you think about the way that operating margin works for your businesses? Are you trying to break even? Are you trying to enable, you know, reinvestment over time? Is there a level of reinvestment that feels, you know, fair and equitable? Or, you know, how do you, how do you think about that need to do more than just break even but actually maintain and reinvest? And, you know, anyone who'd like to feel free to jump in there? I could jump in really quickly and just say that I think that's a really interesting question. And I think in in part, one part of the answer is that I think all publishers like many businesses or companies are balancing a portfolio in some way. So certainly for MIT Press, what we're talking about here is ensuring access to our academic books, while also continuing other parts of our publishing program in different ways. And looking to support those in the ways that need to be customized for those particular areas of the program. So when it comes to monographs, there's a clear need where there's value in the long form work. But there is also, you know, plenty of research shows that it's just not really a market product. And in order to support that value, a community model really makes a lot of sense. But there just needs to be, yeah, and we're ready for something more. And I think that's that's what we're trying to do with this model. And but otherwise, we're expanding all sorts of other partnerships as a way to continue to sort of reinvest in, say, digital infrastructure in ways that we need to to support the work we're doing with Open. So if Roger, if I can jump in and I'll put on my hat from working with annual reviews right before joining CERN and working on the Subscribe to Open program. And I mean, I think the reality is for for most publishers with multiple journals is that you have there are some journals that that make money and that are our revenue drivers and that those and those may even generate a surplus that's in excess of, you know, like what what some people might think is reasonable for for a nonprofit publisher to make. But the the truth is that for a lot of those kinds of publishing operations, particularly the nonprofits anything like the revenue gets reinvested into the publishing program and it, you know, it helps support the the development and exploration of of new journals and, you know, which which also, you know, tend to have investment costs that take about seven years to recoup. And so there are journals and across portfolios that are that are kind of the financial winners and those help support journals that are either new or or maybe journals that do need to exist and and there's a there's a need for them in the community, but that might not have a large enough market to to generate any kind of surplus and may actually be be losers. But I think the the key element in in all of that is is trust and and transparency. And I think one of the like one of the great things about about nonprofits like and your views is that they're they've always been very open and honest and and transparent in the way that that that they work with customers. And and I think the I think it's key in and Sarah, I'll ask her to talk a little bit about a little bit about their radical transparency approach they're taking with supporting you know, these these two actually quite important. And I'd say, you know, like relatively expensive titles to to convert to open that that I think that the trust that comes with with transparency is something that at least in my experience, libraries are are up for paying more so long as they have a clear understanding of the way that the the money that they are spending is being used. And so I don't want to speak on behalf of the library community as a whole not being one. But at least my experience is that, you know, there are levels of surplus that that librarians are comfortable with just so long as that the trust is there in this relationship. And and that's why I think, you know, particularly what's what's happening at plus around, you know, this radical transparency that approach they're taking is is the key in building that kind of trust and to enable, you know, the support of the support of these kinds of of models. And I'll just add since it what we're building is something that's going to support multiple models and multiple programs. We are consulting with the publishers, editors, whoever it is we're working with to encourage them to build in, you know, everybody has a different name for it, Margin or what have you. We're calling it a sustainability fund. We're encouraging them to build in at least, you know, 10, 15 percent is what we actually encourage more than anything to on top of what they need to just recover their costs. Because the people who are coming to us, they're saying, this is how much it costs exactly. They don't understand necessarily that there are, you know, whatever services they might be using to pay for might have annual increases. They're not building those in, they're not necessarily predicting multiple years into the future. They're saying, we just need this much money right now. And we're trying to consult with them to help them learn how to build a business model that is sustainable for them and then be able to communicate that back out to the library community through, you know, we're not calling it a prospectus, but the idea is just like a mutual fund where you can go in and you can look at all of the whatever criteria that libraries might be looking for, especially around sustainability. They want to know that what they're investing in lasts for a long time. We're not just doing this for one time. This is a this is a shift, a transition to a new way of supporting scholarly publishing in those publishers in which we trust, right? And that that we see a good, a strong impact in the entire community, not just locally. So that's what we're doing to try to encourage sustainability. It's taking what we learn as an organization and from our libraries and understanding that, you know, just like at home, we want more than just being able to pay just for that week's groceries. We need to be able to be sustainable and grow and be able to contribute in an organization or publisher sense. That means being able to have some freedom to be able to reinvest, to innovate, especially as researchers are changing how they're wanting to publish and how do we keep up with what they need as well? So it's all a lot of communication across all of the stakeholders and educating all of us as we go. Super. Thanks. Thanks all for those really helpful thoughts. It's interesting. I I feel like I have heard some library leaders say things like, you know, I don't I don't I would rather keep that capital here with me to decide where to reinvest, then, you know, turn it over to just to someone else. But as as several of you said, it's all about the trust, isn't it? So so a question came in from from Don Waters, who is really going to ask us to shift our attention from the revenue side to the cost side. And I think that's a really great point. And I'll read his question. I think that's I think that's the best approach here. So so Don writes a terrific session. Thanks for the thoughtful presentations. Extending a Rogers question. Collective action here has been defined as in terms of revenue generation models. Several speakers alluded to ways of increasing efficiency and other kinds of changes beyond the forms of generating revenues for publishers. Plus has certainly brought to life some changed conceptions of journals that push down the cost of publication. I think that's referring to plus one among other things. Moreover, their publishers not represented here like UNC Press that are experimenting in the humanities with stripped down digital first products that lower the costs of traditional monographs make open access more affordable. This is these are great observations. There's evidence that other forms of digital publishing that make use of digital data and modeling are actually increasing the cost of publishing. And I think certainly in the STM space, I can say this without any question, there's all sorts of new mandates and and requirements. Can the speakers say more about how they envision using collective action models, your models to influence and change the cost of publication and not just generate revenue? I have an answer. Oh, I feel so strongly about this because it's it's borne out of need. Just I really appreciate Don's question and how that was formulated. I feel that so strongly, you know, we're we're going out to the community and asking help us cover cost short of like giving you a list of like, this is how much our heating bill is and this is how much pencils cost, right? Short of doing that, which I don't think anybody wants to wait into. It is incumbent upon us, certainly from a nonprofit side to to in good faith tell anyone partnering with us that we are engaging really thoughtfully and prudently around what we spend, right? And so one of the things that I think is a critical collective action effort is not so much an offering to libraries, but as stakeholders within the community collectively acting around shared open infrastructure. And that means paying your bit to make something like OA switchboard work, paying your bit to make, you know, whatever community organized effort is out there such that each publisher is not then building things independently in silos whose costs we then transfer to our partners when it comes time to pay the bills. So a very simple kind of example of this, a number of libraries have asked us, particularly in the US, well, you know, can you just build up? Can you just syndicate and push to us our content, your content? So it ends up in our repository, right? And that was a common request that a lot of libraries had for subscription publishers justifiably, right? They had institutional repositories. They had mandates on campus. You had to deposit. Our content is natively OA. We never really did that. Every library now, quite a few are asking for it. And they're really surprised when we push back and say, let me tell you how much that costs. Let me tell you the volume of content you're going to get when you're dealing with a journal like one. Let's talk about corrections. Let's talk about versioning. That is super expensive to maintain. Do you want to pay for it? And every library goes, oh, no, it's fine. Like we get like that makes sense. We get it, you know, and having a really frank conversation. Now, though, I will say, I turned to every single one of those library and goes, we are trying to work with OA switchboard. It's possible OA switchboard may be a mechanism where we build one thing once and everyone gets what they need because they're participating in that. So in my mind, I can rant about this because I'm so excited that there's going to be a central thing that's going to save us money in time. I think that kind of collective action is really important, particularly around the smaller players, the non-profits, the societies that are just, we don't have the, you know, 2000 person production team to pump out the kinds of deliverables that libraries have come to expect from, you know, our larger commercial colleagues. So that's, I think, an example of collective action to reduce cost and facilitate collaboration. That's important. Yes, and I think it's not just, we need to think about communities of practice here and that the communities of practice are not just the librarians that are, you know, that are making the decisions for funding. There are a whole slew of stakeholders out there that have always been giving money into the publishing, whether they're capital F funders, you know, departments, they've always done that. It's not new for us to be thinking about the multiple stakeholders within open access. So collective action isn't just about those who are giving the money, though. We see this in consortia all the time. With consortia, yes, there's a, you know, the buying club kind of mentality that we're reducing costs, that we're negotiating certain terms. But there are some consortia that do what they call deep collaboration, where they're, they're actually reducing costs for the group they serve by centralizing, you know, catalogers, having one category, having one scholarly communications librarian for all of them. I would love to see publishers doing this more. It's not just in the models that we build where we can save money. It's also in how we function. And we need to work together more. It's not just the libraries who need to be coming together as consortia. I would love to see the societies doing more together in deep collaboration to try to reduce the costs. And any other, you know, the small scholarly publishers where they don't have 2,000 person teams to be able to do things. But they have the knowledge of the skill set and the diversity as, as one unit to be able to come together and do something that is common across all of them. They have their unique aspects about them and we want them to maintain that for diversity of scholarship. But there are some common things they all do and that maybe that's where they can reduce costs. The models that we're all talking about by participating the funders around the revenue for participating in that way, they also have ability then to provide feedback. This is how we can improve things. Asking the questions, you know, we've been paying it this way for so long. What if we think of something else? We've come up to that question, oh, well, it's because it costs this much. Well, then what can we do to maybe to reduce that cost? So it's all connected even though we're collective action around the revenue. It's really a community of practice that's forming. Yeah, just to agree and support that and just in addition to sort of add the perspective from books, which really, you know, the models do share a lot of things, but at the same time, books have their own particular needs. And book authors, you know, if you're talking about sort of cost reduction, when an author publishes a monograph with MIT Press, there are all manner of things that they expect in terms of marketing, the branding that goes along with it. And all of that, in order for our acquisitions editors to continue to be able to acquire books, they have to be able to assure their authors that they will be treated the same whether the book is open access or not. And that is an incredibly important factor. So sort of cost reduction, yes, but, you know, to some degree we have to do a revenue comparison because that's how we know we're sort of keeping standards the way that they are at the moment in serving our author community. So as Charles is considering scholars as part of that community of practice, even though we're taking the cost burden off them. If I could just add just one general observation, which is that if you look at, so we're all kind of familiar with some of the market forces that have dominated scholarly publishing and the oligopolistic control that the big five have exercised. It's interesting if you kind of have a broader just look at the trends. It does seem that, you know, there's an increasing realization that at least content is going to move to open and there's this kind of inevitability around it in a way. But what is happening in that space is there's a lot of the corporate acquisition around publishing services happening. And that's something that I think everyone needs to be a little bit wary of because, you know, perhaps that's going to be the next front where they're going to be making their profits is in the services space. So the thing, you know, the points that my fellow panelists have been making are really well taken. I think, you know, OE Switchboard is a really good example of a global initiative that will deliver services for institutions around the world and for publishers that is going to be collectively funded. And then there's other efforts like invest in OE infrastructure, a number of different collective action efforts that are going on to create alternatives to these corporate systems. And I think those are the kinds of things that we need to be on the lookout for and to think about supporting, you know, just so that we don't take our eye off the ball and before we know it, we're stuck in another situation where publishing is controlled on the service side by profit maximizing entities. Well, thanks everyone for answering that question. I mean, I know we're at time and I'll just perhaps close this question by saying that, you know, I think there's so much more we as a community can do to think about cost mitigation, cost reduction. And when I think, because when I think about collective action on the cost side, and you know, this is where you'll hear me more as a critic, you know, I think of some of the collaborative open initiatives that didn't really go anywhere and resulted in an awful lot of resources that were squandered. And, you know, we don't have to agree that, you know, we don't have to believe that the commercial publishers are a good use of resources to recognize that under the guise of collection, collective action, we've sometimes not made the best use of community resources either. So Don's question is really, really well taken and I really appreciate the discussion here. Perhaps we'll be able to continue it, but I know we're right at, or maybe even a minute or so after five o'clock Eastern. So I want to thank the panelists for their participation, turn things back to Clifford and Diane. Thanks, Roger, and to all of our panelists, thank you so much for really spirited, interesting, really fascinating conversation about these issues. And thanks, Don, for that wonderful question. And as we are past time here, I will go ahead and close down this session again with sincere thanks to our panelists and to all of our attendees for joining us here today. Thank you so much. I hope we'll see you back at CNI sometime over the next week or two. Thanks so much, everyone. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye.