 So, welcome back for the closing session for our spring 2017 member meeting. I hope you've enjoyed Albuquerque and I hope also that you've really both enjoyed the meeting and found it informative and valuable. I know that the sessions that I went to were great. Obviously, as some of you well know, you can't cover them all, but there were some really, really fabulous sessions I thought. So, the place I guess I'd like to start is with a round of thanks for all of the presenters. You're the ones, of course, that have made this conference what it is. And we all thank you very much for your efforts and your contributions. I'd like to especially thank our volunteers who were kind enough to come and help do some of the AV capture along with our AV team. Much appreciated and I'm delighted to say that Diane tells me it looks like all of the talk captures have come out well. So, you can look forward to those finding their way onto the CNI website over the next weeks. And we'll, of course, announce the availability of those as they come out on CNI announce. I also want to mention in the AV area that I was very surprised by the turnout for my report out session on the institutional repository roundtables. We had taken audio of that really to help us in writing the report, but since there were people who I guess couldn't quite fit into the room, we're going to go ahead and put that up with the other session recordings. It'll be audio only, but it might be of some value to some who wanted to see that and weren't able to. I also want to extend a special thanks to the CNI staff. The logistics around this meeting were a little more complicated than usual, but everybody and most especially Jackie Udell, who many of you have met at the registration desk, did an amazing job of making it all come out perfectly. So, thank you all very much. One final note is I had an email from our colleagues at the JISC this morning, and I will send out a formal poll the date announcement shortly, but we have now scheduled the joint JISC CNI meeting for Oxford in the UK from the 1st to the 3rd of July. We'll make more information on that available as we put it in place, but in case you want to just put a note on your calendar. And with that, I've got one more treat for you. I was just so pleased that Amy Brand's schedule allowed her to come and join us and share some of her thinking. Amy is quite an amazing person in that she comes to the whole scholarly communication process from many, many different angles. I mean, she is a trained PhD cognitive psychologist, and she has worked in scientific and academic publishing. She's been an administrator at Harvard. She has worked in the private sector and came back pretty recently to MIT Press, which is a wonderful place for her to land as their new director. MIT Press is an organization with a tremendous history of innovation. In everything from what they publish, and they're really responsible for trail-blazing several new subfields of knowledge over the past 30 years or so, but also in their enormous flexibility in trying various kinds of things about how they publish and working with authors. There's been a lot of talk about university presses in the digital age and what happens to them, what their new role is. We've seen many university presses beginning to transition from being these sort of freestanding organizations to becoming a part of the library and reporting to the library as is the case at MIT. And that's really opened up a whole new set of avenues and questions. And I'm just, I can't think of a better person to give us this kind of multi-perspective look at the possible futures of a university press. So welcome, Amy, and thank you so much for coming. Thanks very much for that introduction and to everyone at CNI for this opportunity to share some of my thoughts about the future of university-based publishing and also to the audience for sticking it out into the end of the meeting. I had a conflict yesterday, so I didn't arrive until last night and I missed yesterday's sessions. But the ones that I attended today were really, really excellent and so this is quite humbling, but it's also a real pleasure and a real honor. So Paul Courant, who is well known to this audience for his work on the economics of universities and the economics of libraries as well as his work on things like HathiTrust and he's now acting provost at the University of Michigan wrote in an article in the Journal of Electronic Publishing back in 2010 about university presses that they, quote, confer a warm glow to the local university in recognition of the service provided to the system of scholarly publication and the article goes on but that they are in effect really inessential in the university's excellence beyond that. So in other words, you know, Harvard and Yale, just to pick two excellent universities and there are many others, would still be excellent universities if they didn't have the excellent presses that they have and it may come as a surprise to you but I take no issue with that. In fact, I concur completely. On the other hand, I suspect we would all agree that they wouldn't be such excellent universities if they didn't have the great libraries that they have, you know, from the perspective of their own faculty and students in terms of their research output and their reputation because libraries and librarians are really integral to that knowledge discovery process. They provide valuable resources to it and let's be honest, the members of their communities would be able to publish and disseminate their work regardless of whether or not their university had its own press. Now, presses on the other hand provide resources in support of the curation and dissemination of scholarship to the academic community writ large and in fact we press directors kind of like to brag about the fact that a very small percentage of our authors actually come from our own universities, lest anyone think that we are a vanity operation. I got very interested in this and I recently conducted a sort of a spur-of-the-moment survey on the AUP director's listserv. I got about 50 responses in 12 hours. It was really amazing because AUP hasn't been collecting this information in the past and many people were interested in it and it wasn't quite what I expected. What I expected was that the larger and therefore implicitly the more prestigious the university press, the smaller the percentage of authors would be coming from the home institution and in fact what I found is that many small presses have minuscule representation among their own faculty. So this first one to five percenter bar consists of very many small university presses and I think that that's because the focus of those presses doesn't really, in some of these cases doesn't really align with the academic strengths of that institution but that doesn't mean that those presses aren't important to that broader system of publishing. So this is really interesting data that we're still digging into. The bottom line is that the mean percentage across all the presses is about 10 percent across the board. So university presses have different strengths, they have different missions, they have different relationships, financial and otherwise with their institutions but we do form a multi-university collective for academic peer review and credentialing in book-centric fields and that's really an enduring part of our relevance and that's the ecosystem of scholarly publishing referred to in Paul's article. Another really interesting thing to emerge from that quick survey and the data was about publishing services. So a few of the responses were like this one and I'm just not naming the press because I hadn't sought permission to do so before this meeting in this press. They said, well our number is probably around five percent for a 16 campus system but if you include the publishing services division that we started a couple of years ago it would jump to 30 percent. And so this really resonates with the future of university-based publishing more focused on serving the publishing needs of the host institutions and I'll talk at greater length about what this means for the MIT press and how I think about providing publishing services at MIT in a way that doesn't otherwise dilute a reputation built on being highly selective because that's been a real concern among our staff members and our editorial board. So Cliff mentioned something about my past. I did my PhD in cognitive science at MIT in the 80s and when I was a student in the 80s there the MIT press generated enough in profits that it indirectly contributed to my research stipend before my advisor at the time was able to add me to his own grant. I think it was a Sloan grant. And so those days of the press being in a position to provide funds back to the institute for academic purposes are gone at least for now. It could change in the future. From a budgetary perspective though the institute groups the press with entities like dining services because we're still more of a revenue center than a cost center. And when I was an acquisitions editor at the MIT press in the 1990s I don't recall generating a publishing a single professional scholarly book with an initial print run of less than 1200 copies because we could always account on the global academic library market to purchase a two thirds of that initial print run and no such luck today. When most academic libraries have severely reduced their print purchasing in favor of digital collections. And so another thing I'm going to talk about is what we're doing at the MIT press to meet the interest and needs of libraries in digital books. So as a university press director of still very successful and largely financially self-supporting university press continuing to do exactly what we've done is just not on the table. The markets have changed. The needs and demands of our authors have changed. If we didn't change essentially it would be kind of continuing this slow but certain decline which no one that I work with is interested in doing. And so the legacy that I hope to create as a director will really future proof the MIT press with new sustained ability models that are consistent with our values around experimentation which Cliff talked about and openness. So when you walk into the offices of the MIT press in Cambridge it's about a half mile from MIT's campus now. There's a really nice display wall of books and it's a regular reminder to me when I come into the office in the morning about my responsibility to these books and I think about it in a couple of ways. I think we have these beautifully produced often very expensively produced print books and it's our job to get them out into the world and into the hands of people that are interested in them. At the same time there are now digital files for all of these books in circulation and are we doing everything that we can to make sure that all this copyrighted content is accessible and searchable and discoverable now and into the future. And particularly in an environment where almost everything that we publish digitally gets pirated. So what does that mean for book authors and in particular authors of trade books and textbooks because we publish not only professional books but also trade books and textbooks. You know who we're hoping for some extra income from their book writing efforts. Writing a book after all is no small undertaking. For many people it takes years and a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And I was giving a talk recently at a library conference in Charlotte and I mentioned an impressive statistic around e-book pirating and one of the librarians in the audience was really taken aback and I was taken aback that he was so taken aback and during the Q&A he said, you know, I'll never let my provost know that all these books are freely available, you know, authorized or unauthorized because it would only mean further cuts to my already shrinking budget. And here's just an example of one of our lead trade titles from 2016 and I just love the irony of it being the sharing economy, you know, that showed up in LibGen basically a couple of weeks after we published it. Now the good news is it's still selling very well, right? And I'm going to come back to why that is. So the reality that the internet enables peer-to-peer dissemination of published information in all forms in all media I think can be construed as a threat equally to the relevance of libraries and publishers or as I prefer to see it as a forcing function to both to invent new models. Libraries and university presses I think are very much in this soul searching together, reexamining the relationship with, the relevance to the constituents that we serve and working to create new roles and objectives for members of our staff. And I do feel strongly that our academic institutions should be championing and protecting their presses but I feel even more strongly that university presses as a group should be controlling the narrative around what we do, how we differ in some ways from publicly held commercial publishers and our motives and our values and how we align with our host institutions. So that's what I'm going to talk about. Both the MIT libraries and the MIT press have embraced strategy and an action plan that at a high level construes relevance as being worthy of a place like MIT, an institute that values experimentation above all else. And you heard yesterday from the director of the MIT libraries and my boss, Chris Berg, as well as my colleagues, Armand and Heather, about a bold new vision for the MIT libraries and for libraries in general. But what does institutional relevance look like at the MIT press today and going forward? Where are we pushing boundaries? How are we partnering with the MIT libraries and elsewhere on MIT's campus? First, just a little bit more about my background, where I'm coming from personally. As Cliff mentioned, I was named director of the press not quite two years ago in July of 2015. But this is basically my 14th year all told at MIT. And in the past 30 years or so, the period of time that I wasn't at MIT, I was at Crossref, I was at Digital Science, I was at Harvard for a period of time working on open access and then working on policies around tenure and promotion, which is still something that I think a lot about. So I've inhabited many regions of the scholarly communication landscape, as Cliff mentioned, books and journals, technologies, administration, startups, metrics. And so I come to the press directorship with a real bias towards a more digital future and a more entrepreneurial work culture and a mandate from our provost and from Chris to really reimagine a university-based publishing. And yet, lo and behold, I get back to the press. And what I find is that the vast majority of our revenues are made selling print books. And that's true for most university presses. And I'll tell you exactly what I mean by vast in a moment. So our long lived romance with the form factor of the print book continues. I'm not complaining. I love them too. I love book art. I love books. I love everything about them. But it does make the change that we sorely need in our culture and in our work processes to really leverage the full capabilities of digital that much harder to affect. Just a bit about the MIT Press as well. MIT published its first book in 1926 and was sporadically publishing books in science and technology up until 1962 when the MIT Press formed. And so we're in university press world. That's pretty young. We're a pretty young university press. But we quickly became one of the larger presses. We now publish about 250 books a year and about 35 journals. And what really makes us unique is our legacy in publishing science and technology. That's not exclusively what we publish, but most university presses, as you know, are much more focused on humanities and social science. We're also one of a handful of university presses with a significant journals publishing program. Other presses that have these are Duke in Chicago, obviously Oxford and Cambridge. All of our journals have an APC option, but that hybrid model is very, very rarely adopted. And it's not really that interesting to us. We have several journals that are completely open access. We're trying to make more completely open access. And we also have some journals in the more popular space if you've ever heard of the magazine Nautilus. It's this great popular science magazine. And we co-publish the print edition of it. And then the art space magazines like Leonardo. So our areas of strength across all of our publishing programs are the ones you see listed here, computer science, architecture, design, economics, neuroscience. And when I talk about this on the MIT campus, I talk about us really amplifying the strengths of the Institute in these spaces because we're publishing works that go beyond the research on MIT's campus, but very much aligned with what's going on there. And the real crux of the identity is this transdisciplinary art, science, design, and technology that's a very MIT-ish thing, maybe a very media lab-ish thing, but that's very much the identity of the press. So one of the new objectives that I brought to the press is a stronger emphasis on trade publishing. And in particular books that make research and science and technology accessible to non-specialist readers, which is another priority aligned with MIT's values. And just to make sure no one thinks that that means that we're no longer focused on publishing course books and professional books, I just wanted to share some acquisitions data with you. And it's easy to see that our editors are signing up as of 2015 when I got to the press a lot more trade books, that's the blue line, that's the second from the top, but we're definitely not publishing fewer course books or professional books, although we're de-emphasizing some edited volumes that we published in the past and stuff like that. So what this means is that we're just publishing a lot more than we used to. And this is kind of the reaction among the staff, as you can imagine. It's a scary transition. We've had, I think some presses have been further along than we have in sort of thinking about what should be in-sourced and what should be outsourced. We've always had this very kind of high-touch, craftsman-like approach to editorial production and design at the press, and we don't want to lose that, but we really can no longer afford to have that be the only option. And so what is in-sourced and what is outsourced is changing, some of those roles are changing. And the way I think about it and talk about it at the press is in terms of the importance of project management and relationship management. So retooling existing positions and creating new roles focused around these two things. And counseling impacted staff that learning these skills, how to start up a completely new initiative, how to be okay with iterating and failing, how to track multiple work processes and manage many external and internal relationships will not only help the press, but it will also help them in their own careers because those are the kinds of skills that really translate into almost any workplace today. So a bit more on the trade. So we're publishing more crossover books and we're now explicitly focused on titles that spread the gospel of science. I think there are all kinds of good reasons to do that. And I want to just distress that I think the role that publishers perhaps uniquely play in translating technical content, science and technology for a broader readership is a large part of expanding access to information. Yes, it's making it available, making it free, making it cheap, but it's also really making it accessible in that sense. And I'm not talking about dumb-down blockbuster books, but books that honor the complexity of their subject matter, it's a phrase I like to use that one of my more eloquent colleagues had spoken. And so these are books that can generate significant revenue for the press. This book was one of our lead trade titles recently. I think this weekend it's supposed to be on 60 Minutes. If you missed it on the Today Show, that's very exciting for us. We hadn't had publicity like that in the past and this really helps support other parts of our publishing program. And it's part of what has allowed us to do the open access publishing that we do for the most part without any subvention. So looking a bit more at what we do in open access for books, so we've been publishing digitally for a long time, but we only started about 10 years ago to publish absolutely every book that we publish and print in digital form as well. And quite frequently, although definitely not more than maybe 25%, we publish, when we publish digitally, we make books openly available. And I can talk about how those decisions are made. It's generally an author requesting that we do so or our assessment that this is a market that would benefit from that, an audience that would benefit from that. And when the content is not OA, we are moving away from DRM to a kind of lightweight watermarking strategy. As I said, we've often done this without any kind of subvention. We typically find, although it varies, that we can still sell enough print books to make this an affordable thing to do. This is the first year that we're participating in Knowledge Unlatched, and we're very excited about that. And even more excited about a relationship, a partnership with the libraries where the Scholarly Communications and Collections Directorate has decided to redirect resources that might have otherwise gone into collections towards funding a new open access book series that the press focused on network technologies. So if this term of inside out came up in the library presentation yesterday, this is a great example of that strategy and action and of the growing coordination between the press and the libraries. The other thing on this slide was just a quote from a professor at MIT who's one of our authors. And this is the one example of, so this is a book called Free Innovation, which was published openly online in which the author also insisted that there be a $0 Kindle. And this is the first real kind of experiment that we've done where we've shown that that actually doesn't work very well. If you have a $0 Kindle, you're not gonna sell many print books, but it was still worth doing. And we like doing these kinds of experiments. But it does turn out that the best selling book that we've had in a long time is an open access textbook on the topic of deep learning. Very important topic right now. I think we just timed it really well because we got this book out before there were other books out there. The print edition is 800 pages. It only costs about $80 before a discount. So it's affordably priced for a book of that kind as all of our textbooks. But this content was on the web well before the book was published and it's still up HTML on the author's side and then there's some pirated PDFs of course. But this book continues to sell extremely well. Now typically with textbooks we're a little bit more protective. We have a separate ebook textbook rental platform. But authors in certain fields and in particular computer science are increasingly requesting an open access option. And so far that's been working for us. And so almost, even though almost everything that we publish is available in digital form. It's open whether authorized or unauthorized open. We're still finding that individuals are buying print books. And just to give you a sense of what these numbers mean. If you look at our domestic sales about 95% of that is individual sales. Not institutional sales. I have a lot to do that I'm gonna talk about on the institutional side. And of that 95%, 90% of those revenues are print based revenues. The digital ebook market is still quite small. Very different story on the institutional side on the library side where there's a strong preference for digital over print collecting. So I talk about this as a juggling act. A leadership perspective, a financial perspective. The persistence of print books on the one hand and the individual market, growing institutional ebook market on the other. What's the right way forward? And this is my answer. And I'll talk about what I mean. If libraries are forgoing print and buying digital, how intermediated should that institutional ebook strategy, sales strategy be? On the one hand it's a question of institutional sales to be sure and the margin on those sales, but it's also a question of controlling our digital destiny and mission in a way that aligns with our principles about access to information. So a central part of the future proofing strategy is designing and creating our own ebook subscription platform for libraries, potentially also for individuals like if it were a membership, mainly on collections of professional books. Now I really don't like to have slides that have lots of words on them, but I wanted to spell out here all the reasons why this is a good thing for us to do. It's not necessarily a good thing for all presses, but capturing a larger percentage of those revenues if we're selling directly for our authors and ourselves, providing terms of access that are consistent with our values, as I mentioned, bringing it home so that we're focused internally on digitizing and controlling our own ebook content, being able to provide much more customized collections for libraries, creating that kind of foundation for experimentation with new functionality that I'm gonna talk a bit more about direct institutional relationships. We'll really make this a lot less opaque for us and we'll get the user data that we really need to improve our publishing program as a whole. We're also concerned about controlling our own brand, which has been an issue with some of the ebook platforms that we've worked with, and then, most importantly, providing a foundation for institutional of subvention of open access monographs, and so that's really the thing to think about. Is there a tipping point at which best practice licensing terms like the Charlotte Principles and the fact that piracy and unauthorized sharing really force our hand, that whether you're calling it licensing or subsidized OA, it really is, I think subsidized open access, and if that's the case, why should that be intermediated? So that was my line of thinking. These are sort of, this is sort of a rough outline of the terms of the platform, which is now under construction and should be ready for prime time at the beginning of 2018. And another thing that will be really different from the start is that it's designed in partnership with the MIT libraries. That means not only that library expertise is informing the features and functionality of the platform, but also that the libraries is actually committing dedicated staff hours on an ongoing basis to the institutional ebook service. And so we're very excited about yet another partnership with the libraries. So I talked about library partnerships. There are a lot of other partnerships that we've undertaken at the MIT Press. I think when I came back to the Press, one of the things that had changed was that the Press had moved a little bit further away from MIT's campus, but it also felt slightly more pivoted away from the institution because my experience of the Press, and in part because I had this long relationship with MIT was very integrated with the Institute. So we've been doing a lot of that. There are two fairly popular magazines that MIT publishes, Tech Review and Sloan Management Review. There was never any relationship in the past with the Press, but we now have close relationships not only for publishing books together, but also for certain international distribution arrangements. Very excited about a partnership with the Office of Digital Learning at MIT. Those are the folks that do open courseware and MITx, the edX platform, and found that they wanted to have very lightweight paperback print materials to accompany some of their courses. And so we've started partnering with them on that and have a couple of books coming out. And the nice thing about it is when you end one of those courses and the platform closes for you, you don't necessarily have anything to take away, but a book with those materials is something to take away and could potentially also be of interest to readers beyond the people that actually took the course. Very close partnership with the Media Lab at MIT and in particular around a new open source publishing platform created by some grad students at the Media Lab called PubPub. It's sort of like open authoring, open review platform with a lot of cool interactivity. We started last year with one journal and we're gonna be doing a lot more publishing on the platform. And then there's the Publishing Services stuff, the way in which we can take departments at MIT like SA and P is the School of Architecture and Planning, CAST is the Center for Art, Science and Technology who have book publishing programs but that don't have the infrastructure to do it and we're going sort of out of house, out of institute. And now they can use the press essentially as their back office. So we are not officially publishers of these books, we just distribute these books. That's nothing new. New publishers have been doing this for a long time but it is relatively new for us. So a bit more on the Publishing Services piece. We're finding that because we have all this capacity around not only editorial production and design but on the marketing and publicity, the warehousing, the inventory management that this is a capacity that we can monetize and it's another part of our model. And we're using it not only at MIT but also with some external partners. So for example, Goldsmiths University in the UK wanted to stand up at University Press very quickly and we were able to allow them to do that because we're just their back office. And then the self-publishing piece is really interesting and more of a partnership with the libraries through a generous gift from an anonymous donor to the MIT libraries, the MIT Press Bookstore which I can tell you a bit more about now has one of these espresso book machines and so it's print and bind a book in color in four minutes. And we are planning to use that, we use it internally for a producing sort of galleys and things like that but we're planning to use it for course materials, the libraries has a range of uses for it and for just self-publishing in the community. One of the things that was also surprising to me when I came back, not just that there were still all these print books we were selling was that there was very little had been done to digitize the back list. We have thousands and thousands of books that are essentially not available in any form except perhaps pirated because they're out of print books from many decades ago. And so that's also been a top priority for me for preservation purposes, for human and non-consumptive uses. In some cases, but this is really sort of the exception, there will be kind of gems in that back list that we probably can add to the e-book collections on our subscription platform. And I'm very happy to announce that we just reached an agreement with the Internet Archive who's gonna scan and all of our back list books and put them in the Internet Archive for different terms of access through openlibrary.org. Brewster Kale of the Internet Archive also has a vision around being able to provide those digital files to libraries that own print copies of those books. And so I think that that could be very, very transformative and we're really pleased to be, I think the first publisher jumping on board with this plan. I also talk a lot about data at work. I talk a lot about metadata. It was really, one of the first hires I made was a metadata librarian at the press because I felt like we weren't really optimizing metadata for marketing purposes. But I also talk about data in terms of just business intelligence. There's a lot of data that flows through publishing houses. There's certainly data about sales, but a whole range of other data that I just felt we weren't making the best use of. And so we're very focused now on enhanced financial analysis and more interoperability across our systems. So that's a key part of the strategy. And another key piece is community development and outreach. And so I talked about the press being, having been somewhat insular I think for a time, as a result of this incredible bookstore that we have, which is very unusual for a university press and it sells books, not just at the press, just it sells other publishers books in these topic areas. We have a forum that we can use for our authors and for the community. And so we've launched a very active series of author events that engage not just folks at MIT, but also the local biotech and innovation community. These are just pictures of some of our authors. And it's really doing a lot to elevate our profile on campus. And you know, the staff were a little concerned again about this different type of activity, but we had a very quick win in the following sense. There was an author we had reached out to, a well-known academic at Harvard Law School we'd reached out to to ask if he would be willing to serve as a commentator on one of the other author talks. And he said, absolutely not. I don't do that. How dare you ask me in effect? But he said, but I have a book coming out. Would you like to? So we said, sure, that's great. And we actually signed him up. And so, you know, he's very happy about that. And a couple of weeks later, we get a call. Would you like to publish my next book? And this was an author that I know that my editor in law and economics would never have thought was in her grasp. And so I think, you know, as I said, sort of raising the profile, being out in the community has all kinds of benefits for us. And I think, and the community. And so I'm just gonna run through very quickly sort of a range of technologies and new dissemination models that we're currently experimenting with. I mentioned Nautilus Magazine. If you haven't seen it, it's a great magazine. The MIT Press now has its own channel so we can take excerpts of our books and journals and make it available to this much broader audience through Nautilus. We're also a new partner in a New York public library program that provides e-book content for download to writers on the New York City subway system. And so this is getting our books out into a different community entirely. It's a form of providing free content and of really a form of marketing as well. We are an early adopter of hypothesis for annotation on our digital platforms. We were a partner with JSTOR on its topic graph project of providing kind of a look inside the book on semantic steroids, right? That you could do this analysis and pull out keywords and people and places and have a view of a book that showed you the frequency of those key items and where they occur in the book as a useful tool to students and readers of all kinds. You Know is another player in that space. You might know them from their library conceptual search tool but they also are working to develop tools for publishers that provide them with visibility into the conceptual makeup of their publications. And so you can have this kind of view at the book level for deep learning. There's more computer science in it than engineering or at the chapter level. And there are a lot of really interesting internal applications of You Know, I think for publishers that we're exploring and helping them develop. We have implemented Altmetric into our book platform so that you can come and see the attention in social media and news and elsewhere paid to publications. But the really exciting thing about that implementation is that authors automatically get an alert telling them about the activity on their book. So you can, the authors of Distracted Mind can see the news outlets, Twitter and blog and blogs and Facebook and you can go through and actually see the content in these things. But what I really like about this is that we're giving authors information that they can use to really kind of provide that richer narrative around the impact of their research. I mentioned the Pub-Pub platform. This was the first journal that we published on it. This is sort of what it looks like on the inside. If this were a live demo, this image would be an animation. It's a very cool platform and a very, very active kind of commenting functionality. And what we discovered was it's not like you build it and they will come, right? If you want to publish as community and conversation it requires a dedicated relationship, community management, and someone who's curating the conversation. And so with our plans to add more content to the Pub-Pub platform, both books and journals, we were actually hiring someone who was a community manager in order to make this successful. And so because we take this experimentation thing so seriously and it's a key to our strategy in building the kinds of integrations I talked about, our plan is to develop a publishing futures lab at the press that will include expanded software development capabilities and support the initiatives that I talked about. But another piece of the plan that's kind of coming together now, it's not finalized yet, is to actually have an incubator at the press for open science, open source startups that want to be in the environment of a publisher and a library. I mean, physically I think they'd be in our space because we have a little bit more available space right now than the libraries, but it would be a joint effort. And these are young people and young companies that are approaching us and are saying I have like the Pub-Pub platform and there are a couple of others that want to be able to be with like-minded people thinking about the tools and capabilities that they're developing. So I hope to have more to say about that soon. So I talked about really not quite two years in what we're doing according to this strategic roadmap that we set for ourselves. Some of these efforts are in coordination with the MIT libraries, some aren't, but overall there's a great deal of complementarity. And I do think that often, not always the discussion around the growing role for libraries in scholarly publishing is misunderstood. I mean, at least the implication that libraries are assuming the core function of publishers can be somewhat hand-wavy. Again, not always, there are real things like new journals that libraries are hosting on OJS. But I think it's because the term publishing can mean so many different things. We use it to include things like open access repositories for articles and data and other artifacts. So I started off talking about university presses providing a collective, a system for peer review. Libraries and publishers both being intermediated. And I wanna go out on a limb here and end on a completely different type of I think overly intermediated ecosystem that I believe institutions should be paying more attention to. And that's namely control over the record of scholarship itself, by which I mean the metadata record. And this came up a lot today. It came up in Jeff Builder's talk. It came up in Cliff's remarks. But I do think U.S. universities as a group have been pretty slow to recognize these broader systemic forces that would compel them to take management of their own research information and outputs more of a priority. And they've also deprioritized the kind of cross-university collaboration on infrastructure that would reduce the void that commercial enterprises like Web of Science and Scopus or ResearchGate and Academic Analytics now so successfully fill because there is a real need for that kind of cross-university nexus of information. But the result is that universities have effectively or are risking abdicating control over those metrics that are typically used in evaluation. And also over systems that support collaboration. And so if the goal is a more open system of science and of scholarly communication and a less metricized one, I think managing academic data is a key institutional component that libraries can play a highly relevant part in, in my view, by, for example, maintaining and hosting a vivo instance. And I really wanted to make a plug for that. So I could go on about metrics and metadata and analytics because I feel really strongly about it, but that's a whole other talk. So thank you very much. Any questions? I'm not seeing anyone. I'll start if I can get away with it. Could you, I had not realized that you had adopted the hypothesis annotation. Could you say a little more about that and how it's going and how you're thinking it's likely to be used and by who? Yeah, so we're in very early stages with this and it's limited to our, we call it our idea commons platform. MIT pressed back in the late 90s and this was something I was involved in and created one of the early online communities called Cognet. And that's where we have, that's a platform where we have control of our own book and journal content. And that's where we've implemented it. And it's purely experimental. I mean, what I've read about the use of hypothesis thus far is that there's a lot of uptake in course use. And so if we can drive the use of our Cognet materials to course environments, I think there probably will be uptake. But I don't really have anything that interesting to report yet. We just wanted to, we think it's a good thing. We wanna see how it's gonna be used. But the annotation component of Pubhub is something that we're gonna be much more actively engaged in because the intent is to use it as a type of open peer review, right? So we're gonna be posting book content that either in pre-publication form or post-publication form is intended to invite community commentary. And we're really interested in seeing how that goes. So. So I had a question about the unrealized potential of electronic books. And I just wondered if you had any thoughts about improving citation of e-books. Something that drives me crazy is that there's no real standard for pinpoint citation for e-books. It seems like it would be trivial to do despite everyone agreeing that we'd have like line number indicators or something that could be cited. But yeah, oh no, is that something you've dealt with at all? I haven't though, I do feel in part because of my background working at Crossref, but because I really do feel strongly that the content in professional books should be integrated into the same discovery environments as our journal content. I'd really like to, we are moving to assigning DOIs at the chapter level to all of our books. And many publishers have done that. And I think that that will be a big help there. And also for discovery. Hi, I really liked your comment about when libraries talk about assuming the roles played by publishers, it can often be hand-wavy. That's a nice technical term. So as somebody who's done a fair amount of hand-waving in this regard, and especially lately, one of the comments that I've received from some of my colleagues is that I get very hand-wavy indeed when I get to academic peer review. So I realized that, somewhat surprisingly, university presses don't actually publish that much academic stuff vis-a-vis the corporate sector, but I'd love to hear your ideas about academic peer review, and in particular, your thoughts about that peer review in the context of your comments about disintermediation. Sure, thank you. We actually, well, two things that you said that I'm not sure I quite understand. One is that in fact, university presses do publish a lot of academic books, and I tried to show that that hasn't changed for us even though we are doing some trade as well. But we take peer review incredibly seriously and most of the university presses that I know do. We have a very rigorous process that is at two stages. We peer review at the proposal level, and then we peer review at the final manuscript level. So, I mean, typically about six, there are gonna be six peer reviews on something before it's published at the MIT Press with few exceptions. I was talking to the director of the National Academy's Press recently, and she said, for the reports that they issue, it's usually about 15 or 16 peer reviews. So, I think that peer review is imperfect in many ways, but I think it's the best thing that we have now we're gonna be making decisions based on quality of content and accuracy. So, does that get at what you're asking? We're not quite. Right. It is hugely labor-intensive. So, any thoughts on making it less labor-intensive? Yeah, so we hadn't, there are some startups that are trying to kind of disintermediate peer review and have sort of cascading peer review. So, if you've submitted an article to one journal and gotten peer reviews and you don't get accepted it or the peer reviews can go to multiple journals, that's not something that we've looked at, but it, you know, my gut reaction is that it's something that's so key to what we do and our processes is probably one of those things, you know, the effort we put into acquisitions and peer review, how we think about our own particular kind of marketing that are very key to the identity of the press and our quality control, right? And it's less like those things like, you know, copy editing, which you can imagine freelancing. It's hard to imagine freelance peer review. Although, as I said, there are definitely startups, you know, in that space. It's not a direction we're going in. Yeah. Hi, Amy. Harriet Hamassi. Yeah. Nice to see you. Thank you so much for the comments. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the future of the scholarly monograph and, in particular, the media-rich, interactive monograph. Sure. We, you know, I'll say quite frankly that we don't have that much experience yet with the media-rich interactive monograph and the relationship that I mentioned with the MIT libraries and I talked about PubPub. This is gonna be monographs that are actually published in the PubPub platform, which does allow for that. So that's gonna be our first real foray into that. There have been a couple of books, but, you know, I often think about long-form scholarly work from the point of view more of the author than of the audience or the reader. You know, we publish these things because people write them for very good reasons and because we're a nonprofit, you know, organization, we can, you know, respond to and be essentially sensitive to the needs of that person, regardless of what, I mean, we're not making publishing decisions on the basis of what we predict the audience size to be. We really try to avoid that. So if something has passed peer review and it's sort of in our wheelhouse topic-wise, we figure out a way to publish it and, you know, consider it part of our mission and our obligation to really support long-form. And on the sort of experimental side, I sort of, what our vision around what we're gonna be doing with PubPub is that we'll have these interactive, media-rich versions of these books that will then publish in more of a kind of plain vanilla form in print and that the interactive ones, even though those have richer material, will be open to the world. I think there's some anecdotal data showing that, you know, for example, with digital textbooks that have lots of bells and whistles and stuff that students, you know, have considered some of those to be a real distraction and they're really interested just in the text or they wanna go back to the book itself or they wanna have both and so that's how we're viewing that now as highly experimental. But we definitely wanna provide a place for it. I will take the opportunity to slip in one more question perhaps before we close. So one of the things that has puzzled me enormously for various reasons is that it doesn't seem, in many cases, to be terribly economical, to be able to acquire both an electronic and a physical print copy of a book. Yet for the kind of scholarly work that you publish, I have to suspect that would be an ideal situation for many individuals who want both the convenience of reading through the thing in a physical form but then later the ease of going back and searching or checking particular passages in the electronic. Are you doing anything in that area or at least thinking about it? So this is, you know, what I can consider it a sad story or sometimes I just feel like my head's gonna explode but we've had a very bad e-commerce platform. And when I came to the press, I hope no one's tried to buy a book from our website because it's a very painful experience. You know, and we tried to send people to Amazon for now but we, and part of that has to do with the DRM but we are building a completely new e-commerce interface along with our new website and our new e-book platform and the key, one of the key reasons that we're doing that is so that we can bundle print with digital because I mean that's just obviously something we need to do and I think the e-commerce piece is the new platform goes live in July. So we will be doing that but you're absolutely right. So, any other questions? Well, thank you very much. Thank you.