 Hi, folks. Thanks for joining. My name is Travis Rich, and I'm with the Knowledge Futures Group, which is a non-profit infrastructure organization, and we're dedicated to building technology for the production, curation, and preservation of knowledge in service of the public good. Today, I want to share with you our infrastructure action campaign to scale community-based distributed publishing models into the mainstream. I'll explain why we're kicking it off, to what ends, and share some of the ways that y'all can join and participate. To start, I'll set the context with a bit of our history. We got our start when we began building out an open-source publishing platform called PubPub, and we began it because we wanted a space to publish that was more iterative, more collaborative, more interactive than the traditional publishing models that were available to us were allowed. And pretty soon after we got into that adventure, the point that was coming across loud and clear wasn't that it was just us angsty grad students who were unhappy with the current set of tools and platforms available, but that many groups inside academia and outside of it, from publishers and researchers to policy makers and journalists, they too felt that they were being held back from doing their best work because of the available models within scholarly publishing. And there have been many different documented reasons for this feeling, from structural equality issues to the enormous extractive profits by commercial groups on a mostly publicly funded endeavor to problems of appropriately signaling quality to just being slow and obstructive. And despite these challenges being well articulated for years and well known, we still don't have mainstream alternatives and understanding why that is has been a big part of our focus. And now, one silver lining of the past year has been that researchers, reviewers, readers with a desire for change have responded to these problems during the urgency of the pandemic by moving towards a system that's more open, more flexible, more timely. And I think we have a real opportunity to leverage that momentum to drive lasting change towards this more equitable, accessible, scholarly publishing landscape. The loudest example of this for me is preprints. Once common in only a few disciplines, they're now flourishing in traditionally resistant fields like medicine. Researchers across fields and around the globe are demanding shorter and shorter review times and in many cases, making do with informal and rapid evaluations of preprints conducted independently of a traditional journal submission process. And at the same time, rapidly shared research is being picked up by journalists and news outlets in their mission to inform an increasingly concerned and curious public. And so we see these review services like Pre-Review or Pure Communion, Rapid Reviews COVID-19, experiencing dramatic uptake of their models and increasing interest from academics and libraries in the press and the public as resources that can help them make sense of the COVID-driven glut of preprints. And most importantly, it appears to work well. Research shows that these alternative models, these efforts to break out publication, review and curation as distributed efforts, that they draw more attention to papers than any other model. They're no less effective at weeding out bad science than traditional processes and potentially much more so. They're a much faster process than traditional publishing with more satisfying feedback loops and done well. They offer traditionally underrepresented groups more access to the scholarly publishing ecosystem. And lastly, they have the potential to offer a broader range of higher quality assessment metrics and to be far cheaper for institutions than traditional publishing processes. And I think it's important to acknowledge that these efforts stand in contrast to the movements of scholarly publishing conglomerates who seem to be learning from Silicon Valley that content isn't king, but the data associated with producing and consuming that content is. They're transforming into information analytics businesses. And my concern is that this transformation will lead to an industry where research will be open, but it won't be free as in speech. These groups can leverage their near monopolistic control of the publishing process to mine the data generated as a byproduct of knowledge production, apply proprietary predictive algorithms and sell that data and tooling for use back to universities, institutions and companies as analytics products to inform their hiring and investment decisions. And we've seen with other commercial conglomerates and news, retail and entertainment that these moves might be good for business, but they're potentially devastating for the health of that ecosystem. And among other downsides, the effect of this business model transformation will be to encode the ecosystem's existing biases into these analytic products themselves, making those biases less visible. And I think we can look to the behaviors of researchers and readers and reviewers to understand this disparity between what's good for business and what's actually needed. During the pandemic, when the going got tough, the tough went nowhere near the direction these monolithic publishers are heading. And unfortunately, without a compelling alternative, the incumbent power of these conglomerates will carry us further and further from the needs of a productive, equitable, accessible publishing ecosystem. I think therein lies our opportunity to build in a space where the commercial modelists don't yet have a foothold. This disparity affords us the ability to be innovative and nimble and work directly with practitioners to drive ground-up behavior change rather than falling into the trap of competing head-on with entrenched traditional models. And researchers, reviewers and organizations dedicated to making pandemic research more accessible and more timely, have found initial success, but face scaling challenges that have prevented the mainstream adoption, I think we all want to see. Their work has shown authors who are eager to engage in more diverse audience and publishers who are excited about new revenue opportunities for viewers who are eager to finally get credited for their expertise, but we just haven't seen that shift in behavior changes scale. And I think we also see this playing out further in communities that are doing enormously valuable curation and publishing work at the margins in Slack groups across GateRepos, but they simply struggle to scale those efforts into legitimate contributions towards a growing global Scali record because they don't have the pathway to do so. And this lack of existing accessible infrastructure to do so means that there are only a few who have been brave enough to actually tackle the challenge. And of those, nearly none of them have the resources to reach the goal despite potential new sustainability models. A second major problem faced by these groups as they leverage an alternative model is that most researchers and journalists and funders and readers just simply don't know that these models exist. And so while at first glance, the urge may be to simply run a marketing campaign, let more people know about these opportunities, the unspoken truth is that these groups can't afford to scale their innovations. They struggle to maintain operations, marketing, outreach, community support, technical stability, while even just supporting less than 1% of the publishing ecosystem. And so I think this unacknowledged reality has led to a vicious circle where despite the effectiveness, despite the promise researchers and institutions are seeing, they're also hesitant to fully embrace models outside of the mainstream. But the purveyors of these models also lack the resources to even support their current levels, much less recruit the numbers of participants required for wider legitimacy and adoption. So you can't blame them. If we provide the resources that allow these models to scale to larger participation, I think what we'll see is we'll see libraries and institutions and researchers be less hesitant about restructuring the resources and their time that's currently being wasted on outsized commercial profits and an ecosystem inefficiency in favor of sustaining these distributed community models and approaches to scholarly publication. But as with any complex ecosystem with many stakeholders, it's challenging to identify who should move first. Do authors change their behavior before funders expect it? Do funders change theirs before the authors request it? Do tenure committees hire in a certain direction before funders have acknowledged the value of that direction with their support? I think the only path forward here is really to bypass that conundrum altogether and simply say yes to all of the above. And so our approach at the Knowledge Futures Group has been to embed ourselves within these different stakeholder groups, a diverse group of funders and publishers and researchers to develop the necessary infrastructure hand in hand with these groups pushing on and needing these new models. And what we've found is that the role we can play is internalizing many of the different needs from these different stakeholders and synthesizing those into pieces of infrastructure that are general purpose, reusable and accessible. And I think this winds up being not only more cost efficient than building 15 bespoke tools for 15 mostly similar efforts, but it also gives us the means to move in unison with many different stakeholders groups at the same time. And we've begun calling this approach an infrastructure action campaign because it's not just about building a piece of tech or just doing the on the ground work, it's about this coordinated movement, a coordinated campaign with specific actions towards a shared goal of making equitable, accessible models of scholarly publishing mainstream. And from the KFC perspective, we found that closely pairing infrastructure development with the community led needs of researchers and publishers and funders who are doing that on the ground work is incredibly important because while not the whole solution, it's often the technical infrastructure that provides accessible on ramps to budding communities. It's the infrastructure that solidifies new norms and best practices and enables scaling of those new behaviors. And so success in this campaign means scaling distributed community based publishing models into the mainstream, shifting the overton window of what constitutes a contribution to the scholarly record and in doing so affecting a more accessible, more equitable, higher quality scholarship. And so we're very focused on the internet and I think the internet at its best has shown us that distributed forms of communication allow multiple participants from all over to contribute to a marketplace of ideas participating in the ways that they're best suited to. I think we see that same potential for publishers and reviewers and curators of scholarly knowledge. And for me, that vision stands in contrast to how commercial giants, whether in publishing or journalism or social media, leverage the internet in that it allows us to use it to enable distributed, equitable, accessible participation in communities rather than using the internet as a global marketing platform to homogenize and entrench preexisting problematic models. So in a world where that's successful, I think authors use faster, easier pathways to share their work and get feedback, reviewers receive credit for their work, funders, orchestrate and empower communities rather than simply doing gatekeeping and publishers and societies realize new revenue streams around doing that crucial work of curating the massive amount and massive volume of content that's out there. So the scholarly publishing landscape becomes one with more pathways for a more diverse set of contributions, types of contributions that we haven't yet imagined from groups we haven't yet recognized. And I deeply believe that the only way for a campaign like this to be successful is for it to be a big, inclusive, accessible tent. And the way we found success in growing that tent is by focusing on the specific benefits and risks felt by particular stakeholders in moving towards these new distributed models of scholarly work, what benefits for researchers, publishers, libraries, readers, journalists exist and which of those can we scale up and make sustainable and make more available and which of those risks can we focus on reducing? And by focusing in that way, we can grow this campaign by adding actions. We can invite new collaborators to work on the action of making public reviews less scary or making library budget considerations simpler. And so we'd love to hear from you what actions ought to be taken to scale certain benefits and make them more accessible or which certain actions should be taken to reduce certain risks and make adoption less harrowing. And of course, after hearing from you, we certainly hope that you'll also consider joining and growing this campaign to help do exactly that. Thanks so much, hope to hear from you soon.