 So Christopher is here this afternoon to address this. We don't need journals, the future of our past. So the development of a flourishing empirical culture is one of the quiet glories of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment scholarly world. But open access raises significant issues about how we organise knowledge or better perhaps the open access movement emerges from the shifts and technological transformations to change the face of scholarly publishing and exchange. In this keynote, Christopher will address the resilience of the periodical, the challenges to its long term future and the positive and negative consequences of our current open access policy and possible alternatives or successes. So the floor is yours Christopher, we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much, and colleagues. It's so good to be with everybody here today. I know from the little I've been able to glean that it's been a hugely positive, exciting and very rich conference. I want to begin by saying how thrilled I am, the way that the relationship between AHRC and RLUK has developed over the recent months and years. And I'll work with you on making clear the way that librarians and archivists are fully part of the principles underneath what we call the technicians commitment that is really a commitment to recognising co-production of research. I'll work with professional practice fellows and so pleased that we've been able to extend this. There are so many more things that we can do together and I'm sure we'll continue to do together. Fundamentally, AHRC and all of the UK, all of UKRI recognise the central importance of research libraries to all of our science, all of our research and innovation. And I want to reiterate my warmest thanks to you for all the work that you and your colleagues have done at every level. Everybody who's put the books back on the shelves, barcoded, the accessions have managed through this incredibly difficult period of vagaries and fluctuations of this pandemic and allowed people access to the knowledge that they need. Thank you so much. We would have just simply been incapable of moving forward as a community of researchers and innovators without you. So thank you all of you. And also all of the people, all of those people we know so well and sometimes don't get thanked, the people who've, you know, repaired the desks, fixed the chairs, cleaned the carpets, made us comfortable in our offices, made it possible for us to work safely. So thank you all of you, absolutely all of you. So here we are. Do we need periodicals? I'm going to use this opportunity to reflect a little on some passages from a book which I suspect that very many people here have read and engaged with which is Robert Jan Smith and Rachel Pells, plan S for shock, science, shock, solution, speed and open access up here, a book monograph which has charted the history of movement towards open access, gathered a variety of views from practitioners about where open access may be going. And you will discover as we go through that some of the views that are expressed in the book, I am going to dissent from. I think the book is balanced, I think the book is important. And the views that I'm quoting aren't necessarily the views of Smiths and Pells, but I want to make that clear, but I'm going to use some of the things that they're quoting from their interviews as hooks to hang an argument. So I'm going to start with an interesting position which comes early on in the monograph about why open access is so important and desirable. So the way it's presented is as a sort of a dilemma for a researcher, it's a researcher who's done something. What does she or he do. And here's the way the dilemma is set out. You write a paper. Now you have a dilemma where to publish it. Clearly you want to submit your precious work to the most prestigious, well known academic journal that you can. If your paper is accepted will score you plenty of points for credibility among the big names in science, ultimately helping you climb the ladder towards promotion for in the world of academia lines a toxic cycle. Many funders will assess your future grant applications based on which outlet you're successfully published in and your university research center will assess your performance and appraisal using the same metric. Oh, but there's a catch. If you choose to publish in that famously prestigious journal, only a tiny proportion of people will ever become aware of your work, let alone read it. Sure, you could be a big fish, you could be left in a very small pond, your work would be underappreciated and underutilized by the vast majority of the planet. Most people would never know about it, because they do not know about or have access to that journal. Some may even go on to do the same experiments and learn the same things over and over again without you. Let's not forget an estimated 72% of the world's research remains hidden to the majority of readers behind a paywall. You have essentially purchased something at great expense that you're not allowed to look at. So that is the dilemma for researcher as put out as the kind of underpinning argument for open access and plan S. I think it's a really interesting position statement because I don't actually recognize a great deal of what's set out in that dilemma. And even if some of us recognize more of it than others, I'm not sure how plausible it is as an argument. So, first of all, it's not absolutely clear to me that at least in all subject disciplines, the outlet of any particular piece of work is the necessary precondition for the grant. And certainly UKRI with our work towards narrative CVs, I hope we'll be circumventing some of that. I also think that it's probably a bad indicator of excellence in peer review, so we should be training people out of it. But to what extent are the vast majority of people on the planet clamoring for technical papers which lead to ref submissions. I suspect not many people have mounted barricades in defense of that argument. Some of the claims which are made elsewhere for why this is so important, which include medical self diagnosis, strike me as tricky. I can remember when I was the vice principal responsible for my university library and we were desperately short of space, taking scientists into the university library. Some of them have actually never been there. And this is a few years before showing them the periodicals on the shelves and said, do you need them there? What can we put into storage? And the medic said to me, I had no idea these were still on the shelves. We must take them all off. This is old knowledge and it's dangerous. Well, that's interesting. Is it enough to be open? Is it enough for anybody in the world to be able to access what you've written or does it matter that you are red? There's a confusion in the way the dilemma is presented between hidden and red. And is it important that you're red with understanding how deep should that understanding be? Where's the concern in that dilemma with legibility in all of its senses, not only interesting enough. The very basic one of language, which language of things written and a lot of people are excluded from research because they don't speak or read language in which it is written. There's also technical language. How easy is it actually to access the content? And I don't just mean the technical language of science. Arts and humanities can be deeply obscure and very difficult to penetrate at times. And there's that issue of purchase at great expense. What actually hangs on that is rather significant. What we all know is that what you purchase is in part the information contained in and in part the container within which the article sits. And I want to focus a little bit today on the container. So my start is to say that at least that particular framing of open access has some significant problems. I want to move on to think a little bit about how we got here. Again, I'm pulling from this excellent book and a paragraph which said, It was not until 1665 that the world's first recognizable scholarly journals appeared in their early forms. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London and the Journal de Savant launched in London and Paris respectively. It was not until 1665. Well, it was not until I think what's being overlooked in that presentation of periodicals as it were being quite a late comer is the extraordinary triumph of the organization of information which is represented by the periodical. It's contextualization in an early model and then an enlightenment culture of groups of people sharing and discussing information, obviously very limited narrow groups and all sorts of ways, largely social, but also gender. But I would add that the attempt to organize knowledge remains huge challenge for us. In fact, it's probably the most significant challenge that all of us have. And it is really my key thing today. With my academic hat dusted off and found from the back cupboard. I'd argue that actually, one of the most remarkable features of intellectual, ancient intellectual thought Greek and Roman thought was indeed the construction of disciplines and divisions of knowledge, those ways of organizing knowledge system, which was then picked up, for instance, by the medieval period and by Ramon Lou. It's very recent very beautiful publication those wonderful branching diagrams knowledge and knowledge is a tree branch of read dividing and re dividing and re dividing so extreme as the ancient version of this that Varo, the encyclopedist and great antiquarian of the late first century BC, Rome, arrived in one of his works at 99 distinct types of soil and earth and how to distinguish between them. Many of us think that he was satirizing his own methodology in increasingly dividing and dividing to smaller and smaller pieces of distinction. That capacity to chunk knowledge into smaller and smaller and more specialist bits is not something which we invented a periodicals are in a sense, or became very much a way of doing that. They are frequently containers in which knowledge is brought together in more discreet and more coherent containers. The development of something which is not just the presentation of work between a particular community of knowledge such as those transactions and the journal this several, and they're moving to particular sub disciplines and ways in which you actually divide knowledge up and containerize them through periodicals is an extraordinary achievement of intellectual collective endeavor. And journals, physical journals are a rather extraordinary thing on one of my great joys in the libraries that I'm hold dearest to my heart, the Library of the Naval Seas Research Institute in Rome, which I had the honor to direct for a few years. So Dan into the rolling stacks, and you could see the development of a discipline through almost just the physical size changing our journal over the years with a great bulk bulking out often in 60s and 70s and 80s before various forms of rationalization take place. The sort of majesty to a periodicals run as Peter Reed from Aberdeen said to me recently in the phrase just stuck with me a majesty to run periodicals, but not everybody would agree. Not everybody would agree. And Robert Keimie, head of strategy coalition s now in the plan s book that we've been talking about is pretty clear. And this is where I got my title from. He showed me journals, he says, journals were really useful in an age where we had to physically print things to distribute them. Since the 1990s we've had something called the Internet. What do we still need journals for. The ads that might ask about the very concept of the journal he says the value of the curated document. That's a good description for a periodical link the value of curated document kindly says is only to say, this is the stuff worth reading. I don't need the 30,000 or more journals that currently exist. Only say this stuff was right. So let me be clear. I don't disagree about the proliferation of expensive journals. I think rather like Varro's division of soil into 99 types. We've almost become self satirizing in a way that we've created ever more tiny specialist journals. There's a good deal of kind of the source of academic self promotion that goes on behind that it's not necessarily constructible conducive to a good scholarly community. But I wouldn't disagree with the idea that the value of created document is only to say that this is the stuff worth reading only. Interaction is critical in an information age. Now we all know the extraordinary statistics for the amount of information is being produced. Of course, this information goes far beyond the scholarly. You know, those, those remarkable statistics about, you know, rate of production of digital content going up 20% a year, expected to grow to 175 zettabytes in 2025. And I read somewhere that if you attempted to download that the average current internet connection speed, it would take you 1.8 billion years to do it. So I think it's reasonably clear that we have an issue with the amount of information being produced and even if on boil that down so scientific production, it would as we all know remain really challenging. For me here, the problem is a distinction between open versus curated. Yes, but also connected. So I want to use just flag up a couple of metaphors that might help us. So what metaphor is that we stand in all of this rather as in a labyrinth. How do we make our way out of this extraordinary, the complicated environment into fresh clean air. That's the thread metaphor, Ariadne and cease use in the labyrinth to mine at all. The other metaphor is how do we join the dots, how do we make connections, how do we make sense, so we can actually bring together different parts of this journey to form a collective narrative or tail. If you like that's joining following the breadcrumbs as Hansel and Gretel did to come to a more flourishing position at the other end. And how do we do either of these how do we follow the thread join the dots trace the breadcrumbs through and maintain that search. I think the answer is communities of knowledge. I think everything that we're talking about here has an answer the way that we construct communities of knowledge the way that we construct people who can speak to each other and give a broader context to what anyone individual can do. Where do we find communities of knowledge well the first place to look for the smart connectors who are making those communities of knowledge is yourselves librarians no question about it. The role of librarians now is as incredibly important co creators and and supporters of our joining up with knowledge is critical. And perhaps something about the way that we produce knowledge. And here I think the periodical itself has had a significant agency. And the director, director Jasmine Langer has said, again quoting from the plan S book, what a journal does is build community. It's a social thing platform for discussion, which is a publisher we have put together with the editors, and are continuously working on to improve by seeking out new authors and new readers. We still need to look for readers for that community, because the information overload makes it hard for people to find online the information that's relevant to them. So there is somebody. It's a publisher, but making the point that I've been trying to make, which is that it's not enough simply to put it on a wall and say there's your information. So we need for that to be understood context lines made legible and brought to people's attention. So that comments that Kaini says about all it's doing is saying this is the stuff this is the stuff worth reading. I think the job of saying this is the stuff worth reading is actually really, really important. The tendencies of knowledge can be but are not necessarily equivalent disciplines. But I think disciplines like periodicals are really important invention of our intellectual history. And I just like to spend a very brief moment on this next topic. And something what we know about disciplines is that they're more or less emerging alongside the organization of knowledge then one of the ways of organizing that knowledge. The very meaning of an encyclopedia early on, the encocleus paideia or the circular education meant you went around a series of individual parts, which once you had completed the circle gave you knowledge as a whole. And your job was then to try and bring it all together that that notion of the encyclopedia, it contains within it divisions that are fundamentally disciplinary. And we talk so much at the moment about inter intra and trans disciplinarity, including you carry and I'm a huge supporter of it, that we sometimes forget that none of that's possible with the disciplines didn't exist, at least as some sort of early building I think of them as sets of rules that are meant to be broken. We construct them in order to test them often to destruction, and that is great it's really exciting. It's the opening from which one can move on. There are infinite possibilities from that firm ground that sets the few the path outwards that you can make it a constraint if all you do is circle back to the old arguments and never break out. That's why I think inter disciplinarity, inter disciplinarity and indeed trans disciplinarity is so important, but it is best. I think that it's something like the something like painting where on the whole entirely but I'll go with it for the moment. You've got in the practice of painting, you've got a stretcher, you've got a canvas, you've got a brush, you've got a paint, but from that point onwards, you can combine infinitely. And that's based all those fundamental materials from which you can recombine endlessly is I think what disciplines and indeed to some extent periodical world is giving us. This combinatory issue for me is absolutely key. But again, the combinatory and contextual nature of the bit is not something everybody would agree with so for me is not enough just to have some paint, you have to have brush you have to have canvas you have to have a stretch and you have to have the whole history of the way in which those have been combined in the past to understand and to create the fresh. One of the quotes from Mark Schultz in our plan S book runs as follows. Everyone knows data is the asset of the future. Open science has the power to turn traditional search practices on their head. So much data generated now we're seeing a paradigm shift in science. We used to be hypothesis driven you have the idea you go and collect the data. Now we have this huge amount of data available. It speaks for itself. It speaks for itself. A hypothesis is found later. It's an entirely new approach to research which is really exciting. And Schultz goes on to argue that a lot of what I've noticed is just just publish the data, just get the data out. I don't doubt the excitement. It is exciting. Even even a humble classicist stroke archaeologists can get very like myself get very excited about just raw data. I've been part of a project that's produced the largest combined data set of survey data that is the stuff you find on the top of the ground when you walk across it in archaeological terms. What are the archaeological data a map that for the region around Rome and it's one of the largest contiguous data sets that we have so I don't doubt the excitement. When I worry about that idea that the hypothesis comes later data without narrative seems to me to return us to a decontextualized a historic view of science, which is really troubling. What we know is that science has context that context can be very difficult. And I don't think we can manage pseudoscience or the false narratives that we see if we think data speaks for itself. Data doesn't speak for itself. It needs a narrative of explanation. And it needs a context. There's an article which simply said, here's some data. Most peer review I think we'll find it difficult. On the whole, we look, even in the science I tested this out with my colleagues, we look for some kind of explanation of why the data is important, how you've come to it, what you what the limitations of it are, what needs to be done next. That narrative and that context is absolutely critical. And periodicals interestingly are a grand scheme way of writing a large narrative and a bigger context for any bit of data, they give a sense of the ongoing narrative of the discipline, subdiscipline. And that's why two of the standard pieces of advice for graduates in my day were read the article next to the article you were directed to, and read the full run of a periodical. Both are ways of saying, understand your narrative and your data and context. Well, how can we do this in a world of zettabytes? How can we do this when the periodical is fractured for amenity dispersed? I think there the answer lies in communities of knowledge, and indeed in team science. This applies as much to arts humanities, as well as physical and medical sciences now. We're not necessarily particularly good at realizing that but actually arts humanities they'd have to address more terms of team science. It's only when we build or rebuild communities of knowledge that we can manage the move from open data and information to connected data. And it's the connected data where we need to be connection is critical. In two ways. Connection of data across time and space through the schemes and webs of narrative and comparison through the tests and resistances of argument. About also though about how data narrative and argument connect us as researchers and readers make us part of the community in which we crowd in knowledge and insight with rules of rigor and methodology which we test. So both about making data join up for making us understand that data together. Openness in other words is really, in my view, not the goal and shouldn't have been the capacity to contextualize the flow of data is. And in some ways, if openness is taken to be the desired goal, it potentially cuts across the ambition of better data and better science. Science is about connection more than it is about openness. If openness simply means that you put things on a billboard for no one to read. That's why I'm so interested in the question of what replaces the journal because although the journal has not been particularly good at being open. I think it's been quite good at being connected and being a connector. So how do we replace the journal in the new world or do we need to at all. Well, one answer to this might be a kind of self curation research tools now offer all sorts of opportunities to order articles by their metadata to put them into end note or whatever to organize your own set of resources. And I think that's really important. And it's one of the things that librarians again are teaching more and more. I wish that somebody had sat down with me when I started my research career and given me the kind of advice you're able to do now about how to curate the information and the articles and so on and so forth that you gather. But the risk is that if this isn't set into scientific context, it may not become part of an ongoing conversation and the ongoing conversation is so critical. There's a reason why it when the period was invented in 1665 it carried on as an incredibly resilient way of conducting conversations across communities, it really works. But I think is important for every self taught genius who changes the world of knowledge of thousands of keyboard warriors churning out our nonsense without scientific validity without context without story but often with prejudice. We have to be desperately alive to this now of all times when we see the terrible consequences not very far away from us in Ukraine and across the world actually of stories that have been allowed to go uncontested, information misinformation that's allowed to flow. So we have to go back to setting data in the context of narrative and the context of communities. Science has always been polemical. And so it's not new that we're dealing with people presenting data through challenging narratives for the future of our past should be better than our past. And my view in some is that we need now to get past talking about an open agenda and get on to talking about a connected agenda. And for that to happen I think we need to understand and support the transition arrangements that are existing and recognize they may last for a while to support some journals which are going to find it a little harder to navigate this world. We need to be open to the significance of research which isn't quite as open to the rest of the world that in terms of its presentation but is open to constructive challenge and debate because it is placed in the context of the community of knowledge. We need to find the mechanisms and maintain the mechanisms that allow debate and discussion to flow over time and over long periods of time. I still argue as many of my colleagues do with articles that were written 200 years ago. And I'm hoping that some of the science which we produce now will be the foundation of arguments in 200 years time, least in parts of our discipline. We're creating here to find arenas in which to test the rules. The periodical has been for nearly 400 years, one of those spaces and one of those mechanisms and for all its oddities, its strangenesses, its quirks, its nightmarish impact on the physical space of libraries as journals proliferate get fatter and fatter. It has been a place where we have tested science for bringing it to the world. In our passion for the open, we mustn't lose the need for connection. Now it is an uncertain future, but one thing I believe is certain that the future of all of this conversation will happen in a library. It will happen in a library. Whatever that place looks like, whether it is a physical place or whether it's a virtual space, however it's constructed, however we organize knowledge, whatever the methods and mechanisms we use. The place where we always have built and always will build communities of knowledge starts from ends in and takes place alongside a library. This will always be the case because a library is simply, but in a richer sense of simply the place where you bring together knowledge to create connections between parts of knowledge and between those who engage with knowledge. It does both of those things. It connects information and it connects us around that information. That's where the open agenda needs to be, which is why the new open is such a brilliant title for your conference. The openness needs to be situated not at the level of my article, my career, where I can read your article, which is where that initial framing came from. It's how we make the barriers to entry lower to science and to knowledge and how we signpost better within that labyrinth. We're back to myths. I think they're the right ones and perhaps a good way to think. And here's another one from Atheist, The Firegiver. The finger who brings humans according to the Greek myth to knowledge of science. He is the one who shows us how to understand the world. He gave us fire is the story, but also he gave us the skills and knowledge to use it. He didn't give us an open access data set sitting in one of the zettabytes for us to trip over. He shared a secret, made the natural legible and helped us help ourselves. That's what libraries do. It's why libraries matter. It's why we should care passionately and defend energetically libraries from small community libraries through to universities, libraries in physical spaces, libraries in cyberspace, libraries across the world. Because libraries are the way that will go from the new open to the new connected. And it's in the new connected. Well, I think we will find the freedoms that we need to navigate the 21st century, all its challenges and the challenges to come. Thank you to you all for making those connections for making them for me throughout my life for making them for thousands of millions of people across the world. And let's go forward together. But you may, in the spirit of challenge, think I'm quite wrong. And there's some Q&A now and you can tell me so. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christopher. I think that's a fascinating challenge to us in the profession. And what an amazing vision for the future. Lots of interesting questions there. Could I kick off by asking you a question really I guess around co design. There are lots of different parties who need to be brought to the table to get us to a new position. Can you reflect for us perhaps on who those those co designers need to be in moving this forward in a sensible fashion. It's an interesting issue about design, which is, you're designing something to do what for whom. And I think there is a little bit of work that we need to do to think about, you know, what are we trying to achieve. You start from the point that you simply want to make all the information available to everybody at the click of a cursor. Well, that'll take you in one direction. But if the co design is actually to bring people towards a greater understanding and that I think is what we're all about. Then there are a number of different areas here where the traditional model of the scholar who writes their piece for other scholars and edited by other scholars is going to fail if it doesn't take account of who else might need to be in the community. This I think is where we get to language. It's where we get to the fact that it's not enough just to produce the thing, it's how you actually take that thing whatever it is to other people. And this is why we have this wonderful backward and forward movement from the production of knowledge to outreach back and forth so that we see it in British science week that's happening at the moment, we see it in co creation of questions. I think that may be one of the places where I'll stop. One of the most challenging things for us is to get people to tell us what questions they'd like to have answered, and then start to think about how our research is in fact, or not in fact answering some of those challenges. So, I'm not sure I've answered brilliantly but I think you break it down in each instance is to what are you trying to design who therefore needs to be in that circle, and how can you make sure that the openness is to the challenge of are you are you managing to do that and are you answering the right questions. How does that go this to start. Fantastic thanks very much Christopher. And so another question here in the Q&A around what role do emergence emerging and expanding professions, such as science communication have to play in creating a bridge between data and research package for experts and interested but not necessarily expert readers. Yeah, that's a really great question. Thank you very much indeed in some ways that's actually said rather better what I was scrambling for in my answer to this. So, I think there's a really fundamental role here when we talk about co design. It is exactly that translation of data, and then questioning whether that those that translation is actually answering questions that people are really passionate the interested in. I do think this is so important. I think it is also what we're really seeing here I think is the expanded need for an ethical responsible approach to the translation of information to broader and broader communities. And I think we have some ways to go, actually, to get to those responsible and ethical standards. And I look very much to press and media here as having to some extent, not kept standards which we might have hoped for in some cases. And we as educators need to be really thoughtful about how we engage with that world. Far too often, we see partial quotation the sorts of things that wouldn't pass muster in an academic world and we think of them as you know, academic pedantry if you like, but they're not, they're about ethics and responsibility. And so I think you're spot on, but the role is a role, not just of doing the work, but setting the standards. Absolutely. So we have another question which is really asking for a HRC views on publishing platform such as welcome open research and open research Europe. What are the comments on that Christopher particularly around kind of the approach to shifting research and research assessment away from that journal based metrics to direct assessment to the output. Yeah. So one of the things I was trying to say and of course, you know, inevitably won't get forced slightly into dichotomies what I'm absolutely not saying is that because my article isn't published in Journal of Roman Studies which happens to be probably the prestige journal for my particular opinion, it's worthless. And I would hope would never want to judge somebody on an article on the basis where it's published breath, critically doesn't care about where things are published carries cares about what the article says that's got to be right. Narrative CVs are one of the ways not the only way of tackling this by allowing people to explain why they chose the places that they chose to publish their work. And I think we need to do a really good job with peer review colleges to make sure that their definitions of excellence aren't based on the the epiphenomenal aspect of where something is but at the essential aspect of what is being said. So, I'm very much with you with you there. I don't think that that runs against the need for us to think about how we put research into containers that are legible. And I agree with the comment that's been made somewhere about, you know, we need more than one way of cutting this. It's not, it's not an either or both and I agree with that. I guess I'm perhaps allegedly reacting a little bit to the some of the sort of extreme versions, you know you don't need journals anymore because you put it all out. And I think I don't think that's quite right myself. But obviously I come in my own baggage. I was interested to kind of I started thinking about our kind of foundations and the professor and information literacy and the necessity to have a more educated readership, perhaps even more broadly than academia. And I just wondered if you felt that actually there was a there is a driver there is a need, perhaps even through the school system, more intensively to actually promote that intelligent approach to information to what you read, fake news, etc. And how perhaps as as kind of hd librarians and hd practitioners more broadly, we should be engaging with that kind of early, early career researcher if you wish, in our primary schools, etc. Really, it's a really important point I mean information literacy. I guess it's partly why I'm so passionately interested in narrative and context. It seems to me that there's something about your capacity to understand what's put in front of you in its context to understand where it's coming from how to assess it how to assess the validity of the source, all of those kinds of things are actually about narrative and context and understanding narrative and context. So, in the first instance, there's the legibility of something so it's our responsibility I think to make information available with some of that context with some of that packaging that makes you understand where it's come from how it's been produced. But then the literacy is okay, how do you engage once you've got that how do you engage with it how do you see things in a broader run. Periodicals that by no means the only way of doing this, you know, I'm not suggesting that primary school children should sit down in the German grammar studies from volume one or read it to the end. But I think understanding the fact that science doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from history builds on is so important for exactly as you say both literacy and legibility.