Seeking a Vaccine for Fake News

Seeking a Vaccine for Fake News

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Bill Gates drops some of the patina of the benevolent philanthropist in an interview with Steven Levy and speaks with the fierce voice of the take-no-prisoners entrepreneur that he was and is. Most COVID-19 tests in the US “are completely garbage,” he says, and social media is a “poisoned chalice.” But wouldn’t expertise make a difference? “I’m surprised at the US situation because the smartest people on epidemiology in the world, by a lot, are at the CDC. I would have expected them to do better.” That Gates remains optimistic (he is placing his bets on massive innovation) is perhaps cause for cheer, though we do wonder how he can maintain that outlook when he has been accused of wanting to implant computer chips into people who get vaccinated. He is doing these things, says Alex Jones, the Edward R. Murrow of our time, because he is, like his father, a eugenicist (because he served on the board of Planned Parenthood, you see). 
 
If technical expertise will not protect us from false information, perhaps we should study how true information is communicated. We were wondering how long it would take for someone to blame everything on publishers, but Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs has filled that hole. The unfortunate situation is that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free.” Although the author makes some standard-issue mistakes (you cannot copyright an idea), he does list a number of free and utterly unreliable sources (Breitbart, Fox News, Infowars — though he fails to mention that you pay for Fox News through a cable TV bundle). He does, however, make the point that a lot of free trash is out there, whether because the business model is marketing-related (sale of advertising, data collection for marketers) or content marketing (e.g., a white paper on climate change from the American Petroleum Institute, essays on the advantages of the free market from the Cato Institute). His conclusion: “The more reliable an article is, the less accessible it is.” At bottom, “the problem is ownership.” If it were not for that pesky ownership thingie, all that is solid would melt into air. Create a universal searchable database of all human knowledge and intellectual production would flourish. 
 
Once we have gotten access, though, how do we know what is true and what is not? In an elegantly written piece for The Washington Post, our colleague at The Scholarly Kitchen, Dr. Karin Wulf, argues that the way to know what is true is to look at the sources. We agree; we are admirers of Dr. Wulf’s work and rejoice in footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes, and grace notes. We burrow through the notes to a book or article like rabbits, exploring antecedents and opening the window to the intellectual universe a bit wider. 
 
Still and all, we wonder. Granted, once you have someone who accepts that rational discourse is desirable, hard analysis of every available resource is, more likely than not, going to yield better outcomes. But how do we get someone into the circle of the rational discussants in the first place? What worries us, what produces that sinking feeling, is not that we don’t believe that knowledge is power but that oftentimes what we observe is that power is power. The advocates of evidence and rationality may be looking in one direction even as the very people they wish to influence are turning to another.

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Source: Wired, Rolling Stone, Current Affairs, The Washington Post

Professional and Academic Publishing

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There is a new library consortium in Texas, called a coalition (which does sound scarier): “Twenty-seven universities across Texas have joined forces as the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA) to think creatively about access to faculty publications and the sustainability of journal subscriptions. TLCUA has organized to identify the best way to change current models and the relationships between academic institutions and publishers. The goals of the Coalition are ambitious — improved access to scholarship, greater control over faculty content, and pricing models that are sustainable for strained library budgets in higher education.” No surprises here: the union makes us strong — and it does. The announcement has some weasel words in describing the benefits to publishers, even as the consortium is being set up to fight publishers. First in the ring will be Elsevier, an odd choice, in our view, as the Amazon gazelle strategy (pick off the small and weak first) is more likely to win significant concessions. Notable are two names that do not appear on the list of participants: the Austin (main) campus of the University of Texas (is that perhaps simply a matter of timing?) and Alexandra Elbakyan, who is the coalition’s silent partner.

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Source: Texas A&M University Libraries, Business Insider, The Scholarly Kitchen

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In a guest post for The Scholarly Kitchen, Christos Petrou, formerly an analyst in the Web of Science Group at Clarivate Analytics, reports on the progress of journal publisher MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute). MDPI has risen from its ignominious inclusion on an early iteration of Beall’s list of predatory publishers to a juggernaut, which now publishes over 100,000 articles a year, making it the fifth largest (by that measure) in all of journal publishing. The secret to MDPI’s staggering growth is that it understood early on that open access publishing is not about painstaking editorial review but about speed and volume. MDPI is a model of an industrial process. But while it is not likely to challenge traditional journals on those journals’ own terms (quality of editorial review, willingness to work with authors to improve papers), MDPI has been able to obtain a journal impact factor for 71 of its 250 journals. This is a notable accomplishment. Increasingly it appears that we will be seeing two systems of journal publishing running side by side: high-volume OA publishing operating on an industrial scale, and more-selective publications with a strong editorial focus. Some authors will see reasons to publish in both paradigms: mass production OA when there is an urgent need to get something out there, and editorially driven venues whose diligent processes confer prestige.

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

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Many scientific and scholarly publishers have made content relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic freely accessible during the pandemic. This trove of content has been heavily used. Vida Damijonaitis, Director of Worldwide Sales at the American Medical Association, reports that the AMA has recorded a staggering 33 million views of 730 COVID-19–related pieces of content. This surge in traffic also comes with notable characteristics: “Google has always been the biggest driver of traffic to our websites, and that has actually fallen off slightly. Traffic is increasingly coming from social media. That has increased by 159% year over year. Access through email alerts has increased by 82%. And we’re actually seeing more and more traffic coming from mobile devices instead of traditional computers and laptops.”
 
It has not just been physicians, researchers, and members of the public accessing this content. As Andrew Pitts, CEO of security firm PSI, notes, more nefarious actors are also afoot, especially Sci-Hub: “The effect on you as publishers is that they have been downloading your content massively and taking everything.” On one hand, no good deed goes unpunished. But on the other hand, at least the pirates are looking at primary sources.

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Source: Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers

Dealmaking

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In a deal that may remind some of the acquisition of Kaplan University by Purdue three years ago, the University of Arizona has acquired Ashford University from its parent, Zovio, a for-profit, publicly traded company. Ashford brings to the University of Arizona 35,000 students for its online courses, instantly making University of Arizona a major player in online education (and sending a message to its in-state rival, Arizona State University, and its enormous position in virtual studies). The exact terms of the deal are complicated. University of Arizona is acquiring Ashford for $1 and setting up a new not-for-profit organization to house the company. Zovio, for its part, will continue to provide back-end services to the new entity, extracting a fee of just under 20% of the organization’s total revenue — in addition to the aforementioned $1 acquisition price. No sooner had the deal been announced when the objections arose. The University of Arizona faculty are miffed for two reasons: first, because they were not consulted about the deal and, second, because they were asked to sign nondisclosure forms in order to be consulted on the arrangement. We don’t see how any mergers and acquisitions activity could go forward, especially with a publicly traded company, in the absence of a nondisclosure agreement, but that is a detail. But perhaps Gary Rhoades, professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Arizona and former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, says it best: “This is a sad example of public universities’ ‘cynical academic capitalism,’ grounded in white privilege and the exploitation of ‘others’ who the public universities themselves generally have largely underserved.”
 
The fact is, though, that the miffed faculty may have a point. A careful analysis of the deal in The New York Times (recommended to be read in full, as it says so much about the lengths — on an often crooked path — organizations will go to to finance higher education) suggests that the deal “is less an acquisition than a long-term partnership…. [Furthermore] This deliberate, complex blurring of entities [between the not-for-profit University of Arizona and the for-profit Zovio] makes it harder for students to know what they’re getting into when they enroll in an online college. And students who think they’re enrolling in trusted public universities may encounter an arrangement that obscures the lines between public and private interests.”

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Source: The Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The New York Times

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UK trade magazine The Bookseller has been acquired by the publisher of theater magazine The Stage. Discussions between the two organizations started in autumn 2019; the deal is effective immediately. Terms of the transaction were not made available.

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Source: The Bookseller

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LinkedIn, a Microsoft company, has sold SlideShare to Scribd.

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Source: Scribd

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Elsevier acquires SciBite, a semantic enrichment company that focuses on scientific research and data.

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Source: Business Weekly

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science has announced that its Science portfolio of journals is moving its digital home from HighWire Press to Wiley’s Atypon platform. Science was one of the first journals to be hosted by HighWire over 20 years ago. We noted last month in The Brief (see Item 1) that HighWire itself has transitioned to new ownership, marking the end of an era. This news from AAAS might be thought of as an exclamation point to that observation.

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Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Higher Education

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“Cuts to university and college budgets are coming. While the magnitude of these cuts will become clearer in the weeks and months ahead, what is certain is that institutions must now prepare for sharp declines in public funding and tuition revenue.” No news there, but what is of interest is where Tammy Kolbe and Rick Staisloff take this. They propose a new “playbook,” one that differs sharply from the one we cited last month (see Item 9). Kolbe and Staisloff deplore the usual steps by administrators, “where cuts are neither strategic nor grounded in important goals of creating a sustainable business model that is aligned with the institution’s strategic vision.” Wherever the word strategic is used twice in a single dependent clause, we know that strong medicine is about to be prescribed. Let’s dispense with “arbitrary ‘across-the-board’ cuts to spending and salaries,” a failure to identify and protect an institution’s “economic engines,” and “failing to fully engage a broad group of stakeholders.” The solution? “Answer strategic questions about the organization’s future … [and] develop a strategic platform to guide resource allocation decisions.” There’s that strategic word again. At this point you might suspect that the authors are consultants (and, yes! Staisloff is a member of the tribe) and that more nostrums, abstractly phrased, are coming; and here they are: prioritize the long-term over the short-term, have clear lines of authority, and establish “robust” lines of communication. We assume the “clear lines of authority” is offered in jest — this is, after all, the academy we are talking about. The one useful idea that emerges here, infelicitously expressed as “economic engines,” is to look at the numbers by product or service line, which many organizations in the not-for-profit sector fail to do (if you are fortunate enough to have profitable athletics or publishing programs, why would you cut them?). Even so, we are inclined to believe that university administrators, whose current responsibilities are simply overwhelming, should be cut some slack, as impossible situations are not likely to yield comprehensive solutions.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed

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This won’t be the last time over the next two months that you will be hearing news like this: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has suspended in-person classes and is moving to an all-virtual lineup for the fall semester. There have been 135 newly reported cases of COVID-19 in one week. Let’s bear in mind the basic assumption that has caused this situation, the belief that you could invite thousands of 18- to 21-year-olds into a defined space and trust them to maintain social distance and behave in a carefully disciplined manner. But if that were even remotely true, what’s the point of being young? And just as this newsletter went into copy editing, the news from Notre Dame came in. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on in-person holdouts.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Ed

The Book Business

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The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has released its figures for 2019— a “normal” year pre-pandemic. Total revenue came in at $25.9 billion, an increase of 1.1% over prior year. These are publishers’ receipts, not what people and libraries spend, for which you have to add distributors’ markups. No one should be surprised that the numbers are flat, though they do conceal the very important question of whether the industry is more or less profitable on flat sales. Our guess is that the cost structure is declining, both because of digitization and the industrial engineering of workflows and the supply chain. The really interesting figure is that, over a five-year period, the audio format has grown 144% (see Item 13). University press books showed a slight (1.1%) increase to $260 million, belying the common chatter of the collapse of the sector.

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Source: Association of American Publishers

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Audiobooks are on a rampage. “A recent report by Deloitte put some numbers on the phenomenal rise. Global sales have been growing at 25–30% per annum for the past three years and will hit $3.5bn in 2020, driven by the US and China, which each make up around a third of the market (for comparison, global print book sales are a whopping $145bn per annum).” Yes, note that number for global print sales. An interesting aspect of the audiobook market during the pandemic is a strong appetite for what one industry insider calls “weighty” nonfiction. We suppose this depends on what one means by “weighty” (one example provided is Malcolm Gladwell), but we are disappointed by the small number of university press titles available in audio. This appears to be an area for growth. Meanwhile, Spotify wants to imagine new possibilities for audiobooks.

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Source: The Guardian, Deloitte, Musically

Technology

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Amazon is in the antitrust headlights. “Three groups representing thousands of authors, publishers, and booksellers in the United States — the Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, and American Booksellers Association — have sent a joint letter to [the Antitrust Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives] enumerating a series of anti-competitive tactics that permit Amazon to exercise extraordinary market dominance over the advertising and sale of books in digital markets. Its practices against both book suppliers and book customers have threatened the vitality of the American publishing industry and rendered any meaningful competition from other publishers, booksellers, or emerging platforms impossible.” 

Meanwhile, in other antitrust news, Google is under scrutiny by the Department of Justice, but DOJ officials are divided as to how and how quickly to proceed. At issue is Google’s advertising business “where the company owns industry-leading tools at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers.”

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Source: Association of American Publishers, The Wall Street Journal

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One aspect of the future of AI is the possibility of being able to talk directly with machines, something we can do today in a limited, and often comical, fashion, with so-called smart devices (“Alexa, play Country Joe and the Fish”; “Siri, not sawbucks, Starbucks”). Dictionary publishers, whose business is the meaning of words (and monetizing the meaning of words), have a special role to play in this world. We were thus pleased to see an intriguing beta site from Oxford University Press that creates a visual overlay for the database formerly known as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and its surrounding lexical environment. The OED Text Visualizer helps to put words in context, thereby enabling disambiguation. You can take the Text Visualizer for a test drive, as Joe did, inputting a snippet of text from one of his own essays from 2005. The tool then displays a visualization of the snippet, with links to an abbreviated dictionary entry. Click on that entry and you are taken to a page that asks for your subscription credentials — the tool, in other words, is a front end to the OED, both a lexical tool and a marketing tool. Among the fields of information displayed are parts of speech, date of first known use, and frequency of use in a particular year. And so, for example, the word “author” appeared four times in Joe’s snippet of 250 words; it derives from French and Latin and was first used in English in 1382. Interestingly, its frequency is now less than in the eighteenth century (presumably as “author” has given way to the cringe-worthy and irredeemable “content creator”). You can also export the tables as a CSV file for further study. Withheld is the definition, as economics demands that something sit behind a paywall. Where will OUP take this? Will someone (Google?) get there first? It’s notable that this is a far more sophisticated use of data than, say, studying sales figures or membership statistics. What begins in analysis evolves over time into machine intelligence. We welcome our robot overlords.

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Source: Oxford University Press, First Monday, The Scholarly Kitchen

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Like every other segment of the economy, the tech business was braced for a sizable downturn when the pandemic hit. For start-ups a downturn could be particularly disastrous, as many of them are pre-revenue or operating at a loss, with little cushion to get them through bad times. We covered this in The Brief in March (see Item 1) and shared a link to a positively apocalyptic blog post from Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s largest sources of funding. The only trouble is, it never happened. While some tech companies have been hit hard by the pandemic, the sector as a whole is flourishing. Hiring is returning, and the tap for venture capital is now wide open. There have even been IPOs! There are several reasons for this, not the least being that, in the end, there is no such thing as an economic sector; there are only individual companies, with their own management teams, and shrewd management wins every war. But certain environmental themes are compelling — for example, the strong likelihood that a tech company was already operating with a great deal of virtual infrastructure, making WFH only a modest inconvenience (unless, of course, there are kids in the home). Also, many tech companies provide different kinds and degrees of virtualization for their customers (think Zoom and DoorDash), making them even more in demand despite a bleeding economy. In scholarly communications, the winners are the preprint services — if they had a revenue-generating model! Perhaps for the next pandemic.

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Source: Sequoia Capital (via Medium), The New York Times

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Zoom’s legal problems are piling up. The issue is security and marketing claims about security. Now the company is being sued for claiming to provide end-to-end encryption when in fact its encryption is architected differently, making it possible for Zoom to (were it to choose to do so) collect user data and for unscrupulous third parties to get access to the system, and presumably scrupulous parties as well. Legal claims of this kind are highly technical and vary by geography, jurisdiction, and use case (the most recent lawsuit claims that Zoom violated the laws of the city of Washington, DC), but the thrust of them all is to make Zoom more careful both about security and its claims about it. Zoom will figure this all out in time and will write a check to make the lawsuits go away; and with over 200 million daily users (up from 10 million in December), it can afford to. Zoom’s bigger problem, in our view, is that the competition in this space is ferocious. Google, for example, is aggressively pushing Google Meet (the naming conventions for tech services get worse and worse). 
 
But Google isn’t alone in boosting its video call services following Zoom’s explosive growth. Facebook also announced that it is launching 50-person video chat rooms, putting it in direct competition with Zoom and others. Microsoft is also making its Teams video and chat software available for consumers. Consumers and businesses alike will benefit from this cutthroat competition, but our sympathies are with Zoom, which was the first company to figure out how to make videoconferencing easy to use. It is mind-boggling to consider how even a few years ago, all these conferences were conducted via Skype or even more cumbersome corporate video technologies. There were many fewer videoconferences then because the tech was a pain and every session wasted several minutes to get everybody up and running.

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Source: Threat Post, Business Insider

People

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Angela Cochran is the new Vice President, Publishing, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
 
Dana Compton is the new Managing Director and Publisher at the American Society of Civil Engineers.
 
Jonathan Bagger will become the new CEO of the American Physical Society in 2021.
 
Beth Hutchins has joined BioOne as Director of Product Management.
 
Andy Bird is the new CEO of Pearson. He was formerly with Walt Disney International.
 
Steven Hall steps down as Managing Director of IOP Publishing. Antonia Seymour has been appointed his successor. 
 
James Silberman has passed away. He was one of the industry’s most distinguished editors, publishing such authors as James Baldwin, Marilyn French, Hunter S. Thompson, and Stewart Brand, among many others.
 
Sumner Redstone, the media mogul behind Viacom and CBS (whose assets include Simon & Schuster), died at 97. He coined the phrase “content is king,” a paradigm that passes with him.
 
Geoffrey Nunberg, noted linguist, author, and media personality, dies at 75.

Briefly Noted

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Someone at the American Chemical Society apparently drank too much C8H10N4O2 as they have announced the launch of nine new gold open access titles in 2021. 
 
This is all beyond stupid,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. “Putin doesn’t have a vaccine, he’s just making a political statement.”
 
America’s newest at-home accessory? A dog.
 
Turns out that there are two different measures for the unit known as a “foot.” But one is about to go away. Who knew?
 
A new venture to keep an eye on, Computable Publishing, from the founder of DynaMed, which was acquired by EBSCO 15 years ago. “The company’s mission is to enable standard-based machine-interpretable expression of public knowledge, especially related to healthcare and scientific evidence.”
 
“Chinese Academy of Science Library has launched a tool called APCheck to help authors find APC information.” The landing page of the tool includes a reminder on the 20K RMB publishing cost cap from China’s latest research evaluation policy.

China passes the US as the world’s most voluminous producer of research papers.

Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai arrested under the new Chinese security laws.

The Twitterverse was angered and saddened after an anthropology professor at Arizona State University died of COVID-19 after being “forced to teach” last Spring. Except it turns out the professor, whom notable scientists and scholars considered a friend, doesn’t actually exist. 

NEH announces $30M for 238 humanities projects nationwide.

Snakes can fly.

The indispensable Bill Kasdorf on the future of the EPUB standard and W3C.  

Mars rover Perseverance will explore “Jezero, a crater close to 30 miles wide,” for evidence of former life on the planet. 

The state of journal production and access in 2020.

Much of the writing on tech is terrible. Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire article on Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel, reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way. This may be the best essay on a tech company ever written. Read the whole thing (HT: John Ellis over at News Items).

From Our Own Pens

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Writing for our own C&E Perspectives blog, Joe discusses the important question of information asymmetry when society publishers seek to make publishing services agreements (PSAs) with larger publishers. Societies typically have far less information about the marketplace and the larger publisher’s operations — and even sometimes less about their own operations — than their prospective partner does. This can lead to disadvantageous or less than optimal deal terms. The asymmetries potentially cover a number of areas, from finance to legal to market intelligence, and the only corrective is for a society to move thoughtfully and strategically to prepare for PSA negotiations, often including the input of trusted and experienced advisers. We are happy to recommend someone.

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Source: C&E Perspectives

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Marketing, as a discipline, has been undergoing profound change — so much so that marketing professions have started using the term “modern marketing” to describe a field with an entirely new set of tools and techniques. Organizations that understand and embrace modern marketing have a substantial competitive advantage. In this post, Colleen Scollans, head of Clarke & Esposito’s Marketing & Digital Transformation Practice, shares her 11 top tips for modern marketing.

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Source: C&E Perspectives

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Guaranteed revenues provide the cornerstone for many publishing services agreements (PSAs), the contracts that professional societies enter into with large publishers related to journal publishing. Societies looking to mitigate their risk and receive predictable revenues must be cognizant of guarantees that do not, in reality, do either of these things (or that do them poorly). In this piece, Michael explores how two common clauses often found in PSAs eliminate or circumscribe guarantees — effectively turning them into a kind of insurance policy for when times are good.

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Source: C&E Perspectives

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Pam moderated the session “The Publisher RFP Process: Key Considerations for Societies” for SSP’s OnDemand Video Content Library. Society publishers share before, during, and after perspectives to cover strategic and tactical activities that take place before the publisher RFP process begins, and how those activities inform the RFP process; structural and project management approaches that can be used during the RFP process to enable clear, effective, and targeted communication of requirements and priorities; and key performance indicators, best practices, and expectations-setting to guide the society–publisher relationship after the contract has been signed.

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Source: Society for Scholarly Publishing

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Joe’s article “Cooperstown, Ground Zero for Altmetrics,” originally published in 2014, was revisited in The Scholarly Kitchen, in part to fill the hole we all feel this year with a vastly truncated baseball season. In reading over the comments from the original post, it became clear that most readers did not know the piece was satire. Forewarned is forearmed.

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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

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Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. —Teddy Roosevelt