Professional & Academic Publishing
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We have been hearing rumblings (here, among other places) that the White House has been drafting an Executive Order (EO) concerning access to government-funded research papers. The draft EO is rumored to update the Holdren Memo. The Holdren memo directed federal agencies to develop policies that result in federally funded research articles being made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. The draft EO is rumored to reduce the 12-month publication embargo to zero months. Reportedly, the draft EO has been sent around to federal agencies for comment and may be released in the coming weeks.
Publishers are concerned about these rumors, as the lack of an embargo is likely to lead, at a minimum, to downward pressure on the prices of subscription journals and possibly even to outright cancellations. Obviously some fields and some publishers would be affected more than others. It seems likely that such a policy would affect smaller publishers (and especially societies) more than the largest publishers, as do all new policies built on good intentions. On the other hand, aren’t most of these articles (and many more) already available via Sci-Hub and scholarly collaboration networks like ResearchGate? There are many questions about the draft EO (what version is made open? by whom? through what process? under what license?) and few details at present. It may take some time to fully evaluate the impact of this EO, if it does in fact come to pass. We anticipate some deep thinking on open access strategy and the future of the journal, particularly among scientific societies, in the coming months.
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Source: EdSurge, Association of American Publishers, The Scholarly Kitchen
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In May 2018 Springer Nature attempted to go public at a valuation of about $3.2 billion, but the offering was withdrawn for lack of sufficient investor demand at that price point. The company may try again, with the possibility of an IPO by the second quarter of 2020. If at first you don’t succeed and all that. Our question is, Why will this time be different? Is the environment for a public offering for a scientific publishing company—considering Plan S, the increasingly assertive national consortia, the ongoing growth of Sci-Hub and ResearchGate, and the possibility of an Executive Order from the White house eliminating research article embargos associated with Green OA—better now? Perhaps the thinking is that investors are still recovering from the hype and lackluster performance of the tech unicorns and some boring old journals and books might suddenly seem appealing! (This is not investment advice.)
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Source: Reuters, Bloomberg
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cOAlition S has now said that in addition to “transformative agreements,” a publisher can comply with Plan S through “transformative journals.” Transformative journals are (wait for it…) hybrid journals, which are now OK, just as long as the journals commit to an “increase in the Open Access penetration rate of at least 8 percent points year-on-year” and either:
- commit to transition to full Open Access at the latest when the Open Access penetration rate has passed 50%,
or - commit to transition to full Open Access by an agreed timeline and at the latest on the 31 December 2024.
There are some other requirements (of course) but let’s stick with these for now. On the plus side, transformative journals are a path to Plan S compliance for those organizations not able to enter into broader transformative agreements (particularly smaller publishers). The problem is that increasing the mix of OA versus subscription articles by 8% per year is not really under the control of the publisher. In hybrid publications it is authors (and not publishers) who choose which track to take. It is hard to understand why authors would choose the Gold OA route at a substantially accelerated pace. As a reminder, research funded by Plan S signatories amounts to a tiny fraction of global output (~3%), so this 8% annual increase in OA is not going to be driven by Plan S funding (just required for compliance!).
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Source: cOAlition S
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In other Plan S news, Elsevier and Couperin (the French academic consortium for higher education and research) have signed a 4-year agreement that is not Plan S compliant. This is notable as France’s National Research Agency is a signatory to Plan S. The deal is a renewal of Couperin’s previous agreement with Elsevier. Updates to the agreement reportedly include cost savings to Couperin (some of the money not paid to Elsevier will make its way into a “national open science fund”) and a 25% discount on APCs for researchers associated with Couperin who elect to publish via a Gold OA option with Elsevier. The agreement also has a Green OA element, allowing French authors who elect the subscription model to self-archive their manuscript in France’s Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) national repository. The deal has its critics. Robert-Jan Smits, the original architect of Plan S (now the president of the Eindhoven University of Technology) commented that it’s a “real pity” that the agreement does not comply with Plan S.
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Source: Elsevier, Science
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Five publishers—Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and American Chemical Society—have announced a new service, GetFTR, whose purpose, ostensibly, is to simplify the process of access to full-text scientific papers when off campus, but which also is designed to serve as an offset to such services as Sci-Hub and ResearchGate, which account for a great deal of “leakage” of usage from publishers’ authorized sites. (One can imagine ResearchGate creating an arrangement with GetFTR, but not Sci-Hub.) Such leakage presents a number of problems for publishers, not least of which is that it puts downward pressure on the economic value of publishers’ subscription publications. It also poses great challenges to gathering all the usage of particular articles, a key factor in journal pricing, since much usage no longer takes place on the publishers’ own sites. GetFTR is not user-facing but works through a network of discovery services (e.g., Mendeley, Dimensions; other services are invited to participate). The service authorizes user access by confirming the user’s entitlements, typically in the form of subscriptions paid by institutions with which users are affiliated. The announcement has met with some skepticism in the library community (see here and here). One issue is simply how the system will work and whether it will work well—for example, a user has to be authenticated on every single device they use. Another is the fact that not all institutions have the necessary infrastructure for implementation. And what will this mean for Crossref and library link resolvers? There are also questions about privacy and concern that libraries were not consulted in the establishment of the new program. All this suggests to us that GetFTR, like all startups, will be tacking in the months ahead, absorbing new ideas and responding to them. We are reminded of the remark of Samuel Johnson: “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”
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Source: Getfulltextresearch.com, The Scholarly Kitchen, ScholCommsProd
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Speaking of Crossref, the organization recently took stock of the views of its various stakeholders. The resulting report highlights a sharp divide between large publishers and other organizations over the mission of Crossref.
The vast majority of our respondents felt the stated Crossref mission to be highly appropriate. However, a small number of very large member organisations, both commercial and not for profit, indicated strongly that they disagreed. For these organisations, Crossref should be focused on the purpose of serving members: helping and supporting them to serve their customers in the scholarly community. This fundamental disagreement is at the heart of increasing dissatisfaction with their relationship with Crossref and is perceived as ‘mission creep’.
A particular point of contention is that Crossref makes metadata (including citation data) available for use by other companies, some of which have launched services that compete with, or pressure, the business lines of larger publishers and societies.
Crossref faces a quandary. The large majority of its members wish for it to continue to offer and expand its metadata services that have become essential to so many scholarly communication services and tools. On the other hand, by expanding its metadata services, it risks losing the largest publishers, who could pull up stakes and form a new DOI registration service. One question we have been thinking about is, Can Crossref meaningfully exist without the larger publishers? Is the value of Crossref’s metadata services dependent on the comprehensiveness of its coverage?
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Source: Crossref
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In its continuing efforts toward the goal of having more of the world’s scientific breakthroughs published in Chinese journals, the Chinese government revealed in November plans to invest around US $29 million per year for 5 years to improve the standards of a select number of its journals, mostly those that publish in English. The investment is one of many initiatives to counter concerns about the quality of Chinese journals and to encourage international submissions.
In other Chinese publishing news, Springer Nature and Wiley announced that they will be re-evaluating articles written or co-written by scientists backed by the Chinese government covering DNA studies of Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minority groups. As reported in The New York Times, “scientists worry that China’s research into the genes and personal data of ethnic minorities is being used to build databases, facial recognition systems and other methods for monitoring and subjugating China’s ethnic minorities.” Also of concern are issues around informed consent and whether study subjects from these vulnerable groups willingly contributed blood samples taken for DNA research.
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Source: Nature, The New York Times
Higher Education
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While we often hear of the pressure on the humanities, which takes the form of reduced enrollments and a corresponding decline in faculty positions and resources to pursue research (not to mention the alteration and even diminishment of the publishing opportunities in this area), the many people working in the humanities have not been standing still. “The new humanities” describes a significant trend for the humanities to work across the campus, forming a variety of interdisciplinary teams and programs. There is an impressive number of these programs in place today, led by the now-familiar “digital humanities,” where the tools of computation, statistics, and information science are brought to bear on humanistic study. For example, a digital humanist might study a large database of the titles of nineteenth-century novels to determine if the titles became longer or shorter over time, perhaps in response to the circumstances (e.g., serialization) of their publication. Such endeavors go beyond the fields of literary study and history and now include environmental humanities, food humanities, energy humanities, and much more. The question that arises, however, is whether the integrity of the humanities is being compromised in such situations: are the humanities an unequal partner in such interdisciplinary collaborations? Or are they being co-opted by the interests of other domains, as, say, a coal company might welcome a study of the place of mining and miners in literature, but resist an analysis of the role of labor and the nature of capitalism? In the name of interdisciplinarity, are the once-robust independent fields of the humanities being broken up and stripped for parts?
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Source: The Chronicle Review
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We have been following news of the “demographic meltdown” in college enrollments as the number of new college students is expected to drop sharply beginning in 2026, an aftereffect of a drop in births during the Great Recession. This topic came up loud and clear at the Ithaka Next Wave conference this year, where it was pointed out that the current method of funding higher education (in public institutions, this is typically tied to the number of FTEs), which is unsatisfactory in any event, is going to be sorely tested in the next few years. We should expect more college closures and consolidation. (With our involvement with academic libraries and publishers, we anticipate that these changes will ripple through much of our client base.) But this particular demographic change comes on the back of another one, as students have been making choices that affect regional enrollments, and in many instances more prestigious institutions have found themselves to be significantly oversubscribed in a so-called “flight to quality.” It was surprising nonetheless to hear of the ordeal of Bennington College, beautifully situated in rural Vermont, national in its reputation, and the alma mater of a great number of prominent people, including Alan Arkin, Yasmin Khan, Andrea Dworkin, Betty Ford, Bret Easton Ellis, and, yes, even Peter Dinklage, Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones. Bennington is small (700 students) and prestigious, but it is located in a region that is shedding students (nearby Southern Vermont College closed earlier this year). The question for administrators is whether this model of the liberal arts college will prove viable in coming years.
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Source: Ithaka Next Wave, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Book Business
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Continuing a multiyear trend, U.S. college students in the fall of 2019 spent about 23% less (dropping from $265 to $205) on textbooks than in the same semester one year ago. Over five years the drop has been from $691 for the full year to $492. The Association of American Publishers tries to put a positive spin on this trend, remarking that the “ongoing decline in spending on course materials reflects the fact that students are taking full advantage of the new, cost-effective options that publishers have made available.” Well, perhaps this is partly true; so-called inclusive access programs, for example, can reduce costs to individual students. But textbook publishers continue to struggle with a multitude of problems: low-priced used books, book rentals, and, of course, piracy. Some portion of the market is also migrating to OER—Open Educational Resources. We were not surprised by the announcement in May of a merger between two of the industry’s largest publishers, Cengage and McGraw-Hill, as consolidation is the norm in a mature market.
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Source: Association of American Publishers, The Scholarly Kitchen, Inside Higher Ed
Miscellany
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We now know where all the missing emails in our inboxes have gone to. Scientists have discovered a massive stellar black hole in our galaxy with a mass 70 times greater than that of the sun. The discovery, reported in Nature, is extraordinary because black holes of this kind and size were not believed to exist. From the article: “[The] formation of such massive [black holes] … would be extremely challenging within current stellar evolution theories.” At this time it is not known if such black holes are to be found elsewhere.
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Source: The Washington Post, Nature
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We screen a great number of sources in our drafting of The Brief, but we have now identified what is assuredly our favorite.
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Source: Dog News Items
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The Thesaurus Linguae Latina gives new meaning to the idea of long-term research. Begun in the 1890s, it may be completed by 2050—maybe. Currently the project, which is based in Germany, is up to the letter R and comes to 18 printed volumes. The aim of the Thesaurus is, for each word, “to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600.” The Thesaurus is being put together by compiling a huge collection of citations of actual Latin usage; there are over 10 million citation slips in the files now, drawn from literature, legal documents, personal correspondence, commercial records, and anything else where the written language appeared. This would be a good place to look up “quid pro quo.” The project, like the empire whose language documented it, has survived major disruptions. Many staff members never returned from the battlefields of WWI, and during WWII the files and text were moved out of Munich to a monastery for safekeeping. Now, fearful of nuclear holocaust, the entire project has been microfilmed and buried in a bunker under the Black Forest, which hints at the possibility that the record of ancient Roman civilization may survive our own. Dr. Christian Flow, who wrote his dissertation on the Thesaurus, notes that the duration of the project is also its strength. “The irony is that the timelessness of the thesaurus [lay] in its inability to finish itself.”
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Source: The New York Times
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Once again Carl Malamud is in the news—and in the courts. The organization he founded, Public.Resource.org, is being sued for having put the Official Code of Georgia Annotated online; the State had it behind a paywall. Should the law not be free and open? Well, yes. But the annotations? This is one of those “the devil is in the details” situations. LexisNexis, which licenses the Code from Georgia, has in fact put a free and open version of the Code on its website, sans annotations. On the other hand, that version is not the official one and includes a disclaimer concerning its accuracy. The case is before the Supreme Court.
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Source: Ars Technica
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For those watching the new HBO interpretation of His Dark Materials, we recommend this essay by Phillip Pullman that was originally published by Oxford University Press as the preface to their 2005 edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman touches on how he found inspiration for his series of famous books, how he came to discover and love Paradise Lost, and how to approach poetry as a form of enchantment. Here is a passage:
The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realise that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there.
Pullman’s essay is a small masterpiece. Read the whole thing.
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Source: The Public Domain Review, Oxford University Press
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We mourn the death of “Lil Bub, the perma-kitten whose droopy tongue and eyes … could vacuum in your soul.” Note that The New York Times has written for Lil Bub a formal obituary.
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Source: The New York Times
Holiday Notes
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We invite all readers of The Brief to our nondenominational celebration of the holiday season by reading the superb essayby Anthony Lane on the resurgence of gin. Lane, derisively, calls this a “Ginaissance,” but his zest in drinking gin and writing about it is almost as good as imbibing oneself. The number of specialty gins has exploded (one bar in New York stocks sixty), and they come from all over the world. One interesting tidbit is that London gin does not necessarily come from London, but “London” refers to a method of making gin, whose recipe is codified in an EU regulation. (Will there still be a “London” gin specification after Brexit?) Gins are now offered with any number of combinations of botanicals, enough, Lane claims, to challenge the nose of a beagle. His taste is catholic: he makes a point to recommend that the reader “grab a seat at the Tribeca Grill, and … try a dose of O.R.E. 118—said to be the world’s first raw vegan gin…. Follow it up with a Wagyu sirloin, medium rare, and feel your conscience explode.” That allusion to Bob Dylan is typical of the wordplay of the piece (“Gin is on the rise and on the loose. It has gone forth and multiplied”), which is reminiscent of the best of P. G. Wodehouse, whom Lane celebrated some years ago. But gin was not always such a salutary guest. In eighteenth-century England its consumption reached devastating proportions; gin was in effect the Oxycontin of its time. Which prompts us to say that if reading The Brief is as intoxicating (hiccup) as we believe it is, this holiday season be sure to appoint a designated reader. We want you to be with us in the new year.
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Source: The New Yorker
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As you may be looking for a last-minute gift suggestion, or simply because you are looking to stretch out and relax with a book over the next couple of weeks, here are some highlights of what we are reading.
Joe: I just finished reading Circe by Madeline Miller (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), and I loved it. This is the story of the witch who enchants Odysseus’s men and who becomes Odysseus’s lover. But Miller goes far beyond Homer’s legend and has Circe narrate her own story, from her loveless childhood to her exile on a remote island, having offended Zeus. Miller is a classicist herself and takes us through the various traditions concerning Circe, far more than are found in The Odyssey. In this sense Circe is not so much a retelling of the myth of Circe as it is a new telling, adding a new tradition to those developed over two millennia. I have Miller’s The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012) queued up on my Kindle.
Michael: I am in the midst of VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas (Harvard University Press, 2019). This is a magisterial history of venture capital, going back long before Sand Hill Road. Venture capital is all about managing and raising funds for highly risky ventures. Nicholas traces the roots of venture capital in the U.S. back to the whaling industry, where investors backed whaling captains on multiyear expeditions with uncertain outcomes. In addition to sharing a similar structure whereby agents (VC firms) pool funds from investors and pick ships (companies) to invest in based (in part) on the track record of the captain (CEO) and crew (team), whaling and modern venture capital share similar distributions of return, both highly skewed toward a small number of high performers.
On the fiction side, this year I became engrossed with The Fifth Season (Little, Brown and Company, 2015) by N. K. Jemisin and its related Broken Earth trilogy. The book is set in a shattered world where civilization is repeatedly destroyed by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Humanity has survived through a caste system designed to retain critical knowledge and expertise (but little more) through the cycles of destruction. I could not put down this refreshingly different (part fantasy, part future history, part ecological caution) story.
A second discovery on the fiction side this year was The Raven Tower (Orbit, 2019) by Ann Leckie, which I can only describe as a kind of fable that explores language, friendship, loyalty, tradition, and other concepts in an inventive and original story.
With a toddler in the house, we do a lot of reading of books with pictures. A few favorites from the year include:
- Hervé Tullet’s Press Here (Chronicle Books, 2011)—A clever book that shows how interactive and engrossing a paper book can be even for a generation born into a world of ubiquitous touch screens.
- Mo Willems’ Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (Scholastic, 2003)—This book provides young readers with the opportunity to pretend to be responsible for the safety of a large vehicle and say “no” to the overtures of a feathered friend with a case of overconfidence. It is funny and charming and provides good practice for the kinds of arguments toddlers are sure to encounter from peers in the years to come (“Come on, just once around the block”). The book has spawned a whole series (Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!, The Pigeon Wants a Puppy!) on encounters with the blue antihero.
- Jon Agee’s The Wall in the Middle of the Book (Penguin Random House, 2018)—A charming and timely story about how our views of life on our own side of the border may not be the full story.
Pam: One book that has stuck with me this year is The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator (Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2019), by Timothy C. Winegard. This is a book about the mosquito written by a historian. It is TERRIFYING. The beautiful narrative writing contrasts starkly with the story of the destructive role of the disease-carrying mosquito and her impact on the history of the world. (Only the females bite humans and animals to get blood to nurture their eggs.) Here’s a taste: “She has consumed virtually every corner of our planet, devoured a vast array of animals, including the dinosaurs, while collecting the corpses of an estimated 52 billion people for good measure.” And we are not yet winning the fight—the warming of the world expands her domain and the domain of the diseases she carries.
Something more cheery for my second set of recommendations. I LOVE clever children’s books. Not books for clever children (though mostly they are), but rather children’s books that are clever enough to entertain adults as well. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Jules Feiffer’s Bark, George (HarperCollins, 1999)—The book starts with George’s mother saying: “Bark, George,” George went: “Meow.” (George is a dog.) The ending is as twisted (in the most wonderful and age-appropriate way) as it gets.
- Antionette Portis’s Not a Box (HarperCollins, 2006)—The book itself is designed to call to mind a cardboard box, and it invites the reader to imagine all the possibilities of a simple cardboard box. Wonderful for sparking creative “out of the box” (of course) thinking.
- B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures (Dial Books, 2014)—Yes, THAT B.J. Novak, from The Office. This is my favorite gift book, as you get to experience the delight of the kid and the horror of the grownup at having to read out loud some ridiculous stuff.
- Jon Klassen’s Hat trilogy (Candlewick, 2011–2016) (I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat, and [finally!] We Found a Hat)—Sly, deadpan humor meets moral dilemma. Get the “Hat Box” set, which is adorably packaged.
Whether or not you have young kids in your life currently, I recommend picking up these titles (and they make great gifts!). There is nothing more satisfying and clarifying to me than a simple, clever story you can get through in about 5 minutes.
Laura: This summer I got caught in a science fiction loop and somehow made my way over to Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (Tor Books, 2016) and its related trilogy. Before I had finished the first book I was recommending it to friends, and telling them not to read the spoiler on the back (that it’s about Earth’s first contact with an alien civilization). My worry feels quaint in hindsight! The plot of this novel, and its spread through the full series, grows breathtakingly in scale over light years and centuries, until a final act that somehow manages to feel simultaneously unpredictable and darkly inevitable. (The novel is also interesting for being wildly popular in the author’s native China. I was pleasantly surprised to catch a profile of the English translator, Ken Liu, in The New York Times earlier this month while I was on Book Three.)
To balance Liu’s dizzying look at the universe, a more cheerful recommendation to end the decade: Andrew Sean Greer’s Less (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2017). As a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Less has had smarter people than me say many more words about its brilliance. All I will say is, it made me really, really happy.
Meetings & Events
We will be attending the following events. Let us know if you would like to set up some time to chat. We’d love to hear from you (info@ce-strategy.com).
- Academic Publishing in Europe, January 14–15, 2020, Berlin
- NISO Plus Conference, February 23–25, 2020, Baltimore, MD
- STM U.S. Annual Conference, April 28–30, Washington, DC
- Society for Scholarly Publishing 42nd Annual Meeting, May 27–29, 2020, Boston, MA. We are pleased to announce that we will be moderating the session at SSP titled: “Your Publisher RFP Process: Key Considerations for Societies (Before, During, and After).” We look forward to seeing you there!
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We read books to find out who we are. ― Ursula K. Le Guin