Good morning everybody and thank you for having me. First of all, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak to all of you Please ask as many questions as you can. I'll try to leave as much time as possible for that I always enjoy the back and forth and I find it more interesting than just talking myself

I pretty much know what's on the slides I Spent a lifetime being a the proverbial square peg in the round hole And so I am taking a theme in a conference on collaboration

I'm starting with a statement about the fact that the system is broken You know, it's a good way to start getting the juices flowing and and everybody to feel relaxed but But I have my reasons for saying that I will explain my reasons as we go along

Feel free to disagree. I enjoy disagreements almost as much almost as much as agreements sometimes more And I will start by confessing one thing this presentation is about bias My biases

Probably your biases the biases of other actors that are quite relevant to what happens in Scholarly communications and why we should think about Which biases we want to conserve and which biases we need to get rid of and if you think about it that way It may help understand where I'm trying to go

So I'll start with my biases I'm not one of you. I'm not an academic. I'm not a publisher. I spent a lifetime Consulting and Actually, I've spent a lifetime trying to think about the future and trying to forecast the future

I've done that as a consultant. I was a partner in McKinsey in Chicago, New York in Milan before that actually I Was a financial analyst at Bernstein covering European media. That's when I started to overlap more closely with your world because I followed companies like Walter's Kluwer and

Redell severe as it was called back then and Pearson and I started to talk to people in the academic community and I developed strong points of view about What was happening in part because as a taxpayer was quite indignant about what was happening to my money

Since 2018, I've actually been collaborating as a consultant to spark in the u.s I focused my work initially on the strategy of the publishers and the understanding of Why they're moving into the data part of the business and they are developing so much research analytics information and analysis

But I've also continued to be interested in the core scholarly publishing business and that's what we'll talk about today So these are my biases. I think I don't come from your world I'm an economic animal and And I'm an indignant taxpayer

See if I can go forward No Go forward this way. Maybe not I'll venture to say you may all have biases if you are part of the academic community and actually I will argue that

I have met in my career two main types of biases within the academic community There are people who believe scholarly communications is run as a set of evil empires Damaging the integrity and the credibility of the academic community

And sorry, this is one exhibit too much. Yes Too many, you know excessive profits focus on citations short-term success of the journals themselves

Restrictions of access Creating opportunity Effectively establishing inequities of various kinds And that's how many people probably in this room feel about it I will also argue however that there are people perhaps not in this room. Perhaps. Yes, who also view the world in a different way

From the academic community. There are many people particularly the people who have been very successful in the past who have grown Through this model of communications. They've succeeded In operating in this model of communications and they're quite comfortable with it

Perhaps part of their careers have been built on this world of scholarly communications as we know it and they tend to effectively Struggle to imagine a world that's radically different from the one that we know So there are these biases

There is a third actor in all of this The publishers obviously the publishers have their own point of view and their biases. I've met I've talked to them many many times over hours and hours of conversations And I would argue there are a couple of biases That affect them as well. One is that it's simply a great and fundamentally pleasant business to be in

It's very profitable. It's relatively straightforward and easy It deals with customers that don't negotiate particularly hard So, you know, they're worse business to be in

And there are other biases that they imagine the world as it is today They struggle very much to imagine a role for themselves If you change that world and so they have a huge bias that's called let's maintain the journal Which is effectively our single most important asset as the basis for the future of scholarly communications

There's a fourth actor that you are unlikely to think about But it's actually quite important and here is where my biases come back to right? Probably there are not many academic Conferences where people start telling you about asset managers and investors

But they matter a lot You cannot really imagine the modern corporation without the financial markets At least in a capitalist society, okay, you can argue that you could have the government and the state own them and so on But in a capitalist society, it's hard to imagine you will be able to fund these companies without

the capital market supporting them and you can see how Thinking about as you think about the companies you are most familiar with a Vast amount of the cash they use of the capital they use comes actually from investors in the form of equity or in the form of loans of some kind and

So they matter quite a lot And they're the actor that's more often than not not Being thought of but they matter a great deal to management if nothing else

When I ran these numbers a year ago, I was actually quite shocked It's these are things you hear about we know that our differences in in compensation and inequities that are rising But it's when you see the numbers and how these things have changed over time Did you start to understand the weight?

of Shares and share performance on how senior management of corporations think it's not just the fact that they continue to pay Themselves a lot more than the people that work for them. They even pay themselves more than anyone else in society Compensation of US CEOs relative to the top 0.1 percent of wedge earners in the US

That includes McKinsey Partners Goldman Sachs managing directors private equity managers, etc Yet over the past 40 years or so They've managed to double their compensation CEOs have managed to double their compensation even against these very privileged groups of people

Forget about the rest of society, right that that's being left well well behind and this rise is directly related to the rise of stock awards and the rise of share prices and When you go back to the companies, we're talking about over half of the compensation of the CEOs is driven by what share performance

So guess what it matters to them how shares perform matters a lot matters between 55 and 80 percent Now the investment community is its own biases. He likes to make money

It's actually struggling a lot because there are a number of trends in financial markets, which I will spare you In detail but are quite relevant to the people in the financial markets one is that You ultimately The institutional investors that give them money as well as some of the retail investors take their money away very fast

When you underperform and so you have only a few quarters to prove that you're right or wrong with your stock picks and that really means that in the end what you're going to do is follow the market and Follow the market means that stocks to do well will continue to do well and better at least in the short term simply because

More money is pouring in its demand and supply and so as long as you're performed the companies are performing in a reasonably stable way Remember what I said about earlier about the business. It's a stable business. So stable business with rising profits Rising valuations. What's not to like? investors really like

these stocks or could like these stocks and CEOs love that investors could like these stocks The world of investing as I mentioned is affected by a number of changes one of the most important one

however is the understanding there is a future beyond the very near term and That understanding has taken the form of something called ESG If you operate in the financial markets today, this is the buzzword that You hear every day now There are tons of articles if you read the Financial Times if you read the Economist you read the Wall Street Journal

There are tons of arguments about whether ESG is good bad should be redefined again. I'll spare all of you. I Will simply give you the very basic concept the very basic idea is that everything else being equal a company that's attentive to its environmental footprint That's attentive to its impact on society and it has good governance

Will do better over time than a company that doesn't do one or more of those things since reasonable, right, I mean it's There is less risk fundamentally if you are a good citizen then if you are a bad citizen and that's what ESG is about

Now you may be surprised by what the ESG and investment community think about the companies that you deal with particularly if you have some of the biases like mine as the indignant investor or you're as the

academic person who Is unhappy about the inequities built into the communications in scholarly communications today There are a couple of I'm citing a couple of easily available sources of information

And you can see that the ranks and the judgments that are passed on companies that you may think of relatively Unfair actors are actually quite strong, right relx is number one in media and tent in the global universe covered by Sustainalytics while is number 13 in media still in the top 5% in the global universe of stocks

Publicly, there are publicly listed clarity. It doesn't do quite as well Bloomberg has points of view and says that Relx leads in environmental social and governance while is leads in social and governance and it's above median in environmental not completely sure

What's underlying this small difference? But that gives you a flavor for how much the financial markets actually like these companies and think that they're behaving quite well Which is something you may or may not agree with Some of these ratings are actually quite easy to explain One is simply that we're in a transition from print to digital that reduces the

emission footprint of these companies and that's quite a good thing if you are Assessing their ESG performance. Also these companies don't have some of the most visible and most Pernicious

Behavior that some companies can and will have they don't engage in child labor. They don't engage in human trafficking There are rare work-related deaths. They don't are not in Involved in contraband for the most part. So there is a lot of Structural things that help them

But the other thing that helps them a lot is the fact that they tell they get to tell their own story And so they get to go and tell to the consultants that tell investors where to put the money and they will parade Their stories of success. They will say oh, we're involved in education. We support research

We enable research and research is what's going to make the world better. So we should give us a very high rating They forget sometimes to mention that the way they do that is not exactly viewed in the same way by the academic community They may not quite enthusiastically disclose that Opening up the licenses during kovat was done at the request of

The world contrast not out of a spontaneous initiative, etc. Those things get lost in the details somehow And Part of the problem is simply the fact that management Fundamentally can tell its own story if you actually take the categories of social performance

That are listed in the taxonomy that is used by the largest asset managers in the world You see the column on the left on this slide those are the elements they are supposed to look at when they

Judge the social performance of a company. I will argue and that's one of my biases again publishers will disagree but I will argue that on Every single category The publishers are in violation of this rules

Not exactly what should lead to a leading Or a very particularly high Rank for any of these companies now some of these violations are

Not sorry, let me say different way all these violations are important if you are the librarian of a academic library That is pushing back on a contract and a publisher starts to badmouth you or make threatening calls you are as affected by that behavior as

Society at large by some of the other behaviors There is no condoning even small violations just because they're small for the individuals affected. They're quite relevant So there is no excuse for those It's just the fact that some are bigger and have a bigger impact and I look at this for as the most important one to

think about One is a self-reinforcing research and publishing cycle that disfavor historically marginalized communities By the way, I've not invented this I'll come back and explain why I'm saying this None of none of this I invented One of the things you should not expect me is to say anything original

The Second one is a set of terminal condition that hinders the resolution of crises and raises major ethical questions The third one is the deployment and use of algorithms that distort academic life And the fourth one is the conflict of interest between publishing and assessing research I'll briefly touch on each of them just to make sure you know why I'm saying these things even as I said

There's nothing creative or particularly insightful for me in this sense If you go after citations you're gonna go after research that's popular and if you're gonna cite and if you're gonna publish research That's popular. Guess what the funding will go into that research and if you go into their research

Then they will drive citations and you get into this cycle where in the end there are marginalized communities that have massive problems, but they're Environmental problems they are diseases there are Social issues are simply not touched because they are not fashionable enough To be fair. We also have seen plenty of examples of

Unfashionable things that touch wealthy societies being ignored right research on our on mRNA is a perfect and recent example, but Nonetheless, this is a major issue. By the way, Dora declaration 2013

Explicitly addressed this issue and said it's important that scholarly communications does not leave anyone behind So that that is not and it's not designed in a way that does that so it again I'm not inventing it the people who Commented on the Dora declaration back almost a decade ago. We're already quite aware of these issues

But the publishers don't see them sway I don't want to pick on this gentleman I don't know him. I'm actually quite sorry in a way that he said this because I'm using this In a way that probably will not please him but to the extent that he published this statement

I have to put it forward This is how people who work in the publishing companies think about the advice editor and strategies to grow the journals in terms of submissions and accepted article citations and downloads You never see the word important science Or her relevant science or anything like that right that that doesn't seem to be particularly

Important for publishers. I'm not saying they don't think about it. I don't know Jason I am sure that he actually cares But he didn't feel particularly compelled to tell all of us as he did What his job is and that's quite troublesome to me And by the way, this was sent to me by someone else who rather than found it highly objectionable again

I'm not inventing anything. I'm just putting together things that other people have noticed before me Covid-19 has shown that you cannot restrict science behind paywalls simply and Interesting enough two years after we had to dismantle paywalls for Covid-19

Paywalls had to come down again for monkeypox It's crisis after crisis And There are many more looming crises from loss of biodiversity to a set of viral threats that we still don't know much about all the way to

climate change and the whole idea that the entire community should be excluded either from Reading or from publishing is fundamentally not acceptable. And by the way my doctor in Zurich cannot afford to buy

Scholarly journals and I don't live in a particularly poor area of Zurich But my daughter still cannot read leading journals because as she told me they're too expensive It affects all of us just to be clear at some level to have this exclusion. I'm in good health

It was she told me in the context of a cardiac check, but everything is fine The third one is Never ceases to astonish me There are two algorithms that are widely used in the academic community. One is the impact factor the other are rankings

There is a litany of complaints about both of them you cannot sit down with a head with a provost or a vice provost for research in any Large academic institution at least in the United States and now get the conversation to start with a complaint

About the ranking and this comes from people who are ranked at the top But there's always someone got ranked a bit higher and something that they complain about it triggers bizarre behavior That affects students and researchers Any company that was buying data that creates these problems

We'll put a moratorium on using that data until it understands what to do with it The academic community seems eager to start buying more algorithms since it cannot deal with the first two it has adopted Let's use a bit more. Let's figure out how to Make things worse. I

Don't know what to say. It's pernicious And it's being done without really thinking about the impact and that these algorithms have on the life of most of you And last but not least you cannot publish and then assess the research you publish I

Have a strong ethical issue with this it fundamentally creates a conflict of interest. I come from an industry that is in my late my final Job was I was a Bernstein right? So I was in a brokerage firm There were high pay high Chinese walls. There was plenty of regulation against conflict of interest. I

Find astonishing that no one understands that if you are Assessing research you cannot publish it if you're publishing it. You cannot assess it You're putting people in a situation where they feel compelled to publish where by the companies that will assess their research

Even unconsciously and it's totally unfair to Researchers to put them in this place All right, so since I have biases and I'm so biased I'll also try to defend the publishers and I will say okay fair enough

It's easy to blame them. But a lot of these problems come from the academic industry itself from the academic sector itself, right? The biases in hiring promoting and publishing the biases against researching Themes and subjects that matter to underserved communities are

Just as much fault of the academic community, right? And senior academic leaders and faculty are involved in to running these things in many ways so You know, there's plenty of blame to shift from the publishers at least in theory to all of you in this room

Okay, not all of you Some of you, but I would argue that publishers are ultimately responsible for their product It's too easy to say someone else is doing it. It's not my fault. And so I will still argue that Participating and profiting from what I have been calling for a few years the academic industrial complex is a choice

It's a profitable one for the companies for the investors For senior management, but it's still a choice And it's too easy to say the Academy made me do it. It's an excuse always used with my mother

So what can be done I'll make a few general comments. The first one is that I'm out of the business of predictions. I Spent a lifetime trying to predict the future. I Sometimes got it right because I got lucky many times

I got it wrong because I was not good enough for predicting the future perhaps But it took 215 years from the Gutenberg's Bible to the first academic journal if anyone thinks that they can predict How scholarly communications will be made in will be around in 50 years in 30 years in? 215 years good luck. I cannot do it. I

Refuse to be in the business of making predictions about the future I'm too old anyway to see the results of my predictions. It will make it too easy It's it's too easy to predict it when you know, you're not gonna be around to be blamed for your mistakes The second comment I will make is that journals are based on

The concepts of journals is based on scale economies that belong to the physical world It's based on printing on binding on shipping on Warehousing and shipping on collecting subscriptions all of that made very expensive to send individual articles Made a lot cheaper to send collections of articles and call them journals is a good way to market them

Very little of that applies in the digital world And so there is no need to think about the scale economies of print in a world where? Research is communicated digitally. The third thing I will say is that

Again, going back to my biases publishers have fooled all of us into two things one is confusing publishing with publishers Will my articles need proof reading and editing yes Absolutely, trust me Does that need to be done by a publisher?

No there are tons of other people who are extremely competent to do that and will be less expensive to do so and perhaps even better and similarly Scholarly journals serve a number of very important functions. I will come back to that in a second and I will list them

But they don't have to come from journals They can come in many different ways and the whole idea that only journals can do that is a fundamental mistake Again, it's a bias. I will also say there's much experimentation ranging from journals with innovative business models to non journal initiatives, and I would argue that

Encouraging experimentation is the best way to prepare for the future These initiatives will need funding They will need the removal of barriers to adoption Trust me. The barriers to adoption are almost worse than the funding as an obstacle And so what I will argue is that what matters is having principles for how to think about the future I

Will argue that long after I will be dead which may be sooner or later. I hope later but sooner or later Some initiatives will come up. They will meet the principles. I will put forward in a couple of slides and It will be clear and recognizable that those principles make those initiatives better than the model we have today

Again, because I don't claim fame When it's not deserved The next slide will show four principles we are suggesting they're not perfect

No intention of claiming that they can be improved. They can be jettisoned and substituted with other principles We don't really worry too much about that. We worry about the fact that someone thinks about the future in terms of principles Rather than in terms of business models because the business models will lead you back to what?

You have been told is the only way to do business today. I The next two pages are the work the next page the next slide after this is the work that Collectively done with two other people one is me Brian They're both great friends and great thinkers and much smarter than I am Amy brand is the director of MIT press and my co-author on the science article the dirt

Mentioned earlier in Jean-claude Donne is one of the signatory original signers of the Budapest Declaration and a great friend from the University of Montreal

And they have done a lot more of the work than I've done I just happen to have the fortune of telling you about it Here are four proposed principles Whatever model you encounter going forward should provide that the force functions of publishing

functions the purpose is why you're doing publishing are Equitably available to all research contribution deemed to be of sufficient quality registration Certification dissemination and preservation. This is what journals are about But this is what scholarly communications in general are about you don't need a journal to do these four things

You need someone to do these four things, but that doesn't have to reside in a journal The second principle is that the model distinguishes certification Cloud is written an article with me Brian has been published in science from assessment The article is good because it's on science who says

Maybe it's a lot of BS There's another statement in this second principle is very important Bianca Kramer in the Netherlands start to use a War a set of words that I find extremely illuminating the publishers continue to tell you the importance of the version of record and

Bianca argues Exactly the opposite that what matters is the record of versions It's the evolution of knowledge and thinking that comes With things building up over time. And so what you want is a model that supports this record of versions

Because that's how knowledge is built think about how Your knowledge has evolved over time and how has it been influenced and changed by inputs from everyone? certainly mine The third one is the model enables research agenda to be driven by global or regional relevance rather than journal visibility

this whole idea that We're all in the business of citations You're all touching the business of citations is really pernicious And that's really important to dismantle. I would argue and finally the model allows equitable open access to research for for the purpose you see

This principles or any other four principles If you can improve on them, please by all means I certainly do not have my future invested in this

I will not be around to see the models that come up. I will not be able to know whether they Do or do not conform to any of them, but when I look around this room there are lots of people who will be around to see what happens in the next years and I trust that you will Have an opportunity to think about

Whether the new initiatives that you see do or do not meet these kind of principles and what to do with them I will leave you with our own final word Because there was something that was on left hand side. I told you about investors I told you about their bias towards making money. I told you about management being biased words making money

So here's my post-scriptum What would have happened if you'd invested in the companies that? That were talked about a decade ago, would you have done well, would you have not done well and so on So if you put a hundred pounds since the main Stock there are two stocks at the relx But the one that trades most is the one in pound another one in euros

If you'd invest a hundred pounds in relx in September 2012, you would have 377 pounds today, that's pretty good If you put the same hundred pounds in an index fund in UK in the London Stock Exchange You would have only 118 pounds. But that's that's a good investment. I would also argue that relx really has changed

Substantially since then has become a risk assessment business In fact for the first time in the final in the past quarter The risk assessment business of relx has become larger than else a year and since it has much faster growth a lot of that Growth in valuation is really what has happened there. Not what has happened else if you had invest $100 in Wiley

You'd have $98 today, not really good Particularly because you could have bought instead index the S&P 500 in US shares and you would have $281 So that would have been a better choice You could have not really bought Springer stock because it was a private company decade ago owned by private equity

Is merged with Nature Group. It has still failed to IPO, tried to IPO At the time right before the merger with Nature Group when that failed that's when they merged Tried to IPO twice more. They had horrible time in both times. They seem to be particularly

unlucky in their respect But the investors have also had fundamental doubts about the future of the business model They totally believed in the projections for the business two and three and four years out, of course If you sign three and four and five year contracts the revenues are pretty much assured

but if you asked what the value of the business would be ten years out they had no idea they will not know how to think about it and Therefore that IPO has repeatedly failed and the company is still private So the picture is modeled It's not a hugely great performance and I would say yes, the system is broken even for the publishers

Thank you