The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) held its inaugural London event in Covent Garden on March 15, 2018. Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives at F1000, spoke about the changes we're seeing, and need to see, in the scholarly communications landscape. Her presentation was provocative and informative, and it stimulated many questions—both immediately, from the audience, and afterwards, about whether the industry is moving quickly enough to support the rapid changes in what researchers require.
Liz has a rare perspective, having moved from funding (Head of Evaluation at the Wellcome Trust) to one of the newer publishing platforms (F1000). She is also involved in such initiatives as the CASRAI CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) Programme, ORCID, and Crossref, and as such was able to bring a challenging, multi-stakeholder view of the evolution of research and new models of publishing.
Promising work is being done in this area. For instance, Liz drew attention to the CRediT initiative, which is a joint initiative between publishers, funders, and institutions that aims to improve the visibility and transparency of an author's specific contributions (examples of the taxonomic terms that researchers can use to describe their roles include: "funding acquisition", "writing - original draft" vs "writing - review and editing", "software", and "data curation"). Untangling what are often informal or ad hoc contributions will remain challenging, but frameworks such as CRediT aim to improve how people across the ecosystem assign or claim credit for work done.
Liz finished by asking to consider what the future of science should look like, and what we need to do to achieve it. She quoted Arturo Casadevall and Ferric C Fang's 2011 paper, where the authors stated that "incentives in the current system place scientists under tremendous stress, discourage cooperation, encourage poor scientific practices, and deter new talent from entering the field. It is time for a discussion of how the scientific enterprise can be reformed to become more effective and robust". Given that it is seven years on from this paper, and the quotation is in many ways as true now as it was then, Liz put forward a call to action. She argued that, despite the many developments of the last decade, we still have a long way to go as an industry.
This ended the presentation on a poignant and reinvigorating note, and gave the cross-stakeholder group much to talk about afterwards.
The SSP London Regional Event was was sponsored by Cenveo, Clarivate Analytics, Crossref, Digital Science, and Ingenta. It welcomed attendees from the publishing, academic, society, partner, and tech/start-up communities, including: Bibblio, Crossref, Digital Science, Future Science Group, IOP Press, International Water Association, SAGE Publications, Springer Nature, Research Square, Royal College of Physicians, Publons, Ringgold, UNSILO, and Veruscript, among others.
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