Good intentions can pave many roads.

Can I agree with some of the premises and goals of the proposal? Sure, but “let’s fuel progress by making the scholarly record harder to find, with more burden on the author, with less obvious signals of validation and worse metadata,” said no one, ever.

If enacted, the Plan S proposal would place enormous new burdens on authors. Not only would they need to agree upon and set the standards of quality control, but in “publishing” all scholarly outputs immediately and openly, authors would be forced not only to take responsibility for that quality control but also for the application of interoperable metadata needed to enable each and every output to be discoverable and connected to final results.

A recent MEDLINE data quality assessment by some of my colleagues identified serious challenges in MEDLINE’s records. Would the Plan S proposal ameliorate or exacerbate challenges like this? Will it lead to greater discovery, increased linkage of articles and data, and greater usage and impact for authors? Traditional publishing outlets expend enormous resources on this and, while it has never been easier to disseminate content online, it also has never been harder for materials to be noticed and linked to, e.g., identities, grants, and institutions.

As mentioned in a Scholarly Kitchen post that I co-wrote in May with my colleagues Jamie Carmichael and Jessica Thibodeau, “[s]cholarly research is complex and interconnected; change in one area can spark improvement or deterioration throughout the ecosystem (emphasis added).” In the transition to open science, stakeholders across the ecosystem acknowledge that authors should not have to shoulder an open access administrative burden that takes time away from their actual research. The scholar-led proposal from Plan S seems to overlook this, which is one of the few things that institutions, researchers, funders, and publishers seem to agree upon. Bluntly, being a great researcher does not inherently make you an adept publisher.

Additionally, the proposal’s call for the community — including service providers — to supply open tools and commit funds to sustain the model with little to no return-on-investment is unsustainable. While well-intentioned, this type of approach is a recipe for failure. Adding links, building metadata bridges, and enriching records have real costs that require significant amounts of money. With the required tools already available, a better approach is to invest in their adoption, not to duplicate work by creating new ones.

Scholarly communications are important, which is why its participants have such strong views. Getting communications wrong has real-world consequences, many of which are unintended. Let’s acknowledge this and work together to solve the challenges that we can actually solve without adding complications and entropy.

The post Roy Kaufman on cOAlition S’s “Towards Responsible Publishing” appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

For those attending the Charleston Conference, CCC will host When the Deal is Done: Reporting the Transformation on Wednesday, 8 November at 2:40 pm EST, a fireside chat featuring Sybille Geisenheyner, Director of Open Science Strategy & Licensing, American Chemical Society; Jade Yonehiro, Open Access Data Analyst, California Digital Library; and Shannon Reville, Senior Product Manager, CCC. During the session, the panelists will discuss the current state of agreement reporting and review the specific industry reporting templates and guidelines they currently follow. The discussion will explore best practices learned along the way and leverage interactive polling to help shape the conversation and allow the audience to share feedback and their own best practices.

In addition to our hosted panel, CCC representatives will join their industry colleagues on the following panels: 

• On 8 November, Ask The Scholarly Kitchen Chefs will bring together a panel of Scholarly Kitchen Chefs, including Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist, Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis; Robert Harington, Associate Executive Director, Publishing, American Mathematical Society; Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO; and Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, Business Development, CCC, for an interactive discussion around scholarly communications.  
• On 10 November, Batten Down the Hatches: Navigating Challenges and Complexities in Open Access Management will take a look at the complexities surrounding open access management with a panel featuring Matthew Ragucci, Director, Institutional Product Marketing, Wiley; Willa Liburd Tavernier, Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University – Bloomington; and Randyn Heisserer-Miller, Head of Collection Strategies, Colorado State University; and Jamie Carmichael, Senior Director, Information and Content Solutions CCC. 
• On 27 November, The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 will be featured as a Virtual Poster Session. Jack Maness, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services, University of Denver, and Jessica Thibodeau, Senior Director, Information and Content Solutions CCC, will discuss the findings of the recent State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 study. 

If you will be at Charleston, please visit us at Booth #128 to learn more about the CCC Scholarly Communications Suite, the industry-tested, data-driven set of tools (featuring RightsLink for Scientific Communications, Ringgold Solutions, and OA Intelligence) that enables publishers to use rich metadata to model, scale, and manage their scholarly publishing programs. You can also learn how Get It Now, the article delivery service from CCC, can help library patrons with the immediate fulfillment of full-text articles from unsubscribed journals and the Annual Copyright License for Higher Education which provides content users campuswide with the copyright permissions they need in a single, multi-use license.  

 Learn more about the Charleston Conference here.   

The post CCC at the Charleston Conference 2023 appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Going to be a big deal? Definitely a big deal.

At the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair last week, the halls were alive with the sounds of AI. In the Frankfurt Studio, I moderated a panel discussion, “Trained With Your Content,” considering what limits should be placed on training Large Language Models (LLMs) and how to address concerns over equity, transparency, and authenticity.

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

“Right now, the current status situation is that the AI governance is far behind the AI capabilities, which is dangerous,” noted Dr. Hong Zhou, Director of Intelligent Services & Head AI R&D, Wiley. “This has impacted the research and also the publishing, because it’s very hard for the people to manage all these AI capabilities.

“That’s why we need to create the legal framework to catch up to these technologies to have the response,” he explained. “I do have several concerns about this. The first concern, as everyone knows, is copyright infringement. Today, generative AI generates content which infringes on copyright without permission. This is a problem. Another concern, actually, is that AI can generate content that is similar to the original content but is not enough to be considered as copyright infringement. This is one scenario. Another scenario is it generates some content which infringes the copyright, but it’s hard to detect. In both cases for the copyright holders, it’s very difficult for them to enforce the rights – in both cases.”

According to Dr. Namrata Singh, Founder and Director, Turacoz Group, the ICMJE has developed guidelines on the responsibility of scientific authors when using AI in their work.

“If you have used an AI tool, then you mention that in your methods section. You mention the name of the tool. You mention the version if it is there or the whole technology part behind it. This is where, I guess, the transparency works. But ultimately, the responsibility is on the author. But guidelines and recommendations do help us just to know what is right and what is wrong and what we can do and what we cannot do.”

The demand for AI tools in research and scholarly publishing raises copyright-related questions about the use of published materials that feed the tools. Carlo Scollo Lavizarri described how licensing solutions might meet that demand.

“These licenses can either be from segments of publishing, perhaps, that have large content that they can license, or it could be voluntary collective license, linking many-to-many situations. For example, you have many writers, many publishers on the one side, and you have many pieces of content on the other side used by different AI tools. So that is one such mechanism – voluntary collective licensing.”

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Last year, industry expert Herman Mentink explored the challenges that publishers face when crafting OA agreement proposals, specifically the role of quality data in their development. This OA Week, revisit the series (and some other blogs highlighting the importance of data quality) and learn why data is the key to building scalable, sustainable OA agreements.  

Exploring the Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 1 – Data 

Exploring the Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 2 – Pricing Models 

Exploring Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 3 – Communication and Collaboration 

How Data Quality Makes or Breaks Open Access Agreements 

OA Agreement Intelligence: A Collaborative Approach to Innovation 

Learn more about how OA Agreement Intelligence helps publishers leverage their data to scale agreement modeling practices and accelerate data-driven decision-making.  

The post ICYMI: The Importance of Data Quality in Moving Scholarly Publishing Forward appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

To help address this issue, CCC and Media Growth Strategies collaborated to study metadata management. Our in-depth review expands upon the existing research and resources to uncover policy and system complexities as well as breakages that create missed funding and access opportunities for the communities that open access and open science models are designed to serve.

This is the second in a series of blog posts in which CCC shares this analysis with the scholarly community to spark dialogue and drive action with respect to metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle. We explore the challenges of each stage, how each stakeholder group is affected, and the impact when these challenges persist.

The first blog in this series looked at the metadata challenges researchers and stakeholders face during the idea development and proposal preparation stages. In this blog, we examine the interactions between researchers and funders during the proposal submission stage. 

Inconsistent Metadata Capture Leads to Ineffective Grant Utilization

During the proposal submission stage, researchers submit applications for funding. The potential funder then selects reviewers and begins the application review process. If the application is approved, the funder will log funding terms in its grant management system.

Interviewees shared that one of the major challenges that emerges during this stage is inconsistent metadata capture. Variability across the grant application process and within its systems can result in the loss of the metadata that’s necessary to determine open access funding entitlements at later stages of the research lifecycle, e.g., institutional affiliations. 

Poor data quality also results in low accuracy of later-stage funding identification and tracking. Poor data quality is often due to limitations of legacy systems and/or lack of awareness. While the free text fields in these systems may facilitate the collection of feedback, they do not automatically capture granular data like organizational identifiers. This inadequate data capture can lead to inaccuracies later in the publication process – for example, researchers confusing proposal numbers with grant IDs. Without disambiguated grant and funder details, grants may not be effectively utilized, leaving open access funding unclaimed and shifting payment obligations to research institutions and/or researchers themselves.

In addition, the lack of registered grant DOIs makes it difficult and costly to link funding to specific research outputs. This results in missed open access opportunities as well as incomplete analysis to inform future funding investments. 

Lack of Systems Interoperability

During the proposal submission stage, we also see multiple systems that need to come together to support the research process. Researchers depend on a variety of systems to do their work, but the systems don’t always work together. Our research found that missing integrations among the systems that researchers use (e.g., CRIS, grant management, curriculum management systems, etc.) often result in gaps in metadata and PID capture. 

Legacy System Limitations Threaten Research Integrity

Another challenge comes when funders select reviewers and begin to review the application for funding. When there’s low adoption of standardized Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) such as FundRef, RAiD, Ringgold, ISNI, and ROR, the process of identifying and managing conflicts of interest among peer reviewers becomes more challenging.  

Guide to Metadata Management Across the Research Lifecycle

While researching metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle, a key artifact CCC developed by leveraging the data and the insights we gained from this study is an interactive report. This report guides you through metadata management—highlighting the challenges, related impacts, and key decision points. The report also offers the opportunity for you to provide your own input and feedback. 

In our next blog post, we discuss the metadata challenges faced by researchers during the Research & Authoring stage. To learn more, please visit The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 and provide your input through the Feedback function. 

The post The Managing Metadata Series: Stage 2 – Proposal Submission appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The coronavirus pandemic that began in March 2020 and the lockdown orders that followed restricted entire nations only to the most necessary activities. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May sparked worldwide demonstrations against racism and brought the Black Lives Matter movement to home pages and front pages everywhere.

36 months later, the world has moved on. Pandemic restrictions have lifted and urban centers are mostly free of protests. But how have we changed? In publishing especially, what is different about our jobs, our professional relationships, and our attitudes?

Did you answer, “Everything”? Or “Nothing?”

That question – “How have we really changed?” – is the challenge presented by Dianndra Roberts, the Senior Publishing Coordinator for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Dianndra Roberts co-chairs the DEI Advisory Council of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors and is the DEIA Associate Editor and a chef for The Scholarly Kitchen blog, published by SSP, the Society of Scholarly Publishing.

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

Dianndra Roberts recently shared with me her reflections on the progress made since the Summer of 2020 toward ending the cycle of racism and discrimination in publishing and everywhere else.

“What does it mean as a Black woman to speak out against racism in your organization and in this profession? Dianndra, has speaking out made you vulnerable to danger, and how do you respond?” I asked.

“I’m not going to say it was easy, and everything we wanted went the way we wanted it to go, or it didn’t take work,” Roberts replied. “Just to say it as it is, when a group of Black people start to organize, it immediately becomes considered political, even if we just wanted to be able to do peer support with each other, and we were not trying to riot or anything. But naturally, somehow, a group of Black people is a political thing.

“I believe in what I stand for, and I think that we should all be treated well and with the same expression. And if me saying anything I’ve said changes it for the person behind me, then yeah, I’m going to keep doing it. I’m just going to keep doing that.”

The post Challenging Racism in Scholarly Publishing appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The post The State of Scholarly Metadata appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

As part of the latest RLSC release, CCC also adopted the European Statistical Advisory Committee (ESAC) Article List, an OA agreement reporting template.

CCC recognizes the importance of simplifying the management of OA agreements. With this enhancement to RLSC, CCC reaffirms its commitment to facilitating access to scholarly content and supporting the community in its pursuit of OA initiatives.

“This new functionality based on the ESAC Article List will foster standardization according to international best practice across the sector,” said Catherine Ferris, Open Scholarship Officer, Irish Research e-Library (IReL). “This is a welcome and needed addition to the infrastructure supporting OA publishing agreements.”

The post CCC Enhances its Scholarly Communications Workflow Solution, RightsLink for Scientific Communications appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Drawing on her work as a scholarly author and as Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington, Willa Tavernier moderated an interactive session with three panelists. Together, they reflected on successful collaborations that streamline OA processes, remove unnecessary work for the researchers, and enable cross-stakeholder transparency.

A real-time audience poll first quizzed the room on their own “level of pain (experienced) in managing Open Access.” Half the room who voted said they felt moderate pain, while another quarter said they experienced very severe pain – or worse.

The 75 session attendees were next asked to choose which “stakeholder experiences the most pain in the OA publication process.”

“The low pain ranking given for institutions/consortium may indicate a need for better communication between publishers and institutions on the pain points they experience and what it will take to solve them,” observed Willa Tavernier. “Transformative Agreements may lessen the friction but not every institution has a TA and even for those that do, TAs don’t cover all Open Access publishing.”

“Author/Researcher was the clear loser. This is NOT good,” noted Dr. Jason Price, Research and Scholarly Communication Director, SCELC Library Consortium. “When authors lose, everyone loses.”

CCC’s Jamie Carmichael, Sr. Director, Information and Content Solutions, agreed: “It’s no surprise authors ranked #1, as there is a collective effort ongoing to reduce author friction in OA administration. Improving the author experience is the number one priority on CCC’s roadmap for RightsLink for Scientific Communications, which reflects input from the academic publishers and institutions we serve.

A poll question next asked the SSP audience to rank the elements of OA management from least to most difficult.

“The first and second highest rated issues – ‘funding eligibility awareness’ and ‘modeling and measuring OA deals’ – seem to be two sides of the same problem,” according to David Haber, Publishing Operations Director, American Society for Microbiology.

“If I am an author, I have no idea what deals publishers can give me for my great research,” he explained. “And as a publisher, I have difficulty knowing that the great research that I just accepted is written by someone who is entitled to a special offer” on an article processing charge.

“Author awareness of funding eligibility – identified as the most difficult element of OA management – has a number of technical and timing based solutions available, at least under Read & Publish agreements. The community of stakeholders should make this a priority,” said Dr. Jason Price.

“I think the reason we see most respondents indicating only ‘moderate pain’ over Open Access management is that business operations supporting these OA models have evolved over the last few years, thanks to greater stakeholder collaboration and advancement in underlying infrastructure,” concluded CCC’s Jamie Carmichael.

The post The Powerful Potential of Improving User Experience in Open Scholarly Publishing appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The perspectives of the stakeholder groups included in the report will be represented as panelists discuss the impact on the open scholarly community when metadata management isn’t prioritized and explore pragmatic solutions for future improvement. Panelists will include Randy Townsend, Editor in Chief, GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing, President, SSP; Ana Heredia, PhD, Affiliate Senior Associate, Maverick Publishing Specialists; and Wolfgang Mayer, Head of E-Resource Management, University of Vienna; in a session I will moderate with  Deni Auclair of Media Growth Strategies.

This session will build on the effort Deni and the CCC team undertook to examine metadata management across the research lifecycle, particularly how it impacts the transition to open access (OA). The key element of that exercise was conducting interviews with dozens of community members to map the complexities, breakages, and value of metadata across all research stages. As we conducted these interviews, it became abundantly clear that whether we were speaking to a researcher, publisher, institution, funder, or service provider, metadata is the throughline that connects the various aspects of the scholarly research process, and when gaps exist, everyone feels pain. In this webinar, speakers will share some of the most significant challenges facing the industry and discuss progress toward actionable solutions.

We welcome your feedback on the report at and encourage questions to be submitted before the webinar to events@copyright.com.

You may register for the webinar here and sign up for updates on The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 report here. 

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