“Change Because We Have To” – Scholarly Publishing in 2023

Scholarly publishers and service providers are pulling and pushing at traditions, opening doors, and introducing innovations.

In the final weeks of 2023, Velocity of Content is looking back at the past twelve months of programs.

The knock against scholarly publishing is that the field often shows its age. As a communications medium, scholarly publishing has roots more than three centuries deep. A scientific article appearing in the digital age of 2023 is largely unchanged in form and format from generations of ancestors. Yet many publishers and service providers are pulling and pushing at traditions, opening doors, and introducing innovations.

The gender gap on Wikipedia narrowed some this year — thanks to volunteers from SAGE Publishing who marked International Women’s Day with an edit-a-thon, creating and editing dozens of biographies for prominent women in the social and behavioral sciences. SAGE is a distinguished publisher of books and journals in the social and behavioral science and was founded by a woman, Sara Miller McCune, who has had her own Wikipedia bio since 2012.

Charisse Kiino, vice president for product and market development with the US college division of SAGE Publishing, joined others in Washington, London, and online for the edit-a-thon. Ariel Cetrone, institutional partnerships manager for Wikimedia DC, a regional outreach affiliate for Wikipedia and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, helps organizations, institutions, and agencies engage with Wikimedia to help improve the world’s largest online encyclopedia.

In scholarly publishing, researcher and author are often taken as synonymous terms. Writing, however, comes only at the end of a lengthy process of investigation and discovery in a lab or in the field. Many scientists and scholars consider writing drudgery – a necessary evil in the pursuit of tenure and research grants. What if a machine could lighten the burden – or, if smart enough, could even do the work entirely?

Such sophisticated writing machines now exist, of course. ChatGPT from OpenAI is the most famous of a growing number of generative AI tools that create narrative responses based on textual input from large language models.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts, a company assisting academic scholars to elevate their research for publication and bring that to the world. While he recognizes the potential fraud and confusion that chatbots can introduce into publishing, Staiman asserts that publishers should encourage researchers to use all tools at their disposal to make their work as accessible and impactful as possible.

Long before ChatGPT arrived on the hype cycle, Martin Delahunty was considering what AI technology could mean for scholarly publishing, how it might change processes developed over centuries, and how publishers should react. Based on his work today with universities, science research organizations, and open science publishing, Delahunty, the founder of Inspiring STEM Consulting, has identified important issues with AI, and he has called for swift responses by human curators.

Three summers ago, the world seemed frozen and convulsed all at once. 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 homepages and front pages everywhere.

As 2023 closes, pandemic restrictions have lifted, and urban centers are mostly free of protests. But have we changed and how? 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 and a chef for The Scholarly Kitchen blog published by SSP, the Society of Scholarly Publishing. She shared with CCC’s Chris Kenneally some of her reflections on the progress made since the summer of 2020 toward ending the cycle of racism and discrimination in publishing and everywhere.

In business, coaches emphasize personal development, helping employees to make positive changes in their work habits and job skills, such as communications, leadership, and team building. Over two decades working in publishing, Amy Beisel held management roles in editorial, product strategy, and business development. She applies that experience as a coach to rising leaders in research and publishing.

“Change before you have to,” advised businessman Jack Welch, who dismantled then rebuilt General Electric. Scholarly publishing in 2023 faces social and technological forces that will see it, too, dismantled and rebuilt. What emerges is what we design by our intentions and our determination.