Category: Academic Publishing

Academic Publishing, Audiobooks, Digital Publishing, Trends in Publishing

Audiobooks in Academic Publishing – Princeton University Press

Gold Leaf

In September we published a short blog post on audiobooks in order to offer a short overview of this topic.

We have since had the opportunity to speak to Kim Williams, Digital and Audio Publisher at Princeton University Press, who kindly gave us an interesting insight into the world of audiobooks in academic publishing.

When Princeton University Press announced its new audiobook programme in 2018 it was the first University Press to do so.  Kim Williams told us that they had been licensing rights for audiobooks for several years – first primarily to Audible, later also to others, including Recorded Books, which is the largest independent producer of audiobooks in the world.

However, interest in audiobooks had evolved into something of a trend, with the US market seeing its 7th consecutive year of double-digit growth in sales. Taking this on board together with the increased interest in audiobook licences, Princeton University Press saw an opportunity to enter the market and not only license, but also produce, audiobooks for their readers. After a lot of investigation and costing, a business case was made and in July 2018, Princeton University Press announced the launch of PUP Audio – an audiobook programme aiming initially to publish 24 titles each year. Princeton chose Sound Understanding as its production partner. It is an audio production company that specialises in non-fiction. A great deal of care needs to be taken with the choice of titles to be converted into audiobooks, as Kim Williams explains:

“When choosing the titles for PUP Audio, we first of all have to think about the potential listenership for the book – will an audiobook increase the audience for the title? I then read the book to check if I can ‘hear’ the text; we also have to make sure that charts and diagrams can either be omitted or explained in a simple way without a visual prompt. And then we have to check that the length of a book is right for audio – we don’t want the audiobook to be either too short or too long – and we have to bear the intended readership in mind. In our portfolio, economics books, biographies and big histories tend to work quite well, but we are excited about the potential for our trade science list.”

PUP decided still to maintain its business relationship with Recorded Books; and last month  announced an exclusive partnership with Recorded’s mother company, RBmedia, for the audiobook licensing of further titles (approx. 40 per year).

Kim Williams believes that there is a need for academic audiobooks as well as the various print formats. Audiobooks can support different learning styles, especially now that accessibility of learning content plays an ever more important role at universities. People for whom English is not their native language can find audiobooks a helpful complement to the print book, and of course listening to a book can be time-saving, as it can be done whilst driving a car, exercising or doing other activities that allow you to listen. She thinks that, like e-books, there is a time and place for audio and that having the choice of multiple formats – including audio – ensure a “frictionless reading experience”.

The distribution of audiobooks has not caused difficulties, as they are treated in a similar way to e-books and all big e-book wholesalers will also include audiobooks in their distribution channels. Princeton’s current wholesaler also has good distribution agreements with large audiobooks platforms like Audible, audiobooks.com, Kobo and many independent platforms.

Princeton University Press is not the only academic publisher who publishes audiobooks, but it was certainly one of the first – and the first University Press to do so. Since the publication of their first titles 13 months ago, many others have taken the leap, including Cambridge University Press and Kogan Page.  

So, who are the readers, or should we say listeners, of audiobooks?
“Students of course, but also lecturers who commute, policymakers, the interested public – anyone who wants to save time or who prefers the spoken word over the written one. That stresses the importance of a good narrator: it is crucial to get the right person, someone who is an authority on the topic; they need to show confidence in what they read and therefore must understand the subject, and at the same time have a likeable and clear voice.  Many of our authors have considerable experience in public speaking, but not always the vocal stamina to read a whole book over five or more days. Several of our authors have narrated their own audiobooks, but we have had wonderful readings from professional narrators, too,” says Kim Williams.

Only one year after launching an audiobook programme of its own, Princeton feels that there are many aspects to success as an audiobook publisher.  The production costs of audiobooks are not inconsiderable – on top of hiring studios and the associated costs of this, the narrator puts considerable time and energy into the preparation of an audiobook and deserves fair compensation; and as a publisher that takes pride in the quality of its content PUP (with Sound Understanding) appoints proof listeners for all audiobooks to ensure that the quality control is as rigorous as it is for its print publications. But even though the revenue may not yet exceed the production costs, Princeton University Press has gained many positives from this first year beyond the obvious marketing advantages, as Kim Williams explains: “It certainly has given us a new lens and has opened ways to reach new readerships. One of our missions as a University Press is to reach diverse people across the world, and the audiobooks initiative lets us frame books in new ways and helps us in achieving this goal. Part of our role is to educate people, not only through the content we publish, but also in the way this content is being accessed. Audiobooks are still an evolving model, but we want to be part of shaping this as part of our effort to educate. We have had great feedback from readers and authors alike; and, after all, they are the ones we are here for.”

Academic Publishing, Case Studies, Trends in Publishing

Grown out of dispute: how collaboration removed frustration – and DRM!

Gold Leaf

Last month, De Gruyter announced the launch of a new initiative, called University Press Library. From early 2020, De Gruyter’s re-launched e-book platform will provide access to the digital book content of 10 American University Presses – with some of whom De Gruyter has long had distribution agreements; others have newly signed with the Germany-based publisher for this project. So far, so good.

What is so special about this project is its background. It all started as a pilot project back in 2014 (very imaginatively, called “the pilot” within De Gruyter!) to get University Presses and their readers to collaborate. At the time, De Gruyter had digital distribution arrangements for America with some of the participating Presses and was therefore aware that one University Press had decided to implement a strict DRM policy for its e-book content. As a direct result of this, 65 subscribing American libraries cancelled their subscriptions and caused a lot of disruption and frustration on both sides of the distribution chain.

At this stage, University Presses were very concerned about piracy and the cannibalisation of print sales. It was for this reason that many had implemented strict DRM rules for e-books, which in turn for the subscribing libraries was difficult to manage and administer. Particularly difficult to deal with was the fact that the Presses implemented different DRM rules on different platforms and for different formats (sometimes even introducing variations on a title-by-title basis).  This caused headaches for the librarians. One knotty issue that emerged was that the duplication of content purchased became unavoidable. For their part, the University Presses had to cope with receipt of inconsistent revenue streams from e-books whilst trying to sustain the publication of scholarly monographs.  (Despite being of high quality, the latter often only generate low usage.)

De Gruyter embraced this situation by turning it into an opportunity; by collaborating with all stakeholders, it developed a solution that worked for everyone: the University Presses, the University Libraries and the consortia.

To tackle the problems, three University Presses – Princeton, Harvard and Columbia – agreed to work with De Gruyter, the consortium LYRASIS and a group of 10 selected US university libraries to start “the pilot”.

In the pilot, all front list e-book content published in 2014 or later, whether user rights had been restricted at title level or not, was made available to the 10 university libraries without DRM. It was agreed with all stakeholders that the pilot would only last as long as it would take to collect enough data to measure the implications of going DRM-free and to evaluate the success of the pilot itself. Eventually it took 5 years to gather enough data, but the outcome was overwhelmingly positive. It turned out that there was no evidence that providing unlimited access to e-books would cannibalise the print sales. User behaviour amongst the 10 participating libraries was very consistent and showed that usage and adoption rates were not dependent on DRM.

This collaborative approach has now led to the development of a product which serves the needs of University Presses as well as consortia and university libraries; all the stakeholders have agreed to a solution that works for them. Even more, it is promising to be so successful that another 7 University Presses have already signed up to become part of the initiative. Each will have its own microsite to keep its branding and profile distinct, but will enjoy the benefits of being part of a larger platform.

When the programme is rolled out globally, it will be interesting to see how many university libraries within and outside of the USA will be interested in participating.  It will allow front-list e-books access (and in some cases also back-list access) on a DRM-free platform.

This blog post is based on an interview with Steve Fallon, Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships at De Gruyter.

More information on the Pilot Project and the University Press Library can be found on the De Gruyter website.
University Press Library: https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/2001
Pilot Project: https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/2003

Academic Publishing, Learning from Libraries, Libraries

Changing sides: From Publisher to Library

Gold Leaf

In the academic publishing world, every now and again you meet librarians who have moved across to work for a publisher, or vice versa. We wondered about their motivations and experiences, so we decided to talk to some of them.
Three weeks ago, we spoke to Tash Edmonds, who left her job as a librarian to join ProQuest. This week, we spoke to someone who used to work for Cambridge University Press and moved from the UK to Sweden to become a librarian.

Jonathan McCrow

  • Please give us your name and describe your role.

Jonathan McCrow
License Coordinator – Librarian
Licenssamordnare – Bibliotekarie
Stockholm University Library

  • What makes your library a special place to work?

At Stockholm University we all work in diverse working groups in order to meet the needs of our patrons and to support the university. My working group is the Licensing Group – looking after all e-resource acquisition and Open Access. I, fortunately, get to work within a small team of very experienced librarians with a wealth of knowledge for me to slowly steal, bit by bit.
Within the license group, we aim to meet our Media Plan strategy as best we can. A strategy that we treat as our standards guideline – laid out by the library director and steering committee. With a straight-forward strategy focussing on patron and usage-driven acquisition, we have a clear pathway and game plan as to how we will meet our users’ needs with regards to academic resources. This, of course, doesn’t fend off the usual challenges acquisition teams typically face – budget restraints, inflexible sales models, etc. – but it does give us reasoning and focus.

  • Why did you choose to become / what do you enjoy about being a librarian?

Brexit. If the UK had not voted for us to leave the European Union, then I would not have applied to Information Science MSc courses in Europe – wishing to squeeze in some last-minute free studying as an EU citizen. Without one thing leading to another, I would not have studied for a librarianship master’s degree and I would not have ended up in Stockholm, Sweden.
The work I now do as a librarian has been a true eye-opener. Although there were many practices on this side of the fence that I have always known about, it has been a joy to watch them in motion. With the knowledge and experience I garnered in Academic Publishing I now get to discuss the industry of academic research/publishing without any blinkers on – this is quite refreshing.

  • What was your responsibility when you worked in publishing?

During my years working in academic publishing, I have almost exclusively worked in e-resource sales. The years spent selling e-resources in the Nordics were a particular highlight for me, as I got to meet many nice librarians and visit many gorgeous libraries.
Following my years as a sales rep, I worked as the development manager for the journals team – sat in between the sales teams and the journals editorial teams. Half of my work was assisting sales teams globally with transitions to new sales models. The other half of my work was to assist the editorial teams with the management of the academic journals from a sales and financial point of view. With so much change going on, it was imperative the two teams had a bridging employee to direct conversations and link working practices together.
My work with journals was extensive – as was the sales work for ebooks, with a strong focus on Evidence-Based Acquisition. Working with a varied set of different tasks and slightly different fields of interest gave me a nice balance to keep me interested and on my toes.

  • How does your experience of working in publishing help you in your current role?

My years of following the journal editorial and production processes allowed me the good fortune of learning all the general intricacies of journal publishing, plus many irregular matters. Trying as we are to transition to a world of Open Access publishing, we in my working group are tasked with assisting researchers as they attempt to author their articles as Open Access. My previous experiences with journals publishing and knowledge of Open Access has given me a real boost in this field, allowing me to assist our authors as best I can.

  • How does the work as a librarian compare to what you used to do in a publishing company?

Working for an academic institution feels quite different from working for a commercial publisher. Not to suggest things are more relaxed working in a library, but there sure are fewer people rushing and whizzing around – darting from one meeting to the next. We are of course kept extremely busy, working within similar cycles as academic publishers and sales teams – tied almost strictly to the terms of the academic year. Even during the ‘quiet’ months over summer outside of the academic year, we still had plenty of work to do to prepare for the new term starting in September. I remember doing similar things and waiting for the new term to start when I was working for a publishing company – not much has changed in that respect.

  • What are the particular challenges you face as a librarian?

In very similar fashion to publishers, we on the library side have to keep ourselves up to date with so many different aspects of scholarly communications. It is not just Open Access – although this does top the bill. The management of our catalogues and acquisition portfolios really does keep us busy, as we are expected to keep abreast of model changes and the different approaches publishers have. More so when adjustments to how e-resources are offered changes in one way or another – especially when we are not informed until after the fact. When it comes to data and information sharing, we all need to make improvements and streamline our information channels.

  • Is there anything else you would like our readers to know (about yourself or your library)?

Librarians are cool. Never forget it. Librarians in Sweden more so than all the others – with all further librarians worldwide coming a close second.

Academic Publishing, Bookselling

Vale atque Ave, Tim!

Gold Leaf

(written by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf)

People who are old enough to remember President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 nearly always say they can remember where they were when they heard the news; similarly, members of a different generation remember precisely what they were doing on the day in August 1997 when Princess Diana’s death was announced. 

For those of us working in the publishing and bookselling industries (and, again, of a certain age!), a similar indelible moment occurred when the demise of the Net Book Agreement [NBA] was first made public in 1996.  At the time, I was attending the Scottish Library Association’s Conference in Glasgow – so the delegates there were among the first to hear.  It was on the second day of the conference that the axe fell.  A speaker at the conference who had passionately defended the NBA on the previous day – I won’t name him, but he was the very prominent MD of one of the UK’s largest publishing houses – was one of the chief architects – or assassins, depending on your point of view – of its departure.  “The Net Book Agreement”, he had proclaimed earnestly the day before, “is safe.  It will be abandoned over my dead body.”  This was well before the era of fake news; but suffice it to say that the gentleman concerned managed to survive – and I believe is with us still.

For those too young to know what it was all about, the NBA was the legally enshrined practice of  price-setting their own publications by publishers. Booksellers and others selling these publications were not allowed to undercut the publisher’s chosen price, except in very particular circumstances: 10% discount could be offered to libraries and schools, and, with the publisher’s permission, old stock could be ‘remaindered’.  New stock had to be sold at the correct price. At the time of its demise, the NBA had been in force for the best part of a century.  It was designed to prevent booksellers from discounting each other out of existence – or other retailers from discounting booksellers out of existence.  Technically it was a restrictive practice, and in 1996, when a Tory government had been in power for well over a decade, ‘restrictive’ and ‘practice’, when seen adjacent to each other, were two very dirty words.

Everyone in the two industries knew the NBA was controversial, of course: it had endured a few nasty moments down the years and, to be fair, it didn’t enjoy unanimous support.  Everyone also knew, and hugely respected, the man who had been championing it, thus saving many booksellers from insolvency: Mr Tim Godfray, the already veteran CEO of the UK Booksellers Association.  Tim was and is a tireless supporter of all above-board initiatives to support proper bookselling; I still have in my possession two of his iconic and well-reasoned pamphlets on maintaining the NBA (Books Are Different) and not introducing VAT to print (Say No to VAT on Books).  He has prevailed on the latter issue, having campaigned against VAT on recurring occasions: VAT is still not applied to print books.

Why am I bringing all this up now?  Because today, after 47 years at the Booksellers Association, most of them in the top job of CEO, Tim is retiring.  Yesterday evening a farewell reception was held for him at the atmospheric, also iconic, London Library.  The event was attended by 250 guests of Tim’s own choosing, from across both industries.  Remarkably, he presented each with a handwritten letter telling him or her why they were special to him.

Tim has campaigned on many other issues to make life happier and more prosperous for booksellers and publishers.  Latterly and most extensively, and in league with his counterparts across Europe, he has lobbied the EU and individual European governments to close the loophole that allows large online retailers to escape or greatly reduce payment of corporation tax.  More joyfully, in 2013 he spearheaded the enduring and highly successful Books Are My Bag initiative, which is now in its seventh year.  Academic Book Week eventually became one of the offshoots of this campaign.

In many ways, Tim will be irreplaceable: he has combined tireless hard work with a fine brain, ready wit, genuine sympathy and unfailing patience when listening to others.  For those of us who have known him a long time, it has been a comfort just to know he is there.  He will leave a large hole in the fabric of our universe.  Yesterday evening, however, he hinted that he may come back – at least in a part-time capacity – in another guise.  I’m sure we all hope so.  Vale atque Ave, Tim!

Academic Publishing, Digital Publishing, Libraries

How to make your publications more discoverable: tips from Lone Ramy Katberg, Special Adviser to Aalborg University Library and the Royal Danish Library

Gold Leaf

In today’s academic library world, there are scores if not hundreds of companies offering every possible kind of solution for cataloguing, displaying and making the library’s holdings discoverable.  However, some of these are very expensive; and, as Lone Ramy Katberg, Special Adviser to Aalborg University Library and the Royal Danish Library points out, few will work unless publishers prepare carefully first.  Here are some tips from Lone on how to make publications more discoverable.  They are even more pertinent this week, which is Open Access Week.

Be distinctive 

Lone says it is a good idea to choose titles that stand out. Adopting the identical title other publishers have also used – e.g., Economics – will only work if the author is very famous in his or her discipline.  Subtitles are sometimes crucial: they are an easy way of directing content expectation. If the title covers some new or unusual ground, creating the right metadata becomes all-important.

Bibliographical descriptors must be accurate, but at the same time not “drown in detail”; e.g., Life in Cyberspace – is it about social media, cybercrime, psychology?

Think in buzzwords

Crafting the correct metadata to underpin a snazzy or challenging title is key. The short description or blurb, especially its first two lines, is also very important. There can’t be too many keywords listed, as long as they are a true reflection of the content.

My Google does not look like your Google

Google uses a lot of knowledge about the user individual when displaying search results.  This is information it derives from gmail, bookmarks and interactions.  Consequently, the list of articles a user gets from searches differs according to that user’s behaviour. The language used by the searcher also makes a huge difference to the search results. 

Google is easy, but is it enough?

Libraries have gone full circle in their approach to Google.  At first, librarians discouraged students and academics from using it; after some years, they realised that, in order to achieve maximum discoverability, their holdings had to appear on Google.  But is Google enough?  No, it is not… Google fathomed this quite early on and introduced Google Scholar to the market.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar was launched in 2004. If you feed “Dolly” into the Google search engine, you come up with information about a sheep and not a country-and-western singer: from the outset, academia was and still is its focus. But what is included in it and what is not is still a big issue.  It is by no means comprehensive.

Library systems and workflows

In an academic library setting there are two ways of being found.

  1. Via a link resolver which discovers via basic metadata – title, author and ISBN.
  2. By direct indexing, where you let your content be indexed by the provider.

If a publisher does not use link resolvers, although the publications may be indexed in Google Scholar, Web of Science, and so on, libraries can’t connect the reference to the content if no direct URL is provided. Addressing this issue is especially important for publishers wishing to make Open Access content discoverable, because otherwise libraries can’t switch on access and display the content as available.

Direct linking/indexing

There are several off-the-shelf discovery systems now available.  Each has its drawbacks: in some, the hierarchy of display order seems illogical, some are difficult for consortia to use, some seem to favour certain publishers over others.  In addition, these are add-ons and not necessarily an integrated part of the library system environment.  Nevertheless, unless publishers are brave enough and have sufficient resources to take on a great deal of discovery work themselves, working with third party discovery system providers may at present be the only practical way forward to maximise discovery.

Academic Publishing, Learning from Libraries, Libraries

Changing sides: From Library to Publisher

Gold Leaf

In the academic publishing world, every now and again you meet librarians who have moved across to work for a publisher, or vice versa. We wondered about their motivations and experiences, so we decided to talk to some of them.

Tash Edmonds

  • Please give us your name and describe your role.

Tash Edmonds, Senior Book Sales Specialist at ProQuest

My role involves working very closely with library teams to aid them with their collection and acquisitions strategies and key purchasing decisions for books, both print and electronic. This can range from helping support Print to E initiatives, reviewing procurement policies and implementing new acquisition models. I am expected to have a very high level of sector expertise and product knowledge and the skills to be able to ascertain what is the right solution for a specific library to help them achieve their departmental and institution-wide goals.

  • What makes your company a special place to work?

ProQuest take a very customer focused approach and that appealed greatly to me and is one of the reasons I have stayed for the past four years and am proud to work here. We do listen to the market and endeavour to be as responsive to change and innovative with our products, as much as our libraries require us to be.

On a personal level, I have always felt that every colleague, regardless of role or position within the company does have a voice and there are channels through which you can be heard to make suggestions and share ideas. That’s so important when working for a large organisation and is something that I believe is a core value at ProQuest and makes it a special place to work.

  • Why did you choose / what do you enjoy about working for a publishing company?

I was intrigued about the inner mechanics of an aggregator and how the relationship with libraries worked from their perspective. As a librarian in HE I saw so many changes in the sector in terms of content, platforms, licensing etc, some which I found positive, confusing and at times, downright irritating, and so I wanted to gain some insight into the rationale behind certain decisions.  My interest was with ebooks and the advantages that they can offer researchers and library users in terms of access and collaboration, and I liked the direction ProQuest was heading with their ebook platform.  I’m an inquisitive person so it did feel like being in The Wizard of Oz and seeing what was behind the curtain!

My biggest enjoyment is getting to work with my libraries and trying in some small way to help them with their day to day roles, as well as supporting them with larger initiatives and collection polices that they are working towards within their institutions. Librarians have a high level of expertise and tend to be very generous with sharing knowledge so I’m lucky to be able to learn a lot from them as well.

  • What was your responsibility when you worked in a library?

I was a member of the Acquisitions Team, starting off as a library assistant before becoming one of the team leaders. I worked on pretty much all aspects of Collections from managing access and resourcing material types for print and electronic journals and books, administering DDA programs and having responsibility for the accessible formats service which supported students with a variety of learning differences. I also was an active member of the library’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion group working on ways to make the collection and library space as inclusive as possible for all users. My commitment to equality led me to take part in the Race Equality Charter Award where I worked as a lead on the area of professional staff recruitment and progression.

  • How does your experience of working as a librarian help you in your current role?

I think it has been a huge help to me during the past four years and made the transition easier, as it was a sector, I was familiar with and there were many friendly faces that I had either worked with or knew from conferences and courses attended over the years.

On a day to day level I think being able to share my own library experiences such as restructures, moving collections from print to electronic, implementing shelf ready, managing a DDA or coping with a flood have hopefully been a benefit to the libraries I work with. My background really helps with my conversations and building close relationships as I can emphasise and share their pain when things don’t go to plan! Thankfully, I’m also able to draw on many successful projects I was able to work on during my time in libraries, share advice and offer support when required.

  • How does the work for a publishing company compare to what you used to do as a librarian?

Overall it is very different as each day tends to be very different to the next which is one of the best aspects of my role.  I travel quite a lot so there are certain periods of time where I am never in the office and I’m sure I can regularly be seen with my travel bag trying to get a train out of Paddington or Euston. The variety and autonomy are probably the two main differences from the work I did in libraries which tended to have more of a rigid structure. I do miss my old library team but I’m thankfully still in touch with a lot of them.

  • What are the particular challenges you face in your role?

I would say that I am by nature someone who likes to fix things and find answers to a problem or a conundrum (which probably explains why I became a librarian), so if I can’t find a speedy solution, I can become frustrated. I have however learned to accept that not all fixes are quick, and patience is required, but I believe that’s a useful life lesson to use outside of work as well as in it.

  • Is there anything else you would like our readers to know (about yourself or your company)?

ProQuest is a great company to work for and if you are a librarian looking to gain some insight into “the other side” so to speak, it offers so many career opportunities. There are a large group of librarians working throughout the company in a variety of roles so the probability of running into one is highly likely!

(Edit 7 November 2019: You may also be interested in our interview with Jonathan McCrow, whom we asked the same questions. He made the move the other way: he left his job with an Academic Publisher to become a Librarian)

Academic Publishing, Audiobooks, Digital Publishing, Trends in Publishing

Audiobooks – more than just a trend?

Gold Leaf

Audiobooks have been the fastest growing area in consumer publishing, but also in academic publishing they are becoming more and more popular.

Undoubtedly the market leader is Amazon’s “Audible” but other audio services like Spotify, Audiobooks.com and various eBook vendors also offer audiobook programmes and some publishers distribute audiobooks on their own ebook platforms or websites.

Of course, audiobooks are not new – their origins date back to the 1930s when audiobooks were being sold on vinyl records, primarily for educational purposes. However, since they have become digital, their market reach has grown exponentially and with modern devices (for example smart watches or speakers), they can be played in all sorts of environments and have also become more interesting for the academic market. Their potential to bring in new types of content is interesting to the academic market and non-fiction “trade” publishing was  the first to take advantage of this, for example in Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series with a focus on exploring popular music (this project is a co-operation between Bloomsbury Publishing and Spotify).

In academic publishing, Princeton and Cambridge University Presses were the first publishers to announce their audiobook programmes: whilst PUP launched theirs in 2018 , which now comprises 12 titles, Cambridge launched their pilot with 4 titles at the 2019 London Book Fair (and a fifth title will be available in October). They have benefited from some authors who have been happy to read their work, for instance the topical “There Is No Planet B” by Mike Berners-Lee. Both university presses collaborate with the UK-based production company Sound Understanding. In November 2018, Wiley announced a collaboration with RBmedia to produce over 650 audiobooks over the next three years, though the focus will be on business and finance as well as the popular Dummies brand, more than on traditional academic publishing.

No doubt, with audiobooks being one of the buzzwords of the industry, there will be more to follow, and readers ought to keep an eye on our blog, where we will talk more about this trend as it evolves with some industry stakeholders.

Academic Publishing, Trends in Publishing

Finding the truth: Fake News and Academic Publishing

Gold Leaf

“Fake News” was the “word of the year” in 2017 (according to Collins Dictionaries).  It was a buzz-phrase that sprang up the information sector in 2016, when the US presidential election acted as a catalyst.  Its importance is increasing in a world where the extent of democracy and true freedom of speech varies hugely across the globe. The Collins definition says that it is “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting”. While this phenomenon has existed since the earliest broadsheets were published, it has had a much bigger impact on the psychology of today’s society than those of the past. Now Social Media is a major source of information for many, Fake News can be disseminated and spread much more quickly and widely; moreover, today’s Social Media consumer tends to be less and less worried about the sources and accuracy of the “information” s/he reads. Paradoxically, those who read news no longer trust the media – a recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report said that 49% of readers don’t trust the news sources they use, even though they have chosen these sources themselves! – but this seems to make no difference to their popularity.

You may feel that popular journalism has always been a shade scurrilous, but ask how may affect Academic Publishing. In 2016, The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published an infographic on How to spot fake news; a closer look reveals that all eight fact-checking points are very relevant to Academic Publishing.

Fake News presents some fundamental challenges to Academic Publishing, an industry that relies on accuracy and integrity of information as the central justification for its existence. Academic Publishing needs to be robust, transparent and meticulously well-researched, because it drives innovation, public policy, and the entire academic discourse. However, Fake News has a big impact on the sector and the opinions held within academia, since misinterpretations of research results can quickly be spread as “facts”. One very prominent example of this was the measles outbreak in Brooklyn, New York in April this year which caused a local public health emergency, because it had been preceded by widespread misinformation about a (non-existing) link of childhood vaccination to autism, with the result that fewer children had been vaccinated. This “information” was based on a study which was already been proved a fake, withdrawn and the author sanctioned, but was still being spread widely on Social Media.

Again, this is  not new – tabloid newspapers have long based their business models on selling biased research data or exaggerated interpretations to the public – but the power of rapid dissemination and concomitant general lack of interest in sources exhibited by the public at large has allowed Fake News to spread more rapidly, even within academic circles. Publishing is the central route to academic preferment.  Unfortunately, therefore, Academic Publishing sometimes lends itself to fraud practised for unscrupulous personal gain.

The world of Academic Publishing relies heavily on Peer Review as its main mechanism of preventing Fake News; there have been frequent examples of publishers having to retract journal articles because of fraudulent peer reviews, as an examination of the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks scientific integrity, can demonstrate.

In response to such malpractice, fact-checking sites like snopes.com and factcheck.org have been established, to help readers to verify the integrity of academic content. Hypothes.is is a fact-checking site dedicated to Academic Publishing which uses annotations in a very effective way and also allows plugs into blogs and news sites.

The switch to Open Science provides another opportunity to prevent Fake News from contaminating Academic Publishing, because the whole OS publication process is open and transparent, meaning that fraud can be detected at an earlier stage.

There is a demonstrable need not only to educate students, but also the wider public, in information literacy and critical thinking. Websites like NimblyWise are attempting this, but take-up is not wide-spread and their reach to the wider public is limited.

Academic Publishing is therefore not immune from Fake News.  Society’s trust in published work without questioning its authenticity holds far-reaching implications. Clearly there is an urgent need for an improved system that can de-incentivise (and possibly prevent) the production of Fake News, provide education in information literacy; and offer a trusted forum to enable Scientists and Academic Publishers to stay in an active dialogue with the public.