14:00

Opening and Welcome

14:05

Transforming business models

Moderated by: Chris Kenneally, Director Content Marketing, Copyright Clearance Center

Opening Panel Discussion: Flexibility and Freedom in Scaling Transformative Agreements

Join us for an honest and insightful discussion about the practical solutions that publishers, institutions and other stakeholders are implementing to remove friction from the processes that support this monumental transition.

Chuck Hemenway, Director of Business Development, Copyright Clearance Center
Sybille Geisenheyner, Director of Open Science Strategy & Licensing, ACS Publications
Caren Milloy, Director of licensing, JISC

14:30

Integrating and preserving conference content into the publication workflow

Lauren Kane, Chief Strategy Officer, Morressier

Tammy Hanna, Ph.D., Director, Professional Development & Education Products, Sales, Marketing, & New Product Innovation,   American Chemical Society

Meetings and publications departments of most societies have historically operated quite separately and with little opportunity for collaboration. With COVID19 and the current necessity of fully virtual meetings (and likely long-term shift to hybrid formats) comes the opportunity for digital publishing teams to work in closer alignment with their meetings counterparts. Conference content (posters, presentations, videos) that was once ephemeral is now being produced for long-term digital consumption, and thus with it, the opportunity to fully integrate these artifacts within the society’s overarching publications program and digital library. In this session,  we’ll hear how societies like the American Chemical Society with SciMeetings are taking advantage of this shift and successfully integrating and preserving conference content into their offerings, benefitting their member and attendee audiences, as well as creating new growth opportunities.

14:55

Break

15:05

Innovations in Production
Demonstrating bringing publications to life via an End-to-end XML publishing platform

Scott Edmunds, GigaScience Press, BGI Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

COVID-19 has underlined the importance of open, rapid dissemination of trusted research information. Aiming to tackle this challenge, GigaScience has been helping develop a new custom-built platform and workflow using end-to-end publishing technology. Tackling the challenges of speed, handling the supporting data and software, and bringing the results to life through embedded features, the end products of this approach will be showcased with a demo showcasing the first peer reviewed articles to have passed through the system.

15:20

Panel discussion: Getting Ahead of the Curve: Accelerated Science in the time of Coronavirus

Moderated by: John Sack, Founding Director, HighWire

John Inglis, Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press / cofounder of bioRxiv and medRxi

The pandemic has pushed us to move faster to publish and disseminate scientific findings, as demonstrated not only by the exponential growth of preprints during the past nine months but also in the pressure on publishers to rapidly release statements, blogs, and collected content (e.g. Rapid Reviews, Curbside Consults, information hubs). In this panel, we will discuss:

• Is our current system of communications, where it can take 8-9 months for articles to go from acceptance to publication, fit for purpose?
• Will the changes brought by COVID, particularly in the adoption and ongoing embrace of preprints, impact positively in accelerating the wider research and publication lifecycle - or are we sleepwalking into inadvertently enabling an age of dubious science and fake news?
• How can we shift production models to enable faster publication while maintaining academic rigor in a time where trust, truth and transparency are paramount?

Máté Pálfy, Community Manager – preLights, The Company of Biologists

15:45

Personal commitment and fearless experimentation - key strategies in the roadmap for digital transformation

Sam Herbert, Co-Founder, 67 Bricks

When the foundations of the publisher is steeped in hundreds of years of history, culture and ingrained processes, where and how do you start the process of rethinking the role of the publisher? During this talk 67 Bricks co-founder Sam Herbert will discuss the above and introduce a comprehensive roadmap for digital transformation, a tool used by 67 Bricks to help publishers on their journey. The roadmap provides a clear route from where publishers are now - traditional producers of content - to a future where they have the flexibility to deliver valuable tailored user-led products and services.

15:55

Break

16:05

Innovations in process and workflow

Power of Searchability and Discoverability: True Digital First Workflows right from Submission Stage 

Narendra Kumar, CTO, MPS Limited

The industry has undergone a shift from print focused to a digitally driven environment, providing the advantages of searchability and reusability of content. This shift brings with it a greater opportunity for content to be delivered right the first time with granular structuring, linking, and validation. Here we will explore how early XML can be made available during the workflow, enabling authors, reviewers, editorial teams, and production teams to work collaboratively using integrated XML-aware intuitive platforms thereby reducing time to publish.

16:20

The Future of Hyper-Connectivity

Darren Ryan, Founder & CEO, Deanta Global

Digital initiatives can no longer be ignored.  Publishers need to refocus their traditional and digital operations before it is too late.  Many small to medium sized publishers are failing to invest in technology and adapt and evolve into digitized organisations.  As academic publishers wrestle to adopt a new mindset and become open to digital transformation strategies, Deanta’s expert team have been looking into the impact of COVID-19 across a range of organisations to understand how it might act as a catalyst for this vital and necessary change.  We will give an introduction to the concept of the “"hyper-connected enterprise", a possible framework for organisational change, utilising digital connectivity to drive productivity and innovation across all levels of their organisation.

16:35

Collaboration and consolidation: How Organizations and Standards are Advancing the Scholarly Ecosystem

Expert speaker Bill Kasdorf, Kasdorf & Associates, will provide his regular round up of new and developing standards in the production workflow.

The trend for disparate and sometimes competing organizations to work together to address a common problem is not new. But increasingly, organizations realize that it is essential for them to find partners in order for their initiatives to be successful. Strikingly, all of the important developments featured in this year's technology update have been or are being developed collaboratively. And in almost all cases, the resulting solutions are based on combining and consolidating a variety of existing standards and technologies. This is helping to build both agility and rigor into our constantly evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem--and to solve both new and longstanding problems without making what already works obsolete.

16:50

Closing Remarks & End