Against The Grain - The Podcast

This episode features Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub, and Tom Gilson, Associate Editor for Against the Grain, as they interview  Steve Fallon, Vice President, Americas and Strategic Partnerships at De Gruyter. The conversation follows topics surrounding the University Press Library Collaborative, a meeting with the purpose of providing stakeholders a platform to discuss common issues and challenges, as well as the De Gruyter University Press Library product.

Today's episode features a conversation with Juliane Schneider, Senior Bioinformatics Analyst and Data Liaison at Sage Bionetworks. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Juliane obtained a dual degree in Library Science and Information Systems from Drexel University. This training, and her knowledge of databases, has helped her successfully navigate her career path over the years.  She currently works at Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that works mostly with NIH and with data collection, curation and making it available to users.  Juliane says, "she has always been interested in making things discoverable in some way." Juliane and Matthew discuss research data management and how time affects the research data cycle, how challenging it is to get in at the very beginning of the cycle, and the problems with grant funding of research data management. She believes research data management should be a line item

In today's episode we feature audio from a Lively Discussion from the 2020 Charleston Library Conference, titled "Serials Crisis: Can data help treat this chronic condition?" Presented by Lori Carlin, Chief Commercial Officer, Delta Think, Inc.; Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University; Michele Potter, Collection Strategist for Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM), University of California, Riverside Library; and Amy Pawlowski, Executive Director, OhioLINK. When it comes to library budgets, there is an ever-widening gap between university budgets and library budgets, with library budgets continuing to shrink even when university budgets may increase. This gap is neither new nor novel; but now in this era of global pandemic, moves to online learning, and unprecedented changes in higher education budgets, the problem is worse than ever and likely poised to accelerate at a rapid pace.  What may be different, however, is that today's deep well of data can help s

Audio from a Concurrent Session of the 2020 Charleston Library Conference, presented by Sharla Lair, Strategist, Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis; Sara Rouhi, Director, Strategic Partnerships, PLOS; and Maurice York, Director of Library Initiatives, Big Ten Academic Alliance. Library consortia and publishers of OA-native content are collaboratively exploring new business models that attempt to balance the imperatives of multiple stakeholders with the need for more sustainable OA funding models that support shared principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this session, panelists will talk about the models they are exploring, what they are learning through the process, and where they want to go from here. The panelists invite participants to engage in meaningful discussion about: 1) the challenges of designing equitable cost-sharing models that include funders, publishers, reading institutions, publishing institutions, and other stakeholders; and 2) the opportunities to reimagin

Today's episode features a conversation with Max Mosterd, Head of Operations and Analytics, Knowledge Unlatched. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Max received a Master of Science at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He founded a startup, published on bibliometrics and wrote his MA thesis on the pricing of scholarly content, all before beginning his career at Knowledge Unlatched. He started out working in infrastructure, working with publishers and libraries, in sales and relationship building.  For the past two years, his focus has been on a new product called Oable. Max says Oable is a management solution that helps institutions to manage their open access transactions, whether Gold OA or transformative agreements.  Max and Matthew discuss the OA environment, the planning that led to Oable, and working with stakeholders.  Max says Oable releases continuous updates as they work with stakeholders, hopi

Today's episode features a conversation with Jill Heinze, Saddle-Stitch Marketing. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Jill began her career in the library at Virginia Commonwealth University as an outreach person to target and engage undergraduate audiences.  Afterwards she studied marketing and has worked in several marketing organizations, mainly in a research capacity. She now works with product companies doing user research as well as doing marketing for those in the information industry in her side business, Saddle-Stitch Marketing.  Also, Jill wrote for the Charleston Briefings about her experiences with marketing in libraries.  Jill and Matthew will discuss why marketing is broken. She says there are so many different interpretations of the word "marketing, " and many feel that marketing and communications go hand in hand.  She says it is important to have a strong product orientation toward m

Today's episode features a conversation with Peter McCracken, Electronic Resources Librarian, Cornell University. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Peter received a library degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then a master's in maritime history from East Carolina University. While he was working on that master's degree, he was hired for his first professional position as a reference librarian in East Carolina's Joiner Library.  In 1999, he graduated and was offered a position at the University of Washington in the undergraduate library as a reference librarian.  One year later in 2000 Peter, his brothers, and a high school friend started Serial Solutions, which was acquired by ProQuest in 2004, where Peter continued to work until 2009 when he left Serial Solutions and ProQuest to focus on his passion, maritime history. He created a second company called ShipIndex.org, which help

Today's episode features a conversation with Laura Dawson, Head of Data Quality for EDO, Inc.. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Laura has been working with metadata since 1995, mostly focused on metadata about books and publishing, then video. She ran a consulting agency for seven years working with different presses and publishers.  She also worked for HBO for a few years, and she currently works in advertising analytics at EDO, Inc. to create and maintain a taxonomy of brands and products and accompanying attributes like categories. Laura and Matthew will discuss the topic of metadata for non-specialists. Understanding metadata and understanding that the value of metadata is important for all of us in this scholarly communication sphere. They'll discuss what is metadata?  Who is your audience? How are they getting it and what does it cost them? Are all important things to ask about when thinking

Today's episode features audio from a session at the 2020 Charleston Conference titled "Licensing: 'Beastly Breakfast' Roundtable Discussion" led by Adam Chesler, Director, Global Sales, AIP Publishing. This discussion will include topics such as: Who handles licensing at your institution? Procurement? General counsel?  A designated person in the library?  What is the library's role? How do you advocate for your needs if you aren't in control of the licensing process?  Video of the presentation available at https: https://youtu.be/2u3QLlZzW20 Conference Registration Page: https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/registration-info/

Today's episode features Audio from a Lively Discussion at the 2020 Charleston Library Conference, "Research Librarians and Society Publishers Working Together to Advance OA and Research." Speakers are Judith Russell, Dean of University Libraries, University of Florida; Rod Cookson, Managing Director, IWA Publishing; Alicia Wise, Director, Information Power; and Gaynor Redvers-Mutton, Head of Business Development and Sales, Microbiology Society and facilitated by Adam Chesler, Director, Global Sales, AIP Publishing. Large publishers are like fish swimming in the sunlight zone of the ocean: they are very visible to librarians and other stakeholders in scholarly communication. Smaller independent publishers of all kinds also exist and these are like fish swimming in the twilight zone of the ocean: also beautiful, strong, and varied but less visible and less food filters down to them. In these deeper waters there are many potential OA shoalmates swimming about. Publishers with very similar missions and serving t

In today's episode, Tom Gilson, Associate Editor for Against the Grain, talks with Erika Valenti, North American Regional Director, Executive Vice President, Emerald Publishing as part of the "Views from the Penthouse Suite" series for the 2020 Charleston Library Conference. Erika Valenti is Executive Vice President, North America for Emerald Publishing where she directs all aspects of the company's development in the region, including sales, product introduction, brand presence, and corporate strategy. Prior to Emerald, Erika was Global Sales Director for Publishers Communication Group working with clients including BioOne, American Society for Microbiology, the Royal Society, Geological Society of London, and Canadian Science Publishing; and she previously spent ten years in international sales and marketing roles at the MIT Press. She has considerable experience with sales management for books, journals and databases, emerging market entry strategies, library negotiations, and consortia relationships in th

Today's episode features a conversation with David Durant. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  David Durant is Associate Professor and Federal Documents and Social Sciences Librarian at East Carolina University. He has a Master of Science degree in library and information services from the School of Information, University of Michigan, and an MA in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He graduated from Library School in 1999 and has been at East Carolina since then.  David began his career as a reference librarian and then moved on to collection development as well as being the Federal Depository Program Coordinator. David wrote the very first Charleston Briefing titled "Reading in the Digital Age '' six years ago summarizing the debate over the perceived benefits and perils of reading in print versus digital formats. He does believe that there are differences in the types of readin

Today's episode features a conversation with Anthony Watkinson. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Anthony Watkinson is cofounder of CIBER Research and a former publishing executive. Anthony began his education as an Ecclesiastical historian studying the Church of England in the 19th century. His first job was as a librarian at Oxford University in the late 1960s.  His next job spanned 11 years as a manuscript procurement editor for the Academic Press working with scientists.  He then worked as a mathematical publisher for Oxford University Press where he eventually took over as head of Journals. He was approached by Thompson Corporation to be the publishing director at Chapman Hall, a small English publisher, where he worked for about a decade.  Anthony has been self-employed since the late 90's as an academic information scientist.  In 2002 he helped found CIBER Research. He also has served as a Ch

Today's episode features a conversation with Sarah Lippincott. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference. Sarah Lippincott is an independent consultant who was formerly the Program Director for the Library Publishing Coalition, an organization created by the Educopia Institute in 2013 to bring together a community of Library Publishers to share ideas and create a set of common practices. Sarah is currently working with the Educopia Institute on a project called Next Generation Library Publishing.  This program focuses on establishing initiatives to promote best practices around technology, publishing principles, ROI, and the necessary infrastructure for library publishers and their partners. Sarah helps to empower libraries of any size who want to begin a Publishing Program, and she helps develop plans to expand the capacity for library publishing with smaller universities, universities that don't have a hist

Today's episode features a conversation with Ewoud Compeer of Oxford University. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference. Ewoud Compeer is a Dutch biomedical scientist and immunologist. He's been doing research in the US, The Netherlands, Australia and now in the UK at the University of Oxford. When studying the immune system, he looks at how the immune cells communicate with one another, and how they communicate so clearly and effectively. Ewoud is interested in how the research environment in medical science can be improved to be both more inclusive and more open and transparent. He believes that the environment in which research data and study design is not available along with published research is no longer tenable and that this lack of transparency is at the core of the reproducibility crisis ("The ability to reproduce data, by yourself or by others, if you have the same sample set and the same anal

Today's episode features a conversation with Francois van Schalkwyk, founder, African Minds. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Francois van Schalkwyk is a researcher who worked in the academic space with scholarly presses. He also assisted some non-government led businesses with publishing, dissemination, and distribution of their materials to people who were interested in reading them.  The intersection of these two interests led him to found African minds in 2012.  Based in Cape Town on the Southern tip of Africa, African Minds is a not-for-profit trust with a public benefits mission and, from a publishing perspective, underpinned by an open access approach.  Francois says all their publications are available open access on their website.  He says their focus is on topics relevant to the continent and its development and Knowledge produced by African academics.  He also discusses the issues they f

This week, ATG the Podcast interviews Mitchell Davis, CEO and Founder of BiblioLabs, and Robert Miller, CEO of Lyrasis, about the recent purchase of BiblioLabs by Lyrasis. The interview is conducted by Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub, and Tom Gilson, Associated Editor of Against the Grain. Topics range from the acquisition, to potential changes in corporate culture, the future of existing projects, how they both see the future of ebooks, and more. Special Announcement The Charleston Conference is planning a very special "In Between" half-day virtual mini-conference event to explore important late-breaking developments that can't wait til November for discussion! Our first panel will cover the Clarivate acquisition of ProQuest, and will be moderated by Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R. The second panel is called "Exiting the Tunnel" and will feature reflections from savvy executives on what the bright lights of a post-Covid world offers to them. We hope you'll join us on July 28 at 10:30 AM E

Special Announcement The Charleston Conference is planning a very special "In Between'' half-day virtual mini-conference event to explore important late-breaking developments that can't wait until November for discussion. It will include a Panel on Clarivate's acquisition of ProQuest and a panel where savvy executives reflect upon what the bright light of post covid offers to them. We hope you'll join us on July 28 at 10:30 AM EST.  Registration is open now on our website.  Registration Link for "Charleston In Between:"  https://charlestonconference.regfox.com/charleston-in-between In today's episode we have an Interview of Anna Abalkina, research fellow, Freie Universität Berlin. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Anna has recently written an article for the Scholarly Kitchen entitled "Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing-Evidence From Russia."  She has a background in international econom

In today's episode we will feature audio from an interview of Trevor Naylor, Sales and Marketing Director, The American University in Cairo Press. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.  Trevor began working in a bookshop when he was 18 years old, and has lived in Cairo for 12 years. He says the AUC Press recently celebrated its 100 year anniversary, but it wasn't until the 1960's and 70's that they saw a publishing need at the University and then that side of the business took off.  The press now has a very interesting and varied role and is a small and targeted business which allows Trevor the opportunity to be involved and to touch almost every part of the publishing process. He calls himself a "non-academic expert on Egypt" due to osmosis from the publishing industry there. Trevor also talks with us about his work with nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, known as the "Dickens of Egypt," and how the AUC

In today's episode we will feature an interview with John Palfrey, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This interview is part of the popular "Views from the Penthouse Suite" series and was conducted by Tom Gilson, Associate Editor, Against the Grain, and Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor, Center for Research Libraries.  In this episode, John talks about his keynote presentation at the 2020 Charleston Conference titled "Do Librarians Matter and What Might Matter to Librarians?"   He discusses the need for a digital public infrastructure, and how librarians can play a major role in the development of such an infrastructure.  He says radical collaboration is needed among collection specialists,  and librarians should pool efforts to fund the Digital Public Library of America and help set standards.  He says collective, well coordinated action will give more power to librarians.  John also discusses how librarians can use their well earned position of trust to combat misinformation. John tal