COPE Webinar 2022 Report: 10th May 2022

On 10th of May 2022, The Committee on Publication Ethics on COPE conducted a webinar on Book Wars: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on Anglo-American trade publishing. The first speaker John B Thompson is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. John discussed the topic: Digital Revolution in publishing.

The US Recorded Revenues from 2000–2010 had witnessed a sharp decline which haunted the publishing industry. But since Amazon launched Kindle in 2007, the eBook industry changed drastically. US eBook revenue rapidly grew from 2008–2013. But the growth suddenly declined from 2014.

eBooks are broken down into categories. Some type of books sell well as eBooks.

1. Romance: These books are half of major trade.

2. Nonfiction: These are in the middle with average sales

3. Travel, cookbooks: These did not sell at all

Rise of Audiobooks

The rise of audiobooks of digital publishing initially started in the 1950’s. The rise of ebook sales in 2011from $1 billion — $2.2 billion in 2016 is profound. There was a huge shift from CD’s to digital downloads which is 90% of all audiobook sales. Since Amazon launched Audible it was a major development.

Categories of Audio and Print media

1. Print media- 5% which is a massive shift to ebook sales

2. Ebook sales: 18%

3. Physical Audio- 24%

The book business industry as well as the music industry is not a one way shift. Thus digital Revolution is equal to digital impact. The Digital Publishing was not just ebooks. Ebooks were just one aspect of it.

With the rise of self- publishing, there are new modes of publishing avenues opened.

Publishers saw themselves as businesses when they sell it to retailers. But this changed in the digital age. Publishers do not rely on book shops anymore.

The New Digital Age

Now it began to seem that the focus on readers became more reader centric. It built direct relationship with the readers. It also tried to see how to make businesses more reader centric.

The Critical Relationship between Universities and Cope

Then the next speaker Miss Deborah Poff spoke about The Critical relationship between universities and COPE. Miss Deborah is a retired Professor of Philosophy and Senior Academic Administrator. She is the founding editor in chief of the Journal of Academic Ethics, and is the editor of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

Cope is now currently implementing a new membership category for universities to understand why universities benefit from this collaborative relationship.

It has more to do with the strengths, limitations as well as legitimate autonomy of scholarly publications by publishers of academic journals, books as well as video product of scholarly nature. It also works with the strengths, weaknesses and legitimate autonomy of universities to facilitate the production of new knowledge through the process of management of scholarly grants.

Tenure and Promotion

Standards for the tenure and promotion are evaluated for three areas of consideration:

1. Teaching: This is disaggregated respectively to be 40/40/20 percent of faculty workload.

2. Research: Issues which occur in teaching evaluations are believed to have problems with grade inflation as well as biased evaluation tools by faculty. Example: Women scoring lower than men

3. Committee work/service: The quality of commitment is subjective and difficult to standardize.

During the 70’s and 80’s, the neoliberal governments as well as universities which are under financial distress undividedness, and are trying to eliminate tenure and promotion of permanent faculty employment.

Even though there was a little success at some less established or lesser known universities, a large extent of it failed.

Governments have responded to this failure with intervention which is in terms of key performance indicator of evaluation. This is done for faculty performer, which includes a detailed study for integration of research.

And at the same time, the area of publishing changed a lot and continues to through the use of:

· Exceptional growth of journals by academic publishers as well as scholarly ones

· Continuous North-South divide in scholarly publication

· Growth of Grey Journals as well as low quality journals

· The growth of Predatory Publishers

· Radical shifts in publishing due to digitization and more recently the shift to commercial academic publishers

Reasons to evaluate research

· To ensure that faculty is receiving tenure and promotion are valid scholars who contribute to knowledge or the scholarly record.

· To investigate objectively as possible the research ethics and to identify the investigations which has led to violations of research integrity.

· To meet the criteria for the public to recognize excellence (for example: through the meeting criteria of the rankings used by Education World Rankings such as volume, income etc.)

Key Products to evaluation

1. Grants: which are an input products (indicating quality of publications, research proposals, track records of presentations of graduate students education and training)

2. Permanent Records: for evaluation through publications in journals or books with objective criteria for acceptance in such publication

Relationship of Universities and Editors//Publishers to the Scholarly Record

· As we all know and have discussed many times in COPE, particularly in recent years:

· Universities are primarily where much public and publicly funded research takes place.

· Publishers whether small society owned, university presses or commercial academic publishers is primarily where the product of scholarly research is produced and disseminated.

· Universities are responsible for the employees who conduct and produce this research and publishers are responsible for the integrity of the scholarly product that is published.

Further

· While universities are competent and informed to educate researchers’ ethics, this does not include publication ethics.

· While publishers are competent to correct or restrict articles where there is sufficient independent evidence to do so.

· If they don’t have the authority to investigate further allegations within the research/authorship context nor do they understand the policies and procedures of universities with respect to integrity.

Our Conclusion

Our conclusion is that is more than timely, appropriate and helpful to bring together our current membership of universities · with the membership taking forward