If You Need to Tighten Your Belt, Try Applying Standards First

Many often think of association activities or standards development as work for the common good. While this can sometimes be true, and the motivations of the people who engage in these efforts are often altruistic, I resist this framing of NISO’s work. The value of standards is embedded in their benefit for business processes. The implementation of standards should return a value of many multiples of the investments in their creation or maintenance. 

A timely example of this is NISO’s development of an Open Access Business Processes (OABP) Recommended Practice, the draft of which was just released for public comment. As an ever-increasing percentage of content (currently nearing 50% of all published scholarly literature) is published via an open access (OA) business model, there is an increasing need to standardize elements of the processes supporting that content. Publishers have sought to meet funder or institutional mandates, expanding their OA offerings and implementing a range of subscribe-to-open models or read-and-publish deals. This increasing complexity has led to a market need for consistent methodologies and data exchanges to determine things like the appropriate fee to publish the article and how to aggregate transaction information to report to institutions or funders. The entire process needs clear definitions of activities as well as systems call-and-response messages to effectively process transactions, things that have long been established for traditional subscription models but must now be recreated for digital open access transactions. In the meantime, OA business models are supported by a range of bespoke or manual processes. Across the hundreds of thousands of OA papers produced each year by authors from thousands of institutions, to be published by hundreds of publishers, the scale of this problem is significant, and the overall costs of inefficiencies runs into many millions of dollars. Simplifying and standardizing OA business processes will yield significant benefits to the authors seeking to publish OA content, the publishers serving those authors, and the institutions tracking the impact of their publication investments. The new recommendations should help to build consistent behavior and thereby reduce costs and improve service to authors and institutions. 

The OABP Recommended Practice is just an example of the real-world savings NISO standards can bring. Another example is a project idea emerging from the NISO workshops on AI applications in publishing systems hosted earlier this year. Many publishers are seeking to license their content to AI tool developers and working out deals to do so. Yet each of those licensing deals takes significant legal time to negotiate, beyond the time necessary to come to agreement on the commercial terms. Much like the library subscription licensing marketplace of the late 1990s, the current AI licensing marketplace is horribly inefficient, with each deal individually bespoke for practically every term in the license. Later this month, NISO will convene a community effort to develop some model language for AI licensing to help simplify the negotiation process and reduce legal costs. If a content provider can simplify the process by a dozen hours of legal time for each deal, this could be another significant area of savings for publishers.

Business process efficiency leading to cost savings is an underlying element of nearly every NISO standards project. Perhaps the savings comes in better definitions of usage, analytical reporting, or transfer of usage statistics so that processing that data can be undertaken more regularly or with fewer staff. A consistent file format might improve data exchange in the community: a single-file transfer format enables repository  data collection processes that facilitate preservation or discovery, while also reducing the programing costs of file transformations.

The standards process begins with fostering communication, and in just a couple of weeks, we will host our fourth NISO Plus Global/Online event on September 16–17. The virtual conference is not just an opportunity to learn about the issues affecting our community, but also a forum in which to meet with colleagues and peers to collectively address those issues. Ideally, through these discussions we will identify problems and potential solutions that could help save your organization untold time or money. The program is amazing, and I encourage you all to register now.  

We’re constantly working at NISO to deliver on this value proposition for our community. We aim to reduce your costs and make your institution more efficient and effective. As we near the budgeting time for the coming year, this value should be paramount in people’s minds. Today, many institutions are trying to find ways to do the same (or more) with less.  If one is in that position, the best way to do that is through improved processes, which ultimately turn on the notion of standardization. The time when we all must tighten our collective belts is also the most critical time to invest more in standards. The right standards, at the right time, for the right purpose can mean the difference between success or failure.