Last week saw the great and the good of scholarly communications converge in Baltimore, Maryland for the annual Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) event. Many of us were jealous of those attending – particularly those with sweet views of the nearby baseball stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, from their hotel – but publishers were involved in another sort of game that was being discussed at the event, and they weren’t winning.
Hero to Zero?
A new term is doing the rounds in the tech world: Google Zero. No, the search giant hasn’t entered the crowded market for sugar-free drinks – it refers instead to a user needing to use zero clicks following a Google search. Why? Because now Google has integrated AI into its search interface, users see AI’s best guess at what the answer is to the query. And Google says the data is showing users like this a lot and will happily go off and use that information in whichever way they choose, without scrolling down pages of results.
Obviously, this only works for a certain number of use cases, however, it will cover enough visits to Google to reduce the number of clicks on the results significantly. But those clicks don’t just represent the depression of a button on a mouse or on a laptop trackpad – each one of those clicks represents revenue to a whole host of companies and organizations, including publishers. And they are worried.
Dollars for downloads
As those who have worked in academic publishing will know, being able to show customers value for money has been critical in the digital era. Under the subscription model, publishers needed to show academic libraries that the journals they were subscribing to were being used, hence, usage data was a key metric that showed just how relevant research was to faculty members. Pay $10,000 a year for a subscription package which was accessed 10,000 times, you get a dollar-per-download for your unit cost, and then the library can decide if this represents value or not.
As things moved more towards the Open Access model, value add still needed to be proven, just to the individual authors paying their APCs to the publishers instead. If an APC was $2,000 and the article was downloaded 2,000 times over time, again, this showed the author whether it represented value or not for their fee. However, the Google Zero question threatens this market quite clearly, as if fewer people are clicking on the search results to read the article but using the AI summary instead, how will customers know who’s reading their articles?
Trust makers
Other topics on the minds of publishers, of course, included the now usual suspects of AI and research integrity. Publishers have been under pressure in this regard, with high-profile retractions and paper mills causing chaos with the academic record. And yet, publishers might just provide the answer to the Google Zero problem. Because in an era of fake news, fake science, and fake journals, there exists an infrastructure in academic publishing that could still offer validation of research. This may require much closer working with universities and greater overall transparency, but if trust in research is ever to be regained and flourish, there is a pathway that could be cleared to help achieve it. And if we can regain trust, we can perhaps assert the value of publishing without the need to count clicks or divine downloads.
