Today’s Kitchen Essentials interview is with Hylke Koers, Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM (the International Association of Scientific,Technical, and Medical Publishers). STM Solutions was founded in 2021, to develop and manage shared infrastructures and collaborative services to support the scholarly communications community.

Please tell us a bit about yourself — your role at STM Solutions, how you got there, and why you embarked on a career in research infrastructure?

After completing my postdoc in Brussels — I am originally trained as a physicist — I made a deliberate choice to not pursue an academic career. I wanted to broaden my professional horizon and develop new skills, but I also wanted to stay close to the world of research that I’ve always found very inspiring. Elsevier gave me that opportunity when I joined them in 2009, initially working in a number of roles in editorial, publishing, and product management. Things really took off when I joined the team that developed the “Article of the Future”, where we explored how modern web technologies could be applied to better communicate research. What I really liked about this was the combination of applying a very innovative mindset while at the same time strengthening age-old values of scholarly publishing such as transparency, provenance, and reproducibility. I absolutely loved it and was bitten by the innovation bug, which hasn’t left me since.

In 2018, I left Elsevier and joined SURF, the National Research and Education Network (NREN) in the Netherlands. There, I led a team responsible for research data management, working directly with Dutch research institutes to help them set up large-scale data management and processing infrastructures. That immersed me in the world of IT management, service delivery, and large-scale infrastructure.

The opportunity to join STM and set up STM Solutions was, for me, the perfect combination of those experiences. It combined what I learned at Elsevier about academic publishing, product development, and innovation with my experience from SURF on IT infrastructure, operations, and data – and on working in a membership organization, which has a particular dynamic in terms of governance and stakeholder management.

What do you like most and least about working in research infrastructure?

One thing that I really enjoy about this area of work is the problem-solving aspect of trying to figure out how to create something of real value using the technology and data that is available to you  — while of course fully respecting rules and regulations like GDPR. It’s creative and intellectually challenging work – and in a certain way it feels very similar to a research project. I also enjoy the collaborative aspect: infrastructure is often versatile and serves more than one purpose, which means that you need to align and find common needs between different parties with overlapping, but not identical, interests.

What I find challenging in this area of work are the typically long cycle times to make changes and see new services being adopted. Another challenge very common to infrastructure, is that it’s typically a small (but important) element in a much larger value chain. This makes it intrinsically challenging to demonstrate value early on, even though investments are needed at the start to reap greater benefits in the future.

Based on your own experiences, what advice would you give someone starting, or thinking of starting, a career in research infrastructure?

Give it a try! And start small, for example, see if you can work on a single piece of technology or a standard, and use that experience to learn about all the aspects that come with infrastructure projects – and take your time to master those before moving to bigger projects or portfolios.

For me, a very formative experience was the development of Scholix, a framework to link research data with the literature. I was one of the co-chairs of a joint ICSU-WDS / RDA working group that delivered this framework in 2017. This was also my first experience with STM, who coordinated this work. I learned a lot about technology, about data and metadata standards, and about integrations — and, even more importantly, I learned a lot about collaboration in a multi-stakeholder environment with both common and differing interests. And I got to witness first-hand how powerful a new standard can be to propel an entire industry.

What sort of infrastructure does STM Solutions provide, and who are your users?

STM Solutions was set up in 2021, based on the vision of the STM Board that there was a growing number of technology-related challenges in scholarly communications that can only be solved by working collaboratively. With its Standards & Technology Committee (STeC), STM already had a strong capability to develop standards and guidelines, and to incubate ideas that could deliver collective benefit. STM Solutions was put in place to take that agenda one step further, developing and running shared services and infrastructure for STM members and the scholarly communications community at large. It’s been interesting to reread the Scholarly Kitchen interview that Ian Moss and I did back in 2021; I think it still offers a pretty accurate description of the work that we’ve done and will continue to do.

The most significant piece of infrastructure that STM Solutions has developed in the last three-and-a-half years is the STM Integrity Hub, which enables publishers to scan submitted manuscripts for indications of paper-mill activity and other research integrity concerns. It has clearly addressed a need: the Hub is already being used by more than 25 publishers, and it processes over 35,000 submitted manuscripts per month. You can read more on the STM Integrity Hub in this recent update in The Scholarly Kitchen.

In addition to the work on research integrity, I also work on GetFTR and SeamlessAccess, which are collaborative projects that improve researchers’ online user journeys as they look for, discover and access content – another prime example of an area that calls for a common approach to provide researchers with a clear, intuitive, and consistent user experience.

How is STM Solutions sustained financially?

STM Solutions is financed through its parent organization STM, as well as through separate contributions from STM members for specific projects. Depending on the maturity of the concept, this could be project-based funding with voluntary contributions by those members that are able and willing to invest. For more mature services, in particular the STM Integrity Hub, we’re working to put in place a more robust fee-for-service model that enables participation by publishers of all sorts, shapes, and sizes.

As the leader of a research infrastructure organization, what do you think are the biggest opportunities we’ve not yet realized as a community — and what’s stopping us?

For this question I’ll draw inspiration from the STM Trends, which is a yearly forecasting exercise that we run out of STM, as well as a recent piece of research from Ithaka S+R that STM Solutions, together with six STM members, has sponsored.

One of the central, cross-cutting themes in all these resources is around trust and integrity. As researchers navigate an increasingly distributed scholarly web with multiple copies and versions of works available to them, how do we expect them to understand, what content can be trusted and what is authoritative? I think that there are significant opportunities for the scholarly communications community to provide researchers with guidance and commonly understood indicators of trust and authority. I will note that a lot of good work is already underway, for example, NISO’s Peer Review Terminology Standardization and their Working Group on Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC). And, a bit closer to home for me, the work that STM is undertaking to develop a push-based standard and service for content updates (such as retractions, errata, etc.) through the Content-update Signaling and Alerting Protocol (CUSAP) Task-and-Finish Group; and a recent expansion by GetFTR to signal retractions and errata at the point of discovery. All of this is, in my view, very important work to guide researchers to authoritative, trusted content that they can build on for their own research.

Closely related to trust and integrity is the issue of digital identity, which I believe will be a major topic in our sector for the next couple of years. I expect that we will see an increased need for publishers to better understand, and validate, the identities of individuals that they interact with throughout the editorial and peer-review process – not just authors, but also reviewers and (guest) editors. Of course this needs to be done in such a way that it does not unduly raise barriers or exclude bona fide individuals from the process. This poses a real challenge and one that, at least to my mind, calls for a common approach. We’ve started to work on this in an STM Researcher Identity Task-and-Finish Group, which is preparing to release a first report soon.

Thirdly, of course, is artificial intelligence (AI). Here, I think the challenge is to devise workflows that use AI effectively and responsibly, delivering some real and tangible benefits such as increased publication speed and greater inclusivity, while upholding the core qualities of scholarly publishing such as provenance and transparency. That’s not an easy feat, but I am optimistic that this is one of those puzzles that can be solved through the kind of problem-solving that we spoke about before.

Looking at your own organization, what are you most proud of, and what keeps you awake at night?

I feel very excited about what STM Solutions has achieved in a little over three years. Perhaps our most visible achievement is the STM Integrity Hub. While it’s easy to focus on the technology that we’ve developed, I am particularly proud of how we have been able to forge a massive collaborative program — with over 40 organizations and more than 100 individuals contributing in some shape or form — that is supporting the community and fueling an effective development agenda.

While I tend to sleep well at night, I am always mindful that collaboration is never a ‘given’. The onus is on us to continually demonstrate why collaboration pays off, and to earn the trust that is needed to be the locus of that collaboration.

What impact has/does/will AI have on STM Solutions?

One immediate impact is that content is becoming easier to fabricate, which makes it increasingly difficult to detect paper-mill material. With that in mind, while we continue to invest in tools that look for indications of paper mills (or other research integrity concerns) in the manuscript itself, we are also exploring alternative tactics that go ‘beyond the manuscript’ – such as digital identity or digital watermarking of content.

Beyond that, l see lots of potential to apply AI in a responsible way across scholarly communications, in particular as a ubiquitously available method to translate scholarly works between languages, and also to translate a highly technical specialist publication into a lay summary or a policy brief. While I realize that this comes with many risks and pitfalls, it is my hope that such ‘translational capabilities’ can play a positive role to help combat misinformation and disinformation, and restore trust in academic institutions.

Thinking about STM Solutions’ role in this, it is still early days in terms of figuring out which common standards or technology are needed – but I fully expect that plot will unfold over the next couple of years. And on the policy side, STM has already done some good work on AI recommendations and guidelines, for example, STM Best Practice Principles for Ethical, Trustworthy and Human-centric AI (2021), the Ethical and Practical Guidelines for the Use of Generative AI in the Publication Process (2023) and the Guidelines on using STM content for Text and Data Mining and for Training of Artificial Intelligence models/systems (2024).

What changes do you think we’ll see in terms of the overall research infrastructure over the next five to ten years, and how will they impact the kinds of roles you’ll be hiring for at STM Solutions?

I think that goes back to some of the themes that we already spoke about: research integrity; digital identity; access, trust and authority; and AI. Within the five- to ten- year time frame, I also expect that we’ll see an increased diversity of scholarly outputs – with research data, protocols, methods, etc. living alongside the published narrative article. This will call for new approaches to linking such materials on the web, to signal their level of trust and authority, and to preserve them as part of a distributed scholarly record.

In terms of hiring, I’ll be looking for people who are able to identify opportunities across the areas of technology, data, legal,and compliance; who have a passion for scholarly communication and take pride in work that bolsters the scholarly record; and who are able to forge and drive collaborations — who can listen and also lead where the path is becoming clear. Now, that may sound like what the Germans call an ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’ — but I am fortunate to be working with those kinds of people every day, and I am sure that there are more out there!