The next generation (Nex-Gen) of professionals that will serve as authors, reviewers, editors, and journal staff are not going to be impressed with the tools we employ to facilitate scholarly publishing.
Over the last several years, my team has focused much of our strategic thinking around what the expectations and characteristics are of those younger people in the scientific workforce and, more importantly, those coming into the workforce within the next 5-10 years.
For the sake of level setting, these are the groups I am going to reference. I am using the Pew Research definition of the generational breakdowns.
- Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996 making them 29-44 years old right now. That would put them squarely in early-ish to mid-career.
- Gen Z were born between 1997 and 2010 making them 15-28 years old. This is where our immediate focus should be as the generation spans high school through early career.
- Gen Alpha includes anyone born from 2010 until now—so 14 years old and under.
To assess whether we, as an industry, are serving the Next-Gen professionals well, it’s helpful to know a little about the habits and motivations of these individuals.
Note: I don’t love generalizing whole swaths of people based on the year they happen to be born. And there will be wild differences in behavior depending on where people are from globally, regionally, or how they grew up. But for the sake of strategy planning, survey data can be useful and wild generalizations will have to do.
A few years ago, the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) had their research foundation create a series of 3-4 page reports on issues affecting associations. One was on Next-Gen Professionals and another was on Volunteerism. As a society publisher that relies heavily on the dedicated work of our members, understanding how up-and-coming professionals view volunteerism is equally as urgent as understanding their technology expectations.
When we consider Millennials and Gen Z together, it’s important to note the size of the population. These are two very large cohorts. There were about 62 million people in the US and 1.8 billion globally born into the Millennial generation and 67 million people in the US and 2 billion globally born into Gen Z. This will not come as a surprise to those with seniors in high school that are applying to colleges this year. The US high school graduating class of 2025 has over 3.9 million kids, the highest ever recorded (it falls off a cliff from there).
The Future of Volunteering
The ASAE Foresight report on volunteering had some trends to note:
- Virtual volunteering opportunities allow people to participate when and where it suits them
- Micro-volunteering—small, discreet tasks that can fit into busy schedules– is growing
- Reputation systems and gamification of opportunities will keep younger volunteers engaged
Thinking about the opportunities that exist for volunteering with scholarly content, particularly journals, the bulk of our opportunities are longer term and intensive time commitments. Editor terms are typically 3-5 years with caps around 10-15 years. Depending on the journal, volunteer editors can expect to spend 3-12 hours a week, maybe more, on journal work.
Lest you think reviewing is a micro-opportunity, most reviewers report that it takes them 3-8 hours to review a paper.
We are already finding it harder and harder to fill these roles. Anecdotally, an open call for Editor applicants used to generate dozens of candidates and today, many searches are lucky to get 4-5 people. Availability of reviewers is a well-documented crisis.
While it may not be possible to turn these kinds of activities into micro-engagements, it sure is possible to modernize our systems to make the process better, faster, and more enjoyable.
The Digital Revolution Continues
I feel like I know a bit about Gen Z because I have two of them living in my house. Here are some important things to note:
- My two high school kids haven’t seen a textbook in ages. Some of the science or history courses have a dusty stack of them in the corner if you are looking for a little extra help, but all of their resources are either generated by the teacher or online databases.
- Duolingo, the gamified language learning app, has over 4 million average daily users (Q32024) with the largest age group on the platform being 18-24 years old, closely followed by the 25-34 year olds.
- TikTok is the worlds most downloaded app for those ages 18 to 24 and it is the preferred search engine. Yes, I said search engine. In fact, a senior Google Vice President said last summer that when young people are looking for a place to meet for lunch, “something like 40% of them go to TikTok or Instagram” to scout a location.
There are a million other statistics you can find about these two generations but simply calling them “digital native” doesn’t really cut it. They have completely different content consumption behaviors and use non-traditional platforms to conduct traditional activities.
Raise your hand if you work somewhere that once talked about creating the “Amazon” experience on their website. My guess is that this morphed into the “Netflix” experience. It’s important to think about the differences in their two experiences. Amazon is wholly dependent on feeding you recommendations of things it thinks you want coupled with precise “known entity” search. The website also looks like a local parking-lot flea market, but I digress.
Netflix has really bad search and counts on you to browse through fairly limited selections of what it thinks you want to see. If you are a Netflix user, you know how frustrating it can be when the same 10-15 shows or movies somehow fit into every made-up browse category.
Now think of Spotify. Your home page from Spotify is chock full of curated content with snappy titles. These playlists might be based on mood, decade, genre; but it also swings for the fences with things like Pioneering Women Artists, Piano Bar Classics, or RomCom. Talk about a taxonomy!
Are We Up to the Task?
With these images and stats in mind, take a moment to think about the digital experience we subject our authors, reviewers, editors, and readers to.
With all due respect to the tech pioneers in our industry, is the generation of professionals that grew up with TikTok, Spotify, and Duolingo going to be impressed with submitting or reviewing a paper in the biggest commercially available peer review systems?
Will our communities of Next-Gen professionals want to keep receiving email table of content alerts with a list of papers in order of appearance?
It’s time to start thinking creatively. Here are some of my thoughts on peer review systems and content discovery.
Peer Review Gets Mobile
Baseline — Make reviewing extremely mobile friendly for busy people on the go.
- Not just PDFs
- Inline tables and figures
- Mobile friendly text with the ability to tap anywhere and drop in a comment or question
- Mobile friendly questionnaire
- Ability to stop and start again where needed
Advanced — the ability to listen to a paper and dictate comments or questions where relevant.
Baseline — User-friendly dashboards and gamification are not optional. Imagine an app dashboard with a notification telling a reviewer that a new paper has been assigned. In a simple interface, the reviewer can accept or decline the assignment with a personalized thank you message. A running tally of the number of reviews completed is always shown on the dashboard with stats showing if they are in the top, middle, or lowest percentile of users completing reviews. Other stats, such as their average time for completing a review, is shown with the overall statistics from the journal to show how they stand with their peers. Perhaps badges are employed. If a society awards points for reviewing, a tally can be shown with what is needed to hit the next goal.
Advanced — If a reviewer accepts a review, the app will ask if they want to do the review now or schedule a reminder to do it later. Hitting “schedule a reminder” allows them to pick the time and date within the requested window and put it on their personal calendar. This not only nudges the reviewer to schedule time for this activity but also puts them in control of when they will get reminders.
Baseline — Editors can use a mobile app to review papers with AI generated warnings such as Scope Issues, Possibly Incomplete, Overlength, etc. Editors can quickly review and either hold for later, desk reject, or assign to an associate editor or reviewers. Editors should also have a dashboard showing the workload of associate editors or reviewers and have a way to send chat-like discussions with other editors in the system. A dashboard would also alert them to the top 10 papers that have been awaiting action the longest with the ability to send a query to the assigned associate editor or reviewer with one click.
Advanced — Audio versions of the metadata and abstracts are read to the editor.
Baseline — Authors who submit in the desktop version (even I can admit that doing this on a phone would be a challenge) can still answer queries and get notifications on an app. They too would have a personal dashboard with a list of all the papers they submitted listed by acceptance, rejected, or in review. Accepted papers would link to the published version.
Advanced — An author dashboard would include the number of downloads, citations to, and altmetric score of all accepted papers. An easy report could be downloaded listing their contributions and the desired metrics.
Extra Advanced — All of the author’s papers in that system would be in one dashboard regardless of what journal they are submitting to!! I am not talking about one app for every journal, but one for each platform!
Content Platforms Look Like Spotify
Baseline — a logged in user sees a home page with the categories to explore. Some of these are categories they selected and others are created using their past use or preferences. Categories (or playlists) might include specific topic areas, all new content since they were on the app last, by journal, or authored by favorite colleagues they have been following. Custom lists like Read Later should be standard. This experience must exist in desktop and app presentations with customizable notifications.
Advanced — a user can “play” the list of papers and listen to the title and abstract of the papers in the playlist. A simple tap would allow them to listen to a longer summary or the entire paper if they choose. Synching the reading experience between the app and the desktop versions, like how a Kindle knows where you left off or Netflix asks if you want to start where you left off or go back to the beginning, would be a desired experience.
Baseline — everything a user read, passages they highlighted, sections they made notations on, etc., are easy to find on the user home page.
Advanced — a user can highlight a chunk of text and send it with a note and a link to the full text to either themselves or a colleague.
Imagine a World…
I am sure that I am not the only one that dreams of modern systems and improving the experience of our authors, editors, readers, and reviewers. It would be fun to crowdsource more features in the comments to this post.
We know that features such as the one’s listed above are technologically possible because we use these features every day outside of our industry. That is the entire point.
Industry reflection on what the expectations are/will be of the incoming generation of collaborators is crucial. Publishing technology enjoyed decades of innovative leadership in content discoverability and standards. The backbone exists, but the execution and the interface has fallen behind.
Artificial intelligence and Large Language Models are already replacing search and promising new content experiences. If we don’t modernize the way we engage with readers and volunteers, we will be left with doing nothing more than feeding the machines.
Discussion
9 Thoughts on "Creating the Publishing Platforms that Next-Gen Professionals Expect"
Thank you for a great post Angela – our industry has a lot of catching up to do in providing platforms and digital touchpoints that match or exceed customer experiences in other areas of their digital lives. Bringing in the voices of Gen Z – both colleagues and customers – is crucial as they question and challenge the existing systems, processes and touchpoints that are not intuitive, engaging or are time-drainers. I’m excited to see how our industry can take on some/all the points you mention above to make lives easier for our customers now and in the future.
“We know that features such as the one’s listed above are technologically possible because we use these features every day outside of our industry”.
I agree with your overall message, but “possible” is not the same as “economically viable”. Music, movies, search etc., are massive industries that justify billions of dollars in risk capital to disrupt existing players. The pathways to innovation in scholarly publishing are likely to be different.
A couple of questions/observations:
1) If scholarly publishing platforms lack innovations it’s surely because there are inadequate incentives for their creation? You are the exception that proves the rule because in your roles as ASCE and ASCO you have always been willing to fund the development of strategic functionality. But few scholarly societies and small publishers understand this dynamic or are obsessed by owning proprietary innovations or simply expect free innovation. A few years ago, Aries developed a mobile app version of Editorial Manager (including several of the features you mentioned). We showed it to journals. None were willing to pay even a small fee saying it was nothing more than a “nice to have”. That’s fair enough, Aries got the message and stopped investing in a mobile app.
2) The biggest barrier to innovation in scholarly workflow is lack of standardization and the process improvement and economies of scale that it enables. Today technology platforms must be endlessly customized to meet the idiosyncratic requirements of the most junior journal employees who are often granted veto power over new system deployment. For example, if journals had the courage to mandate authenticated ORCID IDs for all authors this would dramatically reduce the cost of development (e.g. registration, user management, reporting, conflict-of-interest reporting, data transfer etc.) and unleash *scalable* technology innovation. Instead, more than ten years since its availability, journals (with a few exceptions – IOPP) still view ORCID as a vaguely inconvenient metadata element rather than a key to economically viable, scalable innovation by their platform vendors.
I think this goes back the the payer vs user problem. The payer of the service is the publisher/society that is trying to cut expenses as revenue decreases. They are also the user— we don’t demo these systems to authors and reviewers! But the authors and reviewers are also users. I hope that the points I make here encourage publishers to see the value in investing in modernization BECAUSE our users will demand it.
Thanks for putting into words, Angela, what I’ve been saying for 10 years. We should be asking 25-year-olds (and 15-year-olds) what the next iterations of our sites and systems should look like — not 50-year-olds!
Going mobile friendly would benefit those certain non-Western and Anglophone regions which skipped home personal computer ownership and went straight to mobile devices. Widen the net to incorporate people outside the Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand sphere.
This is such an excellent post–thank you, Angela, for distilling these great ideas and providing a road map for improvement! One additional thing I think it’s important to address in discussions of both volunteerism and gamification in scholarly publishing is REWARDS. What motivates people to contribute their valuable time and expertise to the review process? And how can we reify, and reinforce, that essential contribution to knowledge-sharing? I would suggest that any dashboard for reviewers should include counters, milestones, scoring, etc.: Congrats! You’ve completed reviews for 100% of the submissions you’ve received! You’re a super-reviewer: Authors consistently rate your feedback as helpful and constructive! Impact calculator: Articles you’ve peer-reviewed have been downloaded XXX times! You’ve contributed XXX hours of professional service by reviewing XXX articles this year! Whether you come from the “gold star sticker on your homework” era or the “dopamine hit from getting likes” era, that motivation matters.
Great ideas! We give points toward Fellow status of membership to reviewers. If you complete three reviews in a year that are rated well, you earn a point. It would be great to tell someone that they have two done and only need to do one more to get a point. Or, you could have earned a point if you were a member.
Sharing metrics and comparing individual metrics to the colleagues doing the same similar tasks is also a motivator for some people.
Certainly has the imagination running rampant. Unfortunately though reality strikes when an image of an editor or reviewers’ phone or tablet, crowded with dozens of apps disrupts the dream. There are literally too many publishers and journals silos and most reviewers, or editors, for that matter, are not exclusive.
Like many of us experience in our daily lives, loyalty programs are great, but when we have to register all the different memberships into our electronic payment medium so we don’t accidentally miss out, it quickly gets tedious. And if we only visit a shop once, do we bother signing up?
Maybe Publons or ORCID, who centrally try and collect their members’ efforts, will be able to take some of these great ideas and trial them. Maybe it will even win more publishers to onboard? But on a Publisher level, economic viability will be a huge deterrent for most publishers. Scale suggests only publishers with a large reviewer community would even see the benefit.
What a beautiful vision; from Angela’s lips to the gods ears.
It seems that standardization/centralization will be key to making some of these compelling features work. Coalescing around open source software projects that can power the technical infrastructure might be a good way to go. (Specifically I am thinking of an AI paper screener here.) That, combined with open standards for the badging functionality could bring down costs.
