When academic societies keep their journals in the big publishing houses, what do they get in return? Cheap or free infrastructure? Or do they even still pay even for that?
I’m trying to wrap my head around what it would take for societies to transition their journals elsewhere (or have their own infrastructure). Can anyone pitch in with experience?
[#]ScholarlyPublishing
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And there are of course alternative venues; I know there are some governmental (or EU) based repositories, but I think society journals play an important role in academic publishing (and from conversations, I believe many researchers place value on society-governed journals). I like that there’s choice, but when the choice is between @PLOS , Royal Society, @Co_Biologists and eLife (I’m broadly a biologist, happy to receive more recommendations!), that’s not that wide. I’d really love for societies to be able to host their own infrastructure (e.g. provided by EU) on EU servers - imagine the money saved… by the EU.
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@roaldarboel @PLOS @Co_Biologists There are also library & institutionally based publishers offering a diamond model (no fees for publishing or reading), like eScholarship (https://escholarship.org/) from my team at the University of California. We publish about 90 scholarly journals. Find other library based publishers at the Library Publishing Coalition https://librarypublishing.org/ Happy to answer questions about this model--we've been doing it for over 20 years! #openaccess #librarypublishing
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@roaldarboel I wonder if some of them might be convinced to join other not for profit academic publishers with a long track record? I'm thinking of ACS in particular, which publishes a huge variety of journals at this point and seems to be pretty successful at it.
(If you're looking for biology related journals there are quite a few, but they do tend to skew in a certain direction towards chemistry because it's ACS)
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@SRLevine @roaldarboel Problem with ACS is that they are sharkier than a Springer and more costly than an Elsevier (hey, they have to find that quarter million for each executive somewhere !)
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@SRLevine @roaldarboel
With ACS you mean the American Chemical Society that makes nearly US$700M in annual revenue from publishing
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207
and often joins Evilsevier et al. in lawsuits against people and orgs that help make scholarship accessible?
https://www.infodocket.com/2018/10/03/american-chemical-society-acs-and-elsevier-file-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-in-u-s-vs-researchgate/
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/american-chemical-society-files-lawsuit-against-pirate-site/3007670.article
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03659-0
The ACS that partners with Evilsevier to make articles stay behind their joint paywall?
https://www.infodocket.com/2022/01/18/new-sciencedirect-pilot-aims-to-improve-research-discovery-and-access-elsevier-acs-rsoc-tf-and-wiley-will-collaborate/
Or is there another ACS I'm unaware of?
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@roaldarboel it's gotta be the infra, and i would bet they still pay , if not just as a cut of the APC.
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@roaldarboel hosting journals is genuinely hard. there are a decent amount of turnkey 'just runs' journal platform programs, but they keep getting abandoned or bought, though PKP just did the deal to become the platform for the EU and hcommons is doing stuff i love.
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@jonny @roaldarboel See my post above. Many of us at institutionally support libraries are doing it! https://librarypublishing.org/ https://escholarship.org
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@lschiff
@jonny @roaldarboel I ❤️ LPC!!
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@j_feral @lschiff @jonny@neuromatch.social @roaldarboel
Yes, lot's of libraries run their own journals (our's does, too), so that's a good stop-gap.
However, I think the biggest problem isn't technical, but conceptual. Many societies are simply not "societies" any more, in the original meaning of the word:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207
Remedy this and all else will follow.
See, e.g., hcommons that @jonny@social.coop also referenced. With a scholarly mindset, even today's societies can again become "societies".
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@brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny @jonny@social.coop It's crazy coming at this, still, a bit blue-eyed. When I think of societies, I'm thinking small-ish congregations of nerds (in the best possible sense of the word, proud nerd). So these mega-societies are a really strange size to me. SfN, AAAS, ACS, they all seem to operate much more like businesses (e.g. with large exec salaries).
Regarding their publications, they all have high-prestige journals. Do you think that the journals derive their prestige from being under the umbrella of a large, esteemed society; or is that mostly a marketing gimmick (unfolded over many years)? If e.g. SfN were to take Journal of Neuroscience to a PKP platform, would the authors follow? (in this hypothetical scenario we don't care about the vast amount of money they surely lose from such a deal).
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@roaldarboel @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
prestige is a mutually beneficial relationship for all who abide by the terms of the game. "we gain exposure for our authors and induce more submissions as a function of being plugged into {the big journal recommendation system}."
there is no incentive in self-hosting for a large society, it's bad for the bottom line, bad for operational stability, bad for the prestige of their top authors. there is little appeal to the upper end of the hierarchy to do things ethically that i'm aware of
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@jonny@neuromatch.social @roaldarboel @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
Exactly. SfN created eNeuro, just so they could have an #oa journal without having to touch (read: risk anything with) JNeurosci.
As JNeurosci is still a subscription journal, authorship or readership isn't necessarily the top concern: subscribers are the top concern. And our institutions have a history of subscribing to anything, no matter the cost.
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@jonny@neuromatch.social @roaldarboel @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
FWIW, in my fields (biology, neuroscience) most authors couldn't care less about readership or editorial boards or any other journal propertiers, as long as the journal is listed in PubMed and ranked highly enough.
Unlike in some fields, journals have long ceased to be the basis of any kind of community, if they ever have been.
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@brembs @jonny @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop I think there’s definitively an age-bias to that (no shade intended!😅). Most of the PhDs and post docs I’ve worked with care much more about the ethics of their publishing venues than their prestige (and could never even imagine looking up an impact factor!). Things are changing - and your fields are my fields roughly. ☺️
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@roaldarboel @jonny@neuromatch.social @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
Yes, there is something to that, for sure. From my perspective it's maybe less a generational shift, but a combination of rule heterogeneity (in some places journal prestige is more important than in others) and a shift in labor market dynamics. In my times, it was Nature paper or flipping burgers. Now it is the choice between science and well-paying tech company.
People, on average, are probably less desperate than us.
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@brembs @jonny @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop I highly doubt people are less desperate! We run faster than ever, are more stressed, depressed and anxious than ever, all in the hopes of securing one of those few hopeful spots that allow us to stay in academia. It’s a different conversation for a different time for me 😉
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@brembs @roaldarboel @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
and this is part of the promise of big publisher tech - all your people are still yelling at you about OA, here's a platform where you can make even more money (phrased as: process more submissions, promote more good science, etc.) while going "Gold OA"
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@jonny @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop Yeah, makes sense.
Does this in effect also leave us in a place where big societies=bad and small societies=good?
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@roaldarboel @jonny@neuromatch.social @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop that’s just one dimension of variation, no? academic discipline matters too: medicine and technology adjacent fields seem a completely different proposition to the humanities.
I don’t think a model of science or academia where each discipline is viewed as an island that needs to be self sustaining is a viable model, and that’s a dimension I’m missing in this discussion.
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@UlrikeHahn @roaldarboel @jonny@neuromatch.social @brembs @j_feral @jonny@social.coop I don't think small or big is the question, it's just that small societies typically have fewer resources. And as @UlrikeHahn points out, that is just one dimension of difference to consider, not the only one, and not always the most important one.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop That’s very likely - I have no idea about what humanities societies look like. What are some big and small societies we could look at as examples?
One reason I focus on natural and medical sciences (besides them being my fields) is that they pull the vast majority of funding. CNS papers are a thing because stakes are so high in those disciplines. So the aforementioned natural and medical societies seem like places where inertia towards change would be the largest. And the bigger the society, the larger sums, the more inertia towards change. My impression of the humanities (which might well be off) is that the money is much smaller and that they are generally much more open to change.
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@roaldarboel @UlrikeHahn @jonny@neuromatch.social @j_feral @lschiff @jonny@social.coop
We have some examples in our paper:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207
Personally, for me the most shining example of how to do it is HCommons, with their own Mastodon instance:
https://hcommons.social/about
We wouldn't be having this conversation if all societies had their mindset.
Oh, and yes to your guess about money, of course.
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@lschiff @roaldarboel just to be super clear i know this and i love it!!! i did not mean to downplay y'alls work at all which i think rocks, just to say it's a ton of labor to maintain any kind of journal infrastructure (as i'm sure you know!) and offering a piece of an explanation why it might be happening at academic societies. more shared work into the commons only lowers that barrier, which is why i'm personally v grateful for work in libraries (among other reasons)
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@jonny @roaldarboel Thank you and totally get it. That said, most folks don't know about this option, so I'm always looking for opportunities to promote it and to encourage scholars/researchers to take control back and start journals with the support of their library!
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@lschiff @jonny @roaldarboel Journal hosting requires effort, but I think it's more or less a solved problem. In the humanities, I think the main issue is typesetting. It's hard to beat just submitting a word file and not caring about which Indian sweat shop produces the final PDF. Libraries usually don't offer it, and soc.s don't have the knowledge or staff. (Might be different in math/science where authors do that themselves via latex.)
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@felwert @lschiff @jonny Yeah, such a pity if that's a barrier - it really shouldn't be when we have HTML. But yeah, a nicely typeset PDF is lovely to behold (I've made several LaTeX templates for e.g. preprints, and am making for Typst atm), but whether they provide anything over a dynamic HTML page, I really doubt.
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@roaldarboel
@felwert @lschiff
Working with JOSS, which should be the place all the dope document tech accumulates, it becomes pretty clear how all the obligations of playing the publication game detract from doing dope shit like having good document tech
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@roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff no shade intended, it makes perfect sense - you want to make a long-lived publication so that all the people who took a risk by trusting you are rewarded rather than punished for doing so. there is no room for experimentation in journals if you don't control the recommendation and bibliometric evaluation systems, part of the hidden value hoarding proposition is punishing the ability to have the value of work survive the journal
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@roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff (incidentally this is one of the reasons why i think it's so important, culturally, to have masto & other fedi apps do lossless account migration, which is currently not the case)
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@jonny @roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff I agree that typesetting is a barrier. I do a lot of self-publishing (digital archives is my field) and we publish our work as PDFs, using OSF as repo & access point, and do our own promotion. We often have to bank on someone from the author group having access to an Adobe product (it's never me lol so I forget which one is for publishing) to do typesetting that looks good. Otherwise it's basically unformatted besides headings.
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@jonny @roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff as a bit of a side tangent, I would rather post as HTML but would like to retain the option for someone to export as PDF. Any tips on how to achieve this in a pretty DIY way?? I have no idea what LaTeX is but I love learning new tech :)
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@j_feral
@roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff
Totally. Bunch of routes depending on source medium. Simplest would be to have source markdown and generate html and PDFs from that. Dont try and touch latex if you dont have to and dont want to take on an inordinate amount of psychic damage, but you can make nice templates to use with eg. pandoc. Alternatively if you only have html you can make special css rules that only apply when you print, so use the print dialogue to render PDF.
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@jonny ah great, I write in markdown usually and I think I have pandoc integrated with Obsidian already (but I had some hiccups getting it set up, not sure it works yet!). Most colleagues write collaboratively in google docs, though, so there's a translation step to obsidian's flavor of md before publishing. Hmmmm. OK so this would be a fun workflow to build but then I'm like, where to host the HTML version lol but I do love the idea of typesetting in md and exporting thank you!!!!
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@j_feral @jonny I'll jump on the tangent train. ;-) This is my perspective as someone who feel there's already a good tech stack and workflow (not perfect by any means, but getting closer), but who also struggles with having to send Word documents back and forth (I know...).
I do most of my writing in VS Code (since I also do most of my coding there), but I really like Obsidian too! Obsidian is about to get real-time collaboration on documents (and a plugin recently "solved" the issue, so can already be done). I would recommend looking into Quarto, which is basically markdown with the option to have code blocks. With Quarto, you can then export either to a website, serve a single HTML, export to LaTeX or Typst (the new player on the field, if you need to I would avoid LaTeX and go straight to Typst) or DOCX.
As a stand-alone solution however, Overleaf, which is sort of Google Docs for LaTeX, does this really well and I previously managed to get collaborators on board. I have since moved away from Overleaf for reasons.
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@roaldarboel
@j_feral
Oh is typst a document syntax? Interesting
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@roaldarboel
@j_feral
Initial thoughts: document and layout macro system seems nice especially after years of being subjected to TeX. I am at once impressed by the audacity and wary of the hubris of choosing not to reuse markdown and TeX math markup when there's no obvious reason why not. Super curious to see if they ported the TeX character-level typesetting engine which is truly the thing it had going for it
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@roaldarboel
They certainly got this right where markdown is wrong
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@roaldarboel
Reversing the order of the link syntax is diabolical tho, and im still wrapping my head around what the doubled function calls are about. I guess as a document syntax it makes sense that the text of something is a special case and always goes in [] where params go in () but its bringing back flashbacks of MATLAB with its whacky(1).ass{[1..3]}.indexing[]
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@jonny @felwert @lschiff Okay I’m tired now and almost asleep, but are you saying I won’t be able to have JOSS papers projected by a miniature retinal device whilst read out in a soothing Attenborough voice that will also engage in pleasant conversation, and that I can interact with by closing my eyes and simply imagine alternative analyses in 2025?! Cause if you are then it’ll be a sad sleep indeed! Lights out.
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@jonny Yeah, I figured it's not an easy task - but also figured that someone must have figured out the tech side at least. PKP and hcommons look great! Do you have some more information on the EU/PKP deal? (I could Google it, but I'm lazy...)
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@roaldarboel that's this one: https://pkp.sfu.ca/2024/09/12/ojs-infrastructure-for-open-research-europe/
i am convinced there is no solving tech, there is only cultivating groups of people who care about things.
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@jonny @roaldarboel
Apart from the mangling of XML and the various interactions with MathJAX, 3D projections and no end of gadgets that can be used in an article the real complications are all the business rules, access, attribution of impressions and COUNTER verification of unique impressions.
The non-functional aspects of hosting articles. aren't that bad in comparison.
Well OK, the political ramifications around it all does not make it easy.
Commenting on old threads again...
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@roaldarboel @jonny @dstephenlindsay
https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/lindsaylab/wp-content/uploads/sites/4861/2023/09/Lindsay-Ross-Hunt-Psychonomic-Publishing-16-May-2023.pdf
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@UlrikeHahn @roaldarboel @jonny Thanks for the bump, Ulrike. Long story on that piece, but the short version is that we lavished a lot of care and thought into it.
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@dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel @jonny yes, interesting to speculate on the extent to which key parameters have (or have not) changed in the time since and how that situation would play out now
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@dstephenlindsay
@UlrikeHahn @roaldarboel
Thanks for writing this, hadn't run across it before and very curious
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@jonny @dstephenlindsay @UlrikeHahn @roaldarboel
tl;dr but I stumbled upon the last paragraph. I'd be so bold and generalize this to a large number of societies who have "partnered" with one of the parasites - at least this is what is often mentioned prominently: the parasites enable societies to reach into the pockets of non-members to finance their member services. I have rarely encountered any awareness of the ethical implications of this shift, on the contrary.
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@brembs @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel but the journal was already “reaching into the pockets of non-members” because libraries subscribed to it (in order to make it available to the thousands of non-member authors and readers)
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
I don't know this specific case, but what often happens is that mostly the institutions of society members subscribe as long as the society runs the journal. Then, when a corporation takes over, the journal becomes part of the "Big Deal" of the corporation, multiplying the number of subscribers. Many/most of these new subscribers never use a single page of this journal, but only subscribe to it via the Big Deal.
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@brembs @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel I would ask that you read the piece: prior to the move the society was operating at a loss because it couldn’t cover the costs of production.
(I think your comment misses the mark and is also unfair to the extensive thought and care people at Psychonomics like Steve put into the decision and transition at the time -I say that as someone who was not a member nor in any way involved in that move)
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
I agree that it is possible that by looking merely at the end product, I do not do the people and their efforts sufficient justice. I tried to make that cleaar right away. I also tried to take this to a more general level, by saying that this seems to happen very often, i.e., similar efforts seem to tend to lead to similar outcomes also in other (but not all) societies.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
So I'm not blaming anybody in particular, but am trying to point out that there are common pitfalls, that some societies tend to fall into. I think it is worth looking at other efforts that did not have the same outcome.
After all, the end-product is what it is regardless of the efforts that went into it. There is a reason why the saying has been coined: "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". 😇
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@brembs @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel Bjoern, that “the road is paved with good intentions” was exactly the thought that motivated me to dig into the PB&R history in the first place. That history, I feel, is better served by Steve’s piece than your reductive explanation. I’d love to have more examples, but maybe we could actually look at this one? Were there plausible alternative routes for the society at the time? What would the options be now? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on that
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
OK, I've read it. By and large, it sounded pretty much like other stories I've heard form other societies. Didn't change anything in my assessment. From my personal perspective, this is a very standard story witrh analogous thoughts and concerns in many societies.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
There are a few aspects that strike me as common themes (no particular order):
There always seems to be more "how can we continue doing what we have been doing without changing too much?" rather than "is this an opportunity to improve the things we are doing by doing them diffeerently?"
Another is that "communication" or "dissemination" is snyonymous with selling journals.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
A third and major common theme is that everyone seems more than happy, eager I would say, to charge members relatively less and instead take more from non-members to finance member benefits. I have rarely seen anybody even raising this as an issue, instead this is seen as a feature, not a bug.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
A fourth, related common theme seems to be that the people running the society seem to see it as a company, rather than a society: the money is the prime consideration and society function comes second. They ask: how can we get money for the society and then come up with things they can finance: satellite meetings, Family Care Grants, Awards, etc.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
This strikes me as odd: I'd imagine they would be asking: what is the core mission of our society and what could members contribute to this mission? After all, one would tend to think that a scholarly society is formed by like-minded individuals with overlapping goals and interests.
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@UlrikeHahn @jonny @dstephenlindsay @roaldarboel
In short, it seems a lot of these societies look like they're caught up between historical baggage and corporate group think. I say that in the most general terms and with no individuals in mind, of course. I'm just an outside oberserver.
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