In the nascent days of the World Wide Web, one figure stood at the forefront of revolutionizing scholarly communication: John Sack. From its humble beginnings as a technology initiative at Stanford University, John Sack propelled HighWire Press into the leading content hosting platform for scientific and academic publishers globally. John Sack isn’t just a name in scholarly publishing; he is a visionary pioneer, a relentless innovator, and an icon who has profoundly reshaped how academic knowledge is disseminated and accessed.
In a revealing interview led by Heather Staines, a seasoned strategist from Delta Think, John Sack recounts his unexpected journey into technology. His story begins not in a lab, but with the seemingly archaic card catalog, a tool that sparked his initial fascination with information retrieval. He shares how interactions with Silicon Valley giants shaped his leadership philosophy and his approach to fostering innovation. Crucially, John Sack details how HighWire Press catalyzed a fundamental shift in scholarly publishing, moving from a journal-centric model to an article-based economy, a transformation that prioritized immediate access to individual research findings.
John Sack also offers valuable insights into the power of diverse perspectives in sparking innovation, his views on the optimal applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the scholarly domain, and a nuanced perspective on the advantages and disadvantages of remote work – topics increasingly relevant in today’s academic and professional landscapes. This insightful interview, conducted on March 30, 2023, provides a comprehensive look into the career and vision of John Sack, a true architect of the digital age in scholarly publishing.
From Literary Roots to Technological Frontiers: The Stanford Chapter of John Sack
Science Editor’s probing question about John Sack‘s extensive tenure at Stanford University opens a captivating narrative of an unconventional academic journey. How did John Sack, seemingly destined for a career in literature, find himself at the heart of technological innovation within this prestigious institution?
John Sack begins his story in the 1970s at the University of Virginia, immersed in an interdisciplinary program that, while intellectually stimulating, didn’t neatly align with conventional graduate school expectations. Despite this, John Sack‘s academic merit earned him a place at Stanford University, a move that ignited his passion for a different intellectual path. However, John Sack soon realized that his interests diverged from the traditional focus of Stanford’s English graduate program, which often centered on the meticulous study of individual authors. John Sack was more intrigued by the broader process of reading and knowledge acquisition. Acknowledging this intellectual divergence, his advisor wisely guided him toward a more fitting direction.
Serendipitously, technology entered John Sack‘s academic life early in his Stanford journey, an unusual trajectory for an English graduate student at the time. Tasked with teaching grammar to undergraduate English students, John Sack ingeniously embraced early computer-assisted instruction as a pedagogical tool. The students’ enthusiastic response was immediate, especially to the novelty of email accounts in the 1970s. This experience underscored for John Sack the burgeoning appetite for technology among this generation, who were poised to embrace the personal computer revolution on the horizon.
Perhaps more profoundly, John Sack‘s research into modern poetry led him to a pivotal encounter with technology within the library itself. Seeking comprehensive resources, John Sack consulted a reference librarian, who, in a mere five minutes using a computer terminal, replicated John Sack‘s laborious two-day manual search through the card catalog, even uncovering missed entries. This revelation ignited John Sack‘s curiosity about the underlying computer program. This system, an early database management system developed at Stanford, capable of natural language processing – a precursor to modern search engines like Google – became the catalyst for John Sack‘s career shift. Remarkably, this very system formed the foundation for the first preprint database, predating and inspiring arXiv in high energy physics. This detail highlights a fascinating cyclical element in John Sack‘s career, returning him from libraries to supporting preprints in the sciences. These formative experiences at Stanford cemented John Sack‘s trajectory, revealing that technology, particularly its application to advance scholarship, offered a more compelling career path than traditional academia.
Mentorship and Silicon Valley Luminaries: Shaping John Sack’s Vision
During his formative years at Stanford, John Sack encountered individuals who transcended the role of mere colleagues, becoming mentors who profoundly influenced his career trajectory. These figures, some of whom are iconic names in the technology world, provided John Sack with invaluable guidance and shaped his leadership perspective.
John Sack acknowledges that while in graduate school, professorial mentorship was geared towards replicating academic careers. However, this mentorship paradigm extended into his administrative role at Stanford. One of John Sack‘s earliest mentors in administration was Don Kennedy, a name well-recognized in scholarly publishing circles, who later became the editor-in-chief of Science magazine and previously served as Provost and President of Stanford. Kennedy’s approach to university governance was deeply rooted in mentorship. He established a university “cabinet” comprising senior officers who met weekly. Crucially, Kennedy included the next level of administrators, including John Sack, in cabinet meetings and even board of trustees meetings. This immersive experience provided John Sack with firsthand exposure to the intricate processes of university governance and the values that underpinned decision-making at the highest levels. John Sack credits this unique mentorship experience with shaping his leadership philosophy at organizations like HighWire, emphasizing service to scholars, mirroring Stanford’s core mission.
John Sack‘s other significant mentor emerged during his graduate studies. An invitation from a fellow graduate student to visit the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) led to a life-altering encounter. The purpose of the visit was to explore database development for textual knowledge. It was in this meeting that John Sack met Doug Engelbart, a true luminary in the history of computing. Engelbart, renowned for inventing the computer mouse, was also a pioneer of windowed operating systems, hypertext management systems, and early video conferencing. John Sack recounts being astounded by a demonstration of networked video conferencing, featuring full-motion video, text editing, and hyperlinked documents – Engelbart’s legendary “Mother Of All Demos” (MOAD) from the mid-1970s. This experience was transformative for John Sack, solidifying his desire to work in this groundbreaking technological domain. Engelbart’s overarching vision of “augmenting human intelligence” resonated deeply with John Sack, shifting his focus from mere automation to leveraging computers to amplify human thought and capabilities.
The early days of personal computing at Stanford and MIT, particularly the influence of Apple, also shaped John Sack‘s perspective. John Sack had the opportunity to interact with Steve Jobs, who, along with Steve Wozniak at MIT, served as Apple’s representatives to these universities. Apple’s strategic vision of placing personal computers in the hands of students, recognizing them as future adopters in the workforce, led to early adoption of Macs at Stanford and MIT in 1984. While the Mac itself was revolutionary, John Sack emphasizes the laser printer as the true game-changer in research technology. The ability to electronically transmit files via email (before the widespread adoption of the web) and print high-resolution documents at 300 dpi, comparable to scholarly journal quality, was transformative. This capability, according to John Sack, fostered the concept of the “article economy” – on-demand access to individual articles, contrasting with the traditional journal issue-based model.
HighWire Press: From Serials Crisis Solution to Scholarly Publishing Revolution
The interview naturally progresses to the genesis of HighWire Press, a pivotal chapter in John Sack‘s career. John Sack sets the stage by describing the “serials crisis” of the 1980s and 90s, a period marked by escalating scholarly journal prices that strained university library budgets.
In a remarkable twist of fate, John Sack‘s involvement in the search committee for a new Stanford University Librarian, chaired by Condoleezza Rice, then Provost, became the unlikely catalyst for HighWire’s creation. As part of the Libraries and Information Resources management team, John Sack proposed an innovative approach for librarian candidate interviews: engaging candidates in problem-solving exercises related to real challenges. The “serials crisis” was chosen as the focal point for this exercise. During a team meeting with a particular candidate, Mike Keller, the concept of Stanford creating a technology-focused entity to support non-profit scholarly publishers emerged. This entity would leverage nascent “web browser” technologies to enhance scientific communication. This was the conceptual birth of HighWire Press, though the name itself came later. Following Mike Keller’s appointment as University Librarian, John Sack, transitioning from managing the Stanford data center, became the director of HighWire Press, reporting to Keller within the Stanford Library system. This marked the launch of Stanford’s significant intervention in scholarly publishing, fostering a community of scholarly publishers around a shared technology platform, empowering them with the scale and technological capabilities to compete with larger commercial publishers in the burgeoning digital landscape. This occurred precisely as the World Wide Web began to gain public traction. While the internet had existed for some time, the web browser was still a relatively new concept in 1994-1995. John Sack recounts the need to explain the meaning of “WWW” to many, highlighting that the web’s transformative potential wasn’t immediately apparent. HighWire’s early insight was recognizing the web as the solution and the shift towards article-centric consumption. Furthermore, drawing upon his early Stanford experience with natural language search engines, John Sack and his team implemented a natural language search engine for the HighWire article database, further enhancing discoverability and user experience.
Community at the Core: The Guiding Principle of HighWire Press
Heather Staines’ observation about HighWire’s technological reputation leads to a crucial clarification from John Sack: while technology was central, the driving force behind HighWire was its community. John Sack emphasizes that HighWire wasn’t merely a Stanford University asset, but a collaborative ecosystem of leading scholarly publishers united by a shared technology platform.
This collaborative nature, while a strength, presented the challenge of collective decision-making. John Sack attributes his aptitude for facilitating consensus and collaborative decision-making to experiences dating back to his youth. His first management role at a young age, as assistant manager at a country club supervising older staff, taught him the art of aligning diverse individuals towards a common goal through persuasion and understanding, rather than directive authority. John Sack draws a parallel to managing faculty at Stanford and the independent, often libertarian, ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley’s tech culture. Leading HighWire, therefore, required a “community organizing” approach, fostering consensus and collaboration among fiercely independent scholarly publishers and technologists. John Sack‘s leadership style at HighWire was characterized by facilitating conversations, identifying common ground, and providing technological solutions to support the publishers’ collective vision. He recounts an anecdote where a senior HighWire team member described his approach as turning every problem into a “community-organizing problem,” a statement that encapsulates his collaborative leadership philosophy.
John Sack reflects on his early experiences as the “pipsqueak” in various social contexts, learning to rely on persuasion and collaboration rather than direct confrontation. He describes his approach as listening attentively to diverse perspectives, synthesizing the best ideas, and articulating the collective aspirations of the community. Jokingly, John Sack likens himself to an early version of ChatGPT, aggregating and synthesizing information from a vast information space. When faced with challenges at HighWire, John Sack‘s strategy involved consulting a wide range of stakeholders – technical staff for technical issues, and publishers for business challenges – to gather insights and formulate solutions collaboratively. He credits this collaborative approach for seminal HighWire innovations, such as toll-free inter-journal linking. This idea, originating from publishers themselves, required John Sack to facilitate discussions and provide the technical infrastructure to realize their vision, even when it challenged conventional notions of content control and access.
Navigating the Future of Scholarly Communication: AI and Beyond
The interview transitions to John Sack‘s forward-looking perspective on technologies poised to reshape scholarly communication. He prefers the lens of “keeping an eye on” emerging technologies rather than making definitive predictions, acknowledging the hype cycles and long-term impacts inherent in technological evolution. John Sack reiterates the core purpose of scholarly publishing: leveraging collective intelligence to build upon existing knowledge. He emphasizes technologies that amplify this leverage, citing search engines and the web itself as prime examples.
Currently, John Sack‘s focus is firmly on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He recalls a HighWire workshop held for journal editors several years prior, seeking their perspectives on AI. The editors expressed a desire for AI tools that augmented their capabilities and saved time, while maintaining human control over outcomes. They envisioned AI as “augmented intelligence,” assisting with tasks like manuscript review and editing, particularly in handling detailed research findings often delegated to junior researchers. John Sack highlights the recent advancements in AI’s text and image generation capabilities as a significant leap. He acknowledges the current variability in AI output quality, stemming from its training on the vast and inconsistent data of the web. John Sack‘s vision is to leverage AI trained on high-quality scholarly data sources like Google Scholar, envisioning tools capable of summarizing research, facilitating rapid literature review, and maintaining evidentiary rigor.
Beyond AI, John Sack remains keenly interested in addressing “friction in the workflow” of researchers. Drawing upon ethnographic research methods from his Stanford background, John Sack emphasizes the importance of understanding researchers’ experiences and pain points in accessing and utilizing research literature. Authentication challenges, particularly remote access to campus research databases, are cited as a significant friction point that John Sack has actively worked to address, including collaborations with Google Scholar to streamline access.
Remote Collaboration and the Evolving Research Landscape
The interview, conducted remotely, prompts a discussion about remote collaboration tools like Zoom and their impact on scholarly work, echoing the earlier discussion about remote document sharing via laser printers. John Sack recounts HighWire’s researcher interviews conducted during the pandemic’s second year, focusing on early-career researchers. These interviews revealed how researchers adapted to pandemic-induced remote work, shifting towards writing and utilizing collaboration tools. While researchers adopted tools like Zoom, John Sack notes the limitations of current digital whiteboarding tools compared to the nuances of face-to-face whiteboard collaboration, particularly in theoretical research. He questions whether general-purpose collaboration tools have adequately evolved to meet the specific needs of research groups and whether research communities are developing their own specialized tools.
John Sack observes the ongoing debates about returning to the office, particularly in Silicon Valley. He raises questions about the comparative effectiveness of remote versus in-office work, considering different job types, project phases, and organizational contexts, especially for early-stage startups. He emphasizes that the implications of remote work extend beyond worker productivity, impacting urban landscapes, retail, and various aspects of modern life.
John Sack‘s insights offer a valuable perspective on the past, present, and future of scholarly publishing, highlighting the transformative role of technology, the enduring importance of community, and the ongoing evolution of research practices in the digital age. His career serves as a testament to the power of interdisciplinary thinking, the importance of mentorship, and the enduring quest to enhance the dissemination and accessibility of knowledge.
Interview conducted by Heather Staines (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3876-1182), Senior Strategy Consultant, Delta Think. Edited by Tony Alves (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7054-1732), SVP, Product Management, HighWire Press.
