Innovation starts with HighWire’s Intelligent Publishing Platform

In this ALPSP guest blog, John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire Press shares how how Highwire are working with their user community to drive innovation.

We help scientific and scholarly publishers stay ahead of research and education trends, adapt to changing user demands, and increase revenues across channels. HighWire continually invests in data science across all our products to offer integrated analytics and insights that drive digital innovation.

The evolution of print and digital publishing is accelerating. Publishers work with us to bring innovative products and services to market faster and deliver the very best user experiences and business outcomes with our Intelligent Platform. Our customers tell us that the evidence we offer, via our Strategic Business Consultancy Services, transform conversations about content development and product strategy. Working together as a strategic business partner, our goals are to advance innovation and best practices, inform successful editorial and business decisions, and create great products and services and business outcomes.

Insights drive innovation across the industry

At HighWire Publishers’ meetings, our community shares analysis, insights, and practical advice to address the challenges they face as well as a future focus on strategies to keep ahead of the curve in the ever-changing publishing ecosystem. Conversations at our meetings focus on delivering what users want, improving workflows to attract readers and leading authors, and creating new revenue opportunities. You can watch brief video excerpts of presentations at recent meetings now available for the first time on our web site outlining specific achievements working collaboratively with HighWire.

Joe Puskarz, Director, Division of Journal Publishing, American Academy of Pediatrics shares the strategic process, data insights, and success metrics around a dramatic change in AAP’s Pediatrics print strategy and online publication gateway to better serve readers and advertisers while improving profitability. See videos Optimizing a publications gateway with reader feedback and analytics and Pediatrics Print Strategy: User behavior drives product development.

HighWire’s Intelligent Platform includes end-to-end publishing solutions from strategy to delivery. Machine intelligence and predictive analytics are applied across all our products to help understand user behavior patterns to attract target readers, authors, and advertisers and inform product development. Kim Murphy and Nandhini Kuntipuram from American College of Cardiology (ACC), describe their journey to develop customer personas, define product requirements and optimize the user experience, leading to the successful launch of ACC’s journals with JCore. Watch Using field research in UX to inform and measure website success. Don’t miss brief case studies on more recent journal launches with JCore.

Our industry's need to improve workflows for efficiency regularly generates discussion and innovation. HighWire collaborates with publishers to develop and implement innovative approaches that support researchers who require faster times to publication while continuing to meet rigorous editorial and content management requirements. Stuart Taylor, Royal Society; Claire Rawlinson, BMJ; and Claire Moulton, Company of Biologists; each contributed a recent London session on “Emerging Trends in Academic Publishing." Issues and opportunities addressed included pre-print servers, post-publication changes designed for an online world, overlay journals, and post publication peer review.

Highlights from our previous Publishers' Meetings

Publishers recently presented on a range of topics at our Fall Meeting in September, including our session on the “Bibliometric Intelligence” product pilot with Meta which illustrated the opportunities offered by predictive analytics. 

Read about past presentations by Valda Vinson, AAAS; Suzanne Rosenzweig, Society for Neuroscience; Keith Gigliello, American Society of Hematology; and an illustrated case study using Impact Vizor to compare article citation levels across disciplines within a journal and to other journals.

Getting in touch with us is easier than ever! Click Talk to Us and connect with industry thought leaders and experts like John Sack regarding emerging trends you think should be addressed in our 2018 meetings.

John Sack is the founding director of HighWire Press and focuses on market assessment, client relations, technology innovation, and the kind of thought leadership and industry-forward thinking that has helped defined the Company's mission since 1995.

Website: www.highwirepress.com/

Twitter: @highwirepress

Facebook: www.facebook.com/HighWirePress

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1797

Highwire is a proud Silver Sponsor of the ALPSP 2017 Annual Conference.

The Emotion of Data – Your Child Is Always Beautiful

In week’s guest blog we hear from Kent Anderson, the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, on the emotional pull of well-presented data….. 

An Excel spreadsheet or data table isn’t usually enough to rouse the emotions. Rigid rows and columns crammed with shapes are difficult to bond with and even harder to get worked up over. Trends are concealed in there somewhere, meaning lurks, yet our senses are stymied by how raw data are assembled.

Over the past 18 months, guiding RedLink, a data company with the slogan “See What You’re Missing,” has opened my eyes to the wonderful emotional pull of well-presented data – what we might call the ultrasound of data, when a real emotional connection begins to occur. I’ve attended dozens of sessions in which we reveal to new customers their data in our products, and every time there is a strong emotional response – the “ooh!” and “wow!” – because they are seeing something of great interest clearly for the first time.

Visualization isn’t the only way to create emotional connections for users. There are other techniques, such as gamification, personalization, and connection.

Visualization – Seeing Is Believing

Turn a set of columns and rows into a set of interactive curves or lines or bars, and suddenly meaning leaps out. Making these trends clear is powerful for sales people, business leaders, managers, and purchasers. There is also the ability RedLink has to import data for libraries and publishers, saving them days or weeks of effort, that liberates time to look at the data and think about its implications.

Gamification – It Makes Data Engaging

Games are great ways to make complex subjects approachable and more understandable. We’ve adopted some aspects of gamification in our products, adding Unlocks and clever names and treasure maps to business-specific products that otherwise would be officious and off-putting. These conceptual candies help to sweeten the experience, adding memorable and pleasant dimensions to the user experience while boosting utility.

Personalization – It’s Your Data

Increasingly, personal data are viewed not as commodities but as elements you have a right to manage. The EU has been more proactive on this front than the US, for example, with initiatives like “the right to be forgotten” and data portability. This places new constraints on data companies. Yet, constraints drive design and innovation, so new services like Remarq – which allows users to put a lot of data about their usage of the scientific and scholarly literature in one place  – are on the leading edge of the data personalization trend.

Connection – Relevance Matters to Meaning

Data matter the most when you can immediately do something with them. We focus a lot on making this happen, whether it’s allowing users to only see data for customers they manage, to see trends across disciplines instead of just around products, to view the macro (consortia, bundles, titles from multiple sources) and the micro (individual institutions, individual titles, individual sources), giving quick paths to relevant views is crucial to making data matter. These views connect the user with the data so that decisions can happen quickly and confidently.

Conclusion

As an independent data company, RedLink helps libraries, consortia, publishers, and end-users “see what they’re missing.” By using visualization, gamification, personalization, and connection, data can become powerful, efficient, and even enjoyable sources of information to help publishers, librarians, administrators, researchers, editors, and authors make better decisions.

https://www.redlink.com 

Redlink is a proud Silver Sponsor of the ALPSP 2017 Annual Conference.

Breaking Down Barriers in Scholarly Publishing

In this ALPSP guest blog, Craig Griffin, Solutions Engineer at Silverchair Information Systems discusses a two-prong strategy to help scholarly publishers optimize the use and functionality of their content.

We in scholarly publishing have visions of a future powered by Artificial Intelligence. Self-learning applications. Powerful discovery techniques. Machine-based learning tools. Change is a constant in any industry, but the rate of change within scholarly publishing is increasing rapidly on all fronts.  Journals and books, long the bread and butter of publishers, have now been joined by an explosion of additional content types such as video, data sets, grey literature, and learning formats.  Optimizing the use and functionality of this content in light of researchers’ needs to author, publish, and discover highly varied content sets alone presents a challenge.

A second challenge is found in the sheer volume of content being pushed through ever greater numbers of channels.  Discovery of content, regardless of channel, occurs off-platform on the servers of Google, PubMed, Crossref, or any number of social media platforms that no publisher, society, or author controls. With content in myriad formats and fractured delivery channels, it’s challenging for even the most capable power-user to be sure that their research is exhaustive or to stay on top of the latest developments.

A solution to this problem involves a two-prong strategy.

First, publishers need to Standardize the entire content set. Of course, content formats have evolved over the years, sometimes in a prescribed, documented evolution, and other times completely organically.  Since the software to display this content needs to handle all these variations, the content itself then becomes monolithic—it works in this one specific way, with this software layer above it, but does not function correctly outside of the content structure/software pair. It’s completely locked in its database.

Standardized formats allow content to reside in a more efficient database.  With a clearly defined data and database structure, the software layer above can extract and display information across content eras and handle associations easily.  Standardization also allows content types to be related in a far more efficient and flexible manner.  A video and a journal article, for example, with separate but standard structures can be related via metadata, content elements, or any other association desired by the publisher.  Additionally, Standardized content becomes much more accessible to machines, which as of now are the primary consumer of content. This can be via discovery bots, search engine crawlers, or Text and Data Mining apparatuses.  The rate and volume of these automated tools is the only true match to the explosion of content.

Once Standardized, publishers can then deploy the second strategy:  Breaking Down Silos.  This is achieved by bringing all the Standardized content—of any type—into a single platform. Once the unification of content has occurred, with discovery, display, relational associations, and third-party linkages all coming from one technology stack, content can then become substantially more functional for the end-user.  Content can then be organized by editorial concepts rather than simply by types or titles.  By improving the organizational options of standardized content, publishers can then tailor (and sell) collections targeted at infinitely narrower user groups.  This achieves the direct benefit of presenting specific content to a user at the exact moment of need.

It’s important for publishers to think of the user’s journey to their content (via any number of discovery methods): think of the user’s purpose in accessing the content. Although AI tools have begun the work of meeting the user at the right moment on their path, publishers can accelerate this process to the benefit of both their audience and their bottom line. By following the strategies of Standardization and Breaking Down Silos, users will be rewarded with an experience that works for them, rather than solely for the content.

About Silverchair: Silverchair integrates and delivers scholarly and professional content from a single platform – journals, books, video, custom formats, and more. The Silverchair Platform delivers advanced semantic technologies and publishing platforms to STM and humanities publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. We collaborate with publishers to propel their content to greater reach and impact.

Website: www.silverchair.com

Twitter: @silverchairnews

Facebook: www.facebook.com/SilverchairNews/

Silverchair is a proud Silver Sponsor of the ALPSP 2017 Annual Conference. Hear from Chief Product Officer, Jake Zarnegar on his takeaways from the ALPSP conference in this insightful video blog.