Mentorship that Inspires: Personal Stories from the ALPSP Mentorship Programme

Liz Malnar, Clelia Petracca and Martina Sollai, mentees on the 2024 ALPSP Mentorship Scheme

Martina

The ALPSP Mentorship Scheme came along at the right time for me. At this career stage, I wanted to dedicate more time to strengthening my network, comparing experiences with seasoned professionals, reflecting on my choices, and gaining external insights into my plans.

I value opportunities to understand publishing from different perspectives, thus in my application, I tried to convey how my interests were diverse. I admit that somehow, I was a bit concerned about finding a match who could relate to this – other careers often look linear from the outside, while mine has been touching on several sides of the industry so far.

With this premise, the experience in the scheme was even more rewarding because I found a great match of views and approaches in my mentor: an expert, caring professional who loves mentoring early career colleagues and enjoys exploring the industry, just like me.

Since our first meeting, I felt energized by our exchanges: the shared process of setting up goals and reviewing them made me feel empowered to follow up and act.

I have a great appreciation for the generosity shown by my mentor in introducing me to other professionals in the industry, which led to interesting and inspiring opportunities like becoming part of one of ALPSP Special Interest Groups.

One sentence my mentor told me sums up very well the sense of the ALPSP mentorship experience for me: this is a space for you to take control over things you would like to do for your own professional development.

Liz

I joined the ALPSP mentorship program because I was relatively new to the world of publishing, a field that is both dynamic and ever-evolving. I was eager to expand my professional network and gain a deeper understanding of current industry trends. The goal was to equip myself with the knowledge and insights needed to grow and progress in my career effectively.

At first, I was uncertain about what to expect and felt a little intimidated, but those concerns quickly faded after our initial meeting. My mentor’s passion and expertise were immediately apparent, creating an environment that put me at ease. We developed a strong working relationship through a structured yet flexible approach that was tailored to my specific needs. Each session offered practical advice and insightful feedback, making the experience both engaging and rewarding.

The focus wasn't on receiving direct answers; instead, I was encouraged to independently find solutions, fostering a proactive mindset and the courage to act on my own. This empowering approach now allows me to confidently tackle challenges and see them as opportunities for growth.

The tasks assigned were deliberately outside my comfort zone, designed to push me into new experiences and activities not typically part of my daily routine. This strategy effectively highlighted areas where I needed further development while also affirming the strengths I already possessed.

Overall, this mentorship experience significantly broadened my perspective on the publishing industry and instilled a newfound confidence in my abilities. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to learn from a seasoned professional and am excited to continue applying these insights as I advance in my career.

 

Clelia

I came across the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme by chance and, when I decided to apply, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I was in that odd stage of my career where I did not have an immediate goal to reach nor a clear understanding of my next move. Curiosity prompted me, and I approached this scheme as an opportunity to learn more about the publishing industry and expand my network beyond my usual circle.

Filling out the application was an enriching experience itself. It forced me to think of the professional I want to become and how to develop new skills spendable outside my role. Being a better editor and leader is a (never ending) journey -an aspiration rather than a measurable goal-, and I was a bit worried about setting unrealistic expectations before meeting with my mentor.

Starting the programme shucked any doubt and my mentor was extremely supportive from the very first day. We met monthly and talked about all things publishing: our jobs and the day-to-day challenges, our career journeys and the inspiring people we met along the way, how the industry has changed over the years (from dress code to hybrid work and DEI). To me, it never felt like a mentor-mentee relationship: we were peers exchanging ideas and empowering each other in ways we did not expect.

This mentorship scheme is a gift to yourself: a wonderful opportunity to reclaim the time and mind space to focus on what really matters to you.

 

About the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme

The scheme aims to connect colleagues across the publishing industry and provide a wider network of expertise and skills to help foster development and progression. Open to ALPSP members (as mentees and mentors) as well as non-members (mentors only), the scheme was the winner of a ‘Most Impactful Mentoring Award’ in 2024. For more information and to register visit our website.

The ALPSP International Mentorship scheme is sponsored by Publishers' Licensing Services.

 

About the Authors

Liz Malnar, Senior Journal Specialist, Frontiers

Liz Malnar is a Senior Journal Specialist at Frontiers, serving as the primary liaison for authors, editors, and reviewers. She collaborates with them to develop impactful article collections and ensure successful outcomes at every stage of the editorial process.

 

Clelia Petracca, Commissioning Editor, Palgrave Macmillan

Clelia Petracca is Commissioning Editor in Creativity Studies and Disability Studies at Palgrave Macmillan. At Springer Nature she also co-chairs the ‘SDG 5 Working Group: Gender Equality’, a company-wide initiative to support Springer Nature’s goal of becoming the SDG publisher of choice with internal and external initiatives and partnerships.

 

Martina Sollai, Account Development Specialist, Frontiers

Originally a researcher in marine microbiology and paleoclimate studies, Martina Sollai moved to academic publishing in 2018, working in content commissioning at Frontiers. After a stint in project management for marine conservation, Martina returned to Frontiers in 2022, now focusing on institutional partnerships in the EMEA region.

Reflections on the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme

Anna Hubbard, mentee on the 2024 ALPSP Mentorship Scheme

Since beginning my journey into scholarly publishing in 2022, I have continuously sought to learn more about the industry’s vast scope and hone my professional skills. So, when I heard about the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme, it felt like an incredible opportunity to obtain new insights from other people’s career experiences.

The mentorship scheme commenced with a well-considered matching process, which I found to be particularly impressive. Before being matched, I was encouraged to share what I wanted to achieve from the programme by filling out a form with my background and interests so that I could be paired with a suitable mentor to match my goals.

Soon after, I was introduced to my new mentor, Emma. Emma has a wealth of professional management experience in STM and society publishing and shares similar interests to me regarding Open Access initiatives. What I found particularly exciting about our match was that while some aspects of our experiences overlapped, some also differed — thus creating numerous opportunities for me to expand my understanding of the profession as a whole.

Emma and I set clear goals for our mentoring sessions, including covering ongoing industry trends, developing strategies for overcoming common editorial challenges, and considering long-term career growth. We met regularly throughout the year, with each meeting covering a chosen agenda of topics we wanted to mutually discuss. Our conversations on AI and open research were particularly fascinating and have enabled me to better understand the industry’s varied responses as well as consider future trajectories.

Emma also challenged me to push myself out of my comfort zone. The belief she had in my abilities often exceeded my own, encouraging me to strive for my full potential in the professional sphere. Her guidance also helped me implement actionable goals to advance my career aspirations and develop confidence while transitioning between job roles.

The wider mentoring team also played an active role throughout the mentoring scheme, hosting numerous meetings that provided an excellent opportunity to connect with other mentees and grow my professional network internationally. The programme coordinators were also wonderfully proactive in giving mentees advice on navigating mentoring relationships, enabling me to benefit fully from the scheme. This additional support was especially useful for me as I had not been part of a mentoring initiative before.

The ALPSP International Mentoring Scheme provided me with the space to grow my professional self actively, receive feedback, and expand my understanding of the publishing industry. I am incredibly grateful for the positive experience!

About the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme

The scheme aims to connect colleagues across the publishing industry and provide a wider network of expertise and skills to help foster development and progression. Open to ALPSP members (as mentees and mentors) as well as non-members (mentors only), the scheme was the winner of a ‘Most Impactful Mentoring Award’ in 2024. For more information and to register visit our website.


The ALPSP International Mentorship scheme is sponsored by Publishers' Licensing Services.

About the Author

Anna Hubbard is an Editorial Assistant at Cambridge University Press & Assessment. She is responsible for organising key content workflows and provides operational and administrative support within the psychology books team. Anna began working in scholarly publishing in 2022 as an Editorial Coordinator at the European Consortium for Political Research.

Stepping out of the comfort zone to help others in publishing by Lorna Berrett, Fiona Carr & Louise Marie Hutton

Lorna Berrett, Fiona Carr and Louise Marie Hutton, mentors on the 2024 ALPSP Mentorship Scheme

For many mentors in the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme this year, it was their first time taking part. However, our mentor cohort is varied in levels of professional experience. Taking part in the mentorship scheme is not just about what you can do for your mentee, but also what you can gain from them. Whether you’re still early in your career or are well-established, the mentorship scheme can help you meet new people, expand your networks, and gain fresh insight into a familiar industry with the support of the ALPSP behind you.

Expanding horizons by Louise Marie Hutton

Since I began my publishing career in 2019, I feel very lucky to have worked with some incredibly thoughtful and kind colleagues who mentored me across various aspects of my career. Due to their impact, I decided to join the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme as a mentor, rather than a mentee. Despite my worries that my lack of managerial or professional mentoring experience would be a hindrance, I wanted to offer constructive advice or even just a sympathetic ear to a fellow publishing professional. The benefits to joining the award-winning ALPSP mentorship scheme are plentiful, but for me personally, I relished the opportunity to work with someone outside my usual networks.

Other than ALPSP, I don’t belong to any other professional organisations or networks where my connections stretch beyond my immediate colleagues. The benefit of networking through the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme is that not only was I paired with someone in a different area of publishing – journals vs books – my mentee worked for a society in a different subject area. Throughout the course of our mentorship, it was fascinating to hear about how different our roles could be despite working in the same industry. I established a very easy rapport with my mentee; it felt like a really mutually beneficial relationship where it seemed we both wanted to connect with someone outside of our daily ‘work bubble’.

Beyond the relationship with my mentee, I really enjoyed the connections made with other mentors. I’ve been fortunate to be part of a super inspiring group of mentors and feel my horizons have been expanded even further by my inclusion in the mentorship programme.

Beating imposter syndrome by Lorna Berrett

I signed up for the ALPSP mentoring program because I wanted to get more involved in the publishing community beyond my own company and get some new perspectives. However, even with many years in the industry, I still wondered if I had what it took to be a mentor. Classic imposter syndrome!

My assigned mentee was from a different function within publishing and was growing in their career. What did I have that could support this bright and dedicated individual, I thought? But I recalled when I moved from managing people doing a job I had done, to managing people who did something else, it meant I learned new things and so did they. This was mirrored in my mentoring experience.

Although my mentee and I have different jobs, I realised that the experience I had in managing teams, managing upwards and exposure to business strategy was useful and transferrable. Discussing specific scenarios also helped me reflect on what I’d done in the past, what I’d learned, and how I might deal with those issues again in the future. Sharing experiences of both what can work and what can go wrong is always useful and even just talking them through can be helpful.

The opportunity to see another point of view, in depth, from a different department was incredibly valuable to me. Hearing their perspective on publishing issues and learning about the demands and priorities of another role gave me some new insights. I probably appreciate some of my colleagues and their challenges a little better as a result!

The Mentorloop platform and the practical focus on goals and real-world issues provided a great structure. This framework was especially helpful at the start to set goals and expectations, to reflect, and to build in transparency and trust. This helped us create a safe space for both mentor and mentee to ask questions and test out solutions to the various issues that we discussed. It was a positive experience for us both that we plan to continue.   

New perspectives from an old hat! by Fiona Carr

I first joined the world of scholarly publishing quite unwittingly at the age of 21 when I just needed a job right out of university to pay the bills. That first job was a Permissions Assistant at Elsevier, back when rights departments churned through piles and piles of written requests that arrive by post (or fax!) to reproduce content from books and journals. Fast forward to now some 29 years later and I’m very fortunate to have worked for some incredible companies, have met and built up relationships with lots of great colleagues and peers across the industry.

So, how could I possibly benefit from joining the ALPSP Mentoring Scheme now? Well, I actually benefited from this experience immensely and it only served to remind me how invaluable such an opportunity to take part as a mentee right back when I started would have been very helpful! As a mentor in this year’s program, I really enjoyed working with and getting to know both of my mentees. It was clear that both were at very different stages in their careers and had diverse perspectives and goals, but I enjoyed sharing my experiences and (I hope) giving some guidance and useful tips and tricks that will help them as they progress. While not continuing with the program in any formal capacity, I plan to keep in touch with both mentees informally from time to time.

It also illustrated what an immense challenge it is to come into this industry now. Not only is the pace of change within the industry moving at an exponential rate – AI, research integrity, open access to name but a few challenges. But anyone coming into this industry now is tasked with the added challenge of what is predominantly a home-working culture. Gone (on the most part) are the impromptu chats around the photocopier, in the kitchen while making a brew and just bumping into each other in the corridor! We now have the daily challenges of working remotely, endless Zoom and Teams calls. Establishing yourself and getting to know colleagues and peers in this industry is even more difficult now than it ever was. That the ALPSP Mentoring Scheme can play a part in helping to overcome these additional challenges will prove to be one of its biggest strengths.  

Testimonial quotes:

Louise Marie:

“It was such a joy to be a part of the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme as a mentor. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to connect with other industry professionals and it really helped to remind me that we all learn from each other, regardless of whether you’re a mentor or a mentee. I enjoyed collaborating alongside some very inspirational mentors and really value the connections made with my mentee, too.”

Lorna Berrett:

“It was a great experience to get outside the “four walls” of one company and get the opportunity to talk about the challenges and opportunities we face across publishing. I’ve learned from my mentee’s experience, reflected on my own, and built my knowledge and understanding of our business. I’ve already recommended to colleagues to sign up for 2025.”

Fiona Carr’s mentee:

“The ALPSP mentorship program was incredibly valuable for my career progression. It provided an opportunity to set goals collaboratively, and I often left sessions with a new lease of motivation to focus on my career development and clarify what I seek in a role. My mentor offered invaluable advice during challenging conversations in my own organisation and shared practical tips specific to my current role that I still use today.”

 

About the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme

The scheme aims to connect colleagues across the publishing industry and provide a wider network of expertise and skills to help foster development and progression. Open to ALPSP members (as mentees and mentors) as well as non-members (mentors only), the scheme was the winner of a ‘Most Impactful Mentoring Award’ in 2024. For more information and to register visit our website.

The ALPSP International Mentorship scheme is sponsored by Publishers' Licensing Services.

 

About the Authors:

Lorna Berrett, Director of Marketing, Partner Acquisition & Retention, Taylor & Francis

Lorna leads the Partnerships Marketing team at Taylor & Francis working  to attract and engage publishing partners and editors. Lorna has 30+ years of experience in academic publishing at T&F, Wiley and Blackwell working across digital product management, marketing and communications.

 

Fiona Carr, Sales Director – Ringgold, Copyright Clearance Center

Fiona is responsible for global sales and account management of Ringgold Solutions. With 29 years’ experience in scholarly publishing, Fiona’s background is in rights, licensing, sales and business development having worked at Elsevier, Oxford University Press and OCLC among others.

 

Louise Marie Hutton, Commissioning Editor (Books), John Wiley & Sons

Louise Marie is responsible for commissioning book content in Dermatology, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Paediatrics, Medical Biosciences and other areas within Clinical Medicine. Louise Marie is also a member of Wiley’s Women of Wiley group, designed to elevate and amplify the voices of our colleague community, deliver impactful events and programs, and engender a more connected workforce.

 

Your diversity is our strength: encouraging first-time mentors to make a difference by Miranda Ashby-Wood, Christina Emery & Marios Karouzos

Miranda Ashby-Wood, Christina Emery & Marios Karouzos, mentors on the 2024 ALPSP Mentorship Scheme

The close of 2024 saw the official wrap up of the 2024 ALPSP Mentorship Scheme that attracted more than 119 mentees from at least 18 different countries, mentored by 103 mentors over the course of eight months, from May to December 2024. The programme provided mentees with a wide network of expertise and skills to help foster their skill development and career progression. It also encouraged collaborative learning between mentors and mentees, both benefitting from the shared dialogue and experience.

Let us take stock of 2024’s mentor/mentee cohort. Most mentees self-identified as female (80%). While the same was true for mentors, the gender ratio was slightly less skewed (75% female) - you can see the full distribution below. Under the assumption that mentors are likelier to be more senior in their careers than mentees, this difference illustrates the well-known leaky pipeline effect, where women are less represented in more senior roles.

In terms of regional diversity, perhaps unsurprisingly, most mentors and mentees were based in Europe and the UK, reflecting the ALPSP membership. Interestingly, while the geographic distributions of mentors and mentees broadly matched, we note a clear dearth of mentor representation from the Asia Pacific region, which includes the Indian sub-continent.

So, what do these numbers tell us? We are not as diverse as we would like, especially lacking in male representation – something which we hope will improve for the 2025 scheme. The numbers may also imply that certain groups of people within our industry may not feel as empowered (or welcomed) to step forward as role models and mentors. What can we do about it? This and other similar mentoring programmes are great tools to increase skills and senior leadership capacity across the industry with mentees of today becoming the mentors of tomorrow.

This blog post also aims to dispel some myths about what a mentor can look like and seeks to empower those of you considering taking up the mentor mantle in the 2025 iteration of ALPSP mentorship scheme.

What does a mentor look like?

Many people may immediately generate an image of a very senior professional – perhaps a senior manager or head of department, or even a CEO – when asked to visualise a mentor, but this is a common misconception.

Anyone can be a mentor, and in fact having a range of individuals at different stages of their careers can benefit a programme such as this. It isn’t necessarily a senior individual mentoring a more junior individual; you could mentor someone at the same career level as you or even someone more senior. One example of how this could work is the scenario where you are perhaps at an earlier stage in your career, but you may have experience in a particular project or area that someone more senior is new to, or is looking to move into. Another scenario is where an early career individual may provide a different perspective to a common problem that is complementary, thereby providing new insights and diversifying established views.

Each mentor-mentee relationship is different, and every individual will have different goals. The aim of the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme is to pair individuals together to ensure both meet their goals. If you have been considering signing up but don’t feel experienced enough or are concerned you don’t have enough knowledge, fear not. We can guarantee there is a mentee out there who would love to learn from your experience and would really value your insight!

Embrace the leap: first-time mentorship matters

First-time mentors often underestimate the impact they can have. Some new mentors expressed an initial hesitancy to participate, fearing that they might not know enough to help their mentee. However, after completing the programme, they shared positive feedback with ALPSP that everything worked well and that they felt their contributions were worthwhile.

Tips for first timers

·        The mentee sets their own goals and meeting agendas, so just by having regular meetings you can guide them through their goals which helps them find motivation and be accountable.

·        You’re not expected to know everything, but you may be able to help your mentee help themselves. You could share useful links, provide them with training resources, or connect them to others who may be able to help.

·        Just by providing another perspective or asking provocative questions, you can challenge your mentee to see things in another light and consider other routes or solutions.

·        There is support available to guide you through the process. The Mentorloop platform has many useful resources on being a mentor, and there is a group chat where mentors can support each other. This adds a real community feel to the programme, and some mentors utilise the chat to ask others for advice or to meet at conferences.

·        In addition, the ALPSP team holds check in sessions at the beginning, during and at the end of the programme to help prepare you.

It’s time to take action

So, apart from helping others, why should you sign up? Being a mentor is extremely rewarding, with benefits including personal growth, increased confidence, learning from your mentee, and expanding your network.

To summarise, the ALPSP mentoring programme needs you! We need diverse perspectives from all regions, genders, backgrounds and levels of seniority, so consider signing up today. To learn more about the benefits of participating, we will be releasing a second blog post focusing on the advantages for mentors.

Testimonial quotes:

Miranda:

“Being part of the ALPSP Mentorship Scheme was an extremely rewarding experience. I developed my mentoring skills and gained confidence in my own abilities and knowledge, and also learnt a lot from my mentee – it was always refreshing to hear another perspective on many aspects of publishing. It was great to see my mentee grow in skills and confidence and reach their goals, and I thank them for their time, commitment and enthusiasm. I encourage anyone reading this to sign up as a mentor!”

Marios:

“Every mentorship is unique in its challenges and rewards. All of them, however, catalysed growth and development for my mentee and myself. I am very proud of my mentee’s achievements and their thoughtful engagement with our mentorship. Sign me up for 2025!”

Christina:

“Being a mentor was very fulfilling; after a great experience being a mentee the prior year, it was rewarding to give something back by helping someone else in need. It also helped me gain confidence through appreciating my own knowledge and skill set. Connecting with others in the industry was a bonus.”

About the ALPSP International Mentorship Scheme

The scheme aims to connect colleagues across the publishing industry and provide a wider network of expertise and skills to help foster development and progression. Open to ALPSP members (as mentees and mentors) as well as non-members (mentors only), the scheme was the winner of a ‘Most Impactful Mentoring Award’ in 2024. For more information and to register visit our website.

The ALPSP International Mentorship scheme is sponsored by Publishers' Licensing Services.

About the Authors:

Miranda Ashby-Wood, Co-Head of Publishing, British Institute of Radiology

Miranda is responsible for the strategic development of the BIR journal portfolio and leading the publishing department at the BIR. She is also responsible for the commissioning and development of BIR video courses and content within the BIR journal portfolio, working with members of the community to deliver relevant and high-quality material. Miranda is Co-Chair of the ALPSP Education Committee and a Director on the ALPSP Board.

Christina Emery, Head of Thought Leadership Programmes, Springer Nature

Christina is Head of Thought Leadership Programmes at Springer Nature, where she is responsible for both the development and execution of the organisation's thought leadership strategy. Christina is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit.

 

Marios Karouzos, Head of Publishing Strategy – Reviews, News & Opinion, Nature Portfolio,
Springer Nature

Marios is responsible for the strategy of the Reviews, News & Opinion content published in the Nature Portfolio. In addition to his role, Marios is a member of the editorial steering committee and a judge for the Inspiring Women in Science Nature Awards and co-chairs the Springer Nature SDG 5 "Gender equality" working group and the Springer Nature Women Employee Network.

Guest Blog Post - Wiley

Research outputs beyond the PDF: Why they matter, and how to get started

Going beyond the default

While the PDF has become the de facto global standard for publishing articles online, the publishing tools of today offer a whole range of ways to publish content that is more flexible, more engaging, and more user-friendly, as well as better addresses current publishing standards. It’s time to broaden our scope beyond the PDF! 

Compared to PDF, both HTML and EPUB3 are better formats for accessibility—not just in the technical sense of image descriptions and ARIA roles, but also in the broader sense of allowing the user to resize and reflow text or zoom in on images. 

But there are also many other ways to publish both the outcomes of research and the materials that lead to those outcomes, and many compelling reasons to use them. The three we’ll focus on here are making research data and protocols available to other researchers around the world; engaging your users with more varied and interesting offerings; and translating research for non-scientists and non-specialists. 

Publishing data sets: Why, what, and how

The why of making researchers’ data available, in keeping with FAIR data principles, is well recognized: when the data behind the research is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, replication studies can be more easily carried out, and testing the replicability of published results is key to advancing science and improving research integrity. 

The how may be more challenging. “Publish researchers’ data alongside the articles or books based on that data” seems perfectly straightforward—until you start thinking about all the things “data set” might mean. Depending on the research and the discipline in question, the data behind a published article might be anything from a vast database of testing data or geolocation coordinates to computer code, from a linguistic corpus to a collection of audio recorded interviews, archival photographs, or tweets. (We won’t get into collections of cells, core samples, or water samples.) While all are data sets and deserve FAIR data treatment, each brings a different set of technical challenges to the publication process.

Using a feature, like Digital Objects on the Literatum publishing platform, that supports multiple publication formats allows publishers to offer—or even require—researchers to make their data available on the same platform and at the same level of discoverability as the publications based on it. A wide variety of data types—essentially, anything that exists in a digital format—can be hosted alongside an article or book, assigned a Datacite or Crossref DOI, and linked bidirectionally with the publication and any other data sets or research products. Depositing a DOI makes data sets easier to find and to cite, benefiting the researchers on both ends of the data-reuse transaction.

Protocols, notebooks, and more

Just as important for replicability as data sets are the protocols used in collecting and analyzing the data—from survey instruments to lab procedures to focus-group guidelines. Publishing research protocols alongside data and findings further encourages replication studies.

A related use case is that of computational notebooks, which are widely used by researchers in many scientific disciplines to carry out, manage, and share their workflows and data analyses but which most publishers can’t yet accommodate as part of the research output. Wiley and Atypon are part of the Sloan Foundation–funded project Notebooks Now!, led by the American Geophysical Union, aimed at developing a standard model for publishing computational notebooks.

Why is this important? As Shelley Stall et al. write,

Providing notebooks as available and curated research outputs would greatly enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research, integrating into computational workflows. The notebooks allow deeper investigations into studies and display of results because they link data and software together dynamically with what are often final figures and plots. [Read the full Notebooks Now! proposal at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6981363.]

Publishing computational notebooks is just one way that making researchers’ data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable helps elevate both integrity and equity across research and publishing.

Access, accessibility, and knowledge translation

Data availability is critical. But publishing “beyond the PDF” isn’t just for data sets!

When we talk about Open Access, or about public access to publicly funded research, we need to consider much more than whether or not a publication is paywalled. It’s important to ask, “Can a member of the public download and read this article?” But we also need to ask, “Will a non-expert reader understand the key findings of this article?” Researchers generally write for other researchers in their field, and the typical editorial process does a good job of facilitating that expert-to-expert conversation—which simply isn’t designed for readers without that specific expertise.

This is where knowledge translation comes into the picture. What alternatives to expert-to-expert academic writing can we provide, in order to make key research findings—for example, from high-quality and up-to-date studies in public health, epidemiology, and occupational safety—both freely available and genuinely useful for non-experts who would benefit from understanding them?

Plain-language summaries, “explainer” blog posts, and static infographics are a great place to start. Translating these into other widely spoken languages takes us further. But why stop there? Publishing platforms like Literatum allow publishers to host audio, video, podcast, and interactive visual content. So consider “explainer” video or podcast interviews where researchers highlight key findings; consider how an interactive graph can help a non-expert understand demographic changes, the spread of a disease, or how languages change over time; consider how an animated map can illustrate economic, weather, or population data across space and time. 

Finally, we need to consider accessibility. Step one, of course, is to make sure that our websites are WCAG compliant. Step two is ensuring that all text content—whether articles, books, blog posts, news updates, or data files—is machine readable, so it can be interpreted by screen readers, and available in HTML or EPUB format (either natively or via a PDF rendering tool such as Atypon’s eReader), so that it’s friendly to those who need large print, reflowable text, and zoomable images. Step three is to work on making non-text content as accessible as possible: well-written descriptions for all non-decorative images, closed captions for all videos, transcripts for audio content … 

All of these elements, too, can usefully have DOIs deposited, to make citing them easier and help direct readers to the version of record.

Make time for metadata!

Whatever you’re publishing, in whatever format, metadata remains key. The challenge comes in determining what metadata are necessary and appropriate for new types of content. To maximize discovery of non-PDF content, it’s important to accurately identify in the metadata what it is (data set? interview? photo archive?), what the format is (.csv? .mp4? .jpeg? .zip?), what it’s about (few things are more frustrating than thinking you’ve discovered a good study of chess and then finding it’s a study of cheese), and all the ways it’s connected to other pieces of content. Metadata should also include information about how and where to access the content, who created it, and what users can and can’t do with it. An additional part of the metadata equation is deciding which elements are supplementary to the article, and which are effectively on the same level.

Finally, depositing a DOI (or other appropriate persistent ID) is important for everything you publish. On a practical level, using and maintaining DOI links makes citation easier, directs readers to the version of record, and ensures that whatever element of their work is cited, authors’ citation stats benefit from the use of their work. On a more symbolic level, depositing DOIs for non-article content signals a commitment to treat these content types as they deserve: as part of the published scholarly record.

So now what?

Your publishing platform provider can tell you what non-PDF content types can be hosted on your site and how to get them there, and we can also help you resolve metadata questions and deposit your DOIs.

The more challenging—and more exciting—part is up to you and your contributors: Deciding what content types best suit your contributors, their research, and your audience, and then making it happen. We’re here to help you all the way!

Author Bio

Sylvia Izzo Hunter joined the marketing team at Atypon as Community Manager in 2021 and has been Marketing Manager at Inera since 2018, responsible for content marketing and social media. Prior to shifting to marketing, she worked in editorial, production, and digital publishing at University of Toronto Press. A past SSP Board member (2015-2018), Sylvia has also served on SSP's Communications, Education, and DEIA committees and is a member of the NISO CREC Working Group.

Guest Blog - Morressier

 Today’s workflows are tomorrow’s headaches: Is it time to change?

Trust in research has never been more important. I’ve lost track of the number of think pieces and surveys, meta-analyses and pessimistic opinion pieces about the critical nature of our time and how that trust is slipping away. 

How is that trust built? It's a complex system with many stakeholders whose competing priorities make it a challenge to find common ground. The media wants certainty and stories, and scientists rely on statistics and replicating results of data sets that few in the general population can understand. But setting how science is shared and communicated to one side, we’re interested in the infrastructure of disseminating science. What about the workflows that build research integrity into the process itself, and the technologies that keep peer review and content management moving forward? 

Today those processes might be part of the problem, but they can lead the way toward a bigger solution. Each time a headline hits the news about a retraction, or fabricated clinical trials, or ethics violations, we have already missed an opportunity to solve the problem at its source in the publishing workflow. And with each headline of that nature, trust in science erodes.

Here’s my vision for the future of research integrity: 

1. It all starts with early-stage research. By the time a journal article is submitted for publication, years worth of research have already gone into those conclusions, and that science is hidden away or ephemeral in the form of a conference presentation two years ago. Imagine having a record of early-stage research, one that was already peer reviewed for a conference, and then workshopped and validated by the peers in the room. And, thanks to an integrated infrastructure, the record of those review stages are linked to the submitted manuscript. 
2. It relies on technology to automate the process so human focus can be reapplied to important matters. Organizations should be able to set up the workflow they need with simple technology solutions, and sit back and watch the infrastructure they set up work for them and not against. Peer review is too important to waste time by sending out and managing manual messages or prompts. Imagine a re-designed workflow infrastructure that never requires leaving the platform? That’s the future, freeing up the time and resources of staff to use workflow data to build pools of new reviewers and authors, or to forecast trends for the discipline. 
3. It is user-friendly and flexible. As valuable as a streamlined workflow is for organizations like publishers and societies, it's equally valuable for reviewers and authors. It's well known that peer review takes too long, these time-intensive contributions are not well recognized or rewarded, and it's frustratingly technical, with standards and policies that can be different for each journal or conference. Peer review should be something researchers line up to do, because it helps move science forward and validate discoveries that could become tomorrow’s innovations. Peer review is the foundation on which trust in science is built. But when the process is cumbersome, hard to justify in terms of the career growth it promises, and all the processes and stages are impossible to remember, it becomes less appealing. Workflows and infrastructure can solve this problem, leaving the path to trust simpler. 
4. Our values are enforced at every step of the process. Infrastructure is a balancing act, and we have to keep our values close as we build. If we focus solely on efficiency, for example, then we might cut publication times but lose some of the rigour of close review. Workflow technology needs to be designed to uphold research integrity. Only by embedding the values and principles of the research industry in the infrastructure built to support it, can we find the right balance and success.

Publishing workflows cannot exist in a vacuum. They need to talk to each other, share data and insights that help human reviewers make informed decisions. We need to stop wasting time on tasks that technology can take over, but we need to retain the most ethical and integrity-rich practices possible. 

Author: Sami Benchekroun, CEO and co-founder of Morressier

Data Opportunities for Publishers

By Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen, Director of Marketing, Silverchair – Silver sponsor of the ALPSP Virtual Conference and Awards 2021

The past year and a half brought considerable change to our industry, accelerating business model shifts, driving further consolidation, and heating some industry dialogues to a boiling point. These changes have led publishers to examine and think creatively about their value proposition and how they can monetize their content and data assets. But despite the break-neck pace of some editorial operations last year, publishing more content is not a sustainable option for increasing revenue. Instead, many publishers are asking if they can do more with what they already have. How can the data, content, and audiences they already have be used in different ways? How can they be optimized? What venues already exist for expanding the value of our resources?

A recent report from Silverchair broke down the primary ways to extend the value of existing assets into the categories of data (audience data and content data) and content (existing content and new types of content). Below are some of the report’s takeaways related to publisher data, drawing on industry and technology insights, real world examples, and expert opinion.

Data Opportunities: Your Audience

Publications have long been a major source of revenues, but they are also a source of something that is now equally or more valuable: data. Relative to some analytics and information markets, our data is laying fallow. With many readers pouring through publishing artifacts every day, this data is often the richest source of real-time information on the interests and key concerns of a publisher’s audience. 

Publishers too frequently define their “audience” in narrow terms, focusing in on a relatively known or knowable set readers, subscribers, and potential authors, and ignore the broader ecosystem of individuals and organizations in which they exist. That ecosystem has, by comparison, countless users who haven’t crossed the threshold into becoming paid subscribers or members, but are interested enough to engage (and pay) at a lesser level. 

To identify the opportunities in expanding your audience, however, you first need to understand who your audience is. Societies, associations, and publishers are perfectly positioned to use digital tools to re-establish a connection to the ignored individual, who is too often lost in Open Science debates, institutional sales arrangements, and by the genericizing effects of scale. 

While these ignored individuals have always existed, only recently has it become viable to identify and engage with them in aggregate or in a meaningful market segment. We now have analytic tools that give us a far richer understanding of our users and how the interact with our content. By using data to address the constituency that is both most ignored and most foundational to publishers—individual readers, users, learners—organizations can generate new areas for growth.

Of course, data intelligence alone doesn’t translate to revenue. The data we collect and amalgamate about our audience has to be actionable in ways that provide a better, more valuable experience for those individuals. Having a detailed and evolving profile for every user allows organizations to then gather those users into audience segments that can be flexibly combined to create directly actionable opportunities. 

Ultimately, a society’s ability to interrogate and segment its data and to test and pivot based on real-time insights, also transforms its ability to do the things it cares most about: advocate for its mission and make a difference in the world, grow membership, and grow revenues. 

Data Opportunities: Your Content

In addition to using audience data to deliver more personalized content to your users, publishers can also harness data about the ways users interact with their content to inform their content strategy. By leveraging data about membership, meetings, education, advocacy, and more, publishers have a data-driven foundation for thinking about new journals, special collections or issues, and ideas for other publishing products, like video series. 

Key to getting more mileage out of your content is the ease with which users can find the content in the first place. Discovery and discoverability have been a high-priority moving target in our industry for years, as publishers look to fulfill the needs of researchers, librarians, Google Scholar, and other indexing companies. The first step is ensuring cleaned data and normalized content formats, which helps to future-proof content to be discoverable by the most users in the most places. 

Once a publisher’s content data is cleaned, the next step is content intelligence, which means having a data-driven understanding of how content is performing. This goes beyond knowing how many people clicked on a link - it’s about knowing how many people started to read the content, how many people partially read it, how many people read the whole thing, etc. With content intelligence, publishers can share the right valuable content at the right time to the right person. Not only does this connect back to personalization and audience engagement, but it also opens opportunities for other ways to drive revenue. The more granular the information an organization has about the ways their content is being used (or not used), the more actionable that data becomes. 

Publishers create and add value in myriad ways, which means both complexity and opportunity for monetization. Even now, when aggregation, consolidation, and dissociation of content feel inevitable in our industry, we’re in a time where the technology and know-how to experiment or pursue these strategies is increasingly available and affordable, even to a small society or independent publisher. There will always be a need to deliver expert and trusted content to specialized audiences, and we’re finally getting the digital tools to succeed.

For deeper insights into these data opportunities as well as the content-related opportunities for publishers, download the full report. 

Silverchair is a silver sponsor of the ALPSP Virtual Conference and Awards 2021. To find out more and book your place, visit the ALPSP event website.

About the author

Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen is Director of Marketing at Silverchair. She has worked in the publishing industry for over 15 years, including at the University of Virginia Press and Clarivate Analytics.

The Marketer's Tool Kit: Leveraging social media - three steps to move beyond broadcasting

We spoke to Emma Watkins, Marketing Manager at IOP Publishing and co-tutor on our Effective Journals Marketing training course about how to get the most out of social media. Here's what she said.


It’s over ten years since Facebook became available to the general public and Twitter was launched (and even longer since long forgotten and yet somehow still in existence MySpace began). In that time we’ve seen numerous new networks rise (and fall) and yet for many marketers the social web is still a daunting place to be.

For those companies who aren’t afraid to try, there is an awful lot of value to be found in engaging researchers in the social sphere – here’s how to start.

1. Start listening

Social networks are a great place to find out exactly what the community wants, needs, and thinks of you. Make sure you’re set up to find those conversations – there are tonnes of social media listening services out there which will aggregate content by keyword or product name. Take the time to skim through these regularly, as there can be valuable insight nestled amongst the pictures of people’s breakfasts.

Helpful link: Brandwatch Blog's Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools

Top tip: Conference hashtags are the perfect place to start – search for relevant events and keep an eye on your timeline when they are on (for example #alpsp19)

2. Conversations are a two-way thing – but make sure you’re speaking the same language

So you’ve done some great listening, perhaps even followed a conference hashtag or two – what next?

Time to start having some conversations! If you can add value to a blossoming conversation, perhaps with a link to some free (and highly relevant) content, or some advice on a publishing problem, then do it! But make sure you enter the conversation as a human being, not as a brand automaton. Where possible include your name – ASOS do this really well on Facebook.

Helpful link: Harvard Business Review - 50 Companies that get Twitter - and 50 that don't

Top tip: Once you’ve joined a conversation remember to stay with it – don’t just log off as people may respond to you.

3. Embrace different forms of content

It’s easy to get stuck on just sharing text content and links, but if you really want to make a splash then you should vary the content you share. Vlogs, infographics, images, podcasts – all of these offer unique ways to get your message across, so make sure you don’t just choose the right channel but also the right content.

Helpful link: Hubspot - 45 Visual content marketing statistics you should know in 2019

Top tip: Audit your current content store (leaflets, blog posts etc…) to look for new ways to repackage this information for social sharing. You could turn an FAQ page into an infographic, or make a video out of a press release on a product launch.


Emma is a Marketing Manager for IOP Publishing (IOPP), where she oversees the academic marketing strategy for the entire journals portfolio, as well as community websites, B2B products, and ebooks programme.

The next Effective Journals Marketing course runs on Wednesday 17 July 2019 in London. Further information and booking available on the ALPSP website.