Why is innovation a challenge for established publishers?

Charles Thiede, CEO of tech startup Zapnito (and former CPO of Nature Publishing Group and CTO of Informa Business Intelligence), explores the theory of the innovator’s dilemma. And what publishers can learn from it.

In a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to be chairing an event with ALPSP entitled ‘Innovate or Perish? How to think like a startup’. It’s got me thinking on the challenges of innovation within large publishers - challenges I’ve seen from the inside, as well as out.

I asked Zapnito advisor Mark Allin, former CEO of Wiley and a speaker at the event, for his view on how innovative publishing companies are at the moment. On a scale of 1-10, he gave them 3 or 4. That’s not ideal.

So why is this the case? There’s no question that the publishing industry is full of talent and resources. Yet startups are often seen as having the edge when it comes to innovation. The ‘innovator’s dilemma’ - a term coined by Clayton Christensen in 1997, offers insight into why that is.

The innovator’s dilemma

The problem isn’t necessarily lack of innovation itself, or enthusiasm to try new ideas, but more the environment in which those new ideas are developed and nurtured.

The value from new innovations isn’t realised immediately. It tends to follow an S-curve (see the yellow line on the graph). Improving a product takes time and many iterations, and quite often the early iterations provide minimal value. That can prove the sticking point for many businesses.

Ultimately, the primary aim of most established companies is to keep and add additional value to their existing customer base and their current business models. This means new and innovative ideas can be undervalued, because they are applied and tested with existing customers or through existing models, rather than looking at new markets or models. 

It also means that if innovative ideas fail to deliver results quickly, they are seen as failing - the ROI is thought to be too low. In this case, often management acts ‘sensibly’, in what they view to be the company’s best fiduciary interests, and rejects continued investment in the innovation. 

This is why startups, usually with little or nothing to lose when they enter the market, are so much more successful. They find new markets to apply their innovations, largely by trial and error, at low margins. Their nimbleness and low cost structures allow them to operate sustainably where established companies could not. They don’t have the same responsibilities to, for example, shareholders or existing customers.

At the same time, especially with ‘bootstrapped’ companies, startups must survive on their own two feet. This means that if the initial idea doesn’t work, they can adapt and even pivot their models. We did this at Zapnito early on. In contrast, for an established publisher, the initial idea is often fixed and changing direction means failure. 

By finding the right application use and market, startups advance rapidly and hit the steep part of the S-curve, eventually entering the more mature markets of the established companies and disrupting them.

What’s the solution?

There is no one way to do innovation. But to me, the most vital change is a change in attitudes. Traditional publishers will need to think outside their traditional business models. Innovation does not need to be in context of existing ways of doing business. Too many media companies are organised around delivery models vs. solutions to a market. That leaves little room for innovation.

There’s also a need to start playing the long game and looking for ways to manage development processes so that it’s okay to change direction, or even to fail.

I also want to challenge the idea of innovation itself. Innovation does not mean invention. Most people think innovation and invention are synonymous. But Jeff Bezos did not invent ecommerce. Steve Jobs did not invent smartphones. The innovation happened in the execution of those ideas and how they were delivered to the market.

There are lots of potential ways for publishers to nurture more innovation within their companies. This could be through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), partnering with disruptive businesses, creating an internal ‘skunkworks’-style structure, or even separating out new innovations into offshoot companies.

These are all ideas I’m looking forward to exploring at the event. Hope to see you there.

The Innovate or Perish? seminar will take place on Thursday 15 November 2018. To find our more or to book your place visit: https://www.alpsp.org/Events/Innovate-or-Perish/60274

Text and Data Mining: International Perspectives, Licensing and Legal Aspects

Graham Taylor welcomes delegates

Licensing for text and data mining is a minefield for publishers. How do you use the technology? What are the implications of policy development in Europe and internationally? How do you ensure that your licenses are fair and practical?

Text and Data Mining: international perspectives, licensing and legal aspects, a Journals Publishers Forum seminar organised in conjunction with ALPSP, the Publishers Association and STM, gathered together a range of speakers to try and answer these questions. This is the first in a series of posts from the afternoon that provides a summary of the discussion.

Graham Taylor, founder of The Long Game consultancy and director of both the CLA and PLS, kicked off proceedings with a summary of text and data mining. It has been something of a political hot potato, but has recently settled down. He introduced Jonathan Clark from Jonathan Clark & Partners B.V., author of Text Mining and Scholarly Publishing report from PRC, who provided an overview of the 'What, Why and How?' of text and data mining.

Text mining is about mining or extracting the meaning from one or many articles. Sounds a lot like reading, right? Yes, but it's about a machine doing it. If you imagine that you were teaching a machine to read, how would you do it? You can provide formalised rules of grammar and language and teach the machine to read. The other way is a statistical, rule based approach. This is where you take as much text as is possible and tell it to read. Amazingly, machines do make up the rules and start to make sense of it. The best example is Google Translate. It achieves this by sitting on a vast amount of translated content that it searches to match particular phrases. Why is this important? Think of the way that scholarly communication is done and how it is structured. It is essentially to share facts and to shape opinions from them. Data mining is pretty much the domain of machines where you look for patterns and trends.

Why do text mining?

1. Getting the facts out of the article, making them sensible and enhancing the text.
2. Systematic literature review: machine reading faster and more of it than humans could ever do, and probably more accurately as well.
3. Discovery: he referenced brainmap.org - completed manually and has become very important resource for researchers on brain scanning since)
4. Computational linguistics research: the new rules about making research available

Eefke Smit is Director of Standards and Technology for STM and co-authored a study on Journal Article Mining on behalf of the Publishing Research Consortium. Historically there has been a mix of optimists and pessimists in text and data mining (TDM). 

The sceptics claim:

• TDM has always over-promised
• It is only in specialised fields
• The tools are still complicated
• It needs manual curation
• There are high investments
• It is domain dependent
• There is no common dictionary
• Subject to over ambition in the promise of knowledge discovery.

However, the optimists counter that:

• There is a vast digital corpus available and growing
• It has more and more application areas (business, legal, social, etc)
• The tools are improving fast
• Manual work is reduced
• It can be public domain or domain precision
• Processing power is less of a problem, analytical tools are better, visualisation adds to analysis.

There are some interesting insights into exactly how publishers approach text and data mining in the report as well as insight into what drives the requests. The third part of the report focused on cross-sector solutions to facilitate content mining better. Suggestions made by experts during the interviews included:

1. standardization of content formats
2. one content mining platform
3. commonly agreed access terms
4. one window for mining permissions
5. collaboration with national libraries

It was interesting to note that most of the interviewed experts did not see open access as a related issue; access issues relate to datafile delivery or mining on the platform itself.

Richard Mollet on the latest policy

Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association provided what he described as an 'aide memoir' of how the policy is tracking in the UK and the EU. Since Hargreaves report in 2011, and the UK Government's subsequent acceptance of all the recommendations, the Intellectual Property Office has been tasked with taking this forward. There is a proposed 'three step test' for text and data mining which will allow copying for purpose of analytic techniques. The caveats are: 

1. the person already has a right to access under an existing agreement, NOT the ability to access;
2. for sole purpose of non-commercial research; 
3. the license may impose conditions of access to licenses or third party system (this allows the publisher to impose some restrictions to avoid degrading the whole system, for maintenance of some form of control).

There is a tension between the challenge of being able to do what is legal under copyright law, but when that is then prevented by a contract. This has made the translation from policy document to parliamentary language even more difficult and has hence been delayed. Due to this, but it's likely that this won't be UK legislation until October 2014.

In parallel, the European Commission has come to that view itself. There are stakeholder dialogue working groups that are trying to identify short term wins. One of these is on data and text mining: trying to ascertain does anyone want to do it and if so how do they want to do it. However, there are real tensions within the Commission with different positions between rights-holder communities who feel they can fix this, with significant work already underway, and the research community that believe the system is broken and needs a complete overhaul. The risk here is that it will move from dialogue to monologue, as researchers have indicated that any licensing solution - as opposed to the reopening of the Copyright Directive - will be insufficient for their purposes. 

Open Access eBooks: the next big thing?

Open access ebooks have historically been overlooked in favour of their journal big brother. But as Eelco Ferwerda, Director at Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), made clear in his morning session at Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar last week, they are a growing part of the publishing family and could well be the next big thing.

There is potential to explore open access for monographs to improve discoverability, usage and impact, while reducing costs through shared infrastructure and digital formats. And the provisional findings form OAPEN-NL, one of the pilot projects researching OA monographs, indicate this is only just starting, but enough is happening to take note.

Recent open access developments in books include some emerging business models such as the Open Access Publishing in European Networks Library which aims to 'improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed open access publications from across Europe'.

Other developments in 2012 include the Directory of Open Access Books which now has over 1250 books from 35 publishers listed.

The Public Knowledge Project has set up a beta software Open Monograph Press project. This is being piloted by a number of presses including Athabasca University Press, Open Humanities Press and the University of Murcia Publications in Spain, amongst others. This project is designed to facilitate uptake of OA software and could work for smaller publishers who need to start this kind of activity.

In August, SpringerOpen Books was launched at the Beijing International Book Fair. This provides authors with the opportunity to publish a book in the sciences that is fully open access immediately, making it freely accessible to anyone online via SpringerLink. Ferwerda pointed out the significance of OA books if a company like Springer is doing it

There is increasing discussion of and development of resources on OA books: at September's Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association conference in Budapest, there was an afternoon dedicated to OA books. Other useful resources include the Open Access Directory: a list of information, terms and resources, including books and OA publishers.

Jeffrey Beal has established Beall’s List. This highlights predatory, open-access publishers looking for APCs to make a quick buck and 'unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit.' At the moment there are approximately 200 of them. This is a real concern for the industry.

Ferwerda provided a sobering reminder of why open access books should be considered: scholarly monographs have lost sustainability and relevance between 1980 and 2000 with sales to US libraries dropping, on average, from 2000 to 500. Publishers need for a new publishing model for academic books.

He profiled the publishers that are trying open access book publishing. They include large and small publishers in academic and non-academic disciplines, the latter comprising the largest part of the market with a lot of self-publishing. They are commercial and not-for-profit, from established organisations to start-ups, with institutional and professional markets that are professional and ‘scholar led’.

There are several models: from free to read (all rights reserved); to free to use and reuse (CC-BY); to non commercial and/or no derivatives. In terms of formats, it's a case of online versus downloads. From online reading only (HTML, e-reader formats) to PDF (personal copy) or both. OA book publishing motives range from front list publishing to a back list long tail approach. Some have a dedicated OA programme or service traditional monographs.

The business models include:

• hybrid and dual edition publishing: OA and print/PoD - all from the publisher - probably not enough in itself
• institutional subsidies
• library-press collaboration (e.g. Mpublishing/Michigan UP, Göttingen University Press)
• author-side publication fee (Springer, Amsterdam University Press, some research councils: FWF, NWO)
• library licensing/consortium (e.g. OpenEdition Freemium, Knowledge Unlatched).

Examples of institutional subsidies include the Australian National University Press which has an E-press publishing OA monographs with the costs covered by ANU’s information budget. In Canada, Athabasca University Press receives support from government grants and from Athabasca University which together provide 80% of their budget. It was interesting to note that 1% of the overall university budget is allocated to the press for scholarly communication.

OA publication funds in the UK will be provided by the Research Councils to pay for the OA processing fee and it is likely that Germany will have something like this as well. New models are being explored such as OpenEdition Freemium which is a licensing model for libraries (so they take part in the funding of publication platform). It has been introduced as a pilot scheme and is based on the combination of free content in HTML + premium content (PDF, e-pub) and services, with a revenue split model.

The Knowledge Unlatched pilot launches next year whereby libraries form a global consortium, use existing acquisitions budget, select individually and purchase collectively. The price is based on fixed or ‘first digital copy’ costs and libraries receive a value-added edition. Monographs are then published open access.

A Swedish project has been established to achieve open access using existing funds for books: ‘Towards quality controlled Open Access Monographs in Sweden - exploring the possibilities of a consortium based approach.’

Ferwerda's own organisation, the Open Access Publishing in European Networks, has developed a Library which aggregates a collection of OA books to provide quality assurance, increase visibility and retrievability. They have more than 30 publishers with over 1000 books listed. He differentiated from other infrastructure services available as:

• the OAPEN Library is a deposit service
• the Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service
• and the e-Depot National Library is a preservation service.

Other OAPEN projects include setting up limited publication funds for books (2-3 years) in different EU countries. They are looking to cooperation of research funders and publishers and want to measure the effect of OA on usage and sales to come up with guidelines and recommendations.

The pilots running in the UK and Netherlands are very similar. OAPEN-UK is managed by JISC Collections. There are five publishers in the UK including Taylor & Francis, Liverpool University Press, University of Wales Press, Berg and Palgrave Macmillan. They have come up against a reluctance from publishers to take part so at the moment there are 80 OA books in total from 13 publishers in the two countries.

They hope to measure the effects of OA on the following areas from this study:

1. Discovery: visits in Google Book Search - 100% versus 10% open
2. Usage: page views in Google Book Search 100% versus 10% open
3. Impact: Citations in Google Scholar
4. Sales

While this is the early stage of the project - and there are limitations in the scale of the study - there are some observations they have been able to make. OA for books works by some measures. It improves discovery with three times higher visits and eight times higher page views in Google Books. OA books were also downloaded six and a half more times (but this is downloads not sales). So far, OA has NOT impacted sales, although it is too early for final conclusions. They have also tried to monitor the costs of books with total average costs of open access titles at 5678 euros while print is at 6489 euros. It is clear that there are still substantial costs for editing, acquiring and reviewing books with both approaches.

Time and data will shed further light on the realities of open access books, but it is worth taking time to consider the different options.

Sarah Price: Library Technology and Metadata - Measuring Impact

The afternoon session at To Measure or Not To Measure: Driving Usage seminar included a session from Sarah Price who is E-Resources and Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham and Co-Chair of KBART.

One of key things librarians are interested in is ensuring that the content they buy is easy to use, is discoverable and accessible for their students. She provided a candid and compelling story of how the University had got to grips with critical feedback from students on the eLibrary provision, and how they instigated a major review and development programme to address the issue.

Traditionally, there were two access points to content: traditional library catalogue (mainly for print collections) and the elibrary service. Both were accessed via the home page, but didn't take into account special collections and other services they had. The user interface was very text heavy, old fashioned and not very user friendly and you had to search separately for ejournals and ebooks, making the experience confusing, unattractive and a source of dissatisfaction.

As a results the University has invest in a Resource Discovery Service which provides:

• single search interface and search box (with a Google-like interface)
• harvesting of collections across institutions
• much faster search and results retrieval
• discovery at article and chapter level
• post search filtering and refinement.

The service is publicly available - with no (upfront) authentication - as a taster for potential students and academics. However, if you want to access in-depth content you have to sign-in with your university account. It is designed to have no dead ends and is integrated with other web services such as the University portal. They worked with Ex Libris to develop the product and included embedded searching as a function.

They added the Primo Central Index to this product which is a very important part of the discovery service delivering article level searching. A user can also narrow research from 'everything' to specific collections or using advanced search. You can log in with your own personal account which then provides access to the full set of content and lifts restrictions. When using a search term, the results will indicate what type of resource it is (e.g. articles, books, etc.) Where it is a book, it will show stock and location of copies on a site-specific basis, even including a map of the location in library. Print and electronic resources are listed alongside in a discovery tool. You can see where terms are where you searched to check relevance and you can also facet or post-filter (e.g. by article, book, library site, date range, author, language, electronic database, etc.), and it will attempt to group similar records.

Another interesting feature for scholarly publishers is the link to the in-house reading list management system on each textbook. This is flagged at the foot of the entry and you can click through to see full reading list and then continue through to other titles and services. Crucially, this will be helpful in checking against your records whether an academic has added a title to a reading list or not after receiving an inspection copy.

The resource is embedded on the university portal my.bham within a MyLibrary tab. This is a primary source of driving usage to the site. It's early days for analytics, but at the start of term they have the same amount of traffic from my.bham university portal as from Google Scholar. In addition, index based searching is generating a lot of traffic from their users.

During the implementation they decided to:

• still provide database level link to native interface function
• provide library catalogue only search but within FindIt@BHam
• 'everything' set as search default but enable a limit of scope
• linking SFX component of Metalib library catalogue to reading list management system and the University of Birmingham Research Archive (UBIRA).

They dispensed with the A-Z list and pre-search limiters and now rely on post filtering facets. They also dispensed with ebook MARC records as metadata input and now directly harvest from SFX. It was a bold decision, but they have found that it works for them. There has also been integration of the single search in the portal and library services homepage.

Price flagged the importance of metadata for discovery. It supports linking to the appropriate copy; allows an appropriate set of links to be presented in a single place; allows the library to accurately and comprehensively display an entire portfolio; accurately depicts the entitled coverage for that user; and allows users to find keywords in full text - not just abstracts.

As 'Resource Discovery Service' isn't the most exciting or engaging title, they ran a competition amongst staff for the new brand name. There were 80 suggestions, but the winner - FindIt@Bham - was felt to tie in with the overall university brand well. They thought long and hard about integrating the Birmingham brand and used pictures of the distinctive campus to customise the out of the box product. They have integrated with the University portal VLE and embedded in the library Facebook page. Other marketing and promotion included:

• social media
• lots of work with the Student Guild
• postcards/bookmarks
• university staff and student newsletters
• focus groups, training and briefing sessions
• integration and prominent website advertising
• university-wide plasma screens.

It's early days in terms of measuring impact, but they are assessing reviews of user feedback post-launch and have a continuous improvement strategy and post-launch authority group in place. They will analyse future quality measures, service and resource usage and benefits realisation. They are expecting to see a big hike in full text usage, are anticipating a massive impact to their ratings and anticipate seeing value added throughout the supply chain.

It has been interesting to compare to a Google Scholar set of results for certain specific searches. These only give generic results, not library entitlement. It has been interesting to note that the top result on a title is a pdf from JSTOR of a similar book to the one searched - their system is much more precise.

When addressing concerns about wider access to content, a demonstration showed that while Google will present the results, it won't present the full text unless they are free for access or the viewer can log in with an entitlement through the library system. The system doesn't embed authentication without library intervention - the link resolver.

Already, in comparison with Google Scholar searches, the Library discovery is context sensitive to the definition and results are more focused. Library discovery allows added value with resources grouped by subject and scholarly recommender services.

Her advice to publishers on how to integrate titles into the system includes:

• send your title level metdata to link resolvers (KBART)
• keep it up-to-date (cessations, title changes, etc)
• provide your deep linking algorithm
• allow discovery platforms to harvest your metadata
• don't be exclusive, be promiscuous!
• assess usage patterns following integration.

She concluded by saying that integration with library discovery tools is essential to drive usage. This needs to be based on industry good practice and there is a growing body of evidence supporting usage increase (and decrease) dependent on RDS integration.

David Sommer: COUNTER - New Measures for Scholarly Publishing

David Sommer is a consultant working with a range of publishing clients to grow products and businesses. He has also been a contributor to the project COUNTER and completed the morning session at the To Measure or Not to Measure - Driving Usage seminar.

He provided an overview of the latest COUNTER Release 4. The main objectives for the update were to provide a single, unified Code covering all e-resources, including journals, databases, books, reference works, multimedia, content, etc. They wanted to improve the database reports and reporting of archive usage. The update will enable the reporting of mobile usage separately, expand the categories of 'Access Denied' covered, improve the application of XML and SUSHI in the design of the usage reports, and collect metadata that facilitates the linking of usage statistics to other datasets such as subscription information.

The main features of the update are:

• a single integrated database
• expanded list of definitions including gold OA, Multimedia Full Content Univ, Record View etc
• improved database report that includes reporting of results clicks and record views in addition to searches (sessions removed)
• enhancement of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol designed to facilitate its implementation by vendors and its use by librarians
• a requirement that Institutional Identifies, Journal DOI and Book DOI be included in the usage reports, to facilitate not only the management of usage data, but also the linking of usage data to other data relevant to collections of online content
• requirement that usage of Gold OA articles within journals be reported separately in a new report - Journal Report 1 GOA
• a requirement that Journal Report 5 must be provided (archive report, broken down by year so you can understand how much you are paying and the journal usage)
• Modified Database Reports in which the previous requirement to report Session counts has been dropped, and new requirements, to report Record Views and Result Clicks, have been added. (Database Report 3 has also been renamed Platform Report 1)
• New Multimedia Report 1, which covers the usage of non-textual multimedia resources audio, video and images, reporting number of successful requests for full multimedia content units - optional
• new optional reports covering usage on mobile devices
• description of the relative advantages of logfiles and page tags as the basis for counting online usage
• flexibility in the usage reporting period that allows customers to specify a date range for their usage reports

Sommers posed an interesting question: what is a mobile device? They have used the WURFL list to define. The timetable for implementation includes a deadline date of 31st December.

Sommer then provided a useful background to Usage Factor (UF). It is designed to be a complement to citation-based measures. While Impact Factors, based on citation data, have become generally accepted as a valid measure of the impact and status of scholarly journals and they are widely used by publishers, authors, funding agencies and librarians, there are misgivings about an over reliance on them. The idea is not to try to kill them off, but to provide other measures to use alongside, particularly as Impact Factors don't work so well for non-STM disciplines.

Usage Factor provides a new perspective: a complementary measure that will compensate for the weakness of Impact Factors in sereral important ways:

• UFs will be available for much larger number of journals
• coverage of all fields of scholarship that have online journals
• impact of practitioner-oriented journals better reflected in usage
• authors welcoming this to build their profile.

Four major groups will benefit: authors (especially practitioner-based fields) without reliable global measures; publishers; librarians; and research funding agencies seeking a wider range of credible consistent quantitative measures of value and impact of output of research that they fund.

The aims and objectives of the project have been to assess whether UF will be statistically meaningful, will be accepted, is robust and credible, and to identify what the organisational and economic model will be. They started in 2007-2008 with market research including 29 face to face interviews from across interest groups as well as 155 librarian and 1400 author web survey responses.

Stage two focused on modelling and analysis and involved relevant bodies, publishers and journals. The recommendations included:

• UF should be calculated using median rather than the arithmetic mean
• range of UF should ideally be published for each journal: comprehensive UF plus supplementary factors for selected items
• UF should be published as integers - no decimal places
• UF should be published with appropriate confidence levels around the average to guide their interpretation
• UF should be calculated initially on the basis of a maximum usage time window of 24 months
• UF is not directly comparable across subject groups and should therefore be published and interpreted only within appropriate subject groupings
• UF should be calculated using a publication window of two years.

There seems to be no reason why ranked lists of journals by usage factor should not gain acceptance. However, small journals and titles with less than 100 downloads per item are unsuitable candidates for UF as they are likely to be unreliable.

Stage three involves testing. The usage data will be used to investigate the following:

• effect of using online publication data versus date of first successful request on UF
• calculation and testing UF for subject fields not covered
• test further gaming scenarios and assess how these can be detected
• test stability of UF for low UF journals and confirm level below which it shouldn't be provided.

This will deliver a Code of Practice which will include definitions, methodology for calculation, specifications for reporting and independent auditing as well as a description of the role of the Central Registry for UF and funding model.

David closed with a summary of PIRUS2 whose mission is to develop a global standard to enable recording, reporting and consolidation of online usage statstics for individual journal articles hosted by Institutional Repositories. Further information is available online.

Vanja Merrild: Marketing Channels for the World's Largest Open Access Publisher

The second session at our To Measure or Not to Measure seminar was presented by Vanja Merrild, a digital marketing specialist working with BioMed Central. Now part of SpringerOpen, BioMed Central have 243 open access journals across biology, medicine and chemistry. 52 journals are society affiliated. 121 journals with Impact Factors.

Their network of sites and users have:

• 32 million page views a month
• over 5 million registered users
• over 380,000 recipients to fortnightly BioMed Central newsletter
• 14,000 new registrants a month
• Google page rank of 8

Their focus as an open access publisher is on submissions, being author driven, using their own in-house submissions system and focusing on author data.

Vanja focused on providing best practice advice on how to drive traffic and usage to content from their experience. Her suggestions for email best practice are:

• build your lists
• have a good welcome programme - what follows after they've signed up
• make it easy for recipients to add your email to their address book
• make it easy to sign up
• maintain consistency in 'From' lines - builds recognition of a trusted source.

She spoke candidly of the action they took recently to boost results for a newsletter that was dipping:

1. they made it easier to access the interesting relevant content (3 rather than 5 clicks through to website)
2. noted they had lots of forwards so added a recommend button
3. captured the forward emails
4. made it easier to sign up on website and from within the email

Segmentation is hugely important: the same message is not relevant for everyone. Editors, authors, members, librarians, scientific interests: they all need their own message. You should test and measure your hypothesis, check spam filters, look at the mobile device appearance and appearance in different email clients (particularly the ones your audience are using).

Vanja suggested a range of factors to test and measure. Keep track of your reputation with services such as ReturnPath senderscore.org. Understand what works where. Check out your 'sleeping beauties' contacts who need waking up and find out when they leave your email.

She then went on to provide some best practice guidelines for tweeting and Facebook posts:

• share more about others than you do about yourself
• promote others and build relationships
• have a distinct voice
• images are important.

Your social media strategy should focus on increased ROI for your business and your time. Create safe tests to experiment and don't make this only one person's role. Be iterative: plan, execute, measure, adjust, repeat. Understand which metrics matter and which are your goals. Track metrics before, during, and after to show return on investment and consider benchmarks to better understand what they actually mean. Use analytics not only as a reactive tool to see how you did, but as a proactive tool to hone your branding messages. She closed with suggested tools to measure your activity including: Twitter Counter, TweetReach and TweetStats.

Breda Corish: From 20 Million Pieces of Content to a New Clinical Insight Engine: ClinicalKey

The first session at To Measure or Not to Measure: Driving Usage to Content - Marketing, Measurement and Metrics seminar was presented by Breda Corish, Head of Clinical Reference for UK and Northern Europe at Elsevier.

The focus was on publisher products that drive users to content. ClinicalKey is Elsevier's 'clinical insight engine', designed to think like a physician and provide information for diagnosis at point of care, the ability to share relevant answers and a resource to maintain knowledge with.

It took three years development work to develop a product platform to answer questions posed within a clinical care context. The scale of information overload is immense: back in the early 90s, the challenge for doctors was that medical knowledge doubled every 19 years. In 2008 this was down to 18 months. Now the forecast is that by 2020, it will double every 73 days.

This creates the doctor's dilemma: how to access trusted information quickly with a seamless experience. The challenge for Elsevier was how to unite 20 million pieces of content into one seamless experience including existing products such as MD Consult, Journals Consult, Procedures Consult, etc.

They started by understanding users. The 'mechanics' are driven by visual procedural content. Doctors are extremely time-pressed, require pre- and post-procedural care resource, with well-defined, fairly narrow, but deep information requirements.

They focused on understanding the patient care management workflow: from diagnosis to creating a care plan, from medical treatment to after-treatment care plans and patient education and compliance. They also identified collateral workflows for doctors on keeping current, sharing information and not working in isolation, but as part of a multi-disciplinary team.

Using this knowledge they moved from unstructured content to structured content and turned it into smart content and made it work in the clinical setting. They created the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT) using 250,000 core clinical concepts, 1 million+ synonyms, 1 million+ hierarchical relationships and 1million+ ontological relationships.

Through concept mapping they focused on making vast amounts of content easily discoverable using speciality-specific navigation, dynamic clinical summary creation and meaningful related content recommendations. The semantic taxonomy was adapted for the clinical setting and semantic relationships are used to suggest other content (e.g. clinical condition, procedures, etc). Weighted tags are their 'secret sauce for better search'.

The smart content infrastructure is based on four areas:

Product development and enhancement

• more accurage search results
• faceted navigation
• improved content discoverability

Content analytics

• greater insights into what we publish
• identification of co-occurring terms
• link to related external content and data

Personalization

• individual content recommendations
• targeted individual marketing
• contextual advertising

Editorial productivity

• flexible product types - new collections, image banks, etc.
• increased speed to market

Usage tracking is based on usage events rather than page views. They have COUNTER-compliant content reports and monthly institution reports based on COUNTER filtering rules. They produce usage reports for different content types e.g. books, full-text articles, FirstConsult, Medline, Guidelines, etc. Every piece of content is tagged so they can produce usage reports. Usage event reports by month include analysis of: discovery (search, browse); content usage; and Advanced Tools usage.

With performance metrics they want to keep the number small for searches per content view as this is key to delivering relevant content quickly. They take insight from the usage reports on what search terms people are searching with and add them back into the product.

A recent Outsell report identified that the 'development of such taxonomies and their use to power the semantic enrichment of collecitons and aggregations of content will increasingly need to become core competencies for publishers further along the digital transition to higher value-added services.' This is something that Elsevier have engaged with directly.

Their plans for the future involve adapting for international markets using same content and powerful functionality, but adding in geographic-specific publications content. They are also looking at developing different interfaces for local languages. Even in cash-strapped health care systems around the world, there is still investment in IT. There is potential for mobile devices and tablets being used in hospitals. Doctors need information when they are on the move and not desk-bound.

They want to do more with content, more with features and functionality for doctors and end users, and develop product further for use any time, any place, any where. They are looking at how they can integrate their clinical or patient records portal or system so it's not disruptive to the experience e.g. developing query buttons to ping off to the other database. Something like 80% of hospitals in the UK are still in early stages of developing these services so there's great potential.

They are currently selling to institutions, but have recently launched a service for individuals - which focuses on their particular clinical specialism, with the option to add on. Overall, their aim is to hit the 'sweet spot' of being at the heart of comprehensive, trusted and speed to answer.

ALPSP Seminar: Marketing to Libraries

During times when many publishers are waiting to hear how their renewals for 2010 are going, and feeling anxious about what the future holds despite weathering the financial storms of a difficult 2009, one of the key things to get right is how to market effectively to libraries.

Which is why you or one of your colleagues need to book a place at our one-day seminar about Marketing to Libraries on the 20 November in London.

British Institute of Radiology, 36 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AT
Friday 20 November 2009

Chair: Bernie Folan, Head of Journals Marketing, SAGE Publications

A great line up of speakers:
Claire Duddy, HM Treasury

Jane Harvell, Head of Research Services and Special Collections at University of Sussex

Phil Jamieson, Wiley-Blackwell

Melinda Kenneway, TBI Communications Ltd

Nancy Buckley and Helen Cooke, Burgundy Information Systems Limited

Kathryn Spiller, Society for Endocrinology

Colin Meddings, Oxford University Press

Katie Sayers, SAGE Publications

Chris Clarke, TALIS

Followed by a networking reception with wine and nibbles

Book your place online or contact me for further information

Dee French: info@alpsp.or or 01827 709188