Keeping pace with changes in eJournal technology

Tracy Gardner: keeping pace with eJournal technology

eJournal technology is an essential part of the scholarly publishing industry. It is also the topic of one of our most popular training courses. Here, we spoke to Understanding eJournal Technology co-tutor, Tracy Gardner, about the challenges of keeping up-to-date in this area.

SK: What is the main challenge that publishers face in the field?
TG: The pace of change within eJournals technology is fast. This technology has removed the barriers between production, editorial, marketing, sales, customer services and most importantly – the customers. Renew Training started running business technology courses specifically for publishers around 7 years ago and during all that time the same course has never been delivered twice!

SK: What is driving the pace of change?
TG: Changes in how libraries authenticate their patrons, how they manage reader navigation and the implementation of new search and discovery tools has changed the eJournal landscape dramatically.

SK: Who does this affect?
TG: For those in sales, marketing and customer service it can be hard to understand the business ramifications of how eJournal technology affects the way librarians and researchers find and access content. How does the fact a library uses a proxy, or only has one IP address for their entire institution, or indeed if their IP addresses are a state secret impact how researchers read your content? Does Shibboleth or Athens solves these issues, or does it create news ones? What about OpenURLs and working with link resolvers – and what are resource discovery services and tools and why should you worry about them?

For those in operational or technology roles, the business technology side of eJournals can seem daunting and especially for those new to the industry, the way the information community works can seems counter to the way many other business sectors operate.

SK: How can you keep pace of these changes?
TG: Educate those in sales, marketing, customer services, product development, editorial, project management and IT in the technologies. These roles are all vital to the delivery of eJournals. You need to clearly position these technologies in the context of the industry issues they aim to solve so your teams understand how they are used throughout the supply chain internally and by librarians through to end users. Understand a) your customers' technical and business requirements, and b) how technology plays a role in discoverability and deploying eJournals.

Tracy Gardner has over 17 years’ experience in marketing and communications and has worked for CatchWord, Ingenta, CABI Publishing and Scholarly Information Strategies. Her career has focussed on improving communication channels between publishers, intermediaries and librarians and she understands the business of scholarly publishing from many different perspectives.

Tracy is co-tutor with Simon Inger on Understanding eJournal Technology course run by ALPSP in association with Renew Training. If you are flummoxed by any of the above terminology, or if you would like to understand more about how your customers are using business technology to serve their patrons, then come along to the next course on 13 November 2013 in Oxford.

How do you make your publication stand out from the crowd? Julia Lampam reflects...

Julia Lampam: make your publication stand out

'How do you make your publication stand out from the crowd? What tools can you use to publicise a journal article? What can you do to harness the immense power of social media to increase awareness of your content?

These questions and more are raised by publicists, marketers, editors and authors alike as we strive to improve the discoverability of the rich academic content we publish. And why? Because we’re all aiming to increase the discoverability and visibility of an article through a number of metrics and citations, with the impact factor being the most widely used.

It's all about discoverability and visibility on an article level
During our forthcoming course, Getting the Most from Journal Publicity, Alexa Dugan and I will share our experience of maximising the promotional and marketing resources available to extend the reach and impact of the research in your publications.

Publicity by its very nature is unpredictable. 
But by asking yourselves a pertinent set of questions and armed with a handful of tools, you can develop and instigate a proactive media campaign to draw attention to the research. By taking advantage of social media and online networks, as well as traditional PR resources, article level publicity efforts can help you reach wider audiences, increasing web traffic to the content and thereby potentially improving the number of citations.

What works, and what doesn't?
The evaluation of such initiatives plays just as an important role as planning – knowing what works and what doesn’t will enable you to focus on which articles you can target your limited means. Publicity campaigns take time and resource, with some being more effective than others. In addition, there is an on-going debate about how to measure the return on investment on such activity. You can focus on the number of citations, journal impact factors, web traffic to an article, number of downloads but you should also think of other benefits such as attracting key authors, as well as developing and strengthening the relationships between publisher and their communities.

Be part of the conversation
The most successful campaigns enable research to embed itself into extended communities of interest and become part of the conversation. I recall working on a journal article publicity campaign about research into the best way to cook your vegetables … two weeks later I read about the research in the weekly musings from my veg box provider … the campaign had gone full circle! Of course this doesn’t happen every time, but when it does; you certainly get a buzz from instigating a successful media campaign.'

Julia Lampam is responsible for Wiley's corporate communications and book fairs within Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and co-chairs the company's global social media group. Previously she managed their publicity activities, instigating proactive PR strategies for academic journals and the For Dummies and Frommer's brands; as well as launching Wiley’s online newsroom.

Julia is co-tutor on Getting the Most from Journal Publicity with Alexa Dugan. Book your place now.