Spotlight on Dimensions - shortlisted for the 2018 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

On the 13 September we will be announcing the winner of the 2018 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited, at the annual ALPSP Conference.  In this series of posts leading up to the Awards ceremony we meet our six finalists and get to know a bit more about them.

In this blog, we speak to Daniel Hook, MD of Digital Science, and Christian Herzog, CEO of ÜberResearch, about Dimensions.

An Introduction to Digital Science 

Set up in 2010 by a team from Nature, Digital Science was established with the aim of investing in startups that originated in academia and that created software tools to help researchers to do their best research. 

An independent company since the Springer Nature merger of 2015, Digital Science continues to pursue the vision of its founders: working closely with the research community to improve workflows, provide new insights, and develop alternative technologies that can better meet their needs.

Many of the Digital Science team either come from a research background, supported researchers in their previous roles, or simply have a love of research and science. It is this ethos that keeps us close to the researcher and to the broader scholarly community. 

Today, the Digital Science portfolio has grown to include now-familiar services Altmetric, Figshare, and Symplectic Elements, amongst others. These tools, widely adopted by publishers, institutions and funders around the world, have helped to evolve the way that scholars work and scholarly information flows. 

Dimensions: re-imagining discovery and access to research 

Launched in January 2018 and built in partnership with over 100 research organisations from around the world, Dimensions is a research insights platform that aims to re-imagine discovery and access to research, transforming the way the scholarly community navigates the global research landscape.

In developing Dimensions, Digital Science wanted to achieve 3 key things: 

• A more complete view across the research lifecycle, with the focus no longer so much on publications alone
• A more open approach to content and metrics that puts the power of data back into the hands of the scholarly community 
• A tool that meets the needs of all stakeholders in scholarly research: institutions, funders, publishers and of course researchers

Dimensions breaks down barriers to discovery and enhances the visibility of research by connecting over 133 million grants, publications, patents and clinical trials for the first time, enabling users to explore over 4 billion links between them to gather new insight into the multi-dimensional aspects of research activity. 

It provides vital information that publishers, institutions, funders and corporate R&D can use to analyze the outcomes and impacts of past work, inform their strategic planning, and strengthen their research programs. 

A free version of the platform for researchers provides openly-available search across the publication records and their associated metrics, and paid-for versions Dimensions Plus and Dimensions Analytics deliver extended functionality and analytical tools to institutions, funders, publishers and corporate research organisations. 

Dimensions was designed with specific publisher benefits in mind. Publication detail pages in both the free and licensed versions link directly to the publisher site, driving traffic to the best available version of the article. For our publisher partners with whom we have indexing agreements - as well as Open Access publishers - we offer the dynamic Dimensions badges, which can be easily added to publisher article pages to showcase citations. The Dimensions citation metrics API, freely available for non-commercial use, can further be used commercially by our publisher content partners, enabling them to use citations data internally or on their platform. 


To make it easy for researchers to consume the publisher’s preferred, legitimate version of an article, Digital Science has also launched Anywhere Access, a technology that enables libraries to provide one-click access to Open Access and licensed content. Anywhere Access ensures that all publications are more easily discoverable and that researchers are delivered the best, legally available version of the content every time. 

Behind the scenes

Dimensions is a study in what can be done with open data, unique identifiers, modern machine learning, some friendly publisher-partners, a great set of development partners and a highly dedicated team. It also relies on the technologies that Digital Science has been investing in over the last 8 years with companies such as Altmetric, Readcube and Figshare.  

Built by a distributed and diverse team located in countries mostly around Europe, the technical group is orchestrated by our CTO, Mario Diwersy, from Frankfurt. Much of the team is specialised in machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

An extensive data enrichment process has ensured that search results are both comprehensive and meaningful. Organisation identification, researcher disambiguation, natural language processing and reference extraction mean Dimensions is able to respond accurately to complex search queries. 

Using Dimensions, users are able to draw out insights that would not previously have been possible to uncover, and trace the research process from ideas to eventual impacts for the first time. 

Just two dedicated staff members were newly hired to work on Dimensions: the rest has come from collaboration between existing teams - pulling together expertise from across the portfolio. 

These contributions included marketing and the development of the Dimensions badges, led by Altmetric; the application development and data science, directed by ÜberResearch; the close partnerships formed by the Digital Science Consulting team and Symplectic that helped to create the development partner programme; and the underpinning publication and infrastructure made possible by ReadCube.

It has been amazing to see the teams evolve and find new ways to work together, sharing different and multifaceted experiences to enable the rapid development and launch of a mature and well-thought-through product that keeps researchers and institutional users as a key focus. 

A 'game-changing' innovation

Until Dimensions, data sets that are highly relevant to one another were often fragmented, or situated in silos, making them difficult to compare. Existing market structures and data monopolies were preventing innovation in a space that needed up to date tools. 

In building Dimensions, we aimed to trigger an evolution in how researchers think about research information, and to address some key problems that had become apparent through our interactions with scholars, funders, institutions and publishers: 

• Difficulties in getting access to content 
  Connecting researchers to the content that they need has been a poorly solved problem for many years. With Anywhere Access, which provides one-click access to OA and licensed content, Dimensions offers the fastest way yet for a researcher to find the article that they’re looking for and to get access to the legal, full text version. Dimensions is also the first freely available publication and citation data source where users can have full visibility of the data that drives the system, and that has been written to meet specific academic use cases.
• Increasing demands on researchers
  There has been a slow but significant shift in what is asked of a researcher. Now, they must find places for PhD students who wish to continue studying, seek out collaborations, identify grant opportunities and craft responses, help to hire other academics in their institutions and ensure that their research is original, translatable and well “marketed”. In essence, they must run their own mini-startup around their research. Dimensions gives them the data to start managing all these facets of their research life. 
• Going beyond publications and citations
  Research institutions, funders, publishers, governments and industry have all focussed on bibliometrics to form some kind of measure of the parts of the research enterprise that are relevant to them, and to help inform their future strategies. With Dimensions, we move to give a broader view and enable users to easily trace the links and analyse connections between content from across the research lifecycle - providing much more comprehensive context on which to base decisions.
• Excessive barriers to innovation
  A core aspect of Dimensions is to put decisions and control back in the hands of the research community. In an era where metrics are so easily misused, metrics must be developed and owned by the community based on a datasource that can be fully audited. In commitment to this, the full Dimensions API is made freely available to bibliometrics researchers as well as to clients, enabling them to build on the data as they wish. 

Crucially, we did not do this alone. Beyond the development partners we have taken the approach of incorporating existing industry standards and data sources, with the aim of furthering a more collaborative scholarly ecosystem.

This includes publications data from Crossref (along with many publishers who actively supported the project), citation data from the Initiative for Open Citations (I40C), OA discovery via Unpaywall, and a partnership with ORCID that makes it possible for authors to supplement how they appear in Dimensions and claim publications directly to their ORCID account from within the platform. 

Our plans for the future

The launch of Dimensions was only the starting point for a continued joint development with the large group of development partners and users, including publishers.

Our aim now is to provide a constantly growing research information database that continues to link elements and content consistently together, providing a data landscape that reflects the complexity of the research process, outcomes and impacts.

In early August we integrated supplementary data from Figshare to publication pages within the platform, and in the next month we expect to add over 330,000 policy documents, offering valuable insights for social science scholars and those looking to understand the societal impacts of research.

In the meantime, we hope that the wider research community will grasp the opportunity to provide feedback and build on the infrastructure that exists today, and look forward to seeing where new ideas might lead!

Daniel Hook, MD Digital Science 

Daniel has been CEO of Digital Science since 2015. Holding a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London, Daniel was a founder of Symplectic and served as its Managing Director from its foundation in 2003 until 2013, when he moved into a senior management role at Digital Science.

Christian Herzog, CEO ÜberResearch 

Christian is the lead on the Dimensions project at Digital Science and CEO of ÜberResearch, which he co-founded. A medical doctor by training, Christian was also one of the co-founders of Collexis, and later became Vice President Product Management for SciVal.

Websites: 

https://www.dimensions.ai 

https://app.dimensions.ai

https://www.anywhereaccess.com

https://www.digital-science.com

Twitter:
@digitalsci 
@dsdimensions

The ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2018 will be held at the Beaumont Estate, Old Windsor, UK from 12-14 September, #alpsp18

Spotlight on Springer Nature SharedIt - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

In this blog we talk to Sarah Greaves of Springer Nature about their shortlisted entry to tell us the story behind SharedIt.

Tell us a bit about your company

Springer Nature was formed through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media in 2015. It is a leading global research, educational and professional publisher, home to an array of respected and trusted brands providing quality content through a range of innovative products and services. The company numbers almost 13,000 staff in over 50 countries.

Our brands are some of the most trusted and respected in their fields, with Springer founded by Julius Springer in 1842, Nature first published in 1869 and Macmillan Education a leading publisher for over 150 years.

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

The project Springer Nature submitted to the Awards is SharedIt. SharedIt is a content-sharing initiative that provides links to view-only, full-text subscription research articles which can be posted anywhere - including on social media platforms, author websites and in institutional repositories – allowing researchers to share research, legally and freely, with colleagues and general audiences.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

SharedIt uses technology provided by ReadCube, part of DigitalScience, to create a readable PDF version of the published paper – but one that cannot be downloaded – and creates a unique ‘SharedIt’ link which authors, and subscribers, can then forward on to other researchers.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

SharedIt is the first initiative by a global STM publisher to encourage authors to promote and use a free sharing facility – meaning anyone can access the published version of record if they have the SharedIt link. By not limiting the amount of times a paper can be shared this increases access to the published literature across the globe and through our own analysis we see many students and post-docs taking advantage of this sharing facility. Authors are also encouraged to share their links on social networking sites knowing that the research community will always have access to the final published version of record.

What are you plans for the future?

We plan to continue developing SharedIt and are currently trialling the use of sharing for books and book chapters. We are also looking into the use of SharedIt for our peer reviewer community. We are keen to listen to the community and expand SharedIt based on their needs and expectations around content sharing.

Sarah Greaves, PhD, is an experienced science publisher at the cutting edge of innovation and product development - having led successful journal launches and numerous other profitable projects in both traditional and new business models. During 18 years at Nature Publishing Group and now Springer Nature, Sarah has moved from being an editor at Nature Cell Biology, to the Nature publishing team; becoming the Nature publisher in 2007.

Since 2010 Sarah has focussed exclusively on innovation and new product launches and drove the launch of open access titles across Nature Publishing Group and has recently launched Recommended, a primary paper pan-publisher recommendation service across the Springer Nature platforms as well as helping to lead the SharedIt initiative.

www.springernature.com/sharedit
https://twitter.com/SpringerNature

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

Cross-Fertilization in scholarly publishing: who, what, where, when and why?

As the scholarly publishing landscape diversifies and the number of stakeholders multiples, it’s hard to keep up with who’s who, what they want, and what they need. In this informal "Question Time" style session, panelists from inside and outside publishing shared their own and their organization's experiences of successful collaboration and cross-fertilization.

@alicejmeadows aptly asks everyone what is cross fertilization, last #alpsp16 session pic.twitter.com/PwaAmrgIhv

— Adrian Stanley (@AdrianStanley13) September 16, 2016

The chair, Alice Meadows from ORCID, believes cross-fertilization is organised serendipity, finding connections between people, organizations, or other things that you wouldn't find out in the usual run of business.

Cross fertilisation goes beyond collaboration, reqs #interoperability #automation #metadata #connectivity #opendata @alicejmeadows #alpsp16

— Lettie Conrad (@lyconrad) September 16, 2016

Helen Bray of the Knowledge Transfer Network believes it is about bringing together businesses, entrepreneurs, academics, and funders. Progress is driven by unusual interactions. Innovation is a contact sport that brings people together.

Nicko Goncharoff from Digital Science observed they don't think they can succeed without collaboration. No single company can 'own' the workflow. Collaboration is paramount. He reflected on the STM Association scholarly sharing initiative that he's now leading as something that can serve both researcher and publisher needs. They have focused on the challenges and have held some - somethings tricky - discussions around article sharing. He believes you always have to try bring people into the fold. People take scholarly publishers for granted, but human curation is important in the digital age.

Walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. https://t.co/EMyQG8I2r6

— David Smith (@drs1969) September 16, 2016

Andrew Stammer from CSIRO Publishing in Australia echoed fellow panellists about the value and benefit that can be gained from cross-fertilization. When Australian ecologists listen to aboriginal peoples oral histories, they accelerate their research.

Observation from @BetsyDonohue cross-fertilisation elements are female characteristics! Cue vigorous nodding from @alicejmeadows #alpsp16

— Suzanne Kavanagh (@sashers) September 16, 2016

This thoughtful and inspiring session was a wonderful way to close the ALPSP Conference. Here's to more scholarly cross-fertilization in advance of next year's conference in The Netherlands!

Cross-Fertilization in scholarly publishing was the closing plenary at the 2016 ALPSP Conference. You can view the full session on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

Digital Business Models

The evolution of long standing publishign models is continuing and there are pressures on the underlying business models. What different business models have developed? What opportunities do they present? How have they evolved across books and journals?

The Digital Business Models panel at the ALPSP Conference provided different perspectives on what's new and developing in this area. Chaired by Laura Ceballos Watling from CEDRO, speakers included Jose Fossi, Vice President of Client Services for PubFactory, O'Reilly Media, Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation at Digital Science, and Dr Julia von dem Knesebeck, Found of Open Publishing GmbH.



The ALPSP Conference was held at the Park Inn Heathrow in London on 14-16 September 2016. View the different sessions on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

Reflections on #alpsp15 - Digital Science's Phill Jones explores the key issues

Phill Jones, Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science, reflects on the duelling keynote talks from Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar and Kuansan Wang, Director, Internet Service Research Center at Microsoft Research in this blog post reflecting on the 2015 ALPSP Conference. He noted their very different views on academic discovery on the open web.

"Citing the difference between "general" search for say a local business, and the geographically global nature of "academic" search, Acharya suggested that personalizing Google scholar wouldn’t yield much additional value. Conversely, Wang described a very different philosophy of highly monitored, highly personalized search through Bing and Cortana that would adapt to individual users needs."

He reflects on the shift in customer base from library to researcher and the resulting revelations as publishers try to better understand their needs:

"Google is so firmly embedded in young researcher’s routines that they don’t even think about the fact that they use it. You wouldn’t expect somebody to tell you that they opened an internet browser, would you?" 

The panel on peer review provoked the following thought:

"One reoccurring theme that emerged from the discussions: the fact too much is currently being asked of the peer-review process. With the mantra of "publish or perish" being truer now than it’s ever been, it can be argued that publishers find themselves unwittingly in the position of administering the process that decides whose career advances and whose doesn’t."

With that position comes great responsibility, something that will no doubt be considered in more detail during Peer Review Week to be held 28 September to 2 October 2015, a collaboration between ORCID, OpenScience and Wiley announced by Alice Meadows during the conference.

Read Phill's full post here on the Digital Science blog.

The publisher as technology company

Phill Jones from Digital Science

Phill Jones, Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science, asked the audience to consider whether publishers need to become technology companies to succeed in today's market?

Information technology has changed everything. A crucial point in time was when telephones and computers collided.  Another key point is when television and the internet collided (think NetFlix). Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder of Netscape and Andreeson Horowitz, came up with the phrase "software eats the world." This is when software is developed into something that heavily disrupts an industry. That is what is happening to our industry. Publishing is changing because it is colliding with information technology.

Who are the most powerful players in publishing? Google, Amazon, Apple. One is an advertising company, one is an online retailer, one is an device manufacturer. What they all have in common is IT.

With science, what is happening now is a transformation from a cottage industry approach to industrial size. Things are on a much larger scale with a range of researchers tackling one part of the research project each. The technologies of choice in the lab lag behind. Post-It notes still prevail.

Another key driver is the change in policy (e.g. Neelie Kroes in the EU through to the NIH compliance where they moved to remove grants from researchers who didn't comply with OA requirements).

There is an evaluation gap. Traditional measures of impact don't take into account funders; requirements to measure impact including societal impact, public engagement and legislative impact. As publishers, we need to be aware of this.

Where does this leave us? The publisher as technology company? When content and technology collide you basically get Open Science. The different stages of research include: getting the idea, doing the research, documenting findings, output and dissemination, maximising return on researcher investment.

There are opportunities to use technology to help with each one of these stages. That is the space that publishers should inhabit. How do you go about this to add value? Digital Science focuses on investment in young companies that have solutions to problems in the science space. To understand what the problems are, they have a consultancy division who undertake research.

Phill Jones chaired the ALPSP seminar Disruption, development and divestment held in London on Tuesday 17 March 2015.

Don’t let disruption scare you, it’s just another word for opportunity

Don't be scared, it's only disruption

Phill Jones is Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science. Here, in a guest post, he argues that disruption isn't scary...

"For publishers, societies and other stakeholders in scholarly communication, innovation and its scarier sibling, disruption can be seen either as a threat, a challenge, or as an opportunity. Particularly for smaller players, it can be very tough to look at the innovation landscape with it’s plethora of technologies, start-up companies and initiatives and decide just where to invest valuable time and effort, not to mention development budget.

The problem doesn't begin and end with technology either. Business models are evolving and the nature of sales channels is beginning to change. At the recent Association of Subscription Agents conference in London, Derk Haank, CEO of Springer, pointed out that in the past 4 years, the journal market share for subscription agents has fallen from 54% to 40%. That’s a massive shift in such a short time. Particularly in light of the recent SWETS bankruptcy, it’s important to go beyond thinking about revenue sources and try to figure out what the sales and revenue channels of the future may be.

On the 17th of March, I'm going to be chairing a seminar for ALPSP at SCI in London titled Disruption, Development and Divestment where we’re going to try to get at some of these complex questions. In the mean-time, here are some of my own thoughts about the state of innovation and what’s next. These may or may not reflect the opinions of the other speakers, you’ll have to come along to find out.

There’s more to platform innovation than user experience

Platform innovation can get a bit of a bad name. The traditional view of web design, focusing on stickiness and design layout can often be dismissed as mere bells and whistles. The persistence of the PDF as the dominant container for academic articles supports this view but is this finally beginning to change? Platform innovation that makes a difference adds real value in the form of new functionality and information. Data sharing, altmetrics, and multi-media all represent new but very real needs of today's authors and readers.

If you want to know what authors will need next, follow the money

Academic researchers are pressed for time and like it or not, they’d actually far prefer to be in the lab, the field, or the library doing research than sat at a computer figuring out how to upload a data set or even write an article (at least that’s true for most of them). So why do researchers communicate at all? Because funders insist that they do so. For some reason, they feel that they’re entitled to proof that their money is being spent wisely. Emboldened by the growth of open access publishing, that has in part been driven by mandates, funders are increasingly asking authors and institutions to communicate in new and diverse ways. In short, funder mandates and funding preferences dictate author needs.

Open access won’t be the last new business model to make an impact

With the role of the subscription agent under threat due to falling margins and market share, the question of what the intermediary of the future will look like is becoming pressing. The major players in the space are already pivoting to become more like technology providers and technology providers are creating connections throughout the industry that organically lead to new distribution channels. What will these new revenue sources and channels look like? Well that remains to be seen, but some people have been arguing for some time that publishers can identify sources of revenue outside of selling licensed content.

My three predictions above pose more questions than they answer. Innovation is a complex subject and there are many questions still to be addressed when it comes to open access, open science, data publication, business models and sustainability. On March 17th, myself and a number of wiser speakers than I will try to get to the bottom of some of it. We’ll try to put some of this into perspective and hopefully, there will be some take-home lessons that will help put all this scary talk of disruption into perspective.

See you in London."

Book online for Disruption, Development and Divestment.

Follow coverage on the day via Twitter #alpspdisruption

Innovation and its place in the changing scholarly publishing landscape

Amy Brand from Digital Science takes questions

Amy Brand opened the ALPSP International Conference 2014 with a keynote reflecting on innovation, how its main function is to advance research, and how vital it is for publishers to participate in the linked information landscape.

There are crucial changes in academic publishing that are directed towards the challenges of new efficiencies in a data publishing environment. It is simply no longer good enough to just read the text. Researchers need to get behind the curtain or under the hood. Who owns what? Institution, funder, publishers? The shifts in landscape are leading to land grabs. There are institutional resources for management alongside publishers ones. But the good news is that there are many new opportunities for publishers to develop new services.

The act of creating something entirely new is an act of innovation. Brand was inspired by her experience at MIT Press. In the late 90s they experimented with open access monographs and were very successful at it. Another MIT  project CogNet was one of the first online tools for researchers. It was very exciting to work on it and proved to be one of the projects that drew her away from books and on to CrossRef.

One of the principle aims of Digital Science is to work smart in order to discover more. They work with researchers, librarians, academic administrators, funders and publishers, who all want to enhance their own platforms. So they spend a lot of time looking at workflows between all these stakeholders. They have built a portfolio of nine different companies and provide supporting tools for every part of the research life cycle.

Innovation sticks when it addresses a specific need. Pain not necessity is the mother of invention. Brand's check list for publishers comprises six 'pain points'.

Paint point number 1: 'I want a smarter way to manage my own record of scholarship.'

Researchers want a one stop interface that manages all aspects from activity reports, personal website, CV grant applications, institutional repository and lab website. Persistent identifiers are one way to help and what ORCID is trying to achieve (although it has not moved as quickly as they would've liked). ORCID identifiers are not all that sexy, but if everyone used them it would dramatically improve the academic world.

Pain point 2: 'I need better ways to manage and share my research data and other outputs'

Figshare allows publishers to host large amount of data and articles with no impact on your infrastructure. Brand believes working in partnership with figshare is a no brainer for publishers.

Pain point 3: 'I'm finding it impossible to keep up with the relevant literature in my field.'

Getting information from the internet is like trying to drink from a fire hose. Sophisticated filtering and recommendation services should be more closely integrated into the publishers' platforms. And this is what ReadCube tries to do: personalised recommendations best on researcher's libraries.

Pain point 4: 'I want to become more efficient at finding collaborators and funding opportunities.'

There are various services and systems available that can help publishers identify candidate peer reviewers. One example, Uber Research, brings in a wider pool of reviewers from a database. They can be filtered on expertise and conflict of interest. This is a real example of linked data that presents an opportunity for publishers to improve how they engage with the peer review process and minimise reviewer fatigue.

Pain point 5: 'Pay walls keep me from accessing needed resources and from disseminating my work as widely as possible.'

How can publishers be new partners for innovative access models? What about differentiated access? As the conference is in Heathrow, think about how airlines break down costs for carry on baggage, early check in, etc. With ReadCube, instead of facing paywalls, the institution has patron-driven but paid access to articles in the library. Brand urged publishers to sell more granular bits of information on the book side as well.

Pain point 6: 'Academic incentives and evaluation norms exert too much control over my research and publication choices.'

The traditional paradigms of where you publish (high Impact Factor, prestige monograph publishers) can constrain the direction of your research. The Journal of Statistical Software is a great example: they provide reproducible code and software tools for readers. Altmetric helps researchers read around the subject and authors can check engagement downstream. It can provide a tremendous force for change as readers start their own little revolutions on what to read.

A more radical way is turning the idea of authors on its head. The relationship between authorship, invention and credit is broken. The Harvard-Wellcome draft taxonomy is helping to drive credit for discovery which in turn can have a huge impact on a person's life and career. (Brand flagged the open invitation to CASRAI-NISO contributor role taxonomy review circle.)

Brand finished with a series of questions she feels publishers should be asking themselves to innovate effectively.

1. Are you using and contributing linked data?
2. Have you implemented ORCID IDs in your workflow?
3. How are you increasing engagement with your content?
4. Do your journals support data sharing?
5. Are you displaying article-level metrics?
6. Do you offer differentiated access options for your users?
7. How do you currently capture contribution, and how can we collectively improve the tracking of research credit?

Amy Brand is Vice President of Academic & Research Relations and North America for Digital Science.  

The ALPSP International Conference debate ‘Who is the Publisher?’

Jane Tappini from Publishing Technology will be chairing a panel session later this year at academic and scholarly publishing event the ALPSP International Conference.  

Titled “Who is the Publisher?”, the session, which takes place from 14.00 – 15.30 on Thursday 12 September will focus on the changing role of publishers in a dynamic content world and discuss the challenges facing them in their battle to stay relevant.

The panel will take a look at how skillsets are set to continue to evolve and how publishers can deal with flexibility in content and pricing mechanisms, the implications they have on rights and royalties and the impact on licensing, author relations and reader expectations. The expert panel will include some leading lights in academic and research publishing.

Ziyad Marar

Deputy Managing Director and Executive Vice President of Global Publishing at SAGE Publications, Ziyad Marar has a BSc in Psychology and a Ma in the philosophy and psychology of language. Marar is also a successful author. Having had three books published over the last decade, he has become an authority on how philosophy and psychology can create a better understanding of a modern identity as well as having extensive knowledge of SAGE’s reference works, humanities, social sciences, technology and medicine publishing programs.

Dr Timo Hannay

Managing director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan and a spin off from the Nature Publishing Group, Dr Timo Hannay specialises in providing software and data solutions for scientists and others involved in the research process. With a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College and a DPhil in Neurophysiology from Oxford University, Hannay has worked on sophisticated data management platforms like SureChem, BioData and Symplectic. Hannay is also involved with the Science Foo Camp, co-organising the collaborative event between Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google. Bringing together between 200 and 300 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders, the Science Foo Camp is a recurring weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration and debate.

Dr Victor Henning

Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley, as well as Vice President for Strategy at Elsevier, Dr Victor Henning understands the role of emotion in consumer decision making, intertemporal choice and the theory of reasoned action. Holding a PhD from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Henning has had research published in Psychology & Marketing and Culture & Society. He won the Overall Best Conference Paper Award at the AMA’s in 2005 and was granted a doctoral dissertation scholarship in 2006 by the Foundation of the German Economy. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has since gone on to join academic social network tool Mendeley with academic publisher Elsevier in the heavily discussed merger from earlier in the year.

Louise Russell

Former COO at Publishing Technology, Louise Russell held the Senior Vice President position at the company’s Scholarly Division and was Head of Client Management at Ingenta, before leaving the company earlier this year to become a Consultant. Having graduated from the University of Liverpool, Russell specialises in publishing, strategic planning and product management.

With such a high calibre of speaker on board and a fascinating topic to explore, the panel is set to be one of the ALPSP Conference’s signature events. To book your place at the conference register here and we look forward to seeing you there.  

Authors: The Publisher's Perspective by Timo Hannay

Hannay: authors have more economic power now

Timo Hannay, Managing Director at Digital Science believes the relationship with authors is a complicated issue with numerous opinions. His view? The economic power is shifting to the author, having historically been with the reader, and publishers should be in the business of getting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors.

What is a publisher? Hannay doesn't feel like one. He sees himself as scientist who is passionate about technology, who runs a software company within a publishing business. It's interesting to note his company has a portfolio of technology companies that are run like start-ups. This is unusual for publishing.

One of the major purposes of journals is to help researchers learn about discoveries. So the nature of the (traditional) relationship has been between readers and institutions with:

• a reader service
• highly filtered content, but inefficient (high rejection rate and editorial input, peer review adds a lot of value, but takes a lot of time and resource for all involved)
• the reader has little economic power - beyond subscription, very few ways of getting hold of the content other than asking author for copy of paper.

Open access delivers the concept of author as a customer for publishing discoveries. PLOS, BioMedCentral and Scientific Reports are examples of organisations that have pioneered this approach. They have much more of an author service and recognise the need of the author to publish, rather than know what is in the fields. They use lighter peer review (which is still inefficient) and the author has more economic power. For Hannay: it is about supply and demand: an increase in the demand to publish, and a decrease in the demand to read.

However, the author experience sucks. Publishers provide a clunky interface, opaque processes, are slow, slow, slow, and create Sisyphean experience for their authors. The publishing industry and the people in it, are not without innovation, but there is not enough of it and it tends to come from large, established players.

We are starting to see new entrants who display different relationships. Examples of new start-ups where innovation comes from outside the industry include:

• f1000 Research
• Rubriq
• Frontiers - developed different model of peer review
• PeerJ

There are two perspectives to take into account: publishing discoveries (author relationship) and learning about discoveries (reader relationship).

For authors its about career path and development of reputation. Journal publishing isn't everything to this. Metrics also help. Getting information isn't everything, it's about exposing your institution and peers about what you are doing. The different stages are:

• Gaining a reputation
• Finding collaborators
• Finding a job
• Obtaining funds
• Planning experiments
• Learning about discoveries

One of the challenges in the past is that the act of publication is the only thing you can measure. However, companies are now providing tools to show what you are doing. When developing tools online, they are more accurate and can be measured so credit can be given where due. Examples include: Altmetric, Symplectic, and Thomson Reuters. Finding collaborators has also changed with projects such as Research Gate and Frontiers facilitating this.

For the researcher, the cycle is:

• learning about discoveries
• planning experiments
• conducting experiments
• evaluating results
• sharing results
• publishing discoveries

Publishers should be in the business of putting the right information in the hands of researchers and authors. In a networked digital world, much more that can be done if we think about it in the right way. Publishers also need to get skilled up in the right way. If researchers are your main market there is so much more that can be done.

Publishers are in fear of Google, Apple and Amazon and lump them all together. They are all very different business: one is a retailer, one is an advertising network and one is a hardware company. Their common success factor is that they are amazing at technology. There is a direct correlation to mastering technology and success.

Publishers should own their technical development for their markets.