What is the Core Expertise of a Publisher Today? The 'buy' versus 'build' dilemma

At a time when developments in technology and the emergence of new services have so much potential for our communities, what should we be doing as publishers? What is the core expertise of a publisher today; should you buy or build your way to growth? Jon White, Sales and Marketing Director at Semantico, chaired a panel of speakers who considered different aspects of what publishers now do.

Alison Jones, Director of Practical Inspiration Publishing, suggested that 'buy or build' is the wrong questions.

Alison Jones from Practical Inspiration Publishing: build or buy is wrong question - look beyond at partnership & collaboration #alpsp16

— Inspired Selection (@Inspiredjobs) September 15, 2016

Collaboration fits with the general cultural move from ownership to access. Traditional publishers are much better at competitive strategy than collaborative strategy.

@bookstothesky says core capability of publisher is to recognize what we do best, and add integration, collaboration, innovation. #alpsp16

— Charles Watkinson (@charleswatkinso) September 15, 2016

Chris Leonard, Head of Product at Emerald Group Publishing argued that publishing articles is a solved problem, but the services around them aren't. They did a lot of UX research and looked at a range of websites that worked - including The Daily Mail's Sidebar of Shame. iTunes playlists inspired their ideas for create-your-own-bespoke-journal functionality.

Taking ideas from outside of the industry opens up new opportunities - curated playlists, for example #alpsp16

— semantico (@semantico) September 15, 2016

Lynne Miller, Managing Director of TBI Communications, focused on the pursuit of high differentiation with low cost. Publishers can stay relevant and working with an agency can be a good way of avoiding internal politics and an unbiased view. Key industry trends are in content marketing, content sharing, author services, impact & outreach and big data. Strategy is also about deciding not what to do. Define what makes you unique and focus on resulting market opportunities.

Miller absolutely spot on - market is fragmenting -> new opportunities for publishers #alpsp16

— Alison Jones (@bookstothesky) September 15, 2016

Dietmar Schantin, Founder of the Institute for Media Strategies, observed that we now expect easy access to relevant content in any place on any device. The audience now looks for best of breed, rather than showing loyalty and want to be engaged in the communication flow. Multi-platform publishing is essential as is cross channel communications that are linked and across media. New fields of expertise have developed - audience insight, social media and distributed content, user experience. News publishers respond by investing in tech start-ups, hiring people from other industries, outsourcing non-core aspects. And remember, a fool with a tool is still a fool!

Schantin: Users don't care about platform - they care about the story #alpsp16

— Kim Eggleton (@kimmibobs) September 15, 2016

Timo Hannay, founder of SchoolDash, was the final speaker of the session. He asked if data is something that publishers should outsource. Data ought to have a particularly pertinent meaning to us as publishers, purveyors of knowledge and that the separation of data and content is anachronistic. Converting rich data into PDFs puts us in the data destruction business. Publishers are worryingly keen to outsource data work; content and data aren't two different things. SchoolDash publishes research in any format that serves our purposes, not in journals. They're really keen to enable the reader to interact with the data directly themselves. Everyone in this room has the capability to do what we're doing; if you're not, that's through choice.

"Publishers make a distinction between data and content - they shouldn't" Hannay #alpsp16

— Jeremy Macdonald (@jermcd) September 15, 2016

The panel took place at the 2016 ALPSP Conference.

Standards: chaos minimization, credibility and the human factor

Standard, standards, standards. One is born, one conforms to standards, one dies. Or so Edmund Blackadder might have said.

And yet, as David Sommer and his panel of experts demonstrated earlier this month, standards underpin our scholarly publishing infrastructure. Without them, we could not appoint editorial teams, enable the review process, tag or typeset articles, publish in print or online, catalogue, discover, or even assess the quality of what we published – assuming, that is, we had been allowed through the office door by our standards-compliant HR departments. We couldn’t determine the citation rates of our publications, sell said publications to libraries (all of them naturally sceptical of our unstandardized claims for high usage) or even contact our high-profile UCL author (is this the UCL in London, Belgium, Ecuador, Denmark, Brazil or the USA?). Resolution, disambiguation, standardization is the order of the day.

‘We are’, as Tim Devenport of EDItEUR said, ‘in the chaos minimization business’.

Devenport: we are in the chaos minimisation business at #alpspstandards #alpsp

— DavidLSommer (@DavidLSommer) November 11, 2015

Speakers at the seminar offered overviews of the roles played by CrossRef, Ringgold, ORCID, COUNTER, Thomson Reuters, EDItEUR, libraries (in the guise of the University of Birmingham) and JISC, considering content, institutional and individual identifiers, plus usage, citation, metadata and library standards.

Audio of all talks is available via the ALPSP site, but here are some broader conclusions from issues discussed on the day.

Humans make standards

But we’re remarkably good at breaking them too. The most foolproof systems are those that don’t allow much human intervention at all (ever tried to accurately type a sixteen-digit alphanumerical code on less than eight cups of coffee?). Vendors should build systems that not only pre-populate identifier fields, but actively discourage users from guessing, ignoring or simply making up numbers.

Consistent theme from #alpspstandards - STOP PEOPLE TYPING NUMBERS INTO SYSTEMS OR IT ALL GOES PETE TONG

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) November 11, 2015

Be the difference

Publishers, funders and institutions need to actively assert their need for standards at every stage of their workflows. Break one part of the article supply chain and something, somewhere, is bound to be lost. (And the worse part? We don’t know where.) That means that the entire supply chain must inform and develop standards, not just 'free ride' on existing ones.

Homework for all attendees at #alpspstandards pic.twitter.com/SpEvIuWmaM

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) November 11, 2015

Standards help authors find their voice

If an article can be found by DOI, funding source, award number or ORCID iD – in other words, if one or more of the key standards is applied to a particular publication – then research gets heard above the online ‘noise’. Authors can help themselves by claiming their own iDs, but it’s up to publishers and institutions to show them why it matters.

Sarah got married last week & the first thing she on returning to work was update her name on her ORCiD record! @pearsosz #alpspstandards

— DavidLSommer (@DavidLSommer) November 11, 2015

Identifiers enforce uniqueness

They not only help with functionality (disambiguating data and eradicating duplication), but they ensure correct access rights, help understand a customer base and build stronger client relationships. All of this adds immense value to your data.

Yikes! University of York (UK) =/= York University (Canada). An illustration of why we need institutional identifiers. #alpspstandards

— Richard O'Beirne (@robeirne) November 11, 2015

Standards build credibility everywhere

We tend to think of publishing standards as being the building blocks of the standard workflows – and they are. But the latest development from ORCID encourages involvement in peer review, with journals and funders now collecting reviewers’ iDs to track review activities. That’s a startling contribution to tenure decisions and research assessments. And what about the prospect of using iDs in job applications to verify your publications?

The Impact Factor is a number, not a standard

OK, so we knew that. And we probably had an opinion on it. But coming on a day when Thomson Reuters announced they were ‘exploring strategic options’ for the Intellectual Property & Science businesses, it was good to hear from the horse’s mouth.

Ian Potter of @thomsonreuters with a crowd-pleasing opening: 'don't take a number and use it as a standard' #alpspstandards

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) November 11, 2015

Even the ‘standard’ standards need, well, standardizing

Given the significance of COUNTER usage statistics for library negotiations, the possibility for inaccuracy seems startlingly high. Over 90% of users still require some form of manual intervention, and that means greater likelihood of error. There is a role for standardizing and checking IP information to improve the accuracy of COUNTER data - but for now, no one seems to be claiming that ground.

There is a role for standardizing and checking IP info to improve accuracy of @ProjectCounter stats - but for whom? #alpspstandards

— Mark Hester (@mh_oxford) November 11, 2015

Slow is good

If a publisher/funder/institution is a late standards adopter, that’s OK. Better to start slow and get it right than to implement poorly and leave a (data) trail of tears. But start. Organizations such as ORCID make available plenty of information about integrating identifiers into publisher and repository workflows.

Standards are not anti-innovation

On the contrary, they facilitate innovation. And they provide the information architecture for innovation to flourish in more than one place.

Standards aren't anti-innovation. Yes!! #alpspstandards

— Richard O'Beirne (@robeirne) November 11, 2015

Share it

Since we can't predict when/where (meta)data will be used, let’s make sure everyone knows as much as possible. Make it open source, or at the very least, make it trustworthy.

Greater need to act on trigger events in publishing workflows - requires a notification architecture @njneilj #alpspstandards

— Richard O'Beirne (@robeirne) November 11, 2015

And finally…

The mobile charging area at the British Dental Association front desk is a perfect example of the need for rational standards. How many wires?

Why #alpspstandards should be applied to the phone chargers in reception @DavidLSommer pic.twitter.com/D3iupcrKpi

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) November 11, 2015

Martyn Lawrence (@martynlawrence) is Publisher at Emerald Group Publishing and attended the recent ALPSP Setting the Standard seminar in London. He can be contacted at mlawrence@emeraldinsight.com.

Where does publishing go from here? Tom Clark reflects...

Tom Clark from Emerald

Tom Clark is Chief Officer for Business and Product Innovation at Emerald. In the closing session at the ALPSP seminar Disruption, Development and Divestment, he reflect on the future for publishing.

We are all learning organisations now. In what can be called "The dawn of digital abundance" everyone is a contributor, discovered and data source. Connectivity is at the heart of internet commerce, but how sustainable is content aggregation? Business models are diverse and fluid while usefulness and discoverability are playing a stronger hand.

He believes we are in an internet business and while he isn't interested in articles, he is interested in author problems and needs. The internet is simply too complex to not innovate and orientate to customer needs. What is a publisher? What does that student think of you? What will they be doing in five years? Digital, lean, agile approach allows publishers to develop better products for markets.

We face digital abundance. How do we see change? Who are our competitors these days? What is an author? Does marketing work anymore? Where will revenues come from? (Clark thinks they will come from varied and many new different sources). How do I develop new business models? Does everyone else understand what's going on? Business faculty have conflicting issues on their time (teaching, admin, research). Emerald feel they have a range of products and services that can help.

You need to learn to develop and blink: what happens on the internet in a minute is huge. There are new rules and new competitors. The ability to harness and connect more things is key. It is worth considering joint ventures, especially if you can't afford to buy or invest.

Mobile will be key. It's not only researchers using it, students are too. What problem can you solve with mobile? Are mobile apps dead and the humble browser reborn? The FT famously ditched its hub app in favour of HTML5 because it was cheaper, searchable and more responsive. Hardware and connectivity improvements are delivering great experiences via 'm' websites. There will be less phone 'litter' and more responsive/intuitive layers.

We are all learning organisations, including Emerald. When a researcher submits and publishes a paper they are enriching their understanding and furthering their knowledge and career. Helping them to ensure their research makes an impact is key.

Clark asked how well we know and understand the data we can get from our own websites. Not very well, he suspects. You need to understand that online attention is decreasing. Divesting the legacy approach is expensive. Are you creating packages of content, delivering through micro-sites, listening, designing the experience? That's where publishers need to be.

What matters? innovation, risk, customer data. Investment, connectivity, new markets. Usefulness, discoverability, openness. Existing markets, print versus digital, direct marketing. Organic growth, social media, market share. Librarians, discovery services, open access.

It was a big cultural shift for Emerald to do things quickly. You need a mixed team and make quick decisions: be agile and decisive. Clark closed by observing that no one has all the answers. You have to experiment.

Tom Clark spoke at the ALPSP seminar Disruption, development and divestment held in London on Tuesday 17 March 2015.