ALPSP Awards Spotlight on... Impact Vizor from HighWire Press

In this, the penultimate post from the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists, John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire Press talks about how it Impact Vizor came about and their plans for the future.

"Can you answer these questions?

Do you reject quality content in one journal that you could use to start a new journal? Are the articles you published this year higher impact than last year’s?
Are you anxious about the impact of the new journal you just launched?
Has your tighter acceptance rate helped your competitors get better articles?
Are you rejecting some very high impact articles?
What topics that you publish are “trending”?  Is this a shift for your discipline?
Who publishes your rejected articles?
Are your review articles this year as good as they were the last two years?
What can you tell the new EIC about the impact of editorial changes?

(What questions are you and your editors asking along these lines?  Let us know in the comments.)

The above editorial and publishing questions have been around forever, but the answers have been based on instinct or feeling or what the EIC’s friends think.  Now we can get better answers.

Where do the better answers come from?

Almost from the start of HighWire, I have been using the tag phrase "evidence-based publishing". With its roots at Stanford University -- and in the Stanford University Library in particular -- HighWire was formed around the idea that data -- evidence -- could inform best practices and the best decisions.

Data hasn't been in short supply lately.  The challenges have been to "mill" the data into information that works for decision-makers: this often means integrating data across disparate systems, making it easy to understand, and timely to access.  We think we are on to how to do this with our "Vizor" suite of analytics products.

What are “Vizors”?

HighWire's Vizors are visualized analytics.  The first Vizor that has begun rolling out is Impact Vizor, which helps editors and publishers see the research impact of the articles they publish, and the articles they reject.

Impact Vizor includes the "Rejected-Article Tracker" (the “RAT”) which visualizes where articles an editor or publisher rejects get published, and how much they get cited.  The "RAT" has been rolled out to sixteen publishers.  Soon we will be rolling out the Section Performance Analyzer (the "SPA") and the Hot Object Tracker (the "HOT").   Following those will be the Advanced Correlator of Citation and Usage (the "ACCU") and the Cohort Comparator ("CC").

Editors get very very excited by the RAT; previously this kind of information has been hard to develop, and hard to visualize.  Impact Vizor does both.  And this information tells you important things about the potential for starting new sections, new journals, or other new products.

And in other big news:  a journal does not have to be hosted by HighWire to use Impact Vizor.  In fact, our first deployment was for a major publisher who is not hosted by HighWire.

How does it work?

Impact Vizor combines data across different systems to put together (literally) a picture of how content is being used and cited.   The key is to get the earliest possible indicators of research merit -- primarily citations -- and see what patterns there are in the data.  In addition to all the visuals, there are also full data tables for those who want to further process and investigate the data, by easily moving it into Excel for example.

How did it get developed?

The Vizor development process incorporated our "early adopter” group of sixteen publishers right from the start: this group prioritized the components to be developed, and three or four publishers are involved in creating the prototypes of each component.

We have a highly-focused team inside HighWire working on the software, and we use a number of open source and "magic quadrant" components.  Key to the software of course is the data, and here we stand on industry APIs and standards, as well as a lot of analytics data and experience at HighWire over the years.



Why should you care?

Impact Vizor solves a significant problem facing publishers and editors: they “fly blind” when making changes in policy, scope or personnel, because the feedback from current citation monitoring tools is terribly slow and painful to interpret.

We integrate varied information sources, and do it rapidly.  We visualize the information, rather than just show large data tables.   Vizors are easy for the non-data-scientist to use; but they can deliver data for the data scientist.

We built a user community to direct the development towards the highest-value business and editorial questions, and we are delivering periodic new function so that value is increasing.

What’s next for Vizors? 

We plan to roll out a half dozen components of Impact Vizor after the RAT, according to a customer-guided roadmap.   Additional data sources and visualizations will come in 2016 as we further expand the concept of impact beyond citation metrics.

HighWire also will be developing other Vizors beyond Impact Vizor, to visualize usage, metadata, use demographics and manuscript workflows."

HighWire Press's Hugh Blackbourn at 'It's all about discoverability, stupid! How to get your content seen by the right people'

Simon Inger & Hugh Blackbourn field questions

Discoverability is an art and a science. How do you find what you are looking for with fidelity? We have to ensure the content can be found quickly and easily. Otherwise, in today's world, with so many articles competing for the readers attention, if you do not focus on discoverability, it's as if you have not published them.  Hugh Blackbourn, Senior Publication Manager at HighWire Press provided a view from their perspective on discoverability. 

For HighWire Press, there are nine elements to consider with discoverability.

1. Search Engine Optimisation
Rather than building technical challenging 'page turning' PDFs make URLs search engine friendly for spidering. Each new site they launch is announced to the major search engines as they deliver most traffic (e.g. Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, Microsoft, Yahoo and ISI, plus other major reference services such as GeoRef for earth sciences). They meet regularly with Google and Google Scholar to have a good relationship (but it helps they are in California). Google needs to know which journals or articles are accessible to which authors. They use subscriber links which enables access links on Google Scholar.

2. Discoverability - web scale and specialised search
This is a broad category and includes customer specialised search engines, which want data to serve particular customers such as library portals. There are also geographically specialised search engines, which serve a region such as China (e.g. Baidu).

3. Visibility
You need visibility and discoverability to work in harmony. The world has moved on and the journal is no longer as important as it was: people read articles now. They have a widget construction kit (WiCK), use RSS for topic collections, related article recommendation services and social media tagging (Facebook, Twitter, Google +).

4. Search within an issue
1. Quick search
2. Advanced search
3. Within an issue (table of contents)

5. Related content link - standard auto-search
Based on topics or subject collections - you can collect from across titles and set topic yourself.

6. Linking and alerting
Working with NCBI/PubMed, HighWire developed the original technology to have links in the reference section. This led to industry development of CrossRef and the DOI system. They exploit NCBI databases by linking from articles to databases in two way linking. There also had toll-free inter-journal linking, which was an odd form of open access before OA existed.

7. Data distribution and repository deposit 
This supports distribution of publisher metadata to more than thirty direct recipients. include ISI, PubMed, CrossRef etc. They also work with LOCKSS.

8. Text mining
HighWire Press support Open Archive Metadata Harvesting Protocol with content structured for use by text mining researchers. With publisher agreement, they regularly respond to data requests. Text and data mining presents additional challenges: Is a separate sub required? Is it counted for COUNTER or Journal Usage Factor? Is an additional license required etc? Prospect - a new service developed by CrossRef - will be available at the end this year aims to solve individual researcher use-case.

9. The changing market
Technology is changing rapidly with new ways of presenting and accessing content. They deliver content to Amazon for Kindle devices and apps. They have many mobile optimised sites and are able to rapidly deliver mini-sites which include topical sites targeted to a specific audience/membership division which incorporate not just information from the publisher's journals, but external content as well. They can help drive traffic, build membership, increase revenue (e.g. via advertising) and provide benefits to authors and editors. They build apps for Apples iOS and for Android phones and tablets and the use of these devices is restoring the notion that readers browse to find relevant content.

Discoverability has many components - seemingly unending process of refinement and adaption to new technical requiring investment of your time and resources. The results are meaningful, fairly immediate and rewarding. Blackbourn closed by reclaiming the model of 'CPD' - commitment to publishing discovery.

Kathy Law on Outsourcing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Kathy Law is a publishing professional with over 30 years' experience in both sales and distribution roles, most recently in business development and publication management at MPS and HighWire Press. She is a member of ALPSP's Professional Development Committee and is a co-opted member of the main Council.

Here, she reflects on the challenges publishers face when outsourcing all or part of their activity.

"For many organisations, outsourcing is not a daily event, but is a major shift for the organisation that can be fraught with potholes for the unwary or unprepared. There is the sense of losing control, where work is not done the way you normally do it. Sometimes, it can seem difficult to get your message or instructions across. And what do you do when you aren't getting the right results?

Poorly defined work specifications and unrealistic expectations about who does what and how much often lead to vendors not delivering what you expected. Confusion over how the outsourced activity will be managed can contribute to an unsatisfactory, and potentially costly outcome.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the challenges, good practices and pitfalls around outsourcing. There are many functions that can be outsourced. Ask yourself the following:

• Are you going to just outsource the ubiquitous typesetting scenarios? This is a hugely important area and probably the first thing to get outsourced by a publisher. 
• Are you interested in outsourcing sales and marketing functions? 
• What about hosting, content enhancement and conversion? 
• And let's not forget copy editing, proofreading and other editorial functions. 

There is much to learn from talking through your outsourcing with a range of potential vendors and other publishers. The more insight you gain into what can go right or wrong - the good, the bad, and the ugly - the more likely you'll be able to be make sound decisions when selecting and working with your supplier.

Don't forget that it's not just a straight transactional relationship, there are also valuable insights to be had on handling cultural differences. Crucially, think about how outsourcing can be turned into a benefit for your publishing activity by allowing you to re-focus affected staff into positive channels of other activity.

In my experience, the more thought that goes into these areas, the more positive and successful the outsourcing relationship will be."

Kathy will be sharing her experience at the ALPSP seminar Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly on 12 June in London. Book your ticket now.

Bill Matthews discusses data analytics on 15 November

HighWire is excited about contributing to the ALPSP webinar this month entitled "Analyzing Customer Data to Create Competitive Advantage".   I have been a 'numbers guy' since early in my career at A.C. Nielsen, so I understand how powerful data can be if transformed into actionable information. There are mountains of data which can be analyzed, but In order to find unique insights, you need to not only access to the information, but also the tools which allow you to manipulate, store, and create custom data sets in real time.  

Analytics touches many aspects of scholarly publishing; content creation, editorial, marketing and sales, product packaging/pricing, and audience development.  Typical business questions can include most read articles, turnaway reports, usage for a specific event such as an annual conference, or simply tracking your content's overall performance. For my section of the webinar, I plan on examining a few of these potential questions and how to extract "valuable nuggets" from data analysis which can provide powerful editorial and marketing insights.

I hope many of you can make it on November 15th!

Bill

For more details on the webinar and to sign up, visit the ALPSP website.  If you can't make the 15th, make sure you sign up to get access to the webinar later.

Bill Matthews
Director of Business Development
HighWire Press | Stanford University

(o) 650-725-9279
(m) 650-208-4643
bmatthews@highwire.stanford.edu

HighWire:  Pathfinders in Scholarly Publishing

ALPSP Conference Day 2: The scholarly article in 140 characters? Are you a denial-o-saur?

Leon Heward-Mills introduces the session

Digital technology, particularly mobile, is changing the way we access and read information - perhaps even in the way we use different parts of our brains - for problem solving rather than 'deep-reading'. The Scholarly Article in 140 Characters session explored implications of this for consumers, publishers and the research community.

Matt Rampone from HighWire Press kicked off with a summary of mobile trends, data and the impact on STM publishing from their own user data. The information comes from 12 months of data from a wide range of publishers they work with and provides a snapshot of an aggregate study.

Mobile usage as a percentage of total online usage in the US is 10.58% and in the UK is 13.16% at August 2012 and based on smart phones, tablets, eReaders, with iPad 85% of tablet market share. Site use by page views can be broken down as:

• 82% content
• 9% home page
• 4% search
• 3% current issue
• 2% ahead of print.

The visits by operating system are split by 69% by iOS, 30% by Android, and 1% by BlackBerry. Mobile website usage trends are going up. People are finding the sites and coming back. Where smaller publishers - who publish once a month - have mobile apps, they found that users were coming back showing real engagement with a mobile platform. The median time for mobile website browsing is 90 seconds.

People spend more time reading with a tablet. With a smart phone they spend less time reading, perhaps because it is not as comfortable a reading environment? PDFs are more lately starting to trend downwards and - unsurprisingly - they are non-existent on the smart phone.

Matt's key recommendations:

1. invest in mobile (mobile optimised websites first)
2. invest in analytics
3. focus on creating good experiences: more tools and better end experience.

Charlie Rapple from TBI Communications - who wins the prize for best slide of the conference - provided a wake-up call for those who won't rethink their content strategy in light of new digital technologies. Content still tends to be long form, text based and not very dynamic. As an industry we've got into the mindset of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Slide of the conference: denial-o-saurs

But are users happy? What they want is changing, but we’re not really recognising and responding to this. One reason is that we haven’t evolved our product or service to the extent to which they have evolved. The risk is that we will lose market share to disruptor players. Does that mean that as an industry we are denial-o-saurs?

We need to consider how long we can win the battle of mind share. We need to win our users back and get better at meeting user needs by reconnecting, re-engaging, and rebuilding relationships with readers and stakeholders. The transition to online wasn't a revolution, but mobile and social may well be. So let's go back to basic principles - the audience and their need - to direct strategy and rethink core value proposition. We need to make better use of mobile technology.

Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs claimed that mobile technology is “not just a way to do old things while moving... a way to do things that couldn’t be done before.”

We should think about what we can gain from deconstructing the article in terms of information and workflow. There is potential to meet reader/customer needs in the right place, at the right time with interactive, relevant and friction-free content. Charlie has a simple equation to work to:

right information + right place + right time = value

What she wants - and is starting - to see is user experience being less passive with a better sense of how it is contributing to their work and therefore the value. Mobile is really contributing to this. For publishers, the key is to get close enough to users to understand and get to know audiences. It doesn't have to be difficult or expensive: you can do desk research, analyse data - you don't need a huge budget. Having a crack in-house is better than not doing anything. An initial bit of work will help you really articulate the questions you need answers to.

You can combine general information from desk research with more focused research you do yourself. Take the general information (e.g. smart phone take-up) with own (user analysis of device type) and also ask really specific questions (e.g. problems that preclude smart phone use: security, confidentiality, connectivity?) Then compare the reality of what is happening with your site and your users to compare perception versus actual behaviour. Consider user observation and it is useful to probe and explore in more detail initial findings of your survey.

Citing an example from one of TBI's recent clients, one interesting finding from this approach was that as much use of professional information happens outside work while commuting or at home. This had implications for the structure and presentation of content with unexpected insights and inspiration. For example, expect the previously unexpected: medics can now use mobiles in the air in the US. This resulted in a medical app being used to save a life on a plane.

Nick Bilton in his latest book I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works suggests we need to make time and space to make innovation happen. Another contemporary theorist, Steven Johnson talks about the “collision of slow hunches”. It's about focusing your efforts, setting and prioritising objectives, as well as embracing and planning for change. Move away from thinking about content to thinking about customers and it will have an impact on every department.

Rapple's vision comprises a roadmap:

1. audience research and segmentation
2. brainstorm problems and solutions
3. prioritise audiences and objectives
4. prepare staff and processes for change.

Despite having to follow the awesome denial-o-saurs, Tom Reding from BBC Worldwide charmed and informed the audience in equal measure with multi-media highlights from key BBC brands (Top Gear and Doctor Who anyone?) as well as some fabulous merchandise giveaways. His was a view from outside of the scholarly publishing industry, one that could provide fresh insight or some new ideas.

BBC Worldwide drives revenue to go back into creative sector and BBC.com has over 50 million users a month. Digital is important because it’s about the money. New revenue streams are driven through new digital channels, new production and cost savings. Digital also opens up new markets. It gives them a closer relationship with audience and engages fans across platforms. But one of the biggest reasons they focus on digital is to stay relevant.

Their teenage audience watch their content exclusively online so they need to unlock that content and seek new value. Areas to consider are:

• the business of free
• getting closer to your users
• new partnerships
• gamification and serious games (new trend)

In one of the more interesting comparisons of the day Redin observed that the cross-platform chunked up and down content for Top Gear isn't too disimilar to what you can do with an article. He advised us to step away from our content. We’re in the business of insight NOT journals. Remember that mobile users are more willing to pay for services than desktop users as they value convenience and immediacy.

A move to digital means more than re-versioning. Sweat your assets, distribute as far as you can, but get to the core of your offer which is insight. Explore new media platforms. Think about the business of free: with marginal cost of production and market factors pushing to ‘free’ can you adopt the free + premium = freemium model? If you scrutinise your sales, you’ll likely find you make your money from 10-20% of your audience. For BBC Worldwide, the rest get it free. It's a classic Pareto Principle model. So consider if freemium will work for you.

He suggested that with a large adddressable audience (250k knowledge workers) and a free version with clear value (the abstract), a premium offer with added value using user analytics (build or partner) and an optimised conversion funnel (build or partner) can demonstrate your confidence in your product.

If 13% of paying users are providing 51% of revenue, create products that cater to this audience and allows them to spend their money. Closing insights included:

• dig deep beneath the Google analytics as they are a free and powerful way to inform your marketing budget
• measure results and iterate
• try things out e.g. work with companies such as Semantico, Mendeley etc
• content still remains king - make the best content and you will get the best users
• look at gamification: take a gaming approach and apply it to none-game situations e.g. FoldIt - Solve Puzzles for Science.

Redin closed with a charming illustration of how gamification and playfulness can inspire mission-type behaviour. The Bottle Bank Arcade form The Fun Theory. It's pretty inspiring stuff.