Innovation starts with HighWire’s Intelligent Publishing Platform

In this ALPSP guest blog, John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire Press shares how how Highwire are working with their user community to drive innovation.

We help scientific and scholarly publishers stay ahead of research and education trends, adapt to changing user demands, and increase revenues across channels. HighWire continually invests in data science across all our products to offer integrated analytics and insights that drive digital innovation.

The evolution of print and digital publishing is accelerating. Publishers work with us to bring innovative products and services to market faster and deliver the very best user experiences and business outcomes with our Intelligent Platform. Our customers tell us that the evidence we offer, via our Strategic Business Consultancy Services, transform conversations about content development and product strategy. Working together as a strategic business partner, our goals are to advance innovation and best practices, inform successful editorial and business decisions, and create great products and services and business outcomes.

Insights drive innovation across the industry

At HighWire Publishers’ meetings, our community shares analysis, insights, and practical advice to address the challenges they face as well as a future focus on strategies to keep ahead of the curve in the ever-changing publishing ecosystem. Conversations at our meetings focus on delivering what users want, improving workflows to attract readers and leading authors, and creating new revenue opportunities. You can watch brief video excerpts of presentations at recent meetings now available for the first time on our web site outlining specific achievements working collaboratively with HighWire.

Joe Puskarz, Director, Division of Journal Publishing, American Academy of Pediatrics shares the strategic process, data insights, and success metrics around a dramatic change in AAP’s Pediatrics print strategy and online publication gateway to better serve readers and advertisers while improving profitability. See videos Optimizing a publications gateway with reader feedback and analytics and Pediatrics Print Strategy: User behavior drives product development.

HighWire’s Intelligent Platform includes end-to-end publishing solutions from strategy to delivery. Machine intelligence and predictive analytics are applied across all our products to help understand user behavior patterns to attract target readers, authors, and advertisers and inform product development. Kim Murphy and Nandhini Kuntipuram from American College of Cardiology (ACC), describe their journey to develop customer personas, define product requirements and optimize the user experience, leading to the successful launch of ACC’s journals with JCore. Watch Using field research in UX to inform and measure website success. Don’t miss brief case studies on more recent journal launches with JCore.

Our industry's need to improve workflows for efficiency regularly generates discussion and innovation. HighWire collaborates with publishers to develop and implement innovative approaches that support researchers who require faster times to publication while continuing to meet rigorous editorial and content management requirements. Stuart Taylor, Royal Society; Claire Rawlinson, BMJ; and Claire Moulton, Company of Biologists; each contributed a recent London session on “Emerging Trends in Academic Publishing." Issues and opportunities addressed included pre-print servers, post-publication changes designed for an online world, overlay journals, and post publication peer review.

Highlights from our previous Publishers' Meetings

Publishers recently presented on a range of topics at our Fall Meeting in September, including our session on the “Bibliometric Intelligence” product pilot with Meta which illustrated the opportunities offered by predictive analytics. 

Read about past presentations by Valda Vinson, AAAS; Suzanne Rosenzweig, Society for Neuroscience; Keith Gigliello, American Society of Hematology; and an illustrated case study using Impact Vizor to compare article citation levels across disciplines within a journal and to other journals.

Getting in touch with us is easier than ever! Click Talk to Us and connect with industry thought leaders and experts like John Sack regarding emerging trends you think should be addressed in our 2018 meetings.

John Sack is the founding director of HighWire Press and focuses on market assessment, client relations, technology innovation, and the kind of thought leadership and industry-forward thinking that has helped defined the Company's mission since 1995.

Website: www.highwirepress.com/

Twitter: @highwirepress

Facebook: www.facebook.com/HighWirePress

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1797

Highwire is a proud Silver Sponsor of the ALPSP 2017 Annual Conference.

Peer review: evolution, experiment and debate

John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire Press introduced the morning panel on peer review at the 2015 ALPSP Conference.

Dr Aileen Fyfe, PI of the ‘Publishing the Philosophical Transactions’ project at the University of St Andrews reflected on how Henry Oldenburg used an editorial driven model for Philosophical Transactions. The Royal Society approved all issues for publication. But it wasn't at the article level, it was to confirm there were no threats to the country: it was ratification of a sort.

Peer review a la française 1760s - fascinating presentation from @aileenfyfe #alpsp15 pic.twitter.com/IvpaphGjkr

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) September 11, 2015

In the 1760s considered papers by looking at the abstracts and would take a vote. This was to protect the reputation of the Society and did not check facts or reasoning. Meanwhile in France, the Académie royale des sciences asked academicians might be asked to report jointly on submitted papers on the truth claims being made in the papers. However, they did not judge each other, only outsiders. This high level checking scrutiny was abandoned in the 1780s as it was deemed too difficult. In the Philosophical Transactions in the 1860s referees who were a member of the society would make recommendations for publications. They provided literary comments about the article. The Fellows were writing about each other's work as well as outsiders. This now included a judgment on originality and significance.

The Philosophical Magazine in the 1920s:

Fyfe: 20th century review didn't necessarily imply validation or agreement. Published as contribution to debate #alpsp15

— Alice Meadows (@alicejmeadows) September 11, 2015

Nature in the 1950s-70s would publish papers if they weren't actually wrong with erratic refereeing. They relied on papers that came from good institutions and/or known labs. In summary, the history of peer review is not as simple as you might imagine. Much better to understand this before we move forward to revise and update peer review going forward.

Dr John R Inglis, Executive Director and Publisher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press wryly noted there are many critics of modern peer review, but the prevailing view tends to be that it may not be perfect, but it's better than nothing. What do scientists think about peer review? Most are satisfied with it, think it helps scientific communication and think it has improved their papers. However, many think it can be improved, think it holds back science and now believe it is now unsustainable with increasing journals and science.

Most scientists think peer review should improve the quality of a paper, determine its originality and the importance of its findings. It helps to ensure previous work is acknowledged, help select the best papers for the journal and detect falsehoods. There are many ways that peer review is changing including double blinding, transparency, publishing reviews alongside papers, checking figures for manipulation, use specialised data, validating authors and reviewers and forbidding author-offered reviewers.

There are also changes to where peer review is done. often it is outsourced to peer review platforms like Rubriq, Peerage of Science, Editage and PubLons. There are also changes to when peer review is done. After publication there are a range of options to comment on papers: journal specific commenting functions, PubMeds Commons, PubPeer, ResearchGate and Academia.edu, ScienceOpen and SelectedPapers.net.

Inglis. Some stats on bioRxiv... Post print feedback is growing #ALPSP15 pic.twitter.com/mKIuKPm7DF

— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 11, 2015

Cold Spring Harbor Press launched their pre-print server for biology bioRxiv. It's a not-for-profit free service that distributes draft papers for open comment. Posting is quick. Papers get a date stamp and a DOI. There is a commenting function and they link to the history of the evolution of the paper. It results in rapid transmission of results for community consideration. They have more than 2000 manuscripts posted from over 40 countries and more than 800 institutions. There are rising rates of submission and usage. Every subject category is respected and most manuscripts eventually appear in journals.

They know that 30% of papers have been revised and 33% of all papers have been published in more than 190 journals. They have extensive feedback via social media including 25,000 tweets. There are plans to make submission easier for authors. The use of pre-prints is changing. The behaviour of biologists is changing and journals policies are changing. Inglis closed by quoting the warnings contained in the Research Information Network report on Peer Review.

Dr Simon Kerridge is Director of Research Services, University of Kent and Chair of the Board of Directors at the Association of Research Managers and Administrators. Peer review is generally for journal articles, monographs and other long form research outputs, research data and other forms of scholarly output. From his point of view, it also includes research project proposals, research environment and strategy, and research impact. There are many purely academic reasons for doing peer review, but recognition is a part of it too. Promotion, esteem, time and money are all factors. Many universities have 'citizenship' as criteria for promotion where peer review is a factor. There may be internal or external mentoring or structured support. Becoming a journal editor or reviewer looks good on a CV.

By raising your profile you gain more recognition, but how is this recorded/advertised? Very few journals list reviewers. Some funders list 'peer review college' and most conferences list reviewers. Most academics list their own reviewing and universities try to keep full lists. There are internal work allocation models that provide recognition for peer review. Some journals reward reviewers with reduction in charges, 'peer review miles' to offset future fees and other waivers. Some conferences have reductions and some funders do pay reviewers or their institution. There are some universities that pay bonuses for peer review (e.g. REF peer review panel). With internal peer review it is unlikely you will get paid.

Questions for the peer review panel. #alpsp15 pic.twitter.com/nx1XxhnKk5

— Suzanne Kavanagh (@sashers) September 11, 2015

Dr Kirsty Edgar, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol provided an early career researcher (ECR) point of view on peer review. She reflected that it always seems to be the third review that's bad! ECRs want to improve research, get academic seal of approval, improve the dissemination of the research. But most importantly, they want to get through the process, publish in the highest impact journal possible, improve their CV and get a job.

There are several issues. There is little in the way of support or training, although this is improving. Are you getting a fair deal as a reviewee? Will you get promotion or fellowship? Will people read your work and will you be able to afford to publish my work?

There are some solutions: improve training or change the system in a small way such as peer choice, cascading reviews and open peer reviews. You can also fundamentally change the system by getting rid of journals, or on a slightly less radical agenda, introduce pre-publication, data and post-publication review. Edgar cited the eLife model of the support they provide to early career researchers. Edgar closed with some recommended reading: Sense About Science, the Voice of Young Science blog by James Steele and the BioMed Central Blog by Sarah Hayes.

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."