The Future for Smaller Publishers: Louise Russell's Practical Guide to Online Hosting

Louise Russell: online hosting for smaller publishers

What is online hosting and how can smaller publishers manage it effectively? Louise Russell, Director at Tutton Russell Consulting, General Manager at start-up Kudos and former COO at Publishing Technology, shared her experience with delegates at The Future for Smaller Publishers seminar.

Aggregation services (e.g. Ingenta Connect, Metapress, HighWire) have a number of advantages:

• visibility - power of the collective
• one-stop shop for librarians (access, COUNTER compliant reports, easier for library technology integration)
• consistent interface for readers
• search engine optimisation
• economies of scale - large sites providing industry standards, up-to-date services.

There are a number of considerations that may be an opportunity or a threat, depending on your circumstances. These include:

• file specifications - that can be quite prescriptive
• level of branding
• ability to customise functionality
• product roadmap - is it a good fit for your strategy?
• level of service and support.

Platform providers are online systems that can be customised to your requirements. Companies include Atypon, pub2web, HighWire, Silverchair and Semantico. Advantages include increased control and the ability to brand. You can expect a better user interface, a wider range of functionality and tool kits, integration with back office systems and customisation. Considerations include the price point which can be higher compared to off the shelf versus more custom options. You need to bear in mind the staff and resource impact internally. A product roadmap is required and think about the ownership of code.

Other alternatives include Open Source solutions such as the Open Journals System or self-hosting. These can provide a range of approaches such as building blocks, involve a roadmap driven solely by you, can provide competitive edge, but require in-house expertise and lack the power of a collective.

When you think about online hosting you need to define the core functionality that is required. Elements include content delivery, access control and e-commerce, adherence to industry standards, integration with library technology, SEO, distribution, usage statistics and reporting. Other optional additional services can include branding and end-user support. If the vendor does not offer the latter, you will need to, but be warned, this can be time consuming.

Increasingly, it is more than journals (books and journal articles). There are emerging business models and you need to consider mobile delivery, semantic enrichment and international visibility. Tailored user experience could include localised services, supporting specific workflows. Online hosting can provide more sophisticated reporting and interoperable services.

When choosing a supplier your selection criteria should include:

• Price point functionality
• Compliance with industry standards
• Digital strategy / roadmap goals
• Age of product
• Service level agreements
• Culture/compatibility.

During the selection process you should aim to crystallise immediate and medium term objectives, define requirements through market research and stakeholder feedback. You need to consider the design and user interface and put in place due diligence such as request for proposal (RFP) and through demonstrations for a robust decision making process.

Managing a transition is critical. Think about the timing of the project and when it falls in the business year so you don't clash with key activity dates. Think about URL redirects, library technology, SEO and customisations. Undertake a content audit and inventory. Think about internal and external communication. You will need to create a project team to manage the process, include stakeholder testing and manage risk through contingency planning.

As a smaller publisher, you don't necessarily have to lag behind the technology adoption curve. Geoffrey A Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised 1999) outlined different groups. Size does not preclude you from being an early adopter or innovator.

• Innovators 2.5%
• Early adopters 13.5%
• Early majority 34%
• Late majority 34%
• Laggards 16%

When creating a digital strategy consider the wider business goals, define your success metrics, do market research and put in place building blocks for agile, flexible solutions. Make sure you have analytics (to measure, monitor and adapt) and a release strategy for launch. Work to industry standards (e.g. COUNTER 4, FundRef, CrossMark, ORCID, NLM DTD - JATS, KBART 1.0). Look at wider industry initiatives such as CHORUS, Kudos, Projects and sipx.

Russell closed with her blueprint for undertaking online hosting: define your digital strategy, identify success metrics, measure, monitor and refine and look at operational structure. The selection of host should reflect these core principles.

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.  

To Disappear or Not to Disappear? How to Avoid Dropping Out of Search Services During a Journal Transition

Ensuring ongoing visibility within search and discovery services is an important success metric for any journal or platform transition but requires careful planning. New sites can easily disappear from search indexes if best practice isn’t followed, resulting in a significant drop in traffic and negative PR. 

ALPSP's webinar To Disappear or Not to Disappear? held last week featured insights from Darcy Dapra, Partner Manager for Google Scholar, who is responsible for external relations with the scholarly publishing and library communities. Highlights from the talk were captured by Louise Russell from Publishing Technology.

Darcy Dapra shared practical advice from a Google Scholar perspective, although the general principles can be applied to other search and discovery services.

The webinar focussed mainly on the implications of a platform change but the advice also applies to any journal transition. The biggest and most common issue identified relates to URL changes. Redirection of URLs from the old to the new site is critical to avoiding being dropped from the search index but is certainly not the full story.

So how exactly do publishers’ avoid dropping out of the search indexes when changing platform? Darcy talked through a comprehensive check list of actions and considerations for publishers and vendors when managing a transition. Most are technical points but some relate more to the user experience and site design and therefore need to be factored into the early stages of planning for any new platform – to share a few nuggets of advice and housekeeping tips from the session:

• Ensure ALL URLs for a journal site redirect from the old location to the new via HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects for at least 12 months. 
• Avoid redirecting users to an interstitial page i.e. “this journal has moved” while potentially useful for a reader, it is not useful for robots. 
• Without redirects your old URLs will effectively disappear from the search indices – the black hole effect! 
• Article landing pages should include an abstract, ideally above the fold so the user can see it. If not abstract is available a readable image of the first page should be provided. 
• Ensure the crawler has acces to full-text articles (PDF or HTML). 
• The browse path or hierarchy for the new site should use HTML links rather than Javascript. Alternative measures should be taken if Javascript is used. 
• Include metatags to ensure your data is structured well. 
• If in doubt review with your platform vendor and Google Scholar. 

You can find additional useful resources on Google Scholar pages for basic start up information. The Transfer Code of Practice is a new version of the code that is due to be released shortly and will include further information on URL redirects in particular.