ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2014: recognising blood, sweat and tears in scholarly publishing

There's nothing quite like winning a prize, is there? And when it comes to gaining recognition from your peers with an industry award, it must make the long hours, hard work, inspiration and perspiration worthwhile.

That's certainly what it felt like for ALPSP's Best New Journal winners Faculty Dental Journal, Innovation in Publishing winners PeerJ, highly commended Drama Online and Contribution to Scholarly Publishing recipient Anthony Watkinson when they were interviewed after the ceremony at last year's conference (skip to 1:30 in the video).



We can't believe another year has almost passed and the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2014 are almost upon us. The judging has commenced and the tension is mounting for our finalists. Congratulations to them all for reaching the short list.

bioRxiv from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Edifix from Inera Inc.
Frontiers open science platform
IOP ebooks from IOP Publishing
JournalGuide from Research Square
ReadCube Connect from Labtiva Inc
RightsLink for Open Access from the Copyright Clearance Center

Keep checking back as we profile each of them over the next seven weeks. If you want to be there on the night, make sure you register for the Annual Conference and Awards Dinner. Book before 8 August to avoid the late registration fee.

Publishing practicalities: Google Analytics and the cloud

David Smith from the IET chaired an insightful publishing practicalities session on day two of the ALPSP International Conference where Jason Hoyt from PeerJ expounded the benefits of being in the cloud and Alan Hyndman from Digital Science outlined how you have to use Google Analytics to improve your marketing.

Why love Google Analytcis?
It’s free. It’s comprehensive. It's the most commonly used analytics tool. As a result, there is an expert online community (blogs, training forums, etc). Google being Google they constantly upgrade it so it is constantly evolving. It is easy to use - you don’t need SQL or excel skills to use the data - and easy to implement.

Key elements of Google Analytics include the audience overview. This provides overarching information and indicates whether your traffic is going up or down and why, are the visitors staying, and helps assess whether you get quality traffic?

Location provides breakdown of geographical spread of visitors. The technology section includes browsers – essential if you are developing a site which tells you what to test on and how to build best structured site for optimal performance. Traffic sources will tell you where people find you and therefore which part of marketing channel is most successful.

Within the content and conversions function, a common mistake that people make is that they don’t set up goals. When defining conversion you can look at macro conversions (sign up for an account, buy a product, buy a subscription) and micro conversions (stay for more than 5 minutes, view different pages,  share with social media, etc). You don’t get data retrospectively so set up goals at the start. You will then be able to drill down into (e.g. conversions or sales and find out how/where people found your site) and focus marketing on the most effective ones.

Goal funnels show drop off points that you can use to spot and solve problems. Another key thing is to do is campaign tracking. Don't forget about multi channel attribution. If you look at the end then you might attribute something to Facebook, but actually people don’t use the web in that way. They might sign up via Google for a newsletter, receive email communications. You need to take a step back and consider all channels and how they influence customer behaviour.

Recognise you can outsource to specialists
Jason Hoyt from PeerJ explained the benefits of moving to the cloud. He suggested that you need to go through a period of introspection and throw out (outsource) anything that is not core or where you aren’t experts.

Identify your customer and their top needs. Throw out anything that your customers don’t care about. The modern organization is SaaS-supprted (software as a service). PeerJ started out with SCALR cloud management solution (open source solution). There are a variety of pricing models (monthly, pay per use, etc). They have back-up with Amazon whose servers are global and regional so there are multiple back-ups. The (Amazon) cloud is for organisations both big and small (e.g. Netflix and Dropbox).

Using the cloud has a psychological bonus – of being on the cutting edge of technology. There are exceptions to these rules, but for the most part you’d be served well to follow these tips.

PeerJ: an open access business model based around individual memberships

PeerJ has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation 2013. Here, co-founder Pete Binfield explains what drove them to set up the company and their business model.

"PeerJ is the open access publisher of PeerJ (a peer reviewed journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (an un peer-reviewed preprint server), both serving the biological and medical sciences. The company was co-founded by Jason Hoyt (previously of Mendeley) and Peter Binfield (previously of PLOS ONE) in 2012.

Jason has a background as a research scientist (with a PhD from Stanford) and it was this, combined with his involvement in Mendeley, that meant he possessed a first-hand experience of many of the pain points in the current publishing system, as well as the skills and knowledge to do something about it. As Jason says,

“When I started grad school I was shocked at the “sticker price” of existing subscription journals - not just their subscription price, but also the page and color charges that many of them use. When Open Access and PLoS arrived, I thought it was great, but that we could still do it better and cheaper. I eventually realized that everyone seemed to be waiting around for either the government or the publishers to drop costs, so I thought why not just do it and see what happens?”

Co-founders: Pete Binfield (left) and Jason Hoyt

Jason came up with the concept for PeerJ and brought Pete onboard in early 2012. We announced the company in June 2012 and since that time, we have recruited an Editorial Board of over 800 (including 5 Nobel Laureates); built submission, peer-review and publication software entirely from scratch; established our publications in the academic publishing world; and published over 150 articles (in both PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints).

As part of our submission to the ALPSP Award for Innovation, we made the case that we innovate in 4 key areas: in our business model; our product suite; our functionality; and our editorial practices. For this blog post we wanted to particularly highlight our business model which is probably the innovation which generated the most interest in the publishing world.

PeerJ has created a new and innovative open access business model based around individual memberships. Authors pay a single low price for a lifetime Membership to PeerJ, giving them the rights to freely publish a certain number of articles with us per year. Each co-author on a paper must be a paying Member with the correct membership level (however if an article has more than 12 authors then only the first 12 need become paying Members).

The Membership levels are described online but to summarize:

• Free Members can publish one PrePrint per year for free 
• Basic Members can publish unlimited PrePrints and 1 PeerJ article per year, for free (for a one-off lifetime fee of $99) 
• Enhanced Members can publish unlimited PrePrints and 2 PeerJ articles per year, for free ($199 for life) 
• Investigator Members can publish unlimited PrePrints and unlimited PeerJ articles per year, for free ($299 for life) 

PeerJ homepage

By building a business model based around individual memberships rather than APC payments per publication much of our functionality and thinking has, by a natural consequence, become very ‘individual centric’ and you will see this as you surf around our site.

For example, you will see this effect in our user profiles, in our academic contributions, in our search functionality and so on. As a result, our business model is not only a very visible innovation, it is also a significant driver of innovation in itself.





The core principles behind PeerJ are to constantly innovate; to stay close to our market (i.e. academia); and to constantly work to reduce the overall costs to the system. By doing so, we believe that we can create a new publishing environment which will benefit from both the cost efficiencies inherent in modern software solutions, and the latest thinking behind new publication models, to help put high quality open access publishing within reach of all authors."

Jason Hoyt holds a PhD in Genetics from Stanford University where he worked under Michele Calos researching human gene therapy. Before founding PeerJ, he worked at Mendeley as Chief Scientist/Vice President of Research & Development and pioneered the data mining group that scaled Mendeley's growth to crowd source more than 150 million academic documents in just over two years.

Pete Binfield has worked in the academic publishing world for almost 20 years. Since gaining a PhD in Optical Physics, he has held positions at the Institute of Physics, Kluwer Academic, Springer, SAGE and most recently the Public Library of Science (where he grew PLoS ONE to become the largest journal in the world).

The ALPSP Awards finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their journal or innovation in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP International Conference on Wednesday 11 September.

The winners will be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September. Book now to secure your place.