Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn talks content with a true purpose, content with a story

Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn

Laura Finn, Content Marketing Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, will speak at next week's Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar in London. We spoke to her to find out more about what makes her tick and what makes content marketing truly work.

So tell me about yourself, how did you end up in your current role?

My marketing career started at Cambridge University Press – I wanted to stay close to books having read English, so I applied for a junior role and thought I’d give marketing a go. Since then, I haven’t looked back! I completed my CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing a few years back and I’m still based in Cambridge, I now head up a new Content Marketing team at the Royal Society of Chemistry where we work to connect the world with the chemical sciences.

What does content marketing mean to you?

I love the way content marketing challenges us to think beyond our own organisational goals and wants, and to engage with what our audience finds relevant instead. Great content is useful, it’s interesting, it solves problems and informs decisions, it immerses our audiences in who we are and why we’re here. I believe that content marketing can help us foster more meaningful relationships with our audiences and help them achieve their goals.

How does your organisation use content marketing?

As an organisation we are moving away from just selling features and benefits of our products, and towards changing hearts and minds. This fits so well with the philosophy of content marketing! My team of specialists work to create and share content that will resonate with our audiences, integrated into larger marketing programmes.

What’s the most effective piece of content marketing you’ve ever done (and results if possible)?

We don’t yet have results but I'm very excited about a recent video project that supported a campaign to increase membership numbers in industry. We filmed four members at their places of work, talking about why they love doing what they do, and how membership with the Royal Society of Chemistry has opened doors for them. Rather than talking about us, and what we thought were the key features and benefits of membership for those working in industry we could let real members decide what was important and spread the word. We are telling their story, not ours – and the resulting videos are engaging and authentic.

Engage with what your audience finds relevant

What’s the biggest no-no for content marketing in your book?

I think mistakes can often come from not asking ‘why’ – it’s very easy to get excited about content marketing ideas, and this can lead to content without a true purpose, content without a story.

My advice would be to always dig deep into the ‘why’ – that way, you can be sure that you’re prioritising effectively and that your content will resonate with its target audience.






Laura Finn will talk about 'Getting your content out there (mapping content opportunities to your audience)' at the Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar. Registration still open, book now.

RSC Advances: using a topic modelling text mining tool to improve discoverability

RSC Advances has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Best New Journal 2013. Here in a guest post the publisher, Emma Wilson, explains how they developed the journal to find a home for research that does not fit in within the existing Royal Society of Chemistry journals programme.

"Over the last 5 years there has been a significant shift in both the global output of scientific research and in the growth of funding levels, through which we identified several emerging markets. From discussions with key scientists working in these areas we received feedback that the Royal Society of Chemistry is seen as a fair, inclusive, well respected, and high quality society publisher. However, it also highlighted that some authors felt they did not have a “society home” for their work, due to their research not fitting within the journals published by the RSC.

This community feedback led us to shape the idea and strategy for RSC Advances. The Journal’s vision is to provide a high quality society publishing option for all sections of the community, including emerging research areas and markets. The Journal is aligned to the Royal Society of Chemistry’s charter objective of ‘advancing the chemical sciences’, including the specific mission “to foster the chemical sciences by the dissemination of chemical knowledge”.

Topic modelling to improve discoverability

The ethos of the Journal is to be innovative and inclusive, providing exceptional levels of author service and support during the publication process, thereby facilitating the publication process and dissemination of the authors work. 


The Journal is supported by an international Editorial and Advisory Board led by Professor Mike Ward from the University of Sheffield, UK.

An innovative topic modelling tool was developed for RSC Advances. A sophisticated, behind the scene, text mining tool (developed in-house) classifies all the published papers into one or more of twelve main subject categories in the chemical sciences. The online functionality improves discoverability of authors’ research, ensuring readers go directly to the content of interest to them.

The success of the Journal has exceeded our high expectations. In just over a year after the publication of the first issue we celebrated publishing our 2000th article, and have moved to weekly publication. The Journal has also attracted many new authors to the Royal Society of Chemistry. The acceptance of the Journal by the community has also been further demonstrated by the release of its first (partial) impact factor of 2.56, placing it above the median impact factor for chemistry journals.

At the RSC we are constantly looking to improve the author and reader experience and RSC Advances, as an innovative online Journal, is pushing these boundaries."

RSC Advances was launched in 2011 by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It is an online Journal publishing well conducted research that furthers the field from across all the chemical sciences, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary and emerging areas.

Emma Wilson is Publisher for RSC Advances and has worked at the Royal Society of Chemistry as a journal publisher since 2006. She has strategic oversight and responsibility for 16 titles in the General Chemistry, Organic, Environment Science and Biological portfolios. Prior to working at the Royal Society of Chemistry Emma worked in a variety of roles in Elsevier’s Life Science Division.

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.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's Richard Kidd with some home truths on semantic enrichment

Richard Kidd on semantics

Richard Kidd, Business Development Manager in the Strategic Innovation Group at the Royal Society of Chemistry, outlined semantics for discovery in STM.

He reflected on the challenge of how you have to learn many different ways to research, as highlighted by Russell Burke from Royal Holloway earlier in the day at 'It's all about discoverability, stupid!' seminar.

How can semantic enrichment help support user search behaviour? And how can it help to show under-researched content? You can use classification, index terms, and identify keywords, then build your own classification.

The value of topic modelling
When RSC Advances launched, it was a new journal covering all of chemistry (and published 1800 articles in 2012). They needed to develop a sensible way of navigating all this content so they used topic modelling. Their publishing expertise gave them 12 broad subjects that would be intuitive to users. They worked with Wordle and then sense checked removing seven topics that were nonsense, one topic that was too general, which left over 120 topics that were classified. The remaining topics can be used for gap analysis, finding hot topics and assessing competitor weaknesses.

Steer clear of ontologies (unless you really want to do them)
A heavier level of classification is ontologies which are used in text mining. An ontology is a machine readable account of what there is in a given domain and how the things there relate to other things. Ontologies tend to be very domain specific and therefore context specific. But in the real world, they don't fit easily into hierarchies which can lead to large gaps in coverage and requires considerable efforts to build and maintain. Kidd's advice? Steer clear of them unless you really want to do them.

Build links on meaning
The semantic web build links on meaning, and each concept should have URLs or URIs. You have to use standard approaches so resources can connect. Why take a semantic approach? There are only a few successful projects out there. Why is that? There are so many different formats, structures, vocabulary, concepts and meanings. The structure should be data-oriented (not HTML). The meaning of data should be clear (not XML). Reusable mappings between data are needed (not XSLT). You should avoid extensive schema rewriting (not data warehouses). And data should have standard APIs (not Flickr). And to quote or paraphrase Lee Harland form Open Phacts, you need to 'synergise with many public efforts.'

Where people have been doing a lot of semantic work, it has tended to be to link their own content together (for example, GeoFacets from Elsevier or Nature.com linked data projects).

Another consideration is text mining. This builds on entity identification (from dictionaries, ontologies, taxonomies) to extract recipes and additional data. You insert the semantic mark-up and conduct sentiment analysis and business intelligence. Examples include NaCTeM tools applied to PMC Europe and SciBite.com.

Does a publisher text mining help text miners? In Kidd's opinion, mostly not.

Semantics won't help with content discovery right now
What should you do? For an immediate return there isn't much evidence that semantics will help your content discovery right now. Customers aren't paying for enriched data. However, making discovery metadata widely available as linked data seems sensible. Semantic works tends to be development rather than discovery. Currently, it is used internally for product development and pump priming. A lot of data is being pushed externally via API for linking, while everyone waits for clever ideas to come along.

And in the future? Big issues are likely to focus on authoring tools and data quality.