Brand Building the Scholarly Author – So what’s in it for the Publisher?

In this week’s guest post we hear from Jean Dawson, Product Manager at Charlesworth Author Services and member of ALPSP’s Professional Development Committee behind ALPSP programme of webinars.

It has never been more topical to develop academic authorship as a ‘brand’; this has been particularly emphasised by educational institutions that now often provide training sessions for their Early Career Researchers (ECRs, including PhD and Master’s students). These courses enable ECRs to understand how to build their online presence and the importance of starting to think of themselves as a ‘brand’ very early in their careers. Professor Stephen Hawking, for example, was not only an academic he was a ‘brand’, as are the TV personalities Dr Alice Roberts and Dr Brian Cox.  Although it is clear that not every academic can reach the same pinnacle of ‘brand’ as Professor Stephen Hawking, they can nevertheless be taught how best to present both themselves and their research to the online community effectively.  I have attended sessions at universities where ECRs have been tutored on how to write and present their LinkedIn profiles as a part of their extended curriculum vitae, create online social profiles, were reminded that prospective employers can search for you on Facebook, were given guidelines on how much of their research to reveal online (and where, as ‘online’ is a big place) and on which online communities to associate with. All vital life tools to assist in publicising your research at an early stage, job searches, promotions, and publishing contracts.

Advancements in technology platforms provide tools that directly assist academics to build their online profiles, understanding where their work is being read and cited, as well as how to build an ‘audience’ for their work. These platforms also encourage authors to be proactive in their research dissemination, rather than just passively waiting for citations. They shout ‘Get out there and sell yourself!’ As Charlie Rapple (co-founder of Kudos) will be pointing out in her presentation in ‘Brand Building the Scholarly Author’ ALPSP webinar, given an annual research investment of over £1 trillion by funders, and with over 2 million outputs published, it’s simply staggering to note that up to 50% of these outputs will never be discovered. No-one reads them, let along cites them.  Funding bodies have woken up to this huge issue and are looking to see activities that drive engagement with research. This puts the ball squarely back into the academics’ court.

So what is the knock-on effect for academic publishers? To paraphrase Cathy Holland (Business Development Manager, Digital Science), the second speaker on the ‘Brand Building the Scholarly Author’ webinar, “Social media has a huge impact on the way information is communicated today… No longer can the publisher or author passively just sit back and let content collect citations.” In the same way as authors now need to become active, publishers also need to be actively engaging online with scholarly research communities. Engaging is not enough and publishers must also now measure their social media efforts to successfully access their reach and effectiveness. As we have seen with the new social-media tool kits for authors to emerge, technology platforms provide Publishers with key measurement and online engagement tools.


Jean Dawson is the Product Manager at Charlesworth Author Services. Jean has over 25 years’ experience in senior management roles in publishing across the industry from academic publishing, start-ups, to publishing service providers. Commencing her career at Oxford University Press, she moved to form part of the Ingram UK Business start-up team. Prior to joining The Charlesworth Group, Jean worked as a consultant providing product development and marketing services to trade and academic publishers. Jean is also an active participant in cross industry membership groups.

The Brand Building the Scholarly Author seminar will take place on Thursday 18^th October 2018. To find our more or to book your place visit: https://www.alpsp.org/Webinars/Brand-Building-the-Scholarly-Author/56883

How to train your author - Is author training a good idea for publishers?

In this week’s guest post, we hear from Dr Gareth Dyke who heads up Charlesworth Knowledge, a new service being launched this year for authors, educational institutions, and publishers.

A huge range of training courses, most often delivered online, are available to help academic researchers improve their writing and publication presentation skills. I’ve often wondered, however, if encouraging authors to attend such courses and improve their abilities (albeit incrementally) is actually a good idea for publishers? There is an argument that it is in the interests of the publication house to receive badly written content so that in-house editing and polishing offerings can be recommended, leading to an obvious knock-on increase in revenue, in spite of the editorial headaches involved in reviewing them.

This feedback loop seems self-defeating for publishing houses. Surely once an author has been trained to write better and more effective articles, then that individual is less likely to avail of in-house language editing services?

I disagree. I’d argue that the whole author-publisher ecosystem should be viewed pragmatically and is, after all, a question of scale. What does a publisher gain from training authors to write better on their own? In addition to reducing the time spent working over the hundreds of submissions that might come through a system week on week, revenue from providing the training itself is important. Looking longer term: better quality submissions enhance the journal, building its reputation, leading to more citations, raising up the impact factor, and driving subscriptions. In this day and age of quick online publications that are often open access amidst competition for your readers' time (even within your own research field), well written and effective articles that draw readers in and keep them going past just the title and the abstract are a bonus for everybody. It’s also important to build loyalty amongst authors so that they keep submitting their papers to the same journals; this could be because this is where they received their key training, as well as the reputation and quality of the journal playing a role in their decision. This is one good reason why the big academic journal publishing houses offer author training, often as standalone ‘academy’-type model or pay-per-view online workshops and seminars; they want to encourage author submission habits with quality product that all feeds into driving up their sales, including insitutional subscriptions, and publisher/journal reputation. 

So, yes, author training is a very good thing. Perhaps that’s why more and more publishing houses are getting into this area and offering these courses either directly or through third-party training providers. Through the many years of providing high-quality language polishing services, Charlesworth Author Services has recognised this growing need to provide high-quality and high-value training to the academic authors who use our services. Author education provided by the unique combination of people with both publishing and reviewing skills at the highest level is the logical next step.

About The Charlesworth Group

With close to 20 years' experience in China, The Charlesworth Group is recognized globally as the trusted partner for sales and marketing representation and consultancy for STM publishers in the Chinese academic market. Charlesworth is also a leading provider of language editing and author services through its Charlesworth Author Services Division.

Dr. Gareth Dyke

Gareth is a prolific scientific author who has published more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals over the last 20 years. During Gareth’s experience as an academic, working across multiple Universities,  he has mentored students at all ages and has developed a large range of teaching techniques.

Website: www.cwauthors.com
Twitter: @CWGAuthors
Linkedin: Charlesworth Author Services
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CWGauthorservices

  

ASA 2013: Fiona Godlee on Who is an author and why does it matter?

In the first session at the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries conference in London, Fiona Godlee, Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal discussed the challenges of authorship credit and the move towards contributorship. Who is an author and why does it matter?

Life and research is far more complicated than it was. We now have multi-centre/author/function research going on. There are questions around who did text, the statistics and the lab work. Research has always been, but is even more so today, competitive with researchers fighting for first author place. Then there is the commercial interest, use of journals for marketing by medical/pharmacy industry

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has guidelines on authorship credit and have added to these to try and tackle some of the emergent issues. The idea of contributorship revolves around credit and responsibility, being explicit about roles and contributions and revisiting responsibility for complex studies with guarantor role.

The things that bother editors are:

• bias
• data manipulation or suppression
• dupliate publication or salami publication
• fabriation of data
• falsification of data
• gift authorship
• plagiarism
• self delusion
• undeclared conflict of interest
• wrong observations, analysis or references.

Source: Stephen Lock, BMJ

You can map these across to what constitutes errors in good faith, 'trimming and cooking' or fraud. Stephen Lock at the BMJ mapped these issues (see Fiona's slide, right).

The reality is that the lack of open data is creating major problems with verifying research. Questions around Tamiflu are a case in point, with contradictory statements confusing the picture, which was compounded by the lack of data available for checking.

Concealment of data is a very serious offence. In the US you have to register your trial and publish data within a year of the end of the trial by law. Yet a large proportion do not. The BMJ are trying to do their bit by insisting that clinical trial data must be available to be published alongside the article. 

With the BMJ open data campaign, Tamiflu is the test case. However, industry funded trials are not the only transgressors. Non-commerical trials are just as guilty. But there are signs of compliance. The UK HTA programme is an exemplar - they badger authors, withhold funding and publish on an open access website. This approach has resulted in near 100% compliance.