Researching Researchers: Developing Evidence-Based Strategy for Improved Discovery and Access

How do you improve discovery and access to improve researchers, academics and students better? Roger C Schonfeld, Direct of the Library and Scholarly Communications Program at Ithaka S+R, chaired a panel including publisher, librarian and a library supplier at the 2015 ALPSP Conference.

Lettie Conrad, Executive Manager for Online Products at SAGE talked about their research on discoverability and delivery and learning from users to support their work. It's not about the user experience, it's about understanding the researcher experience. SAGE organises their product delivery on personas based on researchers and use case studies.

Conrad observed that whether we like it or not, the majority of search starts with the mainstream web. As a researcher advances in study skills and moves along their academic careers, they start to shift to speciality databases. Library discovery is for known items.

@lyconrad shows what system developers think users are... #ALPSP15 pic.twitter.com/aO6wiFp5MX

— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015

They undertook research into researcher experience through their workflow. Findings on queries included higher use of open web search reported, validating authenticity, browser trends.  Findings on retrieval included 100% manually managed citations, low use of hyperlinked reference, few 'version of record' checks. Many  use citation metrics, but only if they were above the fold and nearby.

They went on to ask what the uptake was for apps and tools and were surprised to hear that they didn't help with citation. It was a pain point. Easy import of citations was important. Being able to personalise their digital library.  What did this all mean for SAGE's strategy? They take the research findings to help shape strategy and ensure content is discoverable. They ensure they have  good usage statistics. their discovery strategy is based on their channels (library, open web, social media, academic, SAGE universe). Metadata is a key part of their strategy in three ways: stewardship, optimization and distribution. In the future, they are focusing on what's beyond search. What about the serendipitous process?

Deirdre Costello, Senior UX Researcher at EBSCO talked about how user expectations are formed on the open web, what users look for to make decisions about library resources, and why we need to think about our search results as one of the most important user experiences we can craft.

They conducted a video diary research programme to gather honest and open feedback from college and university students aged 14-18 years old. The great thing about this approach is that they saw the whole ecosystem as well as the wider range of tools they use to organise their lives. The expectations from these wider tools get ported on to those for college use.

Students have competing demands on their time from learning to do laundry for the first time, to making friends and keeping in touch with family. In addition to this, the changing neurology of minds to skim and scan content, impacts on how students search and interact with research.

Students have used Google for years and trust it, focusing on the top five results as it must be them that screwed up with the wrong search term, right? It's only when a tutor takes time out to explain how to question sources that students start to understand you can't trust everything you find on the web.

Teaching staff beware: students more likely to change their search than to assume Google is wrong #alpsp15 #highered @deidre_lyon

— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) September 9, 2015

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Strategic Planning/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois' Library. They have articulated a user-centric framework of principles for library service development.

If you add a default search to your Easy Search query, there's a massive jump in usage. It is a very important piece of real estate for discovery. They use an evidence based and user centric framework in all their work and repeatedly go back to the data.

I ❤️ listening to @lisalibrarian talk about her library. It is so clear they do it well. No one unsure if there's a librarian! #alpsp15

— deirdre (@deirdre_lyon) September 9, 2015

Their users value seamless, digital delivery. They want coherent discovery pathways. They want things as simple as possible, but NOT simplistic. When they say they want 'everything', it's from THEIR perspective. They have tried and tested a number of search options: transparency, predictability/explainability  and customisability are important.

Wow - @lisalibrarian reports that as part of prep for improvements they read all their reports from last 10 years. #alpsp15

— Alice Meadows (@alicejmeadows) September 9, 2015

Changing user behaviours include: the length of queries are growing, known item searches are increasing and there is an increasing use of copy and paste searching.

The user tasks that they aim to support are:

• locate known item
• locate known research tool
• explore topic
• identify/access library tools/databases for topic
• identify/access research data and tools
• identify assistance.

This had led to a range of discovery principles. They required personalisation and customisation with full library discovery for content, services and spaces. They want the fewest steps from discovery to delivery. Everything owned, licensed or provided by the library should be discoverable. They aim to fully develop and deploy fewer tools. They are aiming for a wide scale implementation of adaptive contextual assistance and use consistent language and labelling. Crucially for a state funded institution, they require the greatest discovery delivered at the lowest cost.

Managing the open access data deluge without going grey

Cameron Neylon: the OA data deluge

The final two sessions at ALPSP's Data, the universe and everything seminar reflected on the changing nature of data within an open access context and what needs to be taken into account when trying to cope with data.

Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director at PLOS, counselled delegates on 'Managing a (Different) Data Deluge'. Publishing is now a different business. Customer may look the same, but they act different and you have to think differently. Data is core to the value you give.

There's no sign of the growth trajectory of open access publishers slowing down. PLOS One on its own is 11% of the funded research papers output from the Wellcome Trust. PLOS One is 5% of the biomedical literature. PLOS One Publishes on average 100 papers per day. All the metadata they have comes from the authors and they don’t necessarily have accurate data on who they are or where they are based, so it gets complicated. This is happening on a large scale across scholarly communication services.

Neylon believes that the business of open access publishing is fundamentally different to subscription publishing. With a traditional subscription business you have a pool of researchers and institutions. Advertising and reprints come from third parties. This is a distribution model and not so much about where the research has come from.

With an APC-funded open access business it is a service or push model. The customer is the author at some level. Increasingly (in UK for example) this is coming through the funder. This means that suddenly all these players have an interest) which they didn’t have before). A third model is the funders directly funding infrastructure (e.g. eLife, PDB, Genbank etc).

The customer = institution, the author, the funder. They have questions about how much? How many articles have you published? What's the quality of service? Are there compliance guarantees (this is relatively simple in the UK, but tricky in North America or the EU). They want repository deposit. And all this has to happen at scale. You need to track who funded the research. This means that the market is being commoditized. It also means that the market is smaller, with space to make profit smaller.

Neylon feels that if we do not do this collectively, the whole system will collapse and we’ll be left with one or two big players. Using identifiers, capturing data up front and making it easy for the author to include the correct data up front are key to tackling the issue of the data deluge we face. If we don’t will have lost the opportunities. It’s about shared data identifiers and making them at the core of your systems.

He reflected on the particular challenge that smaller publishers face if they are to survive. They need to share infrastructure across multiple organisations. ALPSP is well placed to support and advise suppliers that smaller publishers need ORCID and FundRef etc up front.

Ann Lawson, Senior Director of Publisher Relations and EBSCOAdvantage Europe, focused on the various challenges for managing open access data without going grey. EBSCO see the impact of data from their own perspective (with 27 million articles in the EBSCO database products) and also from the perspectives of their client publishers and institutions. They have their own ID systems, but also input any partner or publisher IDs which results in 485 data elements per subscription record.

Ann Lawson: trying not to go grey

In a recent research report drawn from their own data, they've noted that large publishers are getting larger: in 1994 the top 10 publishers were responsible for 19% by value. In 2009, the top 10 publishers represented 50% by value. And in 2013, the top 10 publishers accounted for 68% by value.

In the immediate future, EBSCO see a mixed market of Gold, Green and Subscriptions within scholarly communications. However, there will be an impact on transactions from individual journals, to big deals, to small gold open access APCs. The impact on subscription agents is challenging as they have to keep on doing what they do, plus play in the open access area. There is a challenge of scale and transparency for everyone.

What will these market trends mean for data? There is a new cycle for open access which impacts on the need for data. This includes measures of value for money, speed to publication, reach and impact, reporting, funding sources, and the approval process.

There are data issues for the institution: who are active authors? What funding sources are available? Which funders demand what compliance? Which journals are compliant? What happens at school/research group? How much does the APC cost? Who paid what, with what effect? What reporting is needed for whom? Compliance – and deposit in repositories.

The institution workflow is at the heart of the data flow:

• Policies
• Advocacy 
• OA request form 
• Acceptance email 
• Funding pot 
• Copy of invoice 
• Article and DOI 
• CC licence 
• VAT 
• Approvals 
• Records 
• Reporting and analysis.

The reality is that many publisher systems do not have the ability to adapt their systems. Current points of tension include: money management, complex workflows, and author involvement. Discovery is key, but can be tricky with hybrid journals so discovery at article level is essential. NISO is helping, but there is more work to be done in this and many other areas of data.

ALPSP Conference Day 2: Discovering the needle in a haystack

Ann Lawson introduces the panel

Chaired by Ann Lawson from EBSCO, this session is designed to help publishers understand how they can help academics and professionals to navigate quickly and seamlessly to the trustworthy content they need.

Ann's colleague Harry Kaplanian, Director of Discovery Services at EBSCO Publishing, kicked off with an overview of discovery services as well as the features and benefits for the publishers. 

He began by reminding us of the first discovery system is a library catalogue system in the early 1900s. He then went on to outline the pros and cons of subsequent systems. 

The Integrated Library System OPAC (1980-1995) 

Pros: users can search the entire physical collection quickly; tight ILS integration; one place to search. 

Cons: users can only search catalogue; metadata searching only.

In the 1990s, the first electronic databases began to appear. They aren’t part of the physical collection; change often; multiple tools needed for searching content; students and faculty no longer know where to look; and the e-content just keeps on coming...

Federated search

Pros: single search box for all content; currency of content.

Cons: speed; many indexes; multiple ranking algorithms; larger result sets in complete; internet traffic; content provider traffic.

Web scale discovery

Pros: single search box; search all content, single index and complete result sets

single relevance ranking; speed and bandwidth; no local hardware or software to install; eliminates traditional list problems; drive usage and lower traffic.

Cons: not tightly integrated with ILS.

Usage impact

Longwood University

5000 students

09/10 to 10/11 205% increase in usage in text

He classifies content providers as:

• Primary publishers
• Aggregators 
• Subject Index Providers
• What do they need to do?
• What should they watch out for?

Primary Provides - journals & books:

Now standard to provide full text and metadata to discovery services for searching. In most cases content is presented by publishers. The user is guided to full text by link resolver. You have to make sure highest quality metadata and content provided and that active updates to databases are provided.

Aggregators - full journal databases

Most don’t have the right to submit the full text so content presented by aggregator or publishers. The user is guided to full text by link resolver. Make sure highest quality metadata and content is provided, that discovery vendor accurately states if aggregator is actively taking part or not, and active updates to databases are provided

Subject index providers

Powerful subject indexing based on controlled vocabularies, no full text, but a big impact on full Discovery. Make sure the Discovery service is capable of properly searching, merging, ranking and securing entitled access. Consider what happens when a customer cancels subject index subscription, renews, adds it, doesn’t have it?

Make sure Discovery vendor accurately states if subject index provider is actively taking part or not - check the vendor’s claims.

Simon Inger provided an overview of key findings from the Survey on Reader Navigation which is due to be published shortly. Read about the project here. 

Main recommendations for publishers are:

• Publishers need to support all of the discovery channels that their clients (libraries and readers) want to use
• Publishers need to understand how different reader types discover and access their content so that they can target readers and authors more effectively
• Potential to expose more sophisticated discovery information to key channels
• Potential to differentiate through which discovery channels to make subscriber offers.

The summary report will be published for free later this month. The full report will be published at the same time. All supporting publishers receive these items in return for their help. Full results set and analysis framework will be available for a fee shortly afterwards. 

Robert Faber, Director, Discoverability Program at OUP, concluded with an overview of the Introducing the Oxford Index.

Why does discoverability matter to publishers and librarians? Traffic and use are the lifeblood of digital scholarship. use of subscriptions shows the value of the content. Discovery reveals interest and demand for new content. Customer and user behaviour is changing. If you can’t find it, you won’t use it. People are searching for a topic, not book - 80% of traffic to Oxford Journals is direct to article. There are many search systems and rapid evolution. It's about free content outside the paywall for some products - abstracts, keywords, Oxford Journals, Oxford Scholarship.

The MARC program has been improved and expanded. Linking: some in place, mainly in close neighbourhood. Some editorial linking between products. Some partnerships with other publishers and institutions have been set up. New mobiles sites for Oxford Journals and future products are set up. Library discovery services have been developing new partnerships. SEO is at the centre of product evolution.

Discovery happens in Open Web Search, library services, research hubs, through content links, opt-in services, viral awareness and via OUP web features.

What is the Oxford Index? It’s free discovery from OUP: a standardised description of every item of content, in one place. It incorporates external search partners, an Oxford interface - landing pages: quick pathways to full text, web-searchable; and cross searchable - but they recognise that the website might not continue to be very important. It provides a way to create links and relationships across content with meaningful links that add value and traffic. There are overview pages for quick view of topic links embedded in products. This is a free service integrated with existing products.

What does this mean for search rankings and usage?

• No change to existing SEO or rankings
• OI is supplemental route to primary full-text content
• OI gives Google a super-site map across OUP content
• Highly-trusted network reinforces destination full-text sites
• Aim is additional traffic, monitored and reported

What does it mean for library integration? Library visibility? Bring in users from general web search. OI can interact directly with library search. OI identifies library’s provision of full content which highlights the benefits of library services. Visibility through other library, A&I, research services? OI metadata routinely supplied to library systems.

The benefits include i) traffic: sustaining and widening sales, ii) consistent methods - for users and systems, and iii) evolving grid of options to connect content.

Faber finished with trends and predictions that included:

• importance of india, china and the non-western world
• differences between journals, book and reference content defined by role/task within the research journey
• sites that can qualify general users will become a larger focal point of discoverability activity e.g Google Books
• shift from focus on entrance-point to linking: related content, related services
• scholarly/research communities play bigger role in academic discoverability.