Spotlight on Ripeta - shortlisted for the 2019 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

On 12 September we will be announcing the winners of the 2019 ALPSP 
Awards for Innovation in Publishing.  In this series of posts leading up to the Awards ceremony we meet our four finalists and get to know a bit more about them.  

First question has to be: Tell us about your company

Ripeta was founded by a team of three science-related experts who joined forces whilst working at Washington University in St. Louis. Leslie, Anthony and Cynthia, like many of their colleagues, were increasingly burdened with the task of improving science without having the resources to do so. They found that much of the curated data they produced at a data center were used but was not cited. 

They quickly became frustrated and saw the need for a tool and practices to remedy the situation, and the idea for Ripeta was born. The Ripeta software was developed to assess, design, and disseminate practices and measures to improve the reproducibility of science with minimal burden on scientists, starting with the biomedical sciences. In 2017, Ripeta launched its first alpha product.

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

Main features and functions of Ripeta

Ripeta is designed for publishers, funders, and researchers. We provide a suite of tools and services to rapidly screen and assess manuscripts for the proper reporting of scientific method components. These tools leverage sophisticated machine-learning and natural language processing algorithms to extract key reproducibility elements from research articles. This, in turn, shortens and improves the publication process while making the methods easily discoverable for future reuse.

Ripeta Software:  Our software is built on a reproducibility framework that includes over 100 unique variables grouped into five categories highlighting important scientific elements and creating a report: 

1. Study Overview
2. Data Collection
3. Analytics
4. Software and Code
5. Supporting Material (new)

This report is generated in seconds providing immediate feedback.

Portfolio Analysis:   While many publishers have adopted checklists to evaluate reproducibility reporting criteria, the standard practice is for editors or reviewers to manually assess document adherence to guidelines. This review process is neither quick nor consistent. Ripeta offers a critical addition to the scientific publishing pipeline while significantly reducing the time to review and assess manuscripts.   We look across a group of articles based on your criteria and provide an overview, comparisons, and suggested improvements. Do you want to know how your journal or organization is performing overall? Want to know the reporting practices of your grantees? These reports provide insights into reproducibility practices.

Tell us about the team 

Dr. Leslie McIntosh, PhD is the founder and CEO. She has led multi-million dollar projects building software and services for data sharing and reuse. Leslie has a focus on assessing and improving the full research cycle and making the research process reproducible.

Anthony Juehne, MPH is the Chief Science Officer with speciality skills in epidemiology and biostatistics. His current work focuses on developing best-practices for conducting and reporting clinical research to enhance reproducibility, transparency, and accessibility.

Cynthia R. Hudson Vitale, MLIS is the Chief Information Scientist. She has worked with faculty on projects to facilitate data sharing and interoperability while meeting faculty research data needs throughout the research life-cycle. Her current research seeks to improve research reproducibility, addressing both technical and cultural barriers.

In what ways do you think Ripeta demonstrates innovation?

Research reproducibility is increasingly important in the scholarly communication world, yet researchers, publishers, and funders do not have a streamlined method for assessing the quality and completeness of the scientific research.

Ripeta aims to make better science easier by identifying and highlighting the important parts of research that should be transparently presented in a manuscript and other materials.  By detecting and predicting reproducibility in scientific research we provide a “credit report” for scientific publications. Our aim is to improve science and ensure resources are well spent, and we offer a pre peer-review to a paper and report post-publication.

The Ripeta solution is unique because we have identified the components across scientific fields necessary to responsibly report a scientific process. We are using machine learning and natural language processing to programmatically extract these components from scientific manuscripts and present them in a user-friendly report.

Ripeta helps save time, money, and improve reputations.

For publishers, Ripeta offers a quick assessment of a submitted manuscript. It’s hard to find reviewers and the reviewers are experts in specific areas. Ripeta allows a rapid check of important elements that should be in the manuscript and presents a report for editors and reviewers. This is measured in time to complete a pre-review.

For researchers, Ripeta offers a means to improve the manuscript. By rapidly reviewing the manuscript, the report will highlight which elements are missing and which elements have been found in a machine-readable manner. This allows researchers the opportunity to improve their manuscript before submission. This is measured through Ripeta report completeness from first to final submission.

What are your plans for the future?

The Ripeta go-to-market strategy is focused on developing tools for a subscription-model compatible with the needs of publishers and funders where users can assess a single publication. Subscribers will be charged a fee per report with an optional Ripeta software enterprise edition for robust analytics and bulk manuscript evaluation. We are currently engaging and conducting pilots with multiple publishers, universities, and researchers.

Our long-term goals include developing a suite of tools across the broad spectrum of sciences to understand and measure the key standards and limitations for scientific reproducibility across the research lifecycle and enable an automated approach to their assessment and dissemination.

• Enable researchers to upload a single manuscript at a time at no charge;
• Work with  Pre-print services (e.g., bioRxiv), who could charge to have a ripetaReport linked to the pre-print; and,
• Work with large research and development firms, who would purchase enterprise installations for private hosting.

website: https://www.ripeta.com/
twitter: https://twitter.com/ripeta1

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 11-13 September, where the winners will be announced.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2019 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.

Why is innovation a challenge for established publishers?

Charles Thiede, CEO of tech startup Zapnito (and former CPO of Nature Publishing Group and CTO of Informa Business Intelligence), explores the theory of the innovator’s dilemma. And what publishers can learn from it.

In a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to be chairing an event with ALPSP entitled ‘Innovate or Perish? How to think like a startup’. It’s got me thinking on the challenges of innovation within large publishers - challenges I’ve seen from the inside, as well as out.

I asked Zapnito advisor Mark Allin, former CEO of Wiley and a speaker at the event, for his view on how innovative publishing companies are at the moment. On a scale of 1-10, he gave them 3 or 4. That’s not ideal.

So why is this the case? There’s no question that the publishing industry is full of talent and resources. Yet startups are often seen as having the edge when it comes to innovation. The ‘innovator’s dilemma’ - a term coined by Clayton Christensen in 1997, offers insight into why that is.

The innovator’s dilemma

The problem isn’t necessarily lack of innovation itself, or enthusiasm to try new ideas, but more the environment in which those new ideas are developed and nurtured.

The value from new innovations isn’t realised immediately. It tends to follow an S-curve (see the yellow line on the graph). Improving a product takes time and many iterations, and quite often the early iterations provide minimal value. That can prove the sticking point for many businesses.

Ultimately, the primary aim of most established companies is to keep and add additional value to their existing customer base and their current business models. This means new and innovative ideas can be undervalued, because they are applied and tested with existing customers or through existing models, rather than looking at new markets or models. 

It also means that if innovative ideas fail to deliver results quickly, they are seen as failing - the ROI is thought to be too low. In this case, often management acts ‘sensibly’, in what they view to be the company’s best fiduciary interests, and rejects continued investment in the innovation. 

This is why startups, usually with little or nothing to lose when they enter the market, are so much more successful. They find new markets to apply their innovations, largely by trial and error, at low margins. Their nimbleness and low cost structures allow them to operate sustainably where established companies could not. They don’t have the same responsibilities to, for example, shareholders or existing customers.

At the same time, especially with ‘bootstrapped’ companies, startups must survive on their own two feet. This means that if the initial idea doesn’t work, they can adapt and even pivot their models. We did this at Zapnito early on. In contrast, for an established publisher, the initial idea is often fixed and changing direction means failure. 

By finding the right application use and market, startups advance rapidly and hit the steep part of the S-curve, eventually entering the more mature markets of the established companies and disrupting them.

What’s the solution?

There is no one way to do innovation. But to me, the most vital change is a change in attitudes. Traditional publishers will need to think outside their traditional business models. Innovation does not need to be in context of existing ways of doing business. Too many media companies are organised around delivery models vs. solutions to a market. That leaves little room for innovation.

There’s also a need to start playing the long game and looking for ways to manage development processes so that it’s okay to change direction, or even to fail.

I also want to challenge the idea of innovation itself. Innovation does not mean invention. Most people think innovation and invention are synonymous. But Jeff Bezos did not invent ecommerce. Steve Jobs did not invent smartphones. The innovation happened in the execution of those ideas and how they were delivered to the market.

There are lots of potential ways for publishers to nurture more innovation within their companies. This could be through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), partnering with disruptive businesses, creating an internal ‘skunkworks’-style structure, or even separating out new innovations into offshoot companies.

These are all ideas I’m looking forward to exploring at the event. Hope to see you there.

The Innovate or Perish? seminar will take place on Thursday 15 November 2018. To find our more or to book your place visit: https://www.alpsp.org/Events/Innovate-or-Perish/60274

Innovation starts with HighWire’s Intelligent Publishing Platform

In this ALPSP guest blog, John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire Press shares how how Highwire are working with their user community to drive innovation.

We help scientific and scholarly publishers stay ahead of research and education trends, adapt to changing user demands, and increase revenues across channels. HighWire continually invests in data science across all our products to offer integrated analytics and insights that drive digital innovation.

The evolution of print and digital publishing is accelerating. Publishers work with us to bring innovative products and services to market faster and deliver the very best user experiences and business outcomes with our Intelligent Platform. Our customers tell us that the evidence we offer, via our Strategic Business Consultancy Services, transform conversations about content development and product strategy. Working together as a strategic business partner, our goals are to advance innovation and best practices, inform successful editorial and business decisions, and create great products and services and business outcomes.

Insights drive innovation across the industry

At HighWire Publishers’ meetings, our community shares analysis, insights, and practical advice to address the challenges they face as well as a future focus on strategies to keep ahead of the curve in the ever-changing publishing ecosystem. Conversations at our meetings focus on delivering what users want, improving workflows to attract readers and leading authors, and creating new revenue opportunities. You can watch brief video excerpts of presentations at recent meetings now available for the first time on our web site outlining specific achievements working collaboratively with HighWire.

Joe Puskarz, Director, Division of Journal Publishing, American Academy of Pediatrics shares the strategic process, data insights, and success metrics around a dramatic change in AAP’s Pediatrics print strategy and online publication gateway to better serve readers and advertisers while improving profitability. See videos Optimizing a publications gateway with reader feedback and analytics and Pediatrics Print Strategy: User behavior drives product development.

HighWire’s Intelligent Platform includes end-to-end publishing solutions from strategy to delivery. Machine intelligence and predictive analytics are applied across all our products to help understand user behavior patterns to attract target readers, authors, and advertisers and inform product development. Kim Murphy and Nandhini Kuntipuram from American College of Cardiology (ACC), describe their journey to develop customer personas, define product requirements and optimize the user experience, leading to the successful launch of ACC’s journals with JCore. Watch Using field research in UX to inform and measure website success. Don’t miss brief case studies on more recent journal launches with JCore.

Our industry's need to improve workflows for efficiency regularly generates discussion and innovation. HighWire collaborates with publishers to develop and implement innovative approaches that support researchers who require faster times to publication while continuing to meet rigorous editorial and content management requirements. Stuart Taylor, Royal Society; Claire Rawlinson, BMJ; and Claire Moulton, Company of Biologists; each contributed a recent London session on “Emerging Trends in Academic Publishing." Issues and opportunities addressed included pre-print servers, post-publication changes designed for an online world, overlay journals, and post publication peer review.

Highlights from our previous Publishers' Meetings

Publishers recently presented on a range of topics at our Fall Meeting in September, including our session on the “Bibliometric Intelligence” product pilot with Meta which illustrated the opportunities offered by predictive analytics. 

Read about past presentations by Valda Vinson, AAAS; Suzanne Rosenzweig, Society for Neuroscience; Keith Gigliello, American Society of Hematology; and an illustrated case study using Impact Vizor to compare article citation levels across disciplines within a journal and to other journals.

Getting in touch with us is easier than ever! Click Talk to Us and connect with industry thought leaders and experts like John Sack regarding emerging trends you think should be addressed in our 2018 meetings.

John Sack is the founding director of HighWire Press and focuses on market assessment, client relations, technology innovation, and the kind of thought leadership and industry-forward thinking that has helped defined the Company's mission since 1995.

Website: www.highwirepress.com/

Twitter: @highwirepress

Facebook: www.facebook.com/HighWirePress

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1797

Highwire is a proud Silver Sponsor of the ALPSP 2017 Annual Conference.

THINK Innovation

Rahul Arora, Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited, who sponsor the ALPSP Awards for Innovation talks to us about innovation and their recent acquisition of THINK subscription.

 

 

Firstly, what are your thoughts on this year's awards finalists? What do they demonstrate about innovation in the industry.

 

This year's finalists showcase a diverse set of innovative thought, but two major themes stand out: collaborative information sharing, and creative analysis and dissemination of information.

 

Turning to Think Subscription are there any elements of this solution that are particularly innovative?

The THINK application offers an extensive and flexible range of subscription modeling including date-based, issue-based, and unit-based subscriptions, or a hybrid of date-based with issues or units.  This provides publishers with a tremendous capability to envision and develop new subscription offerings, while maintaining compliance with generally accepted accounting procedures and regulatory environments.

In addition, our extensive APIs allow publishers to deploy a true subscriber self-service environment, as well as the ability to extend the system and integrate with third-party applications. Such potential integrations include those with popular CRMs and finance applications. THINK offers a fully integrated E-Commerce & Content delivery platform called ScholarStor (an MPS proprietary platform) which includes various workflow options for open access, unit price, and pay-per-view, along with an end-to-end flow of subscription lifecycle management. At various points, all modules (catalogue management, content management, product display, shop cart, payment gateway, self-serve, promotion management, etc.) have synchronized integration with THINK which allows users to seamlessly experience the complete lifecycle.

What are the aspects of Subscription and Fulfilment management that would benefit from innovation?

THINK aims to be a one-stop solution for publishers. The THINK suite allows publishers to manage one single platform for delivery, rather having multiple systems to manage your back-end invoice & order flow, payment system, accounting system, access management, content delivery, catalogue management, etc. Publishing has becomes complex over time, and innovation is the key to keep it simple and easily accessible.

THINK offers more sophisticated and numerous subscription models along with a wider range of fulfilment capabilities. More and more customers are becoming subscribers because subscription experiences built around services meet consumers’ needs better than the static offerings or a single product. But in a lot of cases purchasing a subscription will still involve fulfilling content or products whether that is physical or digital, and that’s where THINK offers more than just recurring billing.

What are the needs and challenges?

For many clients the key challenge is to provide an application that allows for more than just recurring billing, but to couple this capability with fulfilment, whether physical or digital.

THINK addresses many of the acknowledged needs and challenges inherent in fulfillment of scholarly publications, including:

• Single view of complete order history, regardless of sales channel
• Management of complex order configuration and pricing
• Ability to handle many orders quickly, with access from anywhere
• Support for multiple currencies and languages
• Data security

How will the acquisition of Think Subscription allow you to innovate better in the future in terms of providing end-to -end solutions for your customers?

We communicate with our customers closely in order to understand their goals and challenges. As an organization, MPS has the capability to provide services across the complete author-to-reader value chain, including typesetting services, production services, work-flow management, peer review services, customization & development services, order management and much more. We consistently introduce new technology and update our solutions as necessary to ensure we are adapting to clients' changing needs and market dynamics. Our goal is to help our clients achieving their business objectives.

Position in the publishing value chain - An opportunity to manage and support our customer’s customers.
Advancement of platform business vision - As publishers are investing in their platforms for a competitive edge, we are consistently investing in our platforms.
Rich understanding of the THINK Platform - Users of the platform as a service bureau, system integrators in implementations, and developed various tools above the platform for greater efficiency and extension to other business systems.
Synergies with MPS Platforms - ScholarStor and MPSInsight neatly integrate with THINK, making it together a platform suite fulfilling end-to-end requirements of the publishers.
Complementary client base - We have very limited overlap in customers. MPS is a customer focused organization and we develop deep strategic relationships with our customers.

Do you have any future plans to expand to extend your product/service offering further?

THINK is now part of a growing company. More importantly, publishing is our core; and science and scholarly publishers account for the largest share of our business. We have a platform-based growth vision and the THINK platform will be a core aspect of our growth strategy. Our aspiration will be to offer a platform suite that helps solve your business problems. MPS has a strong track record of building High Performance teams. Our team culture demands great flexibility and high responsiveness to our customers' business needs and technical requirements. We are a competitive organization that is always looking to learn in order to be more meaningful. We have a list of items in our current product enhancement road-map and with every passing day we are approaching towards a new milestone to be achieved in the publishing platform domain. We are actively engaged in introducing new functionality and features.

Rahul Arora

Author biography

Rahul Arora is the Chief Executive Officer at MPS Limited. He graduated from Babson College, Massachusetts and has a MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Rahul led the transformation of his family’s print-focused publishing business to a larger, professionally-driven B2B media enterprise. He has led and grown some of Gallup’s most innovative consulting partnerships in the APAC region. As CEO of MPS, he manages the current operations in India and the United States, while continuing to actively engage with their client base.

About MPS Limited and THINK

MPS Limited provides platforms and services for content creation, full-service production, and distribution. The business division, THINK provides leading order management solutions that help you optimize subscription lifecycle events, maximize billing, and increase return on investment.

Web: www.adi-mps.com
Web: www.mps-think.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mpsltd
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mps-limited

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.  

Spotlight on INASP - shortlisted for the 2017 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

In the third of our series of interviews with ALPSP Awards 2017 Finalists we talk to Andy Nobes, Programme Officer in the Research Development and Support team at INASP the people behind Author AID.

Tell us a bit about the work of INASP

INASP is an international development organization with the vision of research and knowledge at the heart of development. We work with partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia to support individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge, which can transform lives.

Most research is published in the global North but many of the world’s most urgent problems are found in the global South. Early-career researchers in low- and middle-income countries face many challenges in communicating their work. These include: lack of familiarity with the global scholarly publishing landscape; lack of experienced colleagues who can advise them about publishing their work; inexperience of scientific writing; and often inexperience of writing in English. Other common challenges for researchers are: understanding plagiarism; choosing a suitable journal; and knowing the basic structure of a paper. They face all these challenges in addition to inherent biases in the global scholarly system, as well as particular challenges for female researchers and those from minority backgrounds or in fragile or conflict states.

Our AuthorAID project was started a decade ago to address these challenges. We work with partner institutions in Africa and Asia to embed research writing and proposal writing training into their curricula. The AuthorAID website also provides a free service for all researchers -  a database of free resources, an online discussion list, and a mentoring and collaboration platform. Over the last decade, our training has evolved from face-to-face training to online and blended courses, and most recently into our recent Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

In 2015 AuthorAID launched a series of free research-writing MOOCs. These have been run twice-yearly on the Moodle open-source platform and have so far attracted nearly 7,500 researchers from over 100 developing countries. We have also run the course in Spanish in partnership with Latindex, training 3,000 researchers in Latin America. These courses are particularly good at supporting harder-to-reach groups, including female academics and those in fragile and conflict states. Such support is essential for ensuring equity in global research.

The course is six weeks long and covers four topics: literature review, research ethics, writing a paper and publishing in a journal.  Participants learn via text-based lessons, weekly quizzes, a facilitated discussion forum and peer-assessed writing activities, as well as optional short video content.

 

 

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

Course participant Caroline Koech from Kenya

The AuthorAID team is small, and the MOOCs are run by just two core staff – I administrate and moderate the course from our Oxford office and my colleague Ravi Murugesan is the lead facilitator and Moodle expert, who is based in India. In order to manage groups of 1000+ course participants we rely on our team of volunteer ‘guest facilitators’. These are drawn from our global network of mentors and partner institutions, and we also promote ‘star’ participants to be facilitators on subsequent courses.

This facilitation model not only makes it possible to cater for large numbers of participants, across different time zones, but it also helps to pass on the skills to reduce the reliance on INASP. This is a key part of our sustainable development model.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

The innovation in our project is not so much in the technology – after all, MOOCs are becoming increasingly common in global education. Rather, it is the context, community and impact of the AuthorAID MOOCs that are uniquely innovative. Our courses are built on 10 years’ experience of training early-career researchers in developing countries, and our content is aimed at overcoming many of the practical problems that they face in publishing their research, such as writing skills and understanding the publishing process. The lessons are pitched at a basic, introductory level, presented in simple English.

The material is also designed to be used in low-bandwidth environments, as many of our audience have problems with access to reliable internet. The lessons are interactive text-based lessons rather than high-bandwidth video lectures which many participants find difficult to watch.  The strength of the course is in the interactive content and social interaction - the discussion forums, which are energised by our team of guest facilitators, are particularly active and we hear that many researchers make friends and research collaborators on the course.

The completion rate for the courses is around 50%, which is significantly higher than average MOOCs. Our courses include a high percentage (45%) of women researchers and we also reach participants in fragile and conflict-affected states, for example Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Yemen.

Follow-up surveys have found that at least 34% of course participants have published papers after the course. Feedback has also shown increased confidence to publish, and increased awareness of important ethical issues like plagiarism and ‘predatory’ journals. We hear again and again from researchers about the difference that participating in an AuthorAID research-writi

ng MOOC has made to them, their academic careers, their colleagues, and their ability to share their research findings clearly with a wider audience.

Global map showing the geographical spread of the course and the concentration in developing countries.

What are your plans for the future?

We want to improve both the scope and delivery of our MOOCs – for example, we are translating the course into French, and developing a social science version. We are also creating additional content that is important to researchers – for example training in communicating research to the public, practitioners and policymakers. It’s becoming increasingly important to make online courses mobile-friendly, particularly in developing countries, and we are further developing content to be fully mobile optimised, including downloadable lessons and exercises that can be completed offline.

In the long term, INASP is currently looking at opportunities for further funding for this work to ensure that more early-career researchers in the developing world can continue to receive the training and support that they need so that they – and their research – can contribute to global research conversations.

Our ultimate goal is to make this training truly sustainable – not only by growing our network of online facilitators, but also working with some of our partner institutions around the world to run online courses in their own institutions. This training has already started with partners in Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Vietnam. We have also helped grant winners to trial their own mini-MOOC version of the course.

Andy Nobes

Andy Nobes is Programme Officer in the Research Development and Support Team at INASP. This involves the management of the AuthorAID website, and the development of its online mentoring scheme and community forums. 
Before joining INASP, he worked for an academic publisher in journal e-marketing and library marketing.

Web: www.inasp.info and  www.authorAID.info

Twitter:  @INASPinfo and  @authoraid

Blog: blog.inasp.info    
Facebook: inasp.info   
YouTube: INASP   

See the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing Finalists lightning sessions at our Annual Conference on 13-15 September, where the winners will be announced. 

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2017 are sponsored by MPS Ltd.