Will Russell asks where could new ideas come from?

Will Russell, Business Relationship Manager for Technology at the Royal Society of Chemistry, writes:

"From problem solving to planning business transformation, the human capability of creativity will become even more valuable in a world of exponential change – but how can we maximise our own creativity?

Have you ever been in a brainstorm and seen the same ideas coming up? 

What if things could be different and using simple techniques you could unlock truly novel ideas with fewer people in less time?  And not just unlock news ideas – inspire individuals to take ownership to take the ideas forward through validation to development.

I believe anyone can be creative and innovative, and there are tools and frameworks to increase your chances for success.  Successful creativity is more than just a great idea. It’s making a great idea successful.

There are several factors that can help you shape your creative thinking and planning.  Ideation can ensure you are solving the real underlying challenge or problem and cut through the clutter of ready-made solutions that are in your mind.  Validation can ensure that what you are producing actually is a fit for the market.  Iteration will enable you to revise your products based on user feedback, this is even more important in a world where we need to be developing challenges to tomorrow’s problems. On top of all of these there are learnings that can be applied from industries that have been disrupted, and those that have disrupted. 

There are many techniques that David Smith and I will talk about on our upcoming ALPSP course. We are keen that delegates feel enabled, with a toolkit to empower future opportunities – one of which is the five day sprint – enabling them to make business decisions in a short timescale.

A challenge we face today is that, with shorter product lifetimes, we need to predict what challenges our customers will face in the future that our products will need to solve.

I first met David Smith co-tutoring on the ALPSP web 2.0 course (taking over from Leigh Dodds). That course, although relevant in the early days of the social web, ran its course until the social web became standard.  As recently highlighted by Emma Watkins in her excellent ALPSP blog on leveraging social media, it's 10 years since the social web really started to change the digital landscape, and it's hard now to imagine a time without it. So what might the next real disruption on that scale be?  Futurist Gerd Leonhard has produced an excellent video on Digital Transformation.

I've had several different roles whilst working at the Royal Society of Chemistry, working in Technology, Publishing and Innovation, and I have recently returned to Technology.  The change in roles has enabled me to build up a varied experience that I am excited to share with David on the course, from ideation through to validation and moving to development."


Will Russell is co-tutor on the new Disruption, Innovation and Creativity training course alongside David Smith from The IET. Further details and booking on the ALPSP website.

Read David's post on Successful organizations and the creative process.

In a turbulent world, this is why I love the #alpspawards

It's that time of year again. We gather together a panel of experts in a dark room in the bowels of a building, and don't let them out until they have considered, debated, and scored some of the best innovations in the scholarly publishing world.

I love this moment; the point at which we announce the shortlist. While there's disappointment for those who didn't make it (and trust me, it was a close run thing, the standard was high) the excitement and anticipation of who might win ratchets up a level.

For those on the shortlist, the work has only just begun. A face to face presentation with the judges awaits. With 15 minutes each to wow, amaze and convince, they'll be preparing and perfecting their pitches. And then there's the lightning sessions at the Conference. (What do you mean you haven't booked yet? Never mind, here's the link.)

Perhaps the best part is the public debate the shortlist creates. Go on, admit it, you've got your favourite. That's OK. Some whooping and cheering from the sidelines is what the shortlisters need. And there really is something for everyone. The range, scale and quality is quite breathtaking. The full shortlist is below. Take a look. Pick your favourite. Set up an office sweepstake.

The world is a challenging place right now. I personally take great comfort in the dedication and hardwork of colleagues in scholarly communications. They are striving to improve tools for - and access to - research for a global community of researchers and beyond.

And have a care for our poor judges, locked away, deliberating. They won't have an easy decision. It'll be one hell of a ride. We hope you'll join us for it.

Follow #alpspawards and #alpsp16 for updates. The shortlisted entries for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are:

An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma from SAGE Publishing

Traditional methods of teaching and learning are in flux, partly because attention in the digital age is a scarce resource and engagement is ever harder to create. With the scholarly community demanding more, the nature of the transaction between material and student has changed. Coupled alongside a drive in academia to bridge the UK’s quantitative skills gap, a shakeup both in teaching and focus on research methods has been founded. From this, the concept of the latest Andy Field textbook was born – teaching students statistics through a science fiction love story with graphic illustrations. The project rethinks the way that knowledge can be disseminated – embedding theoretical approaches into a narrative to engage the mind of the reader. In a medium, love-story science fiction, not explored within teaching before, SAGE and Andy have taken a creative approach to better understand the needs of and engage students in teaching and learning.

Cartoon Abstracts from Taylor & Francis

Cartoon Abstracts are a fun new way of visualising academic research. They act as a marketing tool, and are making a big impact on social media as well as having other applications. Each individual cartoon abstract summarises the original authors' work through illustration, harnessing the overwhelming power of images over text. Illustrations can aid the understanding of difficult concepts, or broaden the appeal of niche topics. They can also help transcend language barriers, where that is an issue. Authors enjoy being included as characters, and this encourages them to share their cartoon via their networks – increasing communications reach. The author characters also enhance engagement with the audience.

The Crossref Metadata API

The Crossref Metadata API lets anyone search, filter, facet and sample Crossref metadata related to over 80 million content items with unique Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). It's free to use, the code is publically available and end-users can do whatever they want with the data. In exposing the authoritative cross-publisher metadata to the community in this way, it becomes more accessible, functional and much simpler to integrate with third party systems and services (from the publisher and the end-user side). It provides smoother workflows and increased discoverability using existing publisher processes.

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is a quiet innovation with revolutionary potential for not only changing the way the publishing costs of scholarly output are financed but also radically bringing down costs to those who fund it. The KU model is the only one that takes into account the global nature of scholarship and the globalisation of publishing. Because it mirrors these two worlds that are inextricably interwoven it avoids many issues associated with other programmes that serve national or institutional priorities. The service has found a way of making the publishing of specialist long-form content sustainable in a world where monographs, especially, are under severe pressure.

ORCID

ORCID's vision is a world in which all who contribute to research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected with their contributions and affiliations across disciplines, borders, and time. We maintain an open Registry where individuals may obtain a unique and persistent identifier (an iD) - a lifelong digital name they control - and services for the community to collect and connect these iDs in research workflows. Individuals may use their iD through their entire career, to ensure that they are reliably connected with their contributions and affiliations, even if they change their name, organization, discipline, or country.

Wiley ChemPlanner

The global pharmaceutical industry continually develops new drugs to cure or improve the treatment of disease. The drug creation process is extremely challenging; it takes an average of 12 years and billions of dollars of investment for one new drug to make it all the way from the lab bench to approval and into the clinic. Wiley ChemPlanner combines state-of-the-art cheminformatics technology with high-quality data to speed up the early stages of the drug creation process, saving  pharmaceutical corporations millions of dollars and getting drugs to patients faster. ChemPlanner lowers the barrier for synthesizing new molecules, thus accelerating the discovery process and allowing the exploration of an expanded region of chemical space. ChemPlanner also enables chemists to optimize synthetic routes, eliminating potentially harmful contaminating side products  and reducing manufacturing costs.


Suzanne Kavanagh is Director of Marketing & Membership Services at ALPSP.

Successful organizations and the creative process

David Smith, The IET's Head of Product Solutions, writes:

"I cut my teeth in this business, under the original scholarly start-up environment of the legendary Vitek Tracz and his various ‘crazy ideas’ (that he generally managed to sell to the traditional publishers and thus make his return). Late 90s and early 2Ks. It was a wild ride.

Looking back over 15+ years, it’s fascinating to see what has changed and what hasn’t. In our world, we’ve ridden the wave. We digitised our back catalogues, the subscription business model still works well, the OA charging model is humming along nicely. We are not the Newspapers, or the Recording Artists, or the Bookstores and the Record Shops; The High Streets and Main Streets.

Yet we have challenges; the ennui that accompanies the knowledge that our money makers are all very mature things indeed. The knowledge, that despite the above, the networked world has not been kind to other mature businesses. The people who pay for our services are not the people who use them, day to day. We don’t have the luxury of a signal from the user that can be measured by credit card transactions. It’s very hard to connect a piece of new functionality to an increase in ROI. And a new product? Well, it’s probably fighting for existing money, from another product somewhere. New markets, proper new markets, are hard things to reach in our world, and they have fundamentally different environmental parameters.

And the way we are set up as organizations can also be challenging. Mature successful long lasting organizations (many of whom measure their existence in centuries!) have survived by optimising themselves to do what they do, day to day, very effectively. 

The new new thing can be and often is, an existential challenge. Will and I experienced that cognitive dissonance many times with attendees of our (ever evolving) Web 2.0 course.

Like Will, I also help my organization work out what things to focus on and how to best deliver them. And I ‘have people’ who then get to work with the engineering needed for the products to come to life. I’m increasingly fascinated by the processes that successful product shippers use. Iteration; rigorous analytics; unity of purpose; cross functional team building; horizon scanning and rapid delivery and more.

Because one thing is true; the successful organizations, the ones that ‘disrupt’ the old guard, are the ones that have figured out an end-to-end creative process that enables them to outflank their competition.

We will be using the twitter hashtag #alpspcreate to share interesting links on the run up and after the course, please do join the conversation."

David Smith is co-tutor on the new Disruption, Innovation and Creativity training course alongside Will Russell from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Further details and booking on the ALPSP website.

Read Will Russell's post he asks where could new ideas come from?
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Thad McIlroy on Demystifying XML

Thad McIlroy is a publishing consultant and author, currently writing and blogging at The Future of Publishing. Thad, along with Carol Wolfe from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, will be hosting a webinar on Demystifying XML next month. 

Here, in a guest post, he reflects on just what it is that makes XML so pesky yet so important, and how they'll demystify it in the webinar.

"XML was created around 1996; the standard XML 1.0 was first defined in 1998. PDF – the Portable Document Format – was introduced by Adobe in 1993 and became an ISO standard in 2008.

I’m sure that like most publishers (and their teams) you don’t give PDF much thought anymore. You easily convert files into PDF and exchange those files over the web without any fuss. You don’t need to read the 756-page PDF 1.7 specification.

Why can’t XML be so straightforward? 

Because it’s complex, very complex. That complexity makes it extremely powerful. It also makes it hugely difficult for the non-technical to get their heads around how it works and what it enables. I’m not trying to suggest that PDF and XML are equivalent. PDF concerns the look of pages and XML their structure. But they’re part of the same publishing universe.

XMLers will tell you that XML is a simplified version of SGML. 

That’s like saying that xxx is a simplified version of yyy. Gee thanks. They’ll also tell you that the XML DTD syntax is one of several XML schema languages, but that XML Schema utilize an XML-based syntax, whereas DTDs have a unique syntax held over from SGML DTDs. Gee, double thanks.

Nonetheless I’ll tell you that if you’ve somehow managed to postpone adopting an XML workflow you can avoid the challenge no longer. You’re going to have to crawl inside XML, enough to get your bearings so that you can make strategic choices of how important XML will be to your future publishing workflow. 

What you can achieve with XML cannot realistically be duplicated any other way. 

And today, where a handful of output formats have become a multitude, the only way to find publishing nirvana (OK, nirvana might be a stretch) is to add XML structure to your publishing mix.

We’re fortunate that joining the webinar will be Carol Wolfe, VP, Publications and Drug Information at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (AHSP). Carol can tell it like it is. She explained to me that her view is strategic, not über-technical, and I thought: perfect. 

Because more than anything else we all need to recognize that XML is now core to our publishing strategies.

Carol will describe how her core association publications, like the 3822-page AHFS Drug Information and the 1,280-page Handbook on Injectable Drugs were destined to migrate online and why XML structured coding was essential to facilitate the transformation. She’ll describe how she’s managed moving these publications online while also managing online journals and ebooks, while optimizing her publications also for tablets and smartphones.

We’re not going to head too deep into the XML weeds because that would take all month (you might want to Google “introduction to XML” before the webinar if you’d like to brush up). We will introduce XML in non-technical terms so we can describe, in everyday publishing language, why demystifying XML is worth every ounce of effort for you and your staff."

Demystifying XML: A practical guide and case study will be held online on Wednesday 25 September, 2013, 11:00-12:30 ET, USA, 4:00-5:30 UK, 5:00-6:30 CEST. 

Don't miss it, book now. 

If you can't make the time, you can register and still receive the recording to view at your leisure.

The webinar is sponsored by ALPSP and Copyright Clearance Center. 

PSP 2013: The Professional Book: Past Its Sell-By Date?

Shanahan, MacInnis, Usatine and Grillo

Carrying on the theme from Harrison Coerver's 'are associations dead?' session on day one, Scott Grillo, Vice President and Group Publisher at McGraw-Hill Medical chaired a session asking are professional books due for extinction?

Unsurprisingly, the answer was no. Well, sort of, but you have to think about all devices or technologies now, not just print.

James F. Shanahan, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher at McGraw-Hill Professional feels you have to take into account the evolution of print products. Medical reference information has evolved from monographs, textbooks and list summaries to the shelf bending tome of the 90s and 00s, through to concise print reference, then in the present, comprehensive databases delivering quick answers at point of care married to workflow resources.

If you think hard about how best to solve a problem, you can be rewarded - even in print, although it's not so sexy these days. There is a changing value proposition for medical content and the future will be based around the issue of problem solving. Print does remain viable, but you may find that for business reasons (i.e. profit margin, subs renewal rate) you might find it being dropped.

Professionals face the same problems: time, money, patient safety, quality and outcomes, documentation of procedural skills, licensure and certification. But they also face newer problems: documenting competency training, figuring out how to relate income to outcomes, and filtering the overwhelming amount of new content that has no structure or borders. Publishers also need to consider where folks go to solve their problems: Google, Wikipedia, PubMed, social media, viral media, associations, lecture capture systems, as well as faculty with time and gadgets.

The future of medical content is digital. Anyone who thinks it isn't is fooling themselves. Content in context of everyday work is essential. Medical content will be increasingly oriented towards institutional customers as they move towards institutional or large group practice. The future of medical content is also multi-platform and re-usable. If the title of a new book proposal sounds like a Google search result, it will probably struggle to stand out in the market.

Key questions to consider are:

• Are we talking literally about print books, or about content that is book length but delivered digitally?
• Is medical print increasingly archaic, a thing of the past? Is it truly 'past its sell-by date?'
• Do publishers want to keep investing in medical print?
• What do they lose if they conclude that print is past its sell-by date?
• Do health professional want to keep using medical print?
• Do technology partners replace medical print, or add to to?

Dr. Richard Usatine, a Family and Community Health Professor, VP of a media app company, and Editor-in-Chief of Family Medicine Digital Resources Library has a strong attachment to print books. He contrasted their survival to the demise of vinyl. While he clearly holds a traditional view of the value of print, he also acknowledged that there is a time and a place for all different types of medical content, ultimately coming across as platform agnostic. He cited Epocrates as the number one application driving doctors to the smart phone. He's a user of it and finds dosing of drug interactions quicker than he could on the internet or in a book.

Usatine observed that students are now given a selection of electronic books from a selection company for their course. They like that they are light, on a laptop, ipad or tablet. They don't necessarily know the names of the authorities when they first some in to the school, that is something they pick up through their course. They want quick access to information and if they are given a lot of books as part of the fees, it still means the book has value, but no longer has (literal) weight. A variable set of media is being used. Pedagogy is the art and science of education. People will always grab the best tool for the job. Even if it is digital, it doesn't mean print will go away. You can build better tools, but still there is a value of the paper for the look, feel and browsability.

Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling, a digital text tech company, was more forthright: he doesn't care if the book is in demise. Remember what publishers do: they curate and produce quality content. The reality is that whatever device you select to communicate with a subject expert, you have to make it trusted. Consider if the reader is looking for a specific answer to a question or if they want to peruse? The book may be a better device for a particular question or problem, in which case, go ahead and keep printing them.

Things are going to continue to change. Get used to it. Talking about an ebook is silly. Go online, look at an ebook and ask yourself why is it ebook incapable of doing a table? We need a whole new set of methods for this new medium. Ebooks will evolve and develop to become a richer experience. InDesign still asks you to confirm inches and margins when you go to 'new'. Trust and usability has to happen across new platforms. His recommendation to editors is whatever the discipline, be really honest with yourself about what problem you are solving and define it by what that person is trying to do. Then think about format. Be more creative and more aggressive about how the platform you choose solves these problems.

Grillo observed that people often point to pedagogy and authority, and that has meant books continue to survive. He asked does that still hold true? Do students now say 'it's a good answer because I found it in a book?' or do they say 'It's a good enough answer because I found it on wikipedia?' Shanahan disagreed with the idea that pedagogy will keep the book alive. He believes it is third or fourth on the list. Authority is the key thing. When Grillo asked is pedagogy a sub-set of usability? (It's not so much the death of the book, but redefining the book), MacInnis responded by saying that the pedagogy thing is not so much a decision on moving from book to digital, it's more about the technology hasn't moved on a bit.

MacInnis made a powerful closing point: it's dangerous to think in context of print to transition to digital. This is a transition from only thinking about one kind of media, to thinking about many different types. It's a transition in thinking, not a transition from print to digital.

PSP 2013: The Future Value in the Professional Association

The social media challenge ACS tackled

In the first session at the Professional Scholarly Publishing conference, Harrison Coerver asked if associations still have a future. The following panel outlined the value they provide in the internet age and what services they will have in 2018.

Madeleine Jacobs, CEO of the American Chemical Society (ACS), provided an overview of their membership and services. They have over 163,000 members, with 187 local sections and 32 technical divisions. 87% of members have degrees in chemistry and more than 60% of members work in business and industry. 15% of members live outside the US and the offices have two main locations in Washington DC and Columbus, Ohio. They have a governing board for publishing and run - wait for it - 485 programmes. That's a big association with a lot of programmes.

The ACS has four strategic goals:

1. Provide authoritative and indispensable information
2. Advance members' careers
3. Improve science education
4. Communicate chemistry's value

How are they tackling the Race for Relevance? One of the key initiatives they have focused on has been to set up a tech trends roadmap. They have a group of staff who monitor and review on an on-going basis what the latest technology can deliver and what is relevant for members. They identified four challenges and four solutions:

• embrace social media
• make information portable
• expand electronic publishing
• make ACS national meeting presentations more accessible.

They have launched award winning apps, expanded their electronic publishing, focused on providing information through the Chemical Abstract Service and continue to build more virtual services. With 92-93% of revenue coming from publishing, it is critical that they continue to adapt and deliver value.

Her final piece of advice? Hire the very best tech people you can find. Steal people from other organisations who have done well. And don't forget to empower great people you already have on staff.

James Prendergast, COO of the IEEE, outlined the historic merger between AIEE and IRE, driven in the main part because the IRE were moving a lot faster through their international reach and open welcome to students and young professionals, something Coerver advocates strongly. They were quick to adopt advances, the AIEE recognised this, so they merged in the 60s.

The IEEE has more than 429 members globally. Their Xplore Digital Library has more than 3.25 million articles, they have 900 active standards and 500+ standards in development. They held 1396 conferences globally in 2012 and have 572 already in places for 2013. (Cue sharp intake of breath from the audience.) They have interactive HTML full-text articles with unique and active features - not just vanilla HTML.

Jacobs, Prendergast and Dylla with Coerver

The IEEE has completely endorsed open access and provides options for all authors to do this. All their technical journals are now hybrid with subscription and open access options. They have a number of journals that are now fully open access and announced a new mega-journal in 2012 that will be fully open access and multi-disciplinary.

They launched OpenStand for their standards in August 2012. Informational webinars provide new ways to deliver content. Pre-university outreach portals such as TryComputing and TryEngineering are proving to be a big hit. TryEngineering received 12 million hits in 2012 with the average time on site exceeding 10s of minutes. They are fostering engagement through social media and have expanded online impact through an extreme programming competition and the IEEE Day.

Prendergast advised delegates to focus on mobile. Your services have to be at the right time and in the context of when and where members want to receive that information. As an organisation they provide too much information. They have to focus on getting it right and making services relevant and timely.

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics outlined the history of the association and the particular, unique circumstances that make their situation unique and challenging: that they are an umbrella body of ten physics associations. They have a membership of approximately 165,000 scientists with 75% based in the US and 25% internationally.

In 2008 they undertook a key strategic re-evaluation. This included divesting the offer of publishing services to members. Post-2008 there was a lot of self reflection. He described their governance structure as akin to the Senate and House of Representatives structure which led to the governance review post 2010 they conducted with the support of BoardSource. This led to them recently establishing the wholly owned subsidiary AIP Publishing LLC.

Professional Scholarly Publishing Annual Conference: The (R)evolution of Value: Innovation and Sustainability. Are associations becoming irrelevant?

Harrison Coerver, author, Race for Relevance

Are associations becoming irrelevant?

That's the question that Harrison Coerver, President of Harrison Coerver & Associates and author of Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations asked the audience at the opening session at the Professional Scholarly Publishing meeting in Washington DC.

Coerver's organisation has worked with over 1400 associations in their time, so he draws these conclusions based on wide experience. He believes that professional associations aren't going away. They will probably exist, but will they have vibrancy, relevance and vitality? That's not a future we all want for professional societies. So we need to do something about it.

To do this, he believes we need to face up to the "New Normal" for Associations. This is dictated by time, value, membership diversity, generational value, competition and technology. These six trends converge to create an environment where association relevance is challenged. What do associations have to do to get the situation back in balance? And how do they go about it? As a rule, associations are not equipped to tackle a changing situation, so this is no mean feat.

Time
Executives don't have time any more. Institutions are time intensive. Meetings, seminars, events, member queries, reading publications, government affairs: they all take time. When do you hear people saying they have spare time now? You don't. Associations need to acknowledge this. There is no more time.

Value/ROI
Face the fact: associations are competing for people's time so you have to add value and provide a good return on member investment. You used to just join your relevant association. In the 70s and 80s people started to question the value of their dues: what do they get for their money? There's nowhere to hide now.

Membership diversity
Members all used to be the same, but then a funny thing happened: they started to diversify with sub-sections within sections. Coerver cites the American Medical Association who lost members while associations in medical specialisms grew.

Generational values
Demographics are a key factor. The highest satisfaction ratings of associations come from those in their 60s. This drops as you go down the age groups. There is an ageing phenomena that needs to be tackled. Beware the thinking of 'Millennials': those born in the 80s who will find information and arrange events themselves using modern social technology, and resent paying someone else to do it.

Competition
Associations don't like to think of themselves as competitive organisations. From for-profits to non-profits, co-ops to media companies, and from the internet itself: all these traditional and not-so-traditional competitors are taking a piece of the association landscape. You have to a) acknowledge this is competition, then b) understand there are alternative propositions, and c) if competitors do it better than you do, then you are in trouble.

Technology
Associations have been slow to adapt technology and we are behind. Apps, social media are all good examples. With social media - associations have allowed Facebook and LinkedIn to own their networks. Compromised by the lowest common denominator, associations have tended to focus on the one person who still doesn't have a fax machine. A key challenge is to balance member services and satisfaction and not losing the progressive members who will get frustrated by slow progress and go elsewhere (those non-traditional competitors mentioned before, maybe?) Why can't we use the technology that we use everyday in our lives?

So how do associations fix this? Coerver recommends you adopt five radical changes:

1. Establish a five member competency based board - keep it small and tight for effective decision making
2. Empowered the CEO and staff - you can't run a strong association on part-time amateurs
3. Rigorously define the member market
4. Rationalise programs and services (learn from the music industry: think about providing singles rather than albums)
5. Build a robust technology framework

Mismatch between model and environment

The key mistake associations make is equating the volumes of services to the value they provide to members. This is a fast track to over-extending the organisation and not delivering the most important services to members. This is about the power of focus and if you ignore this and technology, it's a short cut to irrelevance, ignore technology.

Strategies for success read like any good business methodology. Create a sense of urgency. Ask loaded questions. Use data. This is critical due to strong traditional ties to services. The best way to confront that is by putting data in front of those who are wedded to historical ways of doing business.

Invest in youth. Get youth on the board as soon as possible. You don't know what will they will say, but you have to evolve from within and learn how to adapt and become relevant to the next generation. Accelerate the adoption of technology. Associations spend more on meals at events than they do on technology. That is a scandal. And finally, harness political skills. Human capital is one of the biggest strengths. Use your board for lobbying and ensure you have the best and brightest team working for your association.