Growing your content’s family tree: Life after primary sale

So much effort in our industry goes into new content: the launch, the debut, the first run. Yet, there is a complex, profitable second life for content after it serves its initial purpose. Often, it is up to publishers to become the guardians of that second act, spawning “children” from the original content that can flourish after primary sale.

Content creators and publishers shape the primary “parent” work in a certain format, for a certain audience, so it can be challenging for them to accept that the world might reinterpret that work in ways they can’t control. The use of child content can be so unpredictable and so detached from the original work that publishers might find it impertinent, trivial, or undermining.

Like a dysfunctional family, some publishers are stricter than others when it comes to sending child content out into the world for fresh creative or commercial endeavors. It’s a balancing act for publishers to protect the value with which they have been entrusted, without stifling the possibility of a productive future. The more inspiring the original work, the more likely that it will yield offspring that flourish beyond the scope of the primary sale. As surprising as the opportunities may appear, reinterpretation of child content can produce immense value to publishers who are open to the concept.

Over the past several years, I have been exposed to companies seeking reuse of creative output of all kinds. Excerpts, charts, and graphs are common, but we also hear about requests for instructional videos, posters, and secondary text created to support website features. These requests are often very difficult to process. I sometimes see bias on the part of content creators and publishers for the primary work to be protected just as it is, cut off from the potential of a second life. Beyond that, the creators of the content can be hard to find, and the intended reuse is hard to describe. When not a lot of money is involved, it’s easy for the trail to go dead.

Taking the widest view of the “permissions” landscape, which my job at Copyright Clearance Center allows me to do, I encourage creators - and custodians of creative works - to embrace the inspiration that others receive from an original work. The inspiration may seem “less than” because it has a different audience, format, or purpose, than the original, but that contribution could take the achievement to a new realm.

I don’t mean that creators should abandon control, allowing every proposed reuse. I’m also not implying that creators should not be compensated for their contributions. Rather, creativity should be encouraged as the seed of further achievement. When creating child content will cause no harm to the parent content, why not embrace the experiment of that creative output? Consider the options carefully, but trust that the intrinsic value of the parent content will be amplified by the life of the child content. If the significance is not apparent to you, take that as testament to the power of independent thought.


Unusual second lives of content in mainstream media

Parent content	Child content
Scene transition cartoons from variety show The Tracey Ullman Show	Television series The Simpsons
AOL’s trademarked email greeting sound, “You’ve got mail.”	Romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail
Nashville-area commercials featuring simpleton Ernest P. Worrell	Ernest children’s television show and nine-part movie series
The Pink Panther cartoon character	Owens Corning building insulation
Star Wars movie series	Scented candles, aquariums and terrariums, a grocery line of fresh fruit, furniture
Disney theme park rides	The Country Bears and The Pirates of the Caribbean movie series
Trading cards and sticker packs	B-movies Mars Attacks and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
Board games	Movies Clue, Battleship and Ouija
Smartphone apps	Movies Angry Birds and The Emoji Movie
Toys	The Lego Movie series, UglyDolls, Bratz: The Movie, G.I. Joe, Transformers movie series, Toy Story movie series, My Little Pony television series
Television show theme songs	Ringtones for smartphones
“It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Broadway musical Annie	Hip hop track “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” by Jay-Z
Theme song from television series MacGyver	Hip hop track “Put Ya Signs” by Three 6 Mafia
Windows 98 chimes and tones	Hip hop track “Windows Media Player” by Charles Hamilton

Jamie Carter

Jamie currently works as manager of publisher account management at Copyright Clearance Center, where she has worked since 2011, finding opportunities to license content and increase royalty revenue.

Jamie’s publishing career began at Arcadia Publishing, a UK publisher with an office in Dover, New Hampshire. Hers was a start-up division; Jamie acquired titles, did production work and editing, and even sold books on the road from time to time.

In the earliest days of the internet, she worked at a web-design company, then worked for six years as a manufacturing buyer at Heinemann in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Jamie moved back online in 2007, when she became product manager at Publisher Alley, a subscription website for analysis of book sales. Publisher Alley was owned by Baker & Taylor at the time, and is now owned by EBSCO. In this position, she was the editor of Alley Talk, a free companion site for Publisher Alley featuring bestseller listings and industry white papers.

Open Annotation for Researchers and Publishers

This month's Featured Member - Hypothesis provides our latest Guest Blog, penned by their Director of Partnerships - Heather Staines.

Created as a nonprofit, based on open source technology, Hypothesis is an independent industry voice that listens to community partners, not shareholders, to create a solution that serves researchers through all stages of their workflow. Our 145,000 users have already created more than 3.1 million annotations in the research, education, and journalism sectors. In 2015, we launched the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition, for publishers, universities, and technology companies wishing to explore interoperable annotation. Free to join, the AAK Coalition invites ALPSP members to learn more. We also host I Annotate, the world’s largest conference dedicated to annotation technologies, now in its sixth year. Join us in San Francisco on June 6–7 2018.

Workflow tools that silo content and data and require researchers to cut and paste notes or reenter information result in frustration and loss of productivity. Visit Hypothesis to create a free account that you can use to annotate content across the web. Deep-linking through annotation creates unique persistent web addresses for content at any level: page, paragraph, sentence, word, or data object across HTML, PDF, and EPUB formats. Embed Hypothesis on your website or platform with just a short piece of javascript code to enable anyone to annotate — whether they have the browser plugin already or not. If you want more control over annotations, consider our Publisher Group functionality.

With the successful launch of the first Publisher Group for eLife in January, 2018, we are pleased to announce further refined group technology for publishers, platforms, and societies.  Publisher Groups are branded and moderated annotation layers that enable conversations, the creation of additional content, private note-taking, and private collaboration groups over publisher versions of record. Increase reader engagement with interaction on your content through annotations, which also populate to your publisher group page.

Publisher Groups enable world-readable annotation layers that are open for anyone to create annotations or are restricted to authors, members, or invited experts. Society publishers can establish a group that spans both their content site and their member site to create a cohesive conversation to benefit members. Societies with similar interests can collaborate to create a discipline-specific layer that spans multiple content sites. The W3C standards-based Hypothesis client can connect to existing account systems to avoid the need for users to create separate accounts, and it can be configured to match the styling of publisher websites and platforms. Hypothesis works with all of the popular hosting solutions across the industry.

Annotations in groups can also be explored through activity pages, giving publishers and societies quick snapshots into annotation activity on specific sites and documents. Full analytics on public annotations and aggregated anonymized data on private and group annotations are available through Hypothesis' robust API. Public annotations are included in the Crossref Event Data project for indexing by Google.

Publishers are discovering additional use cases for annotation every day. eJournal Press has integrated Hypothesis with its peer review dashboard to offer reviewers the option to provide feedback through inline annotation. Discussions with all major manuscript submissions systems are underway. Taking the popular SciBot account functionality as a model, publishers are exploring annotation technology to connect external data to specific identifiers already embedded in their content. SciBot searches papers for RRIDs (Research Resource Identifiers) — key for reproducibility and used by more than 125 journals — then displays information on each RRID in the form of an annotation card on the publisher site. Readers no longer need to navigate away to see the data behind the identifier. The Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University has partnered with Cambridge University Press to connect citations to their sources and underlying data through Annotation for Transparent Inquiry, an innovation that puts quotes and sources in context with author notes. Production departments are using annotation to handle questions on thier xml staging sites or in editorial processes to plan journal migrations. Preprint services such as bioRxiv are considering making society groups visible by default on top of their servers. The possibilities are endless.

Let's talk about how annotation and Publisher Group options can serve your goals for publication and user engagement.

Heather Staines is Director of Partnerships for Hypothesis, working with publishers, platforms, and technology partners to promote open annotation. She has worked at Proquest, SIPX, Springer SBM (now Springer Nature), and Praeger Publishers, and she is active in many industry associations and task forces, including ALPSP, SSP, STM, Charleston, Force11, and more.

Website: https://web.hypothes.is/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/myhypothesis/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hypothes.is/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hypothes_is
You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/c/hypothesis

The ALPSP International Conference debate ‘Who is the Publisher?’

Jane Tappini from Publishing Technology will be chairing a panel session later this year at academic and scholarly publishing event the ALPSP International Conference.  

Titled “Who is the Publisher?”, the session, which takes place from 14.00 – 15.30 on Thursday 12 September will focus on the changing role of publishers in a dynamic content world and discuss the challenges facing them in their battle to stay relevant.

The panel will take a look at how skillsets are set to continue to evolve and how publishers can deal with flexibility in content and pricing mechanisms, the implications they have on rights and royalties and the impact on licensing, author relations and reader expectations. The expert panel will include some leading lights in academic and research publishing.

Ziyad Marar

Deputy Managing Director and Executive Vice President of Global Publishing at SAGE Publications, Ziyad Marar has a BSc in Psychology and a Ma in the philosophy and psychology of language. Marar is also a successful author. Having had three books published over the last decade, he has become an authority on how philosophy and psychology can create a better understanding of a modern identity as well as having extensive knowledge of SAGE’s reference works, humanities, social sciences, technology and medicine publishing programs.

Dr Timo Hannay

Managing director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan and a spin off from the Nature Publishing Group, Dr Timo Hannay specialises in providing software and data solutions for scientists and others involved in the research process. With a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College and a DPhil in Neurophysiology from Oxford University, Hannay has worked on sophisticated data management platforms like SureChem, BioData and Symplectic. Hannay is also involved with the Science Foo Camp, co-organising the collaborative event between Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google. Bringing together between 200 and 300 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders, the Science Foo Camp is a recurring weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration and debate.

Dr Victor Henning

Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley, as well as Vice President for Strategy at Elsevier, Dr Victor Henning understands the role of emotion in consumer decision making, intertemporal choice and the theory of reasoned action. Holding a PhD from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Henning has had research published in Psychology & Marketing and Culture & Society. He won the Overall Best Conference Paper Award at the AMA’s in 2005 and was granted a doctoral dissertation scholarship in 2006 by the Foundation of the German Economy. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has since gone on to join academic social network tool Mendeley with academic publisher Elsevier in the heavily discussed merger from earlier in the year.

Louise Russell

Former COO at Publishing Technology, Louise Russell held the Senior Vice President position at the company’s Scholarly Division and was Head of Client Management at Ingenta, before leaving the company earlier this year to become a Consultant. Having graduated from the University of Liverpool, Russell specialises in publishing, strategic planning and product management.

With such a high calibre of speaker on board and a fascinating topic to explore, the panel is set to be one of the ALPSP Conference’s signature events. To book your place at the conference register here and we look forward to seeing you there.  

ASA 2013: David Myers on Buying and Selling Content - Don't Forget the Small Publisher

David Myers of DMedia Associates focused on buying and selling content, but from a small publisher perspective. He provided some general industry statistics to provide context:

• worldwide there are 25,000 scholarly journal titles from approximately 2,000 publishers
• only 60% or so are indexed by some database
• 3% are open access journals, but this will grow
• historically, small range of well-respected content
• now, ability to have a comprehensive search experience.

New(er) trends include:

1. CLOCKSS/PORTICO, others - need to participate in a digital preservation initiative
2. tablets, mobile - pay attention
• 112.5m US adults own a tablet by 2016 - >third of US
• Tablet adoption up by 400% (source: Nielsen)
• Majority use for reading information
• spend 14 hours per week with their tablets
3. ebooks
• 2011 $90billion global market
• by 2016 - grow by 18.9%
• but in certain parts of the world and certain customers - budget for ebooks is not even in the same part of institution - need to understand arbitrariness of where money comes from with some customers.

He believes that using grass roots direct marketing, that then lead to trials, still remains the primary vehicle for adoptions. Co-marketing of titles with a particular focus, thereby creating a certain level of critical mass, works. Novel or targeted offerings help you to stand out. Bespoke collections where the user chooses are also popular.

Myers advice to small publishers to thrive is to look at:

• commissions and margins
• pay attention to small details, figure it out and give it to the customer
• help those who help you
• be responsive
• invest for the future
• let renewals be handled by experts.

The key take-away points for publishers are about flexibility and remember who you are dealing with as personal relationships matter. External and political issues dictate the environment. Administrative issues are important. Last, but not least, focus on the biggest opportunities.

ALPSP 5th International Conference

It’s finally here! The fifth ALPSP International Conference and we’re off to The Belfry, the “Spiritual Home of the Ryder Cup”, set in 500 acres of stunning countryside.  I’m hoping that delegates won’t be side-tracked by such a spectacular setting as we’ve got an excellent line up of sessions and social events.

2012 is ALPSP’s 40^th year and we look forward to celebrating.  Our opening Keynote on Tuesday afternoon is Mary Waltham, who will take a very honest view of the last 40 years of scholarly and professional publishing and ask ‘how did we do?’  It may not be as good as we might think.  Arend Welmers is our second keynote on Wednesday morning.  If we got a poor grade from Mary, then perhaps Arend may be able to direct us along the right path.

Our plenary sessions start with an entertaining look at the global issues affecting scholarly and professional publishing.  Then we address the thorny issues of just how scholarly communication is going to cope with reducing attentions spans and whether any of us will survive having to give it all away.  Our final plenary on Thursday has a slightly more positive slant: “It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine!”

In amongst all that, there are six parallel sessions to choose from.  Before lunch on Wednesday, we’ll be getting the low-down on proposed changes to copyright legislation and their potential effects, finding out what text mining actually is and how it may impact you, or gaining insights to app development.  After lunch there’s the tricky choice between making content discoverable, dealing with unethical behaviours or finding out about the latest product initiatives. 

Unable to make it?  We have a dedicated band of tweeters to keep you up to date (#alpsp12), and we’re also hoping to have regular blog updates.  In addition, we’re videoing all the sessions, so you can catch up with what you missed after the conference.

I would like to say a huge thank you to all of our sponsors:

Gold             Oxford University Press

Silver              QScience.com

                   SAGE

Copyright Clearance Center

Atypon

Thomson Reuters

Bronze           Publishing Technology

                   SWETS

                   DataSalon

                   Cambridge University Press

Nature Publishing Group

                   Turpin Distribution

                   Wiley-Blackwell

                   RSC Publishing

Reception Sponsors            Publishing Technology (Opening Reception)

                                      Highwire (Dinner Reception)

         

I look forward to seeing those of you making your way to the conference.  I hope you enjoy it and leave feeling reinvigorated and ready to tackle the next 40 years!

Audrey McCulloch

Chief Executive