What does academic engagement mean now?

Isabel Thompson, Market Research Analyst at Oxford University Press, chaired the morning plenary on Thursday at the ALPSP conference with a session focusing on the changes in publishers' engagement with academia and researchers. She noted that academics don't care how publishing works, they just want it to work. Researchers are readers, authors, peer reviewers and editorial board members. As a publisher, you have to find right voice for each one. Without academic engagement there is no publishing.

Thompson: one researcher told her that many of his colleagues view publishers as somewhere between pure evil and a necessary evil. #alpsp16

— ALPSP (@alpsp) September 15, 2016

Dr Philippa Matthews us a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow based at the Nuffield Department of Medicine in the University of Oxford. She is also Honorary Consultant in Clinical Infection at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Hospital Trust. She talked through the results of a survey she conducted in advance of the conference. She is very interested in engagement with schools, also infographics. Wants to share results and resources. As a researcher, life is complicated, a simpler publishing process would be preferable. There are significant penalties imposed if her work isn't open access. She outlined a few gripes around the publishing process:

• we don't accept pre-submission enquiries
• hard copy signed conflict of interest statements are required before submission - can be a very long-winded process!
• COI statements need original signatures from all authors... on six continents... at submission!
• multiple revisions before rejection for incorrect trial format
• new reviewers introduced after rounds of revision
• length of time between submission and publication.

Matthews sent a survey to colleagues and received over 100 responses. Results showed that researchers are happy with peer review, but not the timeline and available support. 47% felt the publication process didin't support innovation or allow creativity. People obsess on the Impact Factor, but it's broken. She closed on a more optimistic note: there is a willingness to discuss this from all parties.

These insights from Philippa Matthews are gold: understanding pain/frustrations of authors is springboard for change #alpsp16

— Alison Jones (@bookstothesky) September 15, 2016

Dr Emma Wilson is Director of Publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry. She outlined how much effort they put in to maintaining a two way dialogue with their community. This involved a lot of scientific conference, international engagement, and by building in-house teams in other countries. They support students and early career researchers via poster prizes and emerging investigator issues of journals. They use social media, but mainly for broadcasting information about them. However, it is growing in importance through initiatives such as through the Twitter-based poster conference.

Great examples of academic and policy engagement from Emma Wilson of @RoySocChem. It is easy to overlook the value of learned socs. #alpsp16

— Rob Johnson (@rschconsulting) September 15, 2016

Dr Sacha Noukhovitch is Executive Director and Editor in Chief at the STEM Fellowship/STEM Fellowship Journal. He feels that with open access, an unexpected, uninvited readership appeared spontaneously - students. A new generation of data-native students is tapping directly into research papers alongside professionals. These students lack the background knowledge, but they use their data skills to understand and interpret the world. If one students finds a paper interesting, others swarm to it creating a real buzz and students use academic communities to help understand complex concepts. They approach parts of the editorial process in a very different way, something that publishers need to follow and engage with.

Students have a different review style free from bias #alpsp16 @STEM_Fellowship pic.twitter.com/LOUxePqUkG

— Ann Michael (@annmichael) September 15, 2016

The ALPSP Conference was held at Park Inn Heathrow London on 14-16 September 2016. View the videos of the session on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

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.

What next for science and engineering books?

Liz Martin, Head of Production at IOP Publishing

IOP Publishing launched their born-digital ebook programme in 2013 (and won the Silver ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2014). Liz Martin, Head of Production at Institute of Physics Publishing outlined how by not being constrained by the need to digitise an existing print programme, they were able start from scratch thinking about what readers, librarians and authors in the STM community wanted from books.

IOP Publishing sold their whole programme to Taylor & Francis in 2005. They got out of books, so why launch books again in 2013? It came from their mission. They wanted to engage with their community in a different way, with different content, levels and media to reach out to a wider audience. Unlike journals, authors can express views, which is a subtly different way of engaging the community. It allowed their communities to buy what they want, where they want, how they want. It also provided a financial channel.

IOPscience is their delivery platform. It has good usability and discoverability. They also had their platform in place. They have two collections: Expanding Physics (highly developed texts from leading names in the field) and Concise Physics (short, concise 'first' books in a subject that are written and published quickly). They adopted a born digital programme. They offer PDF, HTML and ePub 3 of absolutely everything. It is device independent and fully functional. Equations are used to make it readable and accessible. They provide a seamless reader experience with click through to exercises and embedded colour media. They have a no-DRM model so librarians can share content freely. There is a fee based model for authors so no legacy issues. They have a collections based purchasing model. They use their existing experience and contacts for production and workflow, quality and SLAs. They have an XML workflow to enable all formats. The biggest challenge is around author education. The opportunity is to use their journals.

Roheena Anand, Publisher at Royal Society of Chemistry

The Royal Society of Chemistry's main objective is to advance excellence in the chemical sciences. Roheena Anand, Publisher for Books, talked through how their publishing strategy meets the needs of the global chemical science community, where digital fits in, and their focus for the next five years.

Why do they still publish books? Because their community tells them they still want them. They find them trustworthy and knowledgeable. Books are the best way to learn a new topic and go beyond a review article to present coherent body of knowledge. They also cover different levels of knowledge. As chemical science research output is browning, it provides ways to disseminate.

One of their key offers to the community as a Society is that all surplus from their programme is reinvested in science. The RSC is a specialist in chemical sciences and they cover different levels of knowledge from popular science to engage the public, through student materials to post-grad specialist researchers. There are synergies with their journal programme, they have an ePlatform, eBook Collections and high quality titles with recognised authors and editors. It helps time poor researchers with a fast track to relevant, quality materials.

They have achieved 50% growth in output and a concomitant increase in revenue. More titles are originated themselves with new book series and editorial boards. They have nearly 1500 ebooks in their eBook Collection. They have also reduced publication times by 10 weeks (around 20 weeks). They've diversified formats so ePUB and HTML and they have diversified revenue streams including pay-per-view, pick and choose eBooks and eBook aggregators.

Their focus in the future is on quality and has to be relevant for the international community as their membership is global. Subjects need to be in line with organisational priorities for the wider Society. They will extend formats and try to improve existing (e.g. print/POD? E-textbooks?). They will explore access routes to content and consider open access (which has not been a focus to date, but signs are this is changing).

Ian Stoneham from The IET

There has been a relatively recent resurgence in book commissioning activity, perhaps driven by institutional purchase of ebook collections or in some part as a reaction to rebalancing income from traditional society journal publishing revenues. The IET's Ian Stoneham questioned how secure the future of the book is as a discrete entity?

The IET publish a range of book products including monographs, professional reference, Standards (regulations), major reference works, conference proceedings and commissioned content. They have made a strategic decision to invest in programme expansion with a focus on core areas of IET activity and proposition as a learned society. They focus on quality, relevance and authority with established series and focus on edited multi-contributor monographs. They are looking for sustainable offering with depth and breadth, with a focus on digital that works for their community. Their standards publishing is now digital first with print 'squirted out at the end'.

Commissioned content is key to their knowledge offering. It can be an access to point to all other areas of their knowledge products or services. It can be repurposed and repackaged for CPD programmes and other activity. In engineering journal articles are important for career and funding,  but there is a different imperative to write books. Books can bridge the gap between primary research and practical application. Engineers are very pragmatic and having a book to wave in front of a client is a good thing for business.

In the future, they plan to open up their content for semantic enrichment e.g. auto detection of proper nouns, key terms in the text, linking to internal/external sources, etc. They also hope to improve community engagement (which isn't traditionally great in their field). Challenges included automated search, Patron-Driven Acquisition and protecting IP from third parties innovating around their content. However,  if you don't have the content, you can't meet the challenge of disruptive technologies.

Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn talks content with a true purpose, content with a story

Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn

Laura Finn, Content Marketing Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, will speak at next week's Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar in London. We spoke to her to find out more about what makes her tick and what makes content marketing truly work.

So tell me about yourself, how did you end up in your current role?

My marketing career started at Cambridge University Press – I wanted to stay close to books having read English, so I applied for a junior role and thought I’d give marketing a go. Since then, I haven’t looked back! I completed my CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing a few years back and I’m still based in Cambridge, I now head up a new Content Marketing team at the Royal Society of Chemistry where we work to connect the world with the chemical sciences.

What does content marketing mean to you?

I love the way content marketing challenges us to think beyond our own organisational goals and wants, and to engage with what our audience finds relevant instead. Great content is useful, it’s interesting, it solves problems and informs decisions, it immerses our audiences in who we are and why we’re here. I believe that content marketing can help us foster more meaningful relationships with our audiences and help them achieve their goals.

How does your organisation use content marketing?

As an organisation we are moving away from just selling features and benefits of our products, and towards changing hearts and minds. This fits so well with the philosophy of content marketing! My team of specialists work to create and share content that will resonate with our audiences, integrated into larger marketing programmes.

What’s the most effective piece of content marketing you’ve ever done (and results if possible)?

We don’t yet have results but I'm very excited about a recent video project that supported a campaign to increase membership numbers in industry. We filmed four members at their places of work, talking about why they love doing what they do, and how membership with the Royal Society of Chemistry has opened doors for them. Rather than talking about us, and what we thought were the key features and benefits of membership for those working in industry we could let real members decide what was important and spread the word. We are telling their story, not ours – and the resulting videos are engaging and authentic.

Engage with what your audience finds relevant

What’s the biggest no-no for content marketing in your book?

I think mistakes can often come from not asking ‘why’ – it’s very easy to get excited about content marketing ideas, and this can lead to content without a true purpose, content without a story.

My advice would be to always dig deep into the ‘why’ – that way, you can be sure that you’re prioritising effectively and that your content will resonate with its target audience.






Laura Finn will talk about 'Getting your content out there (mapping content opportunities to your audience)' at the Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar. Registration still open, book now.

Data linking systems: publishers’ experiences

Three publishers - Royal Society of Chemistry, Taylor & Francis, and the British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery - shared their experiences of data linking systems at last week's Data, the Universe and Everything seminar.

Sarah Day, Royal Society of Chemistry

Sarah Day, Senior Marketing Manager, CRM and Customer Systems at the Royal Society of Chemistry outlined how they integrated Ringgold into Salesforce, their cloud based CRM system.

The RSC data model includes: activity, contact, account, opportunity, campaign, and campaign member. Salesforce is customisable so they integrated Ringgold into their Account function. They use Ringgold for initial aggregation and import of data into Salesforce, for improving data quality, for external links (to related systems) and for bringing SCV data back into Salesforce. 

Before they implemented Salesforce they had to do manual and fuzzy checks on a range of spreadsheets used for sales leads. One challenge was that they hadn’t fully integrated Ringgold so they had to copy and paste to get hierarchy of institutions. Sales team now have to apply the Ringgold ID otherwise they can’t close or apply revenue to an account. This has proved to be an effective way to drive compliance.

Ringgold is the central identifier source for Salesforce, MasterVision (SCV), THINK (Subscription Management), authentication engine. There are, however, some challenges. The data entry team have to understand the data (e.g. understand phonetic spelling for Japanese or Chinese English pronunciation, etc). You may also have good reasons for inconsistent identifiers in your systems (Salesforce rolls up to a parent organisation, access/permissions may be different, etc).

Sarah Wright, Taylor & Francis

Sarah Wright, Customer Services Director for Taylor & Francis outlined the benefits of linking systems from a customer service point of view. 

Customers expect answers and service instantly. Automated systems help. With traditional systems, a customer order is taken, the payment is processed and you send the issue of the journal. But how can you use the same system to deliver access to online content? 

Print copies are straight forward: you post one to a particular address (e.g. Christ Church College). But if an institutional subscription has been purchased for online access this needs to go to Christ Church College, Queens College, the Department of Economics, in fact the whole university. 

Once you factor in duplications in the system due to different parts of the supply chain having different forms of data for the same place, it's a complex picture. 

As a result, they chose Ringgold ID. They have two levels so they can see they both link to the university one. Although institutional identifiers are great, they don’t always reflect how they sell to their customers (e.g. global corporate companies, consortia, etc). They can tell the system that online access should go at parent level. This has been a big success with benefits including: increased usage, reduction in complaints, improved service, visibility and reporting as well as project transfer. It is now ingrained in daily processes and reviewed all the time – so not a one-off project. Keeping data clean allows them to get the right content to the right customer at the right time.

Peter Richardson, Managing Director at the British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery, outlined the problem they faced: legacy systems - such as old and inflexible subscription systems and the author database - that do not communicate.

They have data ‘black holes’ such as new leads stored in their email marketing client Adestra that aren't updated if/when the lead was converted. There might also be poor data management by individuals and an over-reliance on external subscription data which may sometimes be of poor quality.

Peter Richardson: plugging data black holes

There were also external factors such as opportunities to link data together using identifiers such as Ringgold or ORCID. Users expectations drive the need for better data linking systems as does the drive for better customer service and more efficiencies. 

They have tackled these challenges with a brand new subscription fulfilment system - Myriad - which went live in August 2013. Data about customers is held separately from individual subscription records,  with an improved data intake. 

DataSalon will pull everything together, including data previously poured into ‘black holes’. DataSalon will also pull together customer, subscription information with the Ringgold identifier, leads, authors,  OVID customers etc. They have a greatly improved ‘dashboard’ and enhanced marketing opportunities. 

They hope to achieve better capture of marketing data (demographics, campaign codes, etc) in Myriad, have accurate addresses and data (end user info, mailing address) and better targeted campaigns as a result. Myriad is up and running and the project with DataSalon is just getting under way. They will know more in a couple of months, but believe they are on the right track.

RSC Advances: using a topic modelling text mining tool to improve discoverability

RSC Advances has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Award for Best New Journal 2013. Here in a guest post the publisher, Emma Wilson, explains how they developed the journal to find a home for research that does not fit in within the existing Royal Society of Chemistry journals programme.

"Over the last 5 years there has been a significant shift in both the global output of scientific research and in the growth of funding levels, through which we identified several emerging markets. From discussions with key scientists working in these areas we received feedback that the Royal Society of Chemistry is seen as a fair, inclusive, well respected, and high quality society publisher. However, it also highlighted that some authors felt they did not have a “society home” for their work, due to their research not fitting within the journals published by the RSC.

This community feedback led us to shape the idea and strategy for RSC Advances. The Journal’s vision is to provide a high quality society publishing option for all sections of the community, including emerging research areas and markets. The Journal is aligned to the Royal Society of Chemistry’s charter objective of ‘advancing the chemical sciences’, including the specific mission “to foster the chemical sciences by the dissemination of chemical knowledge”.

Topic modelling to improve discoverability

The ethos of the Journal is to be innovative and inclusive, providing exceptional levels of author service and support during the publication process, thereby facilitating the publication process and dissemination of the authors work. 


The Journal is supported by an international Editorial and Advisory Board led by Professor Mike Ward from the University of Sheffield, UK.

An innovative topic modelling tool was developed for RSC Advances. A sophisticated, behind the scene, text mining tool (developed in-house) classifies all the published papers into one or more of twelve main subject categories in the chemical sciences. The online functionality improves discoverability of authors’ research, ensuring readers go directly to the content of interest to them.

The success of the Journal has exceeded our high expectations. In just over a year after the publication of the first issue we celebrated publishing our 2000th article, and have moved to weekly publication. The Journal has also attracted many new authors to the Royal Society of Chemistry. The acceptance of the Journal by the community has also been further demonstrated by the release of its first (partial) impact factor of 2.56, placing it above the median impact factor for chemistry journals.

At the RSC we are constantly looking to improve the author and reader experience and RSC Advances, as an innovative online Journal, is pushing these boundaries."

RSC Advances was launched in 2011 by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It is an online Journal publishing well conducted research that furthers the field from across all the chemical sciences, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary and emerging areas.

Emma Wilson is Publisher for RSC Advances and has worked at the Royal Society of Chemistry as a journal publisher since 2006. She has strategic oversight and responsibility for 16 titles in the General Chemistry, Organic, Environment Science and Biological portfolios. Prior to working at the Royal Society of Chemistry Emma worked in a variety of roles in Elsevier’s Life Science Division.

The ALPSP Awards finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their journal or innovation in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP International Conference on Wednesday 11 September.

The winners will be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September. Book now to secure your place.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's Richard Kidd with some home truths on semantic enrichment

Richard Kidd on semantics

Richard Kidd, Business Development Manager in the Strategic Innovation Group at the Royal Society of Chemistry, outlined semantics for discovery in STM.

He reflected on the challenge of how you have to learn many different ways to research, as highlighted by Russell Burke from Royal Holloway earlier in the day at 'It's all about discoverability, stupid!' seminar.

How can semantic enrichment help support user search behaviour? And how can it help to show under-researched content? You can use classification, index terms, and identify keywords, then build your own classification.

The value of topic modelling
When RSC Advances launched, it was a new journal covering all of chemistry (and published 1800 articles in 2012). They needed to develop a sensible way of navigating all this content so they used topic modelling. Their publishing expertise gave them 12 broad subjects that would be intuitive to users. They worked with Wordle and then sense checked removing seven topics that were nonsense, one topic that was too general, which left over 120 topics that were classified. The remaining topics can be used for gap analysis, finding hot topics and assessing competitor weaknesses.

Steer clear of ontologies (unless you really want to do them)
A heavier level of classification is ontologies which are used in text mining. An ontology is a machine readable account of what there is in a given domain and how the things there relate to other things. Ontologies tend to be very domain specific and therefore context specific. But in the real world, they don't fit easily into hierarchies which can lead to large gaps in coverage and requires considerable efforts to build and maintain. Kidd's advice? Steer clear of them unless you really want to do them.

Build links on meaning
The semantic web build links on meaning, and each concept should have URLs or URIs. You have to use standard approaches so resources can connect. Why take a semantic approach? There are only a few successful projects out there. Why is that? There are so many different formats, structures, vocabulary, concepts and meanings. The structure should be data-oriented (not HTML). The meaning of data should be clear (not XML). Reusable mappings between data are needed (not XSLT). You should avoid extensive schema rewriting (not data warehouses). And data should have standard APIs (not Flickr). And to quote or paraphrase Lee Harland form Open Phacts, you need to 'synergise with many public efforts.'

Where people have been doing a lot of semantic work, it has tended to be to link their own content together (for example, GeoFacets from Elsevier or Nature.com linked data projects).

Another consideration is text mining. This builds on entity identification (from dictionaries, ontologies, taxonomies) to extract recipes and additional data. You insert the semantic mark-up and conduct sentiment analysis and business intelligence. Examples include NaCTeM tools applied to PMC Europe and SciBite.com.

Does a publisher text mining help text miners? In Kidd's opinion, mostly not.

Semantics won't help with content discovery right now
What should you do? For an immediate return there isn't much evidence that semantics will help your content discovery right now. Customers aren't paying for enriched data. However, making discovery metadata widely available as linked data seems sensible. Semantic works tends to be development rather than discovery. Currently, it is used internally for product development and pump priming. A lot of data is being pushed externally via API for linking, while everyone waits for clever ideas to come along.

And in the future? Big issues are likely to focus on authoring tools and data quality.