The announcement of the winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing is nearly upon us. Much anticipated and sometimes controversial, there's no denying the quality, breadth and range of the finalists.
In an intense lightning session the night before the Awards dinner, each of the shortlisted organizations presented for four minutes each to profile their submission.
The finalists were interviewed in the run up to the conference. Read each post at your leisure then debate who you think should have won on Thursday evening after the announcement!
Bookmetrix from Altmetric and Springer SBM
CHORUS - advancing public access to research
eLife Lens open-source reading tool from eLife
Impact Vizor from HighWire Press
JSTOR Daily online magazine
Kudos toolkit for researchers and their publishers
Overleaf authorship tool
RightFind XML for Mining from the Copyright Clearance Center
The Xvolution board game from NSTDA
The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are sponsored by Publishing Technology. Not at the Awards dinner? Check back on the ALPSP website for the results!
The ALPSP Blog has now moved to our main website. This page remains up as an archive of all of our previous posts.
Wednesday, 9 September 2015
Researching Researchers: Developing Evidence-Based Strategy for Improved Discovery and Access
How do you improve discovery and access to improve researchers, academics and students better? Roger C Schonfeld, Direct of the Library and Scholarly Communications Program at Ithaka S+R, chaired a panel including publisher, librarian and a library supplier at the 2015 ALPSP Conference.
Lettie Conrad, Executive Manager for Online Products at SAGE talked about their research on discoverability and delivery and learning from users to support their work. It's not about the user experience, it's about understanding the researcher experience. SAGE organises their product delivery on personas based on researchers and use case studies.
Conrad observed that whether we like it or not, the majority of search starts with the mainstream web. As a researcher advances in study skills and moves along their academic careers, they start to shift to speciality databases. Library discovery is for known items.
They undertook research into researcher experience through their workflow. Findings on queries included higher use of open web search reported, validating authenticity, browser trends. Findings on retrieval included 100% manually managed citations, low use of hyperlinked reference, few 'version of record' checks. Many use citation metrics, but only if they were above the fold and nearby.
They went on to ask what the uptake was for apps and tools and were surprised to hear that they didn't help with citation. It was a pain point. Easy import of citations was important. Being able to personalise their digital library. What did this all mean for SAGE's strategy? They take the research findings to help shape strategy and ensure content is discoverable. They ensure they have good usage statistics. their discovery strategy is based on their channels (library, open web, social media, academic, SAGE universe). Metadata is a key part of their strategy in three ways: stewardship, optimization and distribution. In the future, they are focusing on what's beyond search. What about the serendipitous process?
Deirdre Costello, Senior UX Researcher at EBSCO talked about how user expectations are formed on the open web, what users look for to make decisions about library resources, and why we need to think about our search results as one of the most important user experiences we can craft.
They conducted a video diary research programme to gather honest and open feedback from college and university students aged 14-18 years old. The great thing about this approach is that they saw the whole ecosystem as well as the wider range of tools they use to organise their lives. The expectations from these wider tools get ported on to those for college use.
Students have competing demands on their time from learning to do laundry for the first time, to making friends and keeping in touch with family. In addition to this, the changing neurology of minds to skim and scan content, impacts on how students search and interact with research.
Students have used Google for years and trust it, focusing on the top five results as it must be them that screwed up with the wrong search term, right? It's only when a tutor takes time out to explain how to question sources that students start to understand you can't trust everything you find on the web.
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Strategic Planning/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois' Library. They have articulated a user-centric framework of principles for library service development.
Their users value seamless, digital delivery. They want coherent discovery pathways. They want things as simple as possible, but NOT simplistic. When they say they want 'everything', it's from THEIR perspective. They have tried and tested a number of search options: transparency, predictability/explainability and customisability are important.
Changing user behaviours include: the length of queries are growing, known item searches are increasing and there is an increasing use of copy and paste searching.
The user tasks that they aim to support are:
Lettie Conrad, Executive Manager for Online Products at SAGE talked about their research on discoverability and delivery and learning from users to support their work. It's not about the user experience, it's about understanding the researcher experience. SAGE organises their product delivery on personas based on researchers and use case studies.
Conrad observed that whether we like it or not, the majority of search starts with the mainstream web. As a researcher advances in study skills and moves along their academic careers, they start to shift to speciality databases. Library discovery is for known items.
— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015
They undertook research into researcher experience through their workflow. Findings on queries included higher use of open web search reported, validating authenticity, browser trends. Findings on retrieval included 100% manually managed citations, low use of hyperlinked reference, few 'version of record' checks. Many use citation metrics, but only if they were above the fold and nearby.
They went on to ask what the uptake was for apps and tools and were surprised to hear that they didn't help with citation. It was a pain point. Easy import of citations was important. Being able to personalise their digital library. What did this all mean for SAGE's strategy? They take the research findings to help shape strategy and ensure content is discoverable. They ensure they have good usage statistics. their discovery strategy is based on their channels (library, open web, social media, academic, SAGE universe). Metadata is a key part of their strategy in three ways: stewardship, optimization and distribution. In the future, they are focusing on what's beyond search. What about the serendipitous process?
Deirdre Costello, Senior UX Researcher at EBSCO talked about how user expectations are formed on the open web, what users look for to make decisions about library resources, and why we need to think about our search results as one of the most important user experiences we can craft.
They conducted a video diary research programme to gather honest and open feedback from college and university students aged 14-18 years old. The great thing about this approach is that they saw the whole ecosystem as well as the wider range of tools they use to organise their lives. The expectations from these wider tools get ported on to those for college use.
Students have competing demands on their time from learning to do laundry for the first time, to making friends and keeping in touch with family. In addition to this, the changing neurology of minds to skim and scan content, impacts on how students search and interact with research.
Students have used Google for years and trust it, focusing on the top five results as it must be them that screwed up with the wrong search term, right? It's only when a tutor takes time out to explain how to question sources that students start to understand you can't trust everything you find on the web.
Teaching staff beware: students more likely to change their search than to assume Google is wrong #alpsp15 #highered @deidre_lyon
— Martyn Lawrence (@MartynLawrence) September 9, 2015
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Strategic Planning/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois' Library. They have articulated a user-centric framework of principles for library service development.
If you add a default search to your Easy Search query, there's a massive jump in usage. It is a very important piece of real estate for discovery. They use an evidence based and user centric framework in all their work and repeatedly go back to the data.
I ❤️ listening to @lisalibrarian talk about her library. It is so clear they do it well. No one unsure if there's a librarian! #alpsp15
— deirdre (@deirdre_lyon) September 9, 2015
Their users value seamless, digital delivery. They want coherent discovery pathways. They want things as simple as possible, but NOT simplistic. When they say they want 'everything', it's from THEIR perspective. They have tried and tested a number of search options: transparency, predictability/explainability and customisability are important.
Wow - @lisalibrarian reports that as part of prep for improvements they read all their reports from last 10 years. #alpsp15
— Alice Meadows (@alicejmeadows) September 9, 2015
Changing user behaviours include: the length of queries are growing, known item searches are increasing and there is an increasing use of copy and paste searching.
The user tasks that they aim to support are:
- locate known item
- locate known research tool
- explore topic
- identify/access library tools/databases for topic
- identify/access research data and tools
- identify assistance.
This had led to a range of discovery principles. They required personalisation and customisation with full library discovery for content, services and spaces. They want the fewest steps from discovery to delivery. Everything owned, licensed or provided by the library should be discoverable. They aim to fully develop and deploy fewer tools. They are aiming for a wide scale implementation of adaptive contextual assistance and use consistent language and labelling. Crucially for a state funded institution, they require the greatest discovery delivered at the lowest cost.
Anurag Acharya, co-creator of Google Scholar asks: What happens when your library is worldwide and all articles are easy to find?
There was a real sense of anticipation in the room as co-creator of Google Scholar Anurag Acharya stepped up to make the first keynote of the 2015 ALPSP Conference.
Browse was the common way to find research: tables of content for newly arrived issues, bibliography sections of papers you read, shelves of the libraries you could walk to. Some libraries had search services that were often based on titles, authors, keywords, included abstracts. There was no full text indexing or no relevance ranking. The most recent came first. but if you couldn't find it, you can't learn from it! In every way you were limited, by shelves, by institution's budget, that which you don't know about.
Fast forward to 2015. Almost all journals worldwide are online. A large fraction of archives are online. Anyone anywhere can browse it all - let your fingers do the walking. Your library is worldwide - online shelves have no ends. Relevance ranking allows all articles to rise - all articles are equally easy to find, new or old, well-known journal or obscure. Full text indexing allows all sections to rise including conclusions and methods.
Anyone anywhere can find it all: all areas, all languages, all time. Your own area or your colleague's, latest research or well-read classics, free to all users. If you can get online you can join the entire global research community. There is so much more that you can actually read from big deal licenses, free archives, preprints to open access journals and articles.
So how has researcher behaviour changed? What do they look for? What do they read? What do they cite? There is a tremendous growth in queries with many many more users and queries per user in all research and geographical areas.
Queries evolve: there has been the most growth in keyword/concept queries e.g. author name queries, known item queries. The average query length has increased to 4-5 words. There are multiple concepts or entities occur often and most queries are unique. Queries are no longer limited just to their own area. Relevance ranking makes exploration easy and broad queries return classics/seminal work. There's a mix of expert and non-expert queries from users with sustained growth in related area queries. The researcher is no longer limited to narrow areas.
What do they read? There has been steady and sustained growth per user as well as in diversity of areas per user compared to the growth in related areas queries. Users read much more shown through the growth in both abstracts and full texts.
There is more full text available than ever before. Iterative scanning is a common mode: do a query, scan. Abstracts that have full text links in the search interface are selected more frequently, even if they don't actually read the full text. PDF remains extremely popular for full text allowed what is important to the researcher to be accessible to them later.
They have undertaken research into what researchers cite and the evolution of citation patterns. The full report is published on the Google Scholar blog.
Anurag concluded by observing if it is useful, researchers will find/read/cite. The spread of attention is widening across the spectrum to non-elite journals (more specific, less known), older articles, regional journals and dissertations. Good ideas can come from anywhere and insights are not limited to the well-funded or to the web-published. The top 10 journals still publish many top papers: 85% in 1995 to 75% in 2013. The elite are as yet still elite, but less so.
Research is inherently a process of filtering and abstracts are a crucial part of the filtering process. Forcing full text on early-stage users is not useful and limiting COUNTER stats to full text misses much of an article's utility to researchers.
He reflected that we are lucky to live in an era of information plenty. Better a glut than a famine.
Keynote... Anurag Acharya co-creator of @google scholar... I suspect this will be interesting!!! pic.twitter.com/ZTXNxIyUHT
— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015
Acharya harked back to his time at grad school in 1990. Print was the dominant format. Research had to be physically handled. Every library was limited or bound in different ways. There was wide distribution for core collections, each field would have its own small sets of journals, with wide visibility for published articles. But there was narrow distribution for other journals that were found in far fewer libraries leading to limited visibility for published articles.Browse was the common way to find research: tables of content for newly arrived issues, bibliography sections of papers you read, shelves of the libraries you could walk to. Some libraries had search services that were often based on titles, authors, keywords, included abstracts. There was no full text indexing or no relevance ranking. The most recent came first. but if you couldn't find it, you can't learn from it! In every way you were limited, by shelves, by institution's budget, that which you don't know about.
Fast forward to 2015. Almost all journals worldwide are online. A large fraction of archives are online. Anyone anywhere can browse it all - let your fingers do the walking. Your library is worldwide - online shelves have no ends. Relevance ranking allows all articles to rise - all articles are equally easy to find, new or old, well-known journal or obscure. Full text indexing allows all sections to rise including conclusions and methods.
Anyone anywhere can find it all: all areas, all languages, all time. Your own area or your colleague's, latest research or well-read classics, free to all users. If you can get online you can join the entire global research community. There is so much more that you can actually read from big deal licenses, free archives, preprints to open access journals and articles.
Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar: researchers not limited by what their library shelves can hold #alpsp15 pic.twitter.com/eUnlcYrMh2
— Bioscientifica (@bioscientifica) September 9, 2015
The transformation is fantastic - he could not have dreamt of this 25 years ago as a grad student. And publishers, societies, libraries and search services have together made this possible.So how has researcher behaviour changed? What do they look for? What do they read? What do they cite? There is a tremendous growth in queries with many many more users and queries per user in all research and geographical areas.
Queries evolve: there has been the most growth in keyword/concept queries e.g. author name queries, known item queries. The average query length has increased to 4-5 words. There are multiple concepts or entities occur often and most queries are unique. Queries are no longer limited just to their own area. Relevance ranking makes exploration easy and broad queries return classics/seminal work. There's a mix of expert and non-expert queries from users with sustained growth in related area queries. The researcher is no longer limited to narrow areas.
What do they read? There has been steady and sustained growth per user as well as in diversity of areas per user compared to the growth in related areas queries. Users read much more shown through the growth in both abstracts and full texts.
There is more full text available than ever before. Iterative scanning is a common mode: do a query, scan. Abstracts that have full text links in the search interface are selected more frequently, even if they don't actually read the full text. PDF remains extremely popular for full text allowed what is important to the researcher to be accessible to them later.
They have undertaken research into what researchers cite and the evolution of citation patterns. The full report is published on the Google Scholar blog.
Anurag concluded by observing if it is useful, researchers will find/read/cite. The spread of attention is widening across the spectrum to non-elite journals (more specific, less known), older articles, regional journals and dissertations. Good ideas can come from anywhere and insights are not limited to the well-funded or to the web-published. The top 10 journals still publish many top papers: 85% in 1995 to 75% in 2013. The elite are as yet still elite, but less so.
Acharya steady and sustained drop in fraction of top papers in top journals ! #ALPSP15 pic.twitter.com/M4jjhItEMb
— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015
Research is inherently a process of filtering and abstracts are a crucial part of the filtering process. Forcing full text on early-stage users is not useful and limiting COUNTER stats to full text misses much of an article's utility to researchers.
He reflected that we are lucky to live in an era of information plenty. Better a glut than a famine.
Thursday, 27 August 2015
ALPSP Awards Spotlight on... JSTOR Daily
Tell us a bit about your company.
JSTOR is part of ITHAKA. ITHAKA (www.ithaka.org) is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. We provide innovative services that benefit higher education, including Ithaka S+R, JSTOR, and Portico. JSTOR is a digital library of more than 2,000 academic journals, dating back to the first volume ever published, along with thousands of monographs, and other material.
What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?
JSTOR Daily is an online magazine published by JSTOR that offers a fresh way for people to understand and contextualize their world. We make historical peer-reviewed scholarly research and other library content relevant and accessible to a general audience by connecting it to the news and offering open access to the original research and other content housed in the JSTOR library. Our cheeky tagline—“where news meets its scholarly match”—encapsulates our belief that deep, substantive journalism doesn’t have to be boring. In addition to weekly feature articles, the magazine publishes daily blog posts that provide the backstory to complex issues of the day in a variety of subject areas, interviews with and profiles of scholars and their work, and much more.
Our idea of a good story is one that:
- tells thought-provoking stories that appeal to a general reader
- draws on scholarly research to provide fresh insight into the news media and current affairs
- deepens our understanding of our world
- highlights the amazing content found on JSTOR
- exposes the work of scholars who are using JSTOR to conduct their research.
Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.
We’re an extremely small team, a micro team, really. The site has two full-time editors and two part-time contributing editors. The stories are written by freelancer writers who are paid for the content they produce. We sit in the marketing and communications department at JSTOR, and work with a part-time in-house marketing person as well as a designer.
Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?
JSTOR Daily publishes high-quality, carefully researched content that provides an alternative to the listicles and clickbait that seem to dominate mainstream media.
JSTOR is home to some of the most fascinating and well-respected peer-reviewed scholarship, as well as thousands of historical documents. In fact, the sheer volume of information available in the library can be so overwhelming that much of the content remains hidden in the archive. By weaving stories around the research, primary source material, and other content in JSTOR, and relating it to current conversations in the public sphere, JSTOR Daily aspires to expose the breadth of this truly great library to a wider audience, and encourage a general reader, regardless of institutional affiliation, to discover and dive into it. The magazine appeals to the knowledge seeker and lifelong learner in each of us.
While the website publishes editorial content, rather than peer-reviewed scholarship, we hope the magazine stories will transform JSTOR from a passive repository of knowledge to an active participant—in partnership with our readers and authors—in the generation and dissemination of collective human wisdom.
What are you plans for the future?
JSTOR Daily was launched in October 2014 on a shoestring budget with just one editor. In keeping with JSTOR's commitment to testing what software developers call "minimum viable products," the site was built using an out-of-the-box WordPress theme called SimpleMag. While the live site is more technically efficient than innovative, we have long-term plans to add interactive content, data visualizations, and a podcast series in the coming year.
The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.
Tuesday, 25 August 2015
ALPSP Awards Spotlight on... Impact Vizor from HighWire Press
"Can you answer these questions?
Do you reject quality content in one journal that you could use to start a new journal? Are the articles you published this year higher impact than last year’s?
Are you anxious about the impact of the new journal you just launched?
Has your tighter acceptance rate helped your competitors get better articles?
Are you rejecting some very high impact articles?
What topics that you publish are “trending”? Is this a shift for your discipline?
Who publishes your rejected articles?
Are your review articles this year as good as they were the last two years?
What can you tell the new EIC about the impact of editorial changes?
(What questions are you and your editors asking along these lines? Let us know in the comments.)
The above editorial and publishing questions have been around forever, but the answers have been based on instinct or feeling or what the EIC’s friends think. Now we can get better answers.
Where do the better answers come from?
Almost from the start of HighWire, I have been using the tag phrase "evidence-based publishing". With its roots at Stanford University -- and in the Stanford University Library in particular -- HighWire was formed around the idea that data -- evidence -- could inform best practices and the best decisions.
Data hasn't been in short supply lately. The challenges have been to "mill" the data into information that works for decision-makers: this often means integrating data across disparate systems, making it easy to understand, and timely to access. We think we are on to how to do this with our "Vizor" suite of analytics products.
What are “Vizors”?
HighWire's Vizors are visualized analytics. The first Vizor that has begun rolling out is Impact Vizor, which helps editors and publishers see the research impact of the articles they publish, and the articles they reject.
Impact Vizor includes the "Rejected-Article Tracker" (the “RAT”) which visualizes where articles an editor or publisher rejects get published, and how much they get cited. The "RAT" has been rolled out to sixteen publishers. Soon we will be rolling out the Section Performance Analyzer (the "SPA") and the Hot Object Tracker (the "HOT"). Following those will be the Advanced Correlator of Citation and Usage (the "ACCU") and the Cohort Comparator ("CC").
Editors get very very excited by the RAT; previously this kind of information has been hard to develop, and hard to visualize. Impact Vizor does both. And this information tells you important things about the potential for starting new sections, new journals, or other new products.
And in other big news: a journal does not have to be hosted by HighWire to use Impact Vizor. In fact, our first deployment was for a major publisher who is not hosted by HighWire.
How does it work?
Impact Vizor combines data across different systems to put together (literally) a picture of how content is being used and cited. The key is to get the earliest possible indicators of research merit -- primarily citations -- and see what patterns there are in the data. In addition to all the visuals, there are also full data tables for those who want to further process and investigate the data, by easily moving it into Excel for example.
The Vizor development process incorporated our "early adopter” group of sixteen publishers right from the start: this group prioritized the components to be developed, and three or four publishers are involved in creating the prototypes of each component.
We have a highly-focused team inside HighWire working on the software, and we use a number of open source and "magic quadrant" components. Key to the software of course is the data, and here we stand on industry APIs and standards, as well as a lot of analytics data and experience at HighWire over the years.
Why should you care?
Impact Vizor solves a significant problem facing publishers and editors: they “fly blind” when making changes in policy, scope or personnel, because the feedback from current citation monitoring tools is terribly slow and painful to interpret.
We integrate varied information sources, and do it rapidly. We visualize the information, rather than just show large data tables. Vizors are easy for the non-data-scientist to use; but they can deliver data for the data scientist.
We built a user community to direct the development towards the highest-value business and editorial questions, and we are delivering periodic new function so that value is increasing.
What’s next for Vizors?
We plan to roll out a half dozen components of Impact Vizor after the RAT, according to a customer-guided roadmap. Additional data sources and visualizations will come in 2016 as we further expand the concept of impact beyond citation metrics.
HighWire also will be developing other Vizors beyond Impact Vizor, to visualize usage, metadata, use demographics and manuscript workflows."
Friday, 21 August 2015
ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… The Xvolution Game from NSTDA
Tell us a bit about your company
The National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) is an agency of the government under the Thai Ministry of Science and Technology. NSTDA is an umbrella organization that plans and executes the four mandated missions of research and development, technology transfer, human resources development and infrastructure development. NSTDA comprises four national research centers: BIOTEC (National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology), NECTEC (National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), MTEC (National Metal and Materials Technology Center), and NANOTEC (National Nanotechnology Center). NSTDA works closely with its partners from other government agencies and the private sector, both domestically and internationally, through different mechanisms to achieve these goals.What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?
The Xvolution is an edutainment board game, partly based on Thai paleontological specimens data. All illustrations are supervised by experts in the field. Augmented Reality (AR) technology and the matched mobile application are an accompaniment to the game. Three stakeholders were involved in game development: the prototype was initiated by researchers, the AR and commercialized version improvement were supported by private companies. The Xvolution is the first Thai commercial board game, providing a new business model for Thai gamers. The game contents were also modified to be used in subway exhibition and also at the Thailand Science and Technology Fair.
Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.
The board game is both a recreational and educational tool. Recently, board game playing has gained popularity among Thai teens and adults, especially in urban areas. But up to now all the commercial games have been imported from abroad. It is hoped that making a prototype game might be a good way to stimulate many gamers to start creating new games themselves. The Xvolution was initiated by a Ph.D. student, Mr. Peechanit Ketsuwan, and two NSTDA (National Science and Technology Development Agency) officers, Ms. Sasithorn Teth-uthapak and Dr. Namchai Chewawiwat.The game design is based on the main idea that most of people, of any age, may enjoy playing the game, and the activity itself is a very effective way for learning. We focused on the basic evolutionary contents that were also supplemented with unique data from Thai fossilized specimens. All drawings were newly created for this project. Dr. Varavudh Suteethorn and Dr. Suravech Suteethorn supervised the accuracy of all the illustrations in the game. Both are the researchers at the Palaeotological Research and Education Centre, Mahasarakham University. Dr. Varavudh is now the Director of the Centre.
The rules for Xvolution are modified from the standard Millionaire Game. But instead of using fixed-squared big board, we designed small hexagon-shaped steps that all the players could select to combine and use as the route.
Some special command signs are added for the Battle, Mutation and Level Up. All of these either use for biological contents adding or game excitement enhancement.
When the player steps on the sign 'Battle', (s)he need to 'Battle' with another player, using specific cards obtained from the start and during the playing. The 'Battle' card shows the special environmental condition, ie. endemic, hot and draught, etc., and the player need to choose their cards to fight, with the opponent player. So, for example, if the ice age is the condition, then the animal with fur will survive better than the animals with thick and thin skin, respectively. About a dozen of environmental change conditions is included, to demonstrate the interaction between animals and physical/ biological surroundings.
The 'Mutation' sign is for the mutation concept learning. The player who steps on this sign will open the 'Mutation' card which will command some actions. This might be to exchange genetic materials: exchange your 'Skin' card with central pool. The most severe mutation condition is extinction!
Every time the player passes the 'Start' point, (s)he will gain some eggs and could use them to exchange to the upper level of evolution. The winner is the one who passes from the oldest to the most recent geological era first or who could gain more cards and eggs in the players' set-up period of time.
The game prototype was tested several times using different group of players, varying from elementary, secondary school and college students and also adults, from lay people to researchers. Most of players were satisfied and had fun with it.
AR Technology is presently merged into several products, including books. G. Softbiz Co., Ltd. and several other Thai publishers were successful in using AR technology to promote fairy tale books. Taking photographs with some dinosaur models is a very attractive idea and has the potential to make young children pay more attention to this game and the palaeontological contents. G. Softbiz Co., Ltd. developed the dinosaur models for AR and the mobile app. The Xvolution is available for free download.
Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?
A specific business model was used for the Xvolution. NSTDA absorbed all the expenses on the prototype development and also partly in final production. Plan Toys, the local expert company in children's toys and books, helped transform the prototype to the commercial version. Some material and resins were changed to be wood and paper works. A lighter and more compact box set was modified. Plan Toys also shared some expenses on production. G. Softbiz Co., Ltd., another local companies that is expert on AR design and book publishing, helped develop the AR model and mobile application and invested in this part. The revenue is shared within these three stakeholders.
What are you plans for the future?
After more than five years of development, the Xvolution board game launched in January 2015 at Isetan Department Store, the Bangkok Central World in the downtown area of Bangkok. The opportunity to export the Xvolution abroad is now being considered. The social media of this game is at https://www.facebook.com/TheXvolution.From the start, the monetary profit is not the major reason or target for our innovation, but the science communication to the public, including the distribution of the scientific information, and the application of a new way for public understanding of science are our concerns.
Therefore we used our information and/or products in many other ways too. The game has been simplified and used as a part in the Thailand Science and Technology Fair 2012. This Fair normally runs for two weeks with more than 1 million visitors, mostly students. We also did the Xvolution mini-exhibition at Chatuchak station of Thailand underground train during July to December 2013. Several ten thousands people transit through this station daily.
We also tried to push the Xvolution contents to be applied as a TV game show on the Thai PBS TV station. The concept of program was discussed several times and the air-time was granted but, unfortunately, we could not find sponsors for this program. We aim to distribute the simple blue-print of the game as a free download for students and teachers, to use as a study tool in schools, in the future.
The Xvolution team:
Ms. Sasithorn Teth-uthapak, sasi@nstda.or.th
Dr. Namchai Chewawiwat, email: namchai@nstda.or.th
Mr. Peechanit Ketsuwan, email: pk.ketsuwan@gmail.com
The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.
Wednesday, 19 August 2015
ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… CHORUS: Collaboration and Innovation for the Public Benefit
"It’s an honor for CHORUS to be included among the impressive group of finalists for the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2015. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to showcase the work we are doing.
CHORUS is the outcome of successful collaboration since 2013 among publishers, funding agencies, scholarly societies, and other stakeholders. Our services and best practices provide a sustainable, scalable, cost-effective, interoperable, and transparent solution to deliver public access to published articles reporting on funded research. As a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) membership organization, CHORUS is policy-neutral and focuses on building consensus and services to advance public access in a way that recognizes and sustains the value that publishers bring to science and scholarship, for the benefit of all. The result is increased discoverability for authors’ research, enhanced accountability for funders, and accessibility to articles reporting on research, for everyone.
CHORUS is growing rapidly, gaining momentum as we add publisher members’ content and enter into partnerships with funders. As of early August 2015, we are monitoring over 120,000 articles associated with 24 funders for public access, with more than 30,000 already publicly accessible. Our membership roster includes publishers of all stripes and sizes (including not-for-profit societies, university presses, and commercial companies with pure OA and hybrid programs) as well as publishing service providers and organizations. Members pay modest fees to support CHORUS’ operations, while funders, researchers, university research officers, librarians, publishers and the public all benefit from CHORUS’ services at no cost. Our small staff includes myself and Howard Ratner (Executive Director) – two publishing veterans bringing multiple decades of experience – along with a Digital Analyst, Program Manager, and outsourced development, legal, and finance staff. We rely heavily on the tireless efforts of a volunteer Board of Directors and working groups.
CHORUS knits together new services and open APIs with the existing scholarly communications infrastructure to minimize effort and expense and maximize the identification, discovery, access, and preservation steps of compliance to funder public-access requirements. CHORUS utilizes CrossRef’s FundRef service to identify and keep track of papers reporting on research coming from funder grants and contracts. We promote the use of ORCID identifiers and other industry best practices. The resulting metadata (including the DOIs of the published articles) helps make articles more easily discoverable (via CHORUS’ Search service as well as agency portals and general search engines) and transparently describes their public accessibility.
Part of what makes CHORUS unique is that our distributed access approach points users directly to the best available version of articles (either the accepted author manuscript or Version of Record) on publishers’ sites, either immediately or after the prescribed embargo period, in perpetuity. CHORUS also provides freely available, downloadable dashboards with detailed reporting on public accessibility and availability of reuse license terms and preservation arrangements. Our auditing system – a hybrid system of automation and manual checking for public access – follows the DOI links for every identified article in our database. CHORUS publisher members are required to archive their content; CHORUS has special arrangements with CLOCKSS or Portico that enable perpetual public accessibility.
CHORUS is committed to evolving with the needs of the scholarly community. Recently we started to provide customized publisher dashboards as a member benefit. We’ll soon be making our open APIs widely available. Further down the pipeline we are considering some projects designed to make publicly accessible content and data more discoverable. Our recent agreement with ORCID formalizes the coordination of our efforts to promote the adoption of identifiers and standards to manage access to and reporting of research outputs. We also see the tremendous potential of providing access to data; as a result, we are participating in such Initiatives as CrossRef/DataCite, RDA/WDS-Publishing Data Services Working Group, and RMAP.
Stay tuned for new developments … it’s going to be a busy fall! Follow CHORUS on Twitter @CHORUSaccess and Linked In."
The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.
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