FEATURE Event report
– enabling the discovery of content in a way that publishers ‘have not nailed yet’, and allowing researchers to manage their reputation and to to gain more feedback from their peers.
Charlie Rapple from Kudos said she was not sure that individual publishers had necessarily missed a trick, given that they were constrained by the fact that they work as separate organisations – whereas SCNs are offering more of a ‘cross-community’ solution. However, she admitted that the publishing industry as a whole could have identified the need for such networks at an earlier stage.
It is not surprising that an ‘insurgent movement’ was required to ‘bend the rules and put all of our content into the same bin’, commented Anderson. Elsevier’s von Hindenburg disagreed with Rapple, pointing out that publishers are all in the business of communication, and also in the business of reputation management – this explained the recent rise to importance of the ‘impact factor’. However, he acknowledged that publishers, while having managed the transition to the internet well, had perhaps missed out on the social angle of the internet somewhat, and the more fluid interpretation of reputations that it brings. Dylla said he felt that a trick had been missed, given the rise of the three largest SCNs and the longevity of some of the smaller, more specialist networks. He said the community needs to learn from what SCNs have achieved, and to improve its own ability to deliver services to its customers. He added that publishers need to engage with the owners of SCNs more,
The panel: from left, Kent Anderson, Hannfried von Hindenburg, Grace Baynes, Fred Dylla, Charlie Rapple and Richard Padley
to provide better services to a shared customer base. He said that while this was an optimistic ambition, his experience in the industry had led him to believe that the community as a whole was a very collaborative one.
Speaking from the audience, Digital Science’s Phill Jones pointed out that the specific community most difficult to engage with is researchers, and asked the panel how publishers could make sure they are better engaged in the future.
Dylla said that editors should be the ‘first point of outreach’ in such an initiative, as they represent the ‘front line’ in the connection between publishers and researchers. Rapple pointed out that only a small percentage of SCN members were active on an ongoing basis, and that publishers have a much more active relationship with the research community, through authors and editors: She concluded: ‘We already have all the ingredients we need to make a success of this. We need to understand that publishing is only a small part of the process for researchers; whatever we do must not be too content-oriented, and we need to understand more fully how researchers are using these networks.’
Conference chairman Arnoud de Kemp 16 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2016
The discussion was just one of many interesting presentations at the conference, chaired and organised superbly by Arnoud de Kemp and his team at the venue, the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Other topics included: Science as Social Machines; New Ways of Building, Showcasing and Measuring Scholarly Reputation; Research Ethics and Publishing; Open Access Policies in Europe; and Wanted! An Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication! The entire conference was filmed by the River ValleyGroup, and can be viewed by readers at
www.river-valley.zeeba.tv/conferences/ape-2016
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
Vera Münch
Vera Münch
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
