ANALYSIS AND NEWS
An obvious objection to this idea is that it requires a commitment to a generation of significant amounts of extra content and the management of a large group of subject matter experts. Of course this content may prove, as in the case of Safari, to be attractive enough that it can generate revenue in its own right. In addition, in the academic world there is already an analogous form of content, the survey or review article, that has many of the same features.
Unfortunately, for the most part these articles exist primarily within their respective repositories and are not properly surfaced through the user interface to provide the guided path through the content that would be useful to our less experienced users. I can imagine a user interface designed around this kind of content that would provide exactly the guided launch pad that less knowledgeable users require to get their bearings in new subject areas. The rest of the Researcher to Reader conference provided a rich diversity of points of view on many different topics of interest to the scholarly publishing community. The conference started with a bang with Vitek Tracz from the Science Navigation Group, predicting the death of journals. Although he was quite
convincing about how their role as containers was no longer necessary in the online world, he could not deny the fact that journals still provide an imprinteur of quality and, consequently, are important to the university tenure process for researchers. Other interesting talks included:
l ‘Show me the Money’ which addressed the financial implications of Open Access (OA) publishing. Danny Kingsley was especially effective in discussing the administrative
‘The conference started with a bang with Vitek Tracz, predicting the death of journals’
costs that universities have to absorb in order to manage the process in the UK where Gold Open Access has become the dominant OA mode; and
l James Evans, a researcher from University of Chicago, presented on ‘Considering the Sociology of Research’ which examined how research articles are changing under the pressure of online discovery, specifically
the increase of writing with longer and more marketing style language, and how researchers themselves are moulding the focus of their work to conform to ‘safe’ areas of study to maximise publication potential. The conference also had a set of workshops that allowed delegates a chance to interact and discuss a particular topic in some depth as each workshop met multiple times over the course of the two days. Each workshop leader then briefly reported back to the entire conference on discussions. I opted to participate in the Innovation in Publishing workshop which was ably led by Martha Sedgwick, executive director of product innovation at SAGE Publications.
The significantly differing views on innovation from the larger publishers (‘how to manage innovation without losing focus on their core business’) compared with both the small publishers (‘how to innovate on a shoe-string’) and the technology tool vendors (‘innovation is the raison d’être for the enterprise’) made for stimulating discussion. It turns out innovation looks very different from different vantage points.
Tom Beyer is director of platform services at Safari Books Online
Believing passionately that engaged scholarship lies at the heart of any healthy society
Heard about SAGE Video? Drop by our stands at UKSG (16 and 25) and at the London Book Fair (LB38) to find out more
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