Feature
gour metadata is passing successfully through their systems and they have an accurate reflection of our content,’ he adds.
But metadata aside, Roberts believes
that recognising discovery as a problem, in its own right, is the most important step to success. As he points out, so many pathways exist to enhance discoverability, that any organisation has to be prepared to make discovery a recognised role within the company. ‘Find someone to help and take advice on approaches and tools, whether it be for SEO, metadata quality, user interfaces, or even the ever-changing foibles of commercial library discovery services,’ he says. ‘We have appointed someone managing content discovery, as well as a cross-functional taskforce with staff from across the business to ensure discovery efforts are co-ordinated across the business,” he adds. “This means that we get the technical aspects right, but also ensure that we’re getting feedback from our customers and users on their experiences.’
Open for research Open access journal, eLife, was launched in 2012 by biomedical funding heavyweights, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society, to rival the big three traditional biology publishers, Nature, Science and Cell. Five years on, investment is flowing – the journal received $26 million from its funders just last year – and the number of publications tops 1800.
Clearly optimising discovery is critical
to the publisher, and from word go and in line with the likes of Clarivate Analytics and Emerald Publishing, a wide range of content designed to appeal to as broad an audience as possible has been served up. For example, plain-language summaries – ‘eLife digests’ – written in collaboration with authors promote accessibility and help users to ‘join the dots’ between scientific disciplines. In a similar vein, expert commentaries –
“Plain-language summaries written in collaboration with authors promote accessibility and help users to join the dots”
6 Research Information June/July 2017
Jennifer McLennan
Insights – provide context, podcasts target a wider audience while impact statements from the author and reviewing editor enhance comprehensibility for all. Metadata quality is also considered key.
Interestingly, Jennifer McLennan, head of external relations at eLife, reckons being relatively new to the world of scholarly publishing has had key advantages here. ‘We’ve been able to capitalise on decades of experiences in publishing, and deploy the latest standards and best practices in metadata as well as information organisation,’ she asserts. ‘Our head of production operations is chair of [common XML standard group] JATS4R, we publish our XML to a GitHub repository and deliver content to many downstream sites such as PubMed Central,’ she says. ‘We have also aimed to push as much metadata to Crossref as possible and ensure each reference is open via its application programming interface, API.’ Metadata aside, as part of ongoing
development, and in a bid to streamline navigation and rapid content discovery for both the desktop and mobile device, the publisher is set to release the latest iteration of the eLife journal website; eLife 2.0. Throughout design, user behaviour has been under scrutiny, via analytics and direct interviews, providing valuable insight. As eLife’s head of product, Giuliano
Maciocci, highlights, the majority of eLife users reach the website from a search engine, hitting the site at the article level. Given this, the publisher has worked hard to improve article navigation in myriad ways. For example, priority is given to an article’s title and body-text over other
Giuliano Maciocci
metadata, and ‘distracting site furniture’ has been removed from the article page. What’s more, the traditional multiple tabs and table of contents navigation is now collapsed into a single menu while mobile navigation has been optimised to cater for the platform’s reduced screen real estate. In 2013, the publisher released its
open source tool, eLife Lens view, that allowed readers to explore figures, references and more, without losing their place in the article text. In eLife 2.0, this will be fully integrated as a ‘side by side’ view alongside the article, rather then ‘relegated’ to opening a new tab, as Maciocci puts it. The changes don’t stop here. A further
reading section, following the main text, will suggest related content based on the currently displayed article while source data associated with figures will be visible in the context of the figure itself. And a so-called Magazine portal will host non- research content – including podcasts and blogs – to draw in generalists. However, as Maciocci is keen to emphasise, not all users reach eLife from a search engine. ‘The users that hit our front page directly tend to be specialists, and they will benefit from a Major Subject Areas list, which provides a jumping-off point into their specialty area,’ he says. ‘They won’t be needlessly exposed to the general list of recent content outside their areas, and this was well received in our direct user testing.’ Change has also featured high on the agenda for Silicon Valley-based Atypon. Recently acquired by publishing giant, Wiley, the software developer has made significant enhancements to its online publishing platform, Literatum. And discovery has been at the heart of its g
@researchinfo |
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