Industry report
dp/B07...), and using neural networking to analyse, understand and tag images for accessibility purposes. We’ve also created an incubator
environment for rapid product prototyping and testing. This incubator is SAGE Ocean (
https://ocean.sagepub.com), where the products solve challenges facing social science researchers looking to work with big data and new technologies. We have created a cross-functional team, marketing, editorial, product management, technology, focused on building minimum- viable products and releasing them to test and learn about the needs in the social science community. We’ve started to look at investments and grant programmes through Ocean as well, as we explore how to bring external skills that aren’t in our traditional core skillset into SAGE.
they can work with new technologies to evolve their own services. There’s real opportunity for more institutions, more libraries, to think about making those sorts of investments to try to innovate and think about their services. Libraries are also beginning to think
more about how they can engage with faculty in new ways, and make the most of the digital environment around them. We recently acquired a start-up called Lean Library that allows librarians to deliver their services directly into their users’ workflow via the web browser, and we’ve also been doing some experimentation with chatbots and voice as a platform, to think about how library services might be extended, using those new technologies to reach faculty virtually. There’s some exciting opportunities there for libraries to think about new ways to provide their services, to support faculty with their research and teaching, and make the most of the new technologies that are available.
What can publishers do to help overcome some of these challenges? It is about being nimble, recognising the challenges and looking for the opportunities, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, having a clear focus and ensuring that we, as an industry,
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo
“AI technologies, like machine
learning, have huge potential in our publishing systems”
continue to work collaboratively. Being an independent company, we are able to take risks – explore opportunities, confidently address challenges and work out the best way in which we can respond to the changing scholarly environment. We’ve done a number of things to
create some structures to make space for innovation, and invest in the very new when there’s no clear return on investment in the short term. We’ve created SAGE Labs (
https://labs.sagepub. com), with engineers sitting alongside the product team with the goal to explore different emerging technologies and the applications they might have within scholarly publishing, whether that’s a feature on a traditional journal website, or potentially the spark of a very new product. We’ve done things like building an Alexa Skill service for SAGE Research methods (
https://www.amazon.com/SAGE- Publications-Ltd-Research-Definitions/
What can researchers do to help overcome the challenges in scholarly publishing? The opportunities vary depending on your area of research, but in many disciplines there is exciting potential in the use of the vast new data available to help us understand the world around us, whether that’s social media data, corporate data, or something else, and obviously there’s also huge ethical considerations to be taken into account when using these data for academic purposes. I would encourage researchers to continue to build awareness of the possibilities that exist, to join the debate around ethical use of data, and to look at the stories from academics who are leading the way. The world around us is changing, as a
result of technology, and we need social science researchers at the table alongside big tech and government to understand the impact and feed solutions. For many social scientists, working with big data in this way is new, and we are doing work to support the development of basic data science skills. One product that we launched recently through SAGE Ocean is SAGE Campus, comprising online self-study courses, specifically with the aim to equip social scientists with data science skills. Publishers like SAGE have responded to the digital landscape to offer new classes of publishing products to institutions, including online video, digitised archives, interactive data sets and online cases. I would encourage teaching faculty to spend time with their librarians to understand the resources available to them and how they might include more of these in their courses, to drive student engagement and respond to different ways of learning in this digital age.
February/March 2019 Research Information
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