Feature
Platforms of note
Five industry figures tell us what authors should be looking for when disseminating their work
In broad terms, what is an author platform?
Marty Picco, Atypon: An author platform allows writers to create, manage and publish a wide range of content, including books and monographs, scholarly articles, student essays, white papers, technical reports, manuals and blog posts. Scholarly authors create specialised
content and, therefore, need tools to create mathematical equations, bibliographies and citations, footnotes and endnotes, tables, and even data and code. An author platform should support the richness and complexity of this type of content. In addition, some of these platforms allow authors to manage their content, communicate with their collaborators, and publish and disseminate their work. At Atypon, we’ve acquired two authoring
products, Manuscripts and Authorea, that we’re combining into a new open source platform that will provide all of these functions. Kaveh Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: We see an author platform as one that allows authors either to create new content, or to edit (or annotate) existing content online, as opposed to using offline applications such as Word. In the case of content creation, the author could write the content directly online, or they could upload a file (e.g. Word or LaTeX) and then ensure that it is correctly converted. The platform would allow them to make any corrections interactively. In the case of editing or annotating
content that already exists online, a typical scenario is that content (e.g. as XML) has
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already been ingested into a platform. The author is then invited to log in and make changes to the content, using online editing tools. The platform would track all changes and allocate them appropriately to the user logged in. This makes for a complete audit trail of changes in a document.
Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: An author platform is a service that allows researchers to showcase their research, boost the visibility of their work, connect with peers, and discover relevant findings. Author platforms can be seen as research aggregators and should make an author’s routine more efficient by connecting them with the right people and newest research in their field. In addition, an author platform should help researchers raise their profile from the very beginning of the scientific process. Graham Douglas, Overleaf: An online workspace that provides authors with a suite of tools which bring efficiencies to one or more aspects of content- creation workflows, enabling the creation, production and subsequent dissemination through output/export into file/content formats suited to wider distribution. Shafina Segon, SAGE India: An author’s platform is an author-led pulpit through which they aspire to connect to their audience, springboard a book into the marketplace, build momentum to sell the book, and promote themselves to a ready- made potential readership. These could be publisher services, blogs, newsletters, speaking engagements, watt pad, social media, TV shows, radio, web series and others.
What key benefits should an author seek out?
Picco, Atypon: Most authors still write with the desktop version of Microsoft Word and use traditional workflows based in text editing. A plausible alternative to Word must feel familiar in both a browser and on the desktop to be successful. And hassle- free import from and export to formats like .docx, LaTeX, and Markdown is essential.
In addition, scholarly authors should
look for tools that are not only easy to use, but also support scholarly tasks that generic writing tools like Microsoft Word or Google docs can not. Authors need capabilities such as commenting, project management, journal-specific templating, and version control for computationally reproducible documents, as well as the
“Platforms should reduce the work of authors and allow them to concentrate on the content”
ability to host data and code, and submit directly to journals and preprint servers. Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: Author platforms should reduce the work of authors and allow them to concentrate on the content, rather than the ‘form’ of the content. I have categorised the benefits an author should seek from platforms: • Ease of use – authors should not have to read instructions to carry out edits;
• Audit trail – a platform should keep track of who changed which part of the content, and when;
• Export of files – authors should be able to export their content at any time, in an open industry standard;
• Repurposing content – an authoring platform should not be tied to a particular output format or publisher. Authors should be able to create any format, including different reference styles. This would save authors significant time; and
• Reference manager – an authoring platform should have a good reference management system, e.g. filling in DOIs when some reference details have been entered.
Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: Researchers should seek out two main sets of benefits when considering which author platform to use. The first set centres around sharing research. Authors should look for platforms that offer
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