Feature
gthem insights into how their research is perceived, allow them to gain feedback from their peers, and help them to increase the visibility of their work. The second set of benefits should focus on the consumption and discovery of research, helping authors to easily and quickly discover the latest findings in their field. Douglas, Overleaf: • Ability of the platform to link into their overall workflow(s): not forming an isolated island of functionality but equipped with bridges/integrations to support/leverage other tools/platforms which form part of authorship process;
• Removing the need to install, manage or update complex local software installations;
• Language proofing/enhancement tools: spell check, grammar check. Word counts. Ability to ingest contents forms/ formats produced using external (e.g., desktop) applications;
• Reduction or removal of barriers to collaboration: support for team-based working – with immediate colleagues and teams distributed around the world;
• In-platform tools to support versioning/ history and chat/communication among team members;
• Enhanced dissemination and tools to aid discovery. Time saved, accuracy: productivity tools, automation; and
• Ideally, the platform vendor/team should have a friendly, human-not-bot support team and a responsive social media presence, which not only enables quick access to experts, but can also act as a way to provide feedback directly to the team.
Segon, SAGE India: The three main core interactions that an author should seek before building, or going on, an author platform are: • Value proposition: how will my platform provide a positive experience to the readers, and enable them to succeed in what they do?
• Connectivity: how easy is it for the readers to plug in to the platform to share and transact with the author, resulting in an interaction?
• Flow: how well does the platform attract readers, and foster the exchange and co-creation of value.
Why is it important for authors to build an audience for their work?
Picco, Atypon: Authors do not have it easy: they must regularly secure funding for their work and disseminate their
12 Research Information April/May 2019
research findings widely – with maximum impact – to establish a reputation and advance their careers. At Atypon, we engineer all of our platforms with audience-building in mind. Integration with publishing platforms,
preprint servers, and electronic editorial offices enable authors to build an audience and proliferate their work widely. Atypon’s new authoring platform will enable authors to format their work for a multitude of journals in a single click, freeing them from laboriously reformatting their work to accommodate various submission guidelines. Our platform will also enable authors to make citable versions of their articles available, as a preprint before their formal publication. Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: A major incentive for researchers is to publicise their work to their peers. A good authoring platform could allow authors to
“Authors do not have it easy: they must regularly secure funding for their work and disseminate their research findings widely”
‘self-publish’ parts of their work that they do not want to submit directly through a traditional publishing process. These might be commentaries on the papers they have published already. Or they might be data that are not traditionally part of a published paper. The author platform should also allow comments or annotations from third parties, and in effect be a ‘home page’ for the researcher. Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: Building an audience for your research equals building your own brand identity. Every author needs to highlight their own unique form of research, methods and approaches. By building an audience for themselves and their research, authors can successfully position themselves as vocal and prolific contributors to their field. Additionally, by increasing the reach of their work, authors are more likely to discover potential collaborators and gain feedback on their research from peers around the globe, as early in the research process as possible. Douglas, Overleaf: To facilitate raising the profile of their research, showcasing the work of their team and institution:
assisting with outreach to help secure funding, develop collaborations and reaching out to provide maximal value/ benefits to wider society. Segon, SAGE India: An author platform is representative of three things - the ‘brand’ that the author is or aspires to be, the author’s sales potential, and a measure of the audience’s support – both online and offline. All three require an audience for the transaction to complete. An author’s platform is a dynamic and organic growth trajectory for the author, as the custodian of the product, their book. Both traditionally-published and self-published authors must build an audience.
How does a good platform enable this?
Picco, Atypon: That starts with acknowledging that more and more research is conducted and disseminated on the web. That, in turn, requires a shift to web-native, HTML-first publishing that makes content easier to publish and reuse, as well as to discover, parse, analyse and present in varied ways. Because Word and LaTeX were built for the print world, they slow down publication cycles and the creation of the kind of media-rich content that digital natives expect. Beyond contributing towards a
faster publication cycle, an authoring platform can positively affect the quality of scientific discourse supporting computationally reproducible content. Science relies on data-driven conclusions. Integrating data and statistical computing environments, such as Jupyter, with content authoring, enables publishers to distribute material that can be reviewed, consumed, and challenged in new ways. Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: A good author platform should have an easy user interface for the author. It should have a convenient and flexible reference manager, so that authors need not enter all details of a reference manually. The platform should have a role-based access system, with the author retaining control of who has access. This would allow any users with the
role of ‘author’ to collaborate on writing a document. Other users, say reviewers or commenters, could make comments or annotations on the site but would not be able to edit the main text. Authors need to be able to upload their
research data in any form. A useful feature will be to have a facility for authors to upload research data in any form, and to allow authorised users to comment on
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info g
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 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
