Feature g
those data. The platform should support as many data formats as possible. Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: A good platform centres all its activities and services around the author. For too long, academia and research has been served by software platforms that do not have a strong focus on design and usability. A good platform supports and promotes authors by putting user experience first, and ensuring researchers have all the tools they need to easily share, discuss, and gain insights into their work. New developments in AI and machine learning help to promote the discovery of research by ensuring the right information is being recommended to the right people. By offering a beautifully designed and easy-to-use product, a good platform helps authors to increase their efficiency and make progress faster.
“A good platform centres all its activities and services around the author”
Douglas, Overleaf: This really depends on the purpose of the platform, but some general observations might be: • Close proximity to users/community through an active social media presence: seeking engagement and solicitation of feedback on platform features, whether existing or planned;
• Fundamentally, a good platform must have a clear focus, designed/built to solve a genuine problem, based on a firm understanding of the target community’s needs/requirements;
• Where relevant, support reproducibility of research through the ability to encapsulate all the ‘assets’ that might be required to fully ‘engage’ with the content, enabling readers to gain maximum benefit;
• It must have clear, published, security/ data privacy policies; and
• It should have a low barrier to entry, such as offering free accounts that enable authors to ‘try before they buy’.
Segon, SAGE India: A good platform will build traction by helping authors build emotional connections with their readers through a one-on-one interaction. The other way in which a good platform would enable this, is helping their readers connect to the author through a community or forum of like-minded people to discuss, directly engage by answering
14 Research Information April/May 2019
questions, having relevant discussions, keeping them updated, and sharing information that they care about, or are looking for.
Is the availability of a huge range of platforms a benefit to the scholarly community, or a hindrance?
Picco, Atypon: Just as scientific discourse benefits from scholarly collaboration, so too does the the scholarly community – including publishers – benefit from a universe of diverse technologies and many different author platforms. Scholarly communication and publishing advances as more and more authors adopt products and platforms that provide new capabilities, provided they are interoperable, across publishers and technologies. An ecosystem of connected content
and technologies will help the scholarly community solve challenges like accessible, discoverability and the need for speedy, reproducible research. This is also why, at Atypon, we’ve created an open source, component-based authoring platform that others can adopt and adapt to their own needs. By integrating authoring platforms
into their publishing and content delivery workflows, publishers will provide a better service to authors, streamline their own processes, and align themselves with the move toward open science. Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: Choice is always good. It is a benefit to have a large range of author platforms. Some authors will prefer one mode of authoring and editing to others. For example some authors will only want to use LaTeX, others a WYSIWYG interface. What would be beneficial to all parties is that different platforms can ‘talk’ to one another. In other words, the author should be able to start writing in one platform, then transport the native file to another system and continue editing. This can be achieved by platforms ensuring that the content is always saved in an open standard such as JATS XML. Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: A good platform centres all their activities and services around the author. For too long, academia and research has been served by software platforms that do not have a strong focus on design and usability. A good platform supports and promotes authors by putting user experience first, and ensuring researchers have all the tools they need to easily share, discuss
and gain insights into their work. New developments in AI and machine learning help to promote the discovery of research by ensuring the right information is being recommended to the right people. By offering a beautifully designed and easy- to-use product, a good platform helps authors to increase their efficiency and make progress faster. Douglas, Overleaf: In practice, it can be seen as both, but is a surfeit of choice a panacea or problem child? How does ‘the market’ decide – what engenders a ‘critical mass’ of support leading to widespread adoption + longevity? Price? Features? Open source code distribution? Backing by well-funded ‘major players’? A proliferation of platforms can certainly
present difficulties: islands of disjoined functionality; duplicated or wasted effort, re-inventing the wheel; fractionation of communities, not forming a ‘critical mass’ by coalescing around key solutions. Platforms can disappear as quickly as
they arise: business models fail to deliver projected revenues: founders and/or investors move on to the ‘next big thing’, perhaps leaving users/authors stranded, potentially leading to future reticence to trust/adopt another platform. Authors may not know how to choose a
platform to trust, one that will be around for the long haul and worth investing their time in. Publishers, too, may not know which one authors really prefer, and thus hesitate investing resources to support it in their workflows, further leading to slower adoption by their authors: chicken and egg syndrome? Minimal longevity of platforms can
also arise through grant-funded project initiatives, whose active development may only last as long as the grant funding itself – resulting in proof-of-concept systems that most likely will eventually disappear without trace. Segon, SAGE India: This is a tricky one. Anyone in research today understands that the philosophy of ‘Publish or Vanish’ rather than ‘Publish or Perish’ holds true. Research cannot be limited within geographical boundaries. For those, who want to engage with
content, the three transformative technologies: cloud, social, and mobile, are very useful, for they enable a global infrastructure for production, allowing anyone to create content, while through the social networks, the scholarly community can connect to people across the world, while maintaining their identity online. The result is a globally-connected seamless world, providing an accessible network of researchers, academic content and visibility.
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