Interview
‘In esteemed company’
Ann Michaellooks back on a varied career encompassing nine different industries
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications … Before finding scholarly communications, I worked in nine different industries including information management, strategy and management consulting, software development, banking and telecommunications. I was introduced to this community in 2000 when I began working for Wolters Kluwer Health. I started there as the director, project management and when I left, I was executive director, electronic strategy and product development. After my time with Wolters Kluwer, I
founded the strategic consultancy Delta Think. Consulting allowed me to work with many different types of organisations across the scholarly communications ecosystem. Early on it was mostly societies and commercial publishers, but in the last few years this has broadened to include libraries, consortia, funders and technology companies. Last year I started at PLOS as chief digital officer. After more than a decade of consulting and recently completing my second MS (in business analytics and data science), I wanted to make a different kind of impact. I wanted full ownership of the issues I had spent the last decade wrestling with on behalf of clients.
What has been the most important development in scholarly communications during your career? In my 20 years in the industry, there have been so many developments. If I focus on publishing, almost everyone has moved from a print paradigm to a digital perspective. What is most important about that is it allowed us to change the way we think about what we do, who we serve, and
16 Research Information April/May 2020
“The most important thing we can do is actively listen, be collaborative, and get more and more comfortable with change”
how we can best serve them. It also enabled us to become more flexible, mentally and operationally. The digital paradigm brought with it the ability to iterate quickly and to better understand and respond to the needs of the customer. In the print world, there was no iteration – you had to get it 100 per cent correct, because once your content was printed that was it! Once we went digital, we could not only correct our content, but we could experiment with how it was presented, we could get data that showed us how people used it (and the features we had built
around it), and we could learn what worked and what didn’t. We could think about what ‘it’ was and start to move beyond the article, to considering other research artifacts such as code, data, algorithms and protocols. The move to digital broke us free from the many limitations of print and allowed us to think more broadly. It enabled us to iterate, but with iteration came change, at an increasingly faster rate. The move to digital forced us to learn how to anticipate and manage change more effectively.
What is the industry’s most pressing need? We could talk about the changes in the scholarly ecosystem, the advancements in AI and machine learning, the rise of data and all of the insights and products it will enable, the increasingly present voice of funders and libraries, increased nationalism and how that might impact how we work together globally, and even climate change or coronavirus, and how our world and our work might change in response. At the end of the day, the most important thing we can
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