Feature


Platform number one


Six industry experts tell Tim Gillett where the future destination is likely to be for publishing platforms


How have publishing platforms developed in the last two or three years?


Sam Herbert, co-founder, 67 Bricks: Changes have been driven by the need for flexibility, control and agility. Flexibility is essential for adapting to the constantly changing publishing environment, control is vital to have ownership of product roadmap and your own customer data, to better serve users, while agility lets you act quickly in response to challenges and opportunities, to innovate and create user- led products. User experience has never been more important and the ability to flex to user demands is paramount. Frankly, academic publishers don’t know what their business is going to be in five years or beyond, because the new data age is changing everything all the time. Given that, publishers are realising they need a modular platform that can adapt to this environment, where they can innovate, learn and scale what works ‘on the go’. As a response to these challenges the


last few years has seen some high profile publishers, such as Emerald Publishing and De Gruyter move away from traditional vendor products and take a very different approach. De Gruyter, whose new digital platform launches in early 2021, sees what they are doing as far more than replacing one platform for another, but a complete shift in their foundation.


Haralambos “Babis” Marmanis, Copyright Clearance Center: The digitisation of publishing platforms continued unabated in the last three years. In particular, the application of “Artificial Intelligence” has grown at a rapid pace and with great intensity. The term (usually referred to just as


10 Research Information October/November 2020


AI) covers a wide spectrum of human activities, ranging from playing chess and speech recognition to autonomous driving and digital assistants (such as Amazon Alexa, Siri). Generally speaking, AI systems facilitate the automation of tasks, normally performed by humans, by incorporating information from the data that they process in order to adjust the outcome of the task.


Under that definition, there is clearly


a tremendous opportunity to gain value from AI in publishing platforms.


Marie Soulière, head of publishing operations, Frontiers: A key aspect has been the increase in collaboration and integration of large publishing platforms


“Frankly, academic publishers don’t know what their business is going to be in five years or beyond”


with third-party tools and products. Examples include the integration of online manuscript-preparation software, direct submissions to publishing platforms from archives websites, and the integration of one-button plagiarism checks with CrossRef. We have, for example, integrated direct submissions from medRxiv, bioRxiv and Chronos with our platform. Direct in-platform searches for reviewers from external databases and options for reviewers to publicly claim recognition of their contributions are another key development.


Brigitte Shull, senior vice president, USA, Cambridge University Press: Publishing platforms never rest, they’re always in development. Many platforms have become more open, both through open source technologies and new features or content that does not live behind a paywall. Platforms have become more central to publishers’ product development strategies, and there has been consolidation in the delivery of digital content. Seamless access and discovery have always been key but some exciting advances in the use of AI for relatedness, for example, has driven innovation. Publishers have also made some strides around accessibility, and have been willing to collaborate across the industry to make this happen more quickly.


Kaveh Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: Publishing platforms have traditionally been used either for disseminating published content to readers, or to carry out the submission and peer review process. In recent years platforms have been extended to cater for all other stages of the publishing process including authoring, copy editing, typesetting and proof checking. These platforms are more complex because they have to deal with the full content of a submission, including modifications, acceptance and rejection of those modifications, and comprehensive track changes. New platforms include proof checking systems that allow authors to check their proofs online and in a browser, rather than on downloaded PDFs.


Violaine Iglesias, Cadmore Media: To focus on what is most relevant to Cadmore’s core expertise, one trend we are seeing is that publishing platforms have been broadening their support for non-traditional scholarly communication formats: social media, blogs, podcasts, videos. This shift is in line with the wider recognition that there is a lot of information to capture in the research cycle besides what makes it into a journal article. It also emphasises a (welcome!) trend to de-anonymise science and amplify authors’ voices, to use storytelling to relate more of the context in which


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