Feature
instructions is to use short videos, available directly and contextually through the interface. Publishing platforms should be accessible as far as possible. For instance, readers with visual impairment or those with dyslexia should be able to select typefaces that are most comfortable for them to read. Ideally, formats other than HTML, such as PDF, should be generated on the fly, according to the preferences of the reader, allowing the reader to select font size for example. A general expectation of modern platforms is that they are fully responsive, and therefore usable on all devices, including tablets and mobile phones.
Sam Herbert, co-founder, 67 Bricks
science is created. Researchers are humans, and science is an imperfect process.
What makes a great publishing platform?
Herbert, 67 Bricks: The best publishing platform is not necessarily the most feature rich. A great publishing platform provides users with seamless access, fits into their workflow and adapts to their needs over time. An exceptional platform gives publishers the control, flexibility and agility required to face future challenges and capitalise on new opportunities as they arise. It fundamentally changes the way publishers interact with and understand their users, which is vital as ‘the smartphone generation’ are used to a certain kind of user experience and have high expectations. The technologies that a great publishing
platform is built on are flexible, robust and scalable;allowing you to improve, innovate, monitor, and optimise over time, and deliver new products and services. This approach enables publishers to implement change without huge technical upheaval and cost.
Marmanis, Copyright Clearance Center: A great publishing platform satisfies the following criteria:
1.
It is fully digitised; digitisation here does not refer only to having the content in digital form, it also includes business workflow and integrations.
2. It can support multiple business models
3. It enables extensible, scalable growth @researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info 4.
Haralambos “Babis” Marmanis, Copyright Clearance Center
It integrates seamlessly with other enterprise systems, as well as external third parties
5. It is secure and accommodates privacy concerns
6. It natively supports analytics
Soulière, Frontiers: A great publishing platform should be able to adapt to the needs of users and continue to add new services to keep improving the experience of the research community. It must keep innovating to provide flexible, stable, interoperable and perhaps, above all, user-friendly services. The inherent challenge is the variety of different needs from research communities, combined with the diverse range of users interacting with publishing platforms. Most will focus on a single stakeholder type, either the readers, the authors, or the editors and reviewers, which results in platforms being considered great by some users, but perhaps not by others. A great publishing platform is able to distinguish between these and offer a balanced approach that works for all of them.
Shull, Cambridge University Press: A great publishing platform needs to be user-driven, responsive and intuitive. The roadmap needs to prioritise work that meets changing user needs, and the user experience should add real value (with minimal contact with technical support teams).
Bazargan, River Valley Technologies: A great publishing platform should need minimal instructions, even for novice users. Any instructions should be contextual, and embedded within the platform. A good way of embedding
Iglesias, Cadmore Media: A great publishing platform is one that doesn’t get in the way. Publishers are the guardians of “good” information, which seems more critical today than ever; they shouldn’t become software companies. Yes, investment in technology and staff to run it is critical, but technology is there to serve content in a manner that is as painless as possible for authors, as useful as possible for readers, and as efficient as possible for publishers. It may take a great deal of complexity and flexibility to create a platform that achieves those simple goals, but that burden shouldn’t rest on the shoulders of publishers – that’s what vendors are for.
How have platforms developed to take account of the move towards open access and open research?
Marmanis, Copyright Clearance Center: Many platforms developed, or integrated with, purpose-built OA-enabling systems, where publishers can delegate anything from the collection of OA fees to full digital implementations of transformative agreements. CCC is proud to offer the market leader of such OA enabling systems, namely, the RightsLink for Scientific Communications platform.
Soulière, Frontiers: The move towards open access for publishing platforms is not as straightforward as many would think. Frontiers was born as an open access and open science platform, and as such, all its technology has been developed and designed around that. To make a functional change to open access, publishers with older models have to adapt many fundamental processes in their platforms.
This includes submission systems,
article production, public pages, access and discovery of articles, as well as
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