Interview
Riding the wave of innovation
Sam Herbert, co-founder of 67 Bricks, casts his eye over the industry – and tells of his early love of surfing
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications… I was born in Iran, where my father was a hydrogeologist, but we moved back to the UK when I was two. I love sport and was a good all-
rounder as a kid; competing at county and regional levels at squash, football, tennis, badminton. In my late teens, I got into surfing and chased waves all around the world – El Salvador, Indonesia, New Zealand. But I’ve always loved tech and gaming; I’m intrigued by what you can and can’t do with software. In my mid-teens, I joined an international peer counselling organisation. It taught me a great deal: how important empathy is; that listening to people and hearing the back story is
so important; and that when people are behaving oddly, there is always a good reason. After graduating, in physics and digital
electronics at Swansea, I worked client- side, running digital applications at Cancer Research UK, and supplier-side at Digitas, PWC and Marketing Net. It was at the latter where I met Inigo Surguy (67 Bricks co- founder), who has the best technical mind I have ever worked with. We realised we had great complementary skills and we started 67 Bricks.
Your company has been going great guns in the last few years. Tell us about that… The shift from traditional publisher to digital product company has been a long time coming in scholarly publishing. Our early clients talked to us about how
the value hidden in their content was going to waste, back in 2007. They could see that a massive shift was coming, in terms of the world going digital, and that simply providing access to long-form content was not a sustainable business model. But nothing happens fast in the sector, and it’s only now, accelerated by Covid-19, that publishers are really starting to transform away from the traditional books and journals business models and diversify. How do you do that? You go back
to that valuable raw content and data, combine it with your user needs and build new products with it. Luckily, traditional platform vendors have not wanted to work with and understand the complexities of each publisher’s unique content, data and users. This has left a gap for companies like 67 Bricks, who aren’t afraid to get into the nitty gritty of specific data challenges.
18 Research Information June/July 2021 As the realisation that digital
transformation wasn’t going away has hit, that space has grown and the value we deliver to the client has soared. Building new modern digital platforms and capabilities for Emerald and De Gruyter were turning points for the business. Everyone knows each other, and word of good work gets about.
What is the biggest issue facing the scholarly communications industry at the moment? It’s two things; organisations deciding where they truly add value in the scholarly eco-system as we move into a digital age, and accepting that they need to quicken their pace when it comes to change. Lots of the valuable services publishers
used to provide are now something that anyone with good technology capabilities can do.
Google Scholar and SciHub have
levelled the playing field further. With this value in transition, publishers need to go back to the drawing board. But it doesn’t all need to be shiny
and brand new, sometimes it is about extending the products you already have
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