Interview


Reaching further ‘to promote equity’


AIP Publishing’s Simone Taylor talks digital books, inclusion, long-distance walking and gluten-free baking


Tell us a little about your background and qualifications… I am a materials scientist by training, with a doctorate in magnetic ceramics for applications in electronics. An interest in presenting research results led me to a career in scientific publishing. I started out as a production editor on engineering journals, moving quickly into materials science, where I wrote news and features for newsletters and magazines, and published market reports for practitioners in the industry. These skills came in handy when I worked in technology transfer at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK.


I later moved back to publishing,


working on acquisitions and business development, publishing books, journals, newsletters and magazines, and building and managing partnerships with scholarly societies. I have an interest in helping authors, particularly those in under- resourced parts of the world, get their work published, and in ensuring that those results are accessible to the people who would make the best use of them.


What led you to join AIP Publishing? In 2018 AIP Publishing’s leadership team started on a path to diversify its product offering and develop a books programme. The organisation needed someone to launch it and my profile fitted the bill: a background in materials science, experience in launching new products, and experience in books publishing.


Tell us about your involvement in AIP’s digital books programme? My responsibility was to lead the launch of that programme, building an entire team and developing the supporting


26 Research Information August/September 2021


infrastructure. The books we publish for research scientists, practitioners and educators in physics and the physical sciences are designed to do two things: 1. Enable our readers to keep abreast


of new developments in their areas of expertise; and 2. Provide foundational information to


readers who need to access background information quickly to allow them to switch to a new domain. We provide a high degree of editorial, design and composition input to support our authors, offering comprehensive language editing, content restructuring and figure redrawing. Since our launch in September 2020 we have published just


‘Systems, processes and services… must be adapted to provide targeted services for the individual, globally’


over half of our inaugural collection of 40 titles due at the end of this year. Our programme is digital first, and books are fully citable as soon as they are published on Scitation, our publishing platform that also hosts our journals and conference proceedings. This offers interoperability across all product types on the platform, providing essential functionality for the books that currently exists for journals: navigational tabs, Crossref links on reference lists, easily downloadable and citable illustrations, indexing, chapter- level DOIs, and hyperlinks to referenced content as appropriate.


Librarians who own our collections


can expect simultaneous access and unlimited downloads to those books for multiple users. Our books are published concurrently in full-text html, epub and pdf, offering a range of options and comprehensive analytics for readers and authors. And, of course, anyone who prefers to read in print can buy a copy. One of the unique services we


provide is to make historical texts that were previously only published in print, available in fully digitised formats for current readers. We have a publishing partnership with the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and as part of that collaboration we’ve published full text html editions of its backlist on Scitation. Books that were only ever available in print now have equations rendered in MathML! Early indications are that our readers value these options.


What’s the biggest issue facing the scholarly communications industry? It is essential that we continue to develop transformative, affordable business models that library budgets can accommodate, given the uncertainty wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic. The move towards a more open publishing structure, driving a shift in focus to the author, will require a sustained level of investment in technology to maintain a robust digital infrastructure at a time when library budgets are under pressure. Systems, processes and services –


traditionally designed for institutions predominantly in developed countries – must be adapted to provide targeted services for the individual, globally. And this work starts earlier than the traditional submission route. Publishers


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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