Publishing platforms
Open, MIT Press with Direct To Open, our society partners piloting smaller-scale transformative agreements, or whatever comes next.
Some of our publishers are aggregators or distributors for a group of societies and publishing partners. These clients are in turn serving a range of societies, from very small to larger independents. And they all have different outlooks and different needs when it comes to OA. Some clients have even found that
different sorts of OA models are needed depending on the type of content, whether that be arts versus hard sciences, book versus journal, or experimental formats. So, it really does take a variety of models to make this work, which also means the technical demands vary and are perhaps larger than we’d hope. Among the most basic platform-level functionality required to support OA are: • •
Rich article metadata;
Connections to upstream/ downstream and secondary/tertiary publication objects;
•
• • •
Compliance with FAIR [findable, accessible, interoperable, (machine) readable] principles;
Information about the users of content;
Improving the discovery of OA content; and
Shoring up other revenue streams with the dwindling of subscription revenue.
However, fully supporting OA practices means the development of more nuanced features to support publisher needs and to deliver the best possible user experience, such as: • Auto-filtered search, recommendation widgets and topic collections to ensure that users accessing OA content are only presented with other OA content (eliminating the disruption of paywalls for a seamless OA user experience);
• Accommodation of various and custom OA license types in the metadata;
• Robust deposit services to meet OA indexing needs;
• Personalised content widgets presenting users with exclusively OA content from across a publisher’s catalogue;
• Powerful and flexible advertising options to support revenue needs on OA content;
• Additional features and tools for engaging OA users and directing traffic toward other revenue- generating avenues;
• More granular author and funding
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo •
data provided upstream, following emerging best practices/standards. This includes multiple layers of institutional affiliation, Ringgold or GRID identifiers, FundRef, ALIs and data availability statements; and
Supporting the publication of peer review reports following JATS4R recommendations.
Many of these features have become industry standards over recent years, while many solutions remain amorphous. The primary technology needs our publishers are concerned with, to address the move to OA, centre on reporting, persistent identifiers and access/funding indicators. Reporting, analytics and data have
shifted from ‘useful’ to ‘critical’ as publishers strive to adequately capture usage, particularly as it relates to some of the new library and funder agreements we’re seeing. Communicating the value of OA models, especially those that rely on a collective community action model, is imperative to their success. Reporting not only demonstrates to stakeholders that these models stand on their own, but
“Persistent identifiers are critical to the open access infrastructure”
also prove pivotal in navigating internal bureaucracy around getting funding for OA projects. However, the nature of ‘open’ makes it
more difficult to capture and report on your stakeholders’ and your library partners’ use of content. A prime example was early in the pandemic, when publishers globally opened access to content, which presented both opportunities and challenges. The opportunities included increased traffic, while a difficulty was not being able to identify where that traffic was coming from. Publishers addressed this through a variety of methods, ranging from IP identification partnerships to registration walls. Addressing OA reporting needs at scale
in a way that works for all publishers and models relies on the next technology requirement: persistent identifiers. Persistent identifiers are critical to the OA infrastructure, whether it’s the ORCIDs, the DOIs, the fund registry data, or the raw data. All those fields being checked, validated and required in the process of ingesting content to a hosting platform allows platforms and publishers to then
have a reporting workflow that doesn’t require significant disambiguation or other remediation. Our client community uses a variety
of editorial, submission, peer review and production systems. Ensuring they have clean data with persistent identifiers coming into the process allows us to report out on the other side with confidence. Our publishers are approaching these needs in different ways and with different partners, and all the bits of data that flow from those workflows/sources are becoming increasingly important in OA models and mandates. That data then appears in a publisher’s XML and that drives platform functionality, such as the way we signal to users what content is open or free, what they’re entitled to access and what license that content is published under. This brings us to access, license and funding indicators on the front-end of the platform. Though there are certain aspects we’ve become used to (that is, the locked/ unlocked padlock), there’s a divergence of approaches, which means even the lock icon fails to capture the distinctions between free content, OA content, content you’re entitled to through your institution, temporarily free content, and so forth. The pandemic certainly exacerbated
these access and funding indicator needs. Suddenly a lot of our publishers were thinking more about whether users can make sense of little unlocked locks, little locked locks, locks that are red, locks that are green, or even other indicators that say you have access but may need to go somewhere else and enter some other bits of information to get into that content. Carrying this further into platform functionality, there’s a need for users to search and filter by the access types. And publishers are increasingly fielding questions from libraries about discovery and questions from funders about the display of funding information and license type on the front end. As a platform, our goal is to work with
partners and industry organisations on developing and delivering evolving industry standards for these and other open science requirements, all while building in flexibility to accommodate new models and needs. It’s unlikely that we’ll arrive at a point in the open movement where there’s a single approach and a single way for platforms to best deliver open science for all its stakeholders, so the best path forward for technology vendors working in this space is, ultimately, to remain open to change.
Hannah Heckner is director for product strategy at Silverchair
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