Beyond the mandates: The far‐reaching benefits of multimedia accessibility

Key points

• Convergence of international standards has made requirements for accessible multimedia content clearer.
• Legal and commercial pressure for accessible content is mounting for higher education institutions (HEIs) and publishers as highlighted by recent high‐profile settlements in North America.
• Accessibility requirements for multimedia can be met by setting realistic, progressive goals and focusing resources on key content.
• Multimedia accessibility benefits range from wider audiences and increased user engagement to greater discoverability and improved search engine optimization.
• Vendors are ramping up their offerings for accessible production, and costs are going down.

     

Publishing with accessibility standards from the inside out

Key points

• Publishers should layer on the right standards to create accessible publications.
• Accessible publications have accessible content at the core, wrapped in semantic structure, and topped off with accessible metadata.
• Resources to help publishers implement accessibility in their programmes are available.

     

Benetech global literacy services: Working towards a ‘born accessible’ world

Key points

• Bookshare is the world's largest library of accessible titles provided to members and through special agreements.
• Dyslexia is often forgotten as an impediment to access but must be accounted for within accessible publications.
• Certification of accessibility provides confidence for purchasers and a marketing tool for publishers.
• Accessibility requires multiple routes to access, on different platforms and in different formats.
• Accessible artworks need particular attention, and this is often lacking in ‘accessible’ publications.

     

Full discovery: What is the publisher's role?

Key points

• Our collective authorship and publishing practices do not always end up ensuring that scholarly content is discoverable by readers.
• Readers of all kinds rely on a variety of ‘discovery pathways’, such as search engines, library systems, and various electronic links, some of which are blind to the content they desire.
• Efforts over the years to improve content discoverability have made great progress, but an increasing amount of freely available content brings up new issues.
• The National Information Standards Organization (NISO)’s Discovery to Delivery (D2D) Topic Committee has developed a grid comparing various ways in which content is shared with various ways in which users discover such content.
• This article brings to light a few of the current obstacles and opportunities for innovation by publishers, aggregators, search engines, and library systems, and invites Learned Publishing readers to step up and identify others.

     

The supply chain for academic books: Why is it so complex and how might we drive change?

Key points

• The supply chain for monographs and related types of books is much more complex than that for journals.
• Sales per title are falling, while the efforts devoted to marketing individual titles have diminished too.
• Readers have a strong preference for physical print rather than e‐books, while libraries’ preference in purchasing is the other way round.
• Publishers, intermediaries, and libraries all face additional costs and complexity because they must continue to deal with both print and e‐books.
• Current inefficiencies in the supply chain act as a restraint on discoverability, demand, and access to academic books.

     

Worth the effort: Why societies should make room for books

Key points

• With increased pressure on longstanding society business models, society journal publishers must pursue more aggressive growth strategies to remain competitive.
• A practitioner‐focused book portfolio that translates research into practice offers an opportunity to establish an alternative revenue stream and an additional path for society member engagement.
• Societies are in a unique position to capitalize on their existing connections to industry via their membership base.
• Brief, easy‐to‐consume content and interactive tools are of the greatest appeal to the practitioner audience.
• Focusing on shorter, template‐driven formats and more frequent updates allows society publishers to develop content more rapidly and at lower cost.
• Challenges include incentivizing society members to author and review the content, identifying individuals who are capable of doing so, and obtaining adequate internal resources.

     

Why I value non‐profit society scholarly publishing

Key points

• The job of society publishers is to carry out the directives and achieve the goals set by the organization's elected and volunteer leaders.
• Society journals form an integral part of the work and outreach of the society and its mission.
• Scholarly societies help develop new findings and individual careers, and a publications outlet supports both of these activities.

     

The rise of the machines: Artificial intelligence meets scholarly content

Key points

• New forms of human/machine dialogue are emerging as robots understand vast amounts of content rather than simply indexing content as strings of characters.
• Recognizing strings of characters as entities (e.g. = names = authors) allows for meaningful associations between entities and reasoning over these relationships.
• Web‐scale adoption of the Semantic Web approach has been slow because it is too complex to implement and does not scale.
• User intent, discovered through conversational models of human–computer interaction, allows for a deeper understanding of exactly what researchers are looking for.
• Personal agents hold the promise of finding information that we will find useful before we have started to look for it.
• Publishers can use Academic Knowledge APIs to interpret academic user queries and find rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph.

     

Do you have a broken link in your accessibility chain?

Key points

• Accessibility of publications in academia is a non‐negotiable legal requirement.
• The accessibility of your journal or other scholarly publication is the most important design consideration in your workflow.
• EPUB Accessibility 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provide a clear publishing pathway.
• Consider the readability chain: Any link can result in accessibility failure but an unbroken chain will benefit all readers.

     

Crowdsourcing: A Platform for Crowd Engagement in the Publishing Industry

Publishers will usually make decisions based on their experience and knowledge in book publishing. However, there are risks of losses as markets can be unpredictable. Now, with the availability of various online social platforms, “crowdsourcing” is being used by publishers and authors to gather new ideas and innovations. This article will analyze how the crowdsourcing platform is used by industry players to attract active participation from the public, especially in the title development process. Publishers or authors also need to understand which platform is appropriate and how to use the platforms as a marketing communication tool. The netnography approach will be used to gather and analyze the data related to the specific subject area of the study, including literature review and online observation. Based on our observations, platforms such Wattpad and Ilham Karangkraf are popular among Malaysian authors and publishers, and had been used to get crowd engagement as well as to communicate with readers. With it, sometimes a work that has many readers or followers will be published.     

Towards universal accessibility: The UK policy landscape and supporting technology

Key points

• The UK policy landscape supports access for the users whilst allowing publishers to maintain business models.
• Advancements such as EPUB 3, aligning publishing with web technologies, and the Inclusive Publishing hub help publishers reach accessibility compliance.
• Print impairment is not an on/off switch, and each reader has his or her own unique set of requirements – a fact that is supported by EPUB 3.
• The time is ripe for publishers to make firm commitments to accessibility initiatives.

     

‘Finding’ and ‘discovering’: How understanding researchers’ search and discovery behaviour informed the building of Cambridge Core

Key points

• Researchers most often visit publisher platforms to ‘find’ a specific article or chapter after ‘discovering’ available resources elsewhere.
• Keywords in the title and author names are the two most important criteria for identifying relevant material.
• Students consider access to be an important criterion for item selection.
• For both humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology, and medicine (STM), user behaviour when identifying relevant content is remarkably similar.
• Students and researchers tend to gather content for later use rather than read it in detail as soon as they find it.

     

Discovery systems: Are they now the library?

Key points

• Library discovery systems have become successfully embedded in many academic and specialist libraries.
• Such systems require excellent metadata to ensure discoverability of content and increasingly publishers are charged with delivering that.
• Libraries’ traditional role in organizing their collections for effective discovery is being usurped by these outsourced systems.

     

Building discovery relationships and expertise at Oxford University Press

Key points

• Centralizing discovery knowledge can improve operational efficiencies while educating and empowering publisher staff.
• Streamlining publishers’ metadata creation and distribution can help improve relationships across the supply chain.
• Working together to optimize discovery workflows benefits publishers, discovery service partners, and institutional customers.

     

Evidence‐based design for discoverability: A case study

Key points

• Lean methods can give rich insights: Even a few, short sessions with a handful of users can generate useful inputs for a user‐centric design process.
• Design for beginners: An interface that supports novices will also support experts.
• Keep it simple: Focus on functionality that supports core search and discovery tasks.
• Popular or high‐value features should have prime position and rarely used or low‐value features should be hidden or removed.
• Visual cues are important for usability, as is balancing the visual space.

     

Closing the PDF gap: ReadCube’s experiments in reader‐focused design

Key points

• Twenty years ago, a fraction of articles were paired with supplements; now, one in five research stories go beyond PDF.
• Why has the evolution of research content's delivery vehicles lagged behind the evolution of the research story?
• Hyperlinked in‐line references are the most used feature of the Enhanced PDF – exposing faster, easier ways to follow the path of research.
• Discovery need not start and end with the search engine – it can start within the PDF itself.
• Discovery is not a solitary process; therefore, content platforms must support collaboration to drive readership.

     

Identifying legitimate open access journals: some suggestions from a publisher

• New publishing models lead to new players – not all of them good.
• No commonly accepted criteria aid scholars to select ‘good’ journals.
• Journals (and publishers) need to assert their good practice.
• How do publishers serve their different customers – readers, authors, reviewers, and the public?

     

Economies of small: How a single‐journal publisher remains independent and grows

Key points

• Delivering focused and relevant content that researchers find valuable creates and sustains a dedicated and loyal audience.
• Partnerships expand the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (JOSPT)’s audience and reach and enable growth.
• Introducing innovations at the right time is key – neither too soon nor too late.
• Investing in specific initiatives developed through strategic planning moves JOSPT forward.

     

Access management: the overlooked but critical enabler

• Access management (AM) is a critical, but often overlooked, enabler for publishers looking to expand the appeal of their online resources.
• This article examines why publishers underinvest in AM, and provides practical examples of how this impacts productivity and growth across the organization.
• Three AM trends that offer new growth opportunities are also explored: (i) enabling a wider range of customer types and business models, (ii) supporting a more diverse range of access scenarios, and (iii) facilitating greater personalization through identity management.
• Publishers need to review their AM strategy in light of these opportunities. In particular, publishers that currently support AM in‐house should outsource to specialist vendors if they are not fully committed to investing the expertise and time needed to support this increasing sophistication.