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.

     

Use and perceptions of information among family physicians: sources considered accessible,relevant, and reliable

Objectives:

The research determined (1) the information sources that family physicians (FPs) most commonly use to update their general medical knowledge and to make specific clinical decisions, and (2) the information sources FPs found to be most physically accessible, intellectually accessible (easy to understand), reliable (trustworthy), and relevant to their needs.

Methods:

A cross-sectional postal survey of 792 FPs and locum tenens, in full-time or part-time medical practice, currently practicing or on leave of absence in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan was conducted during the period of January to April 2008.

Results:

Of 666 eligible physicians, 331 completed and returned surveys, resulting in a response rate of 49.7% (331/666). Medical textbooks and colleagues in the main patient care setting were the top 2 sources for the purpose of making specific clinical decisions. Medical textbooks were most frequently considered by FPs to be reliable (trustworthy), and colleagues in the main patient care setting were most physically accessible (easy to access).

Conclusions:

When making specific clinical decisions, FPs were most likely to use information from sources that they considered to be reliable and generally physically accessible, suggesting that FPs can best be supported by facilitating easy and convenient access to high-quality information.

Highlights

• Medical textbooks were the most popular information source for family physicians'' (FPs'') clinical decision-making purposes, and medical journals were the most popular information source for the purpose of updating FPs'' general medical knowledge.
• FPs considered medical textbooks to be the most reliable (trustworthy) source, colleagues the most physically accessible, and continuing medical education the most relevant and intellectually accessible.
• The lowest ranked information sources across all four attributes were personal digital assistants, mental health professionals, pharmaceutical sales representatives, and other decision aids.

Implications

• The most popular information sources for clinical decision-making purposes among FPs were sources characterized as reliable and generally physically accessible.
• This study suggests the need for further research into interventions that target information access barriers in FPs'' practice settings and the promotion of reliable evidence for FPs'' clinical decision-making purposes.

     

The secrets of failing better: Accessible publishing at SAGE. A case study

Key points

• Accessibility is often misunderstood as a concept that is niche or of secondary importance.
• Reframing accessibility as improving the overall user experience instantly changes the perspective; accessibility becomes a critical requirement worthy of investment and resources.
• The single most prevalent complaint amongst librarians is the time it takes to get hold of accessible content.
• An accessibility roadmap provides structure and transparency for digital accessibility projects within the organization.
• Publishers' non‐compliance with accessibility standards will increase their risk of sales declines and legal complications over time.
• The SAGE A.C.C.E.S.S.I.B.L.E mnemonic offers suggestions on how to devise a successful accessible publishing programme.

     

Accessibility at JSTOR: From box‐checking to a more inclusive and sustainable future

Key points

• Testing for accessibility after extensive changes to a website and addressing them as technical debt is unsustainable in the long term.
• To stay modern and efficient, providers of digital content to academic institutions should build accessibility into development.
• For JSTOR, working with participating institutions to understand their concerns was essential to reaching WCAG 2.0 AA conformance.
• With Artstor recently joining ITHAKA, we face the challenge of making a visual archive accessible.

     

Making materials accessible to students in higher education institutes: Institutional obligations,methods of compliance,and recommendations for future action

Key points

• Current publishing restrictions cause duplicated – and wasted – effort to delivery of accessible information to students.
• Universities have a legal obligation to provide access, but this is not required from publishers.
• Initiatives to support access are helpful, but do not completely resolve the accessibility problems.

     

An overview of content accessibility issues experienced by educational publishers

Key points

• Educational accessibility needs to accommodate not only text but also supplemental, multimedia, and interactive elements.
• Accessibility considerations need to address user needs for timeliness, quality, cost, and security.
• Schools often default to remediation instead of embracing EPUB 3 for practical reasons and to respond to student preferences.
• PDF is often preferred over EPUB for creating alternate formats because of familiarity and expediency.
• Schools require accessibility to deal with increased legal pressure from both government agencies and disability advocates.

     

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.

     

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.

     

How publishing has helped and hindered me: Experiences and advice from a blind reader and publisher

Key points

• Braille remains a relevant technology for access.
• Properly structured content is vital for ease of understanding, as are correctly labelled links and action buttons.
• Accessibility has hugely improved in the past 30 years but remains a fragile benefit, relying on stringent adherence to standards.

     

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.

     

‘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.

     

A brief history of the Open Discovery Initiative

Key points

• The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) was created in 2011 to improve participation among content providers in the then‐novel web‐scale discovery services.
• The issues addressed by the ODI included metadata standards, content indexing, and availability of licensed content in discovery services.
• After adoption of the recommended practice in June 2014, a new Standing Committee has been formed to address unfinished business and implementation.
• A challenge for the ODI is finding the right balance between the needs of commercial partners and library customers.

     

Information-seeking behavior of basic science researchers: implications for library services

Objectives:

This study examined the information-seeking behaviors of basic science researchers to inform the development of customized library services.

Methods:

A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews was conducted on a sample of basic science researchers employed at a university medical school.

Results:

The basic science researchers used a variety of information resources ranging from popular Internet search engines to highly technical databases. They generally relied on basic keyword searching, using the simplest interface of a database or search engine. They were highly collegial, interacting primarily with coworkers in their laboratories and colleagues employed at other institutions. They made little use of traditional library services and instead performed many traditional library functions internally.

Conclusions:

Although the basic science researchers expressed a positive attitude toward the library, they did not view its resources or services as integral to their work. To maximize their use by researchers, library resources must be accessible via departmental websites. Use of library services may be increased by cultivating relationships with key departmental administrative personnel. Despite their self-sufficiency, subjects expressed a desire for centralized information about ongoing research on campus and shared resources, suggesting a role for the library in creating and managing an institutional repository.

Highlights

• Basic science researchers rely on a small network of individuals in their institution and at other institutions to satisfy their information needs.
• Basic science researchers tend to ignore institutional boundaries when searching for information and do not necessarily view the library as the primary source of scholarly information.
• Basic science researchers use the interlibrary loan service regularly but otherwise rarely use traditional library services such as mediated literature searching and instruction.

Implications

• The library must establish a presence in researchers'' work environments, rather than expect them to seek out library resources and services.
• The increased emphasis by funding agencies on clinical translational science may impact the information needs of basic science researchers in the future.
• Libraries have an opportunity to capitalize on their positive reputation and basic scientists'' desire for more centralized information to create new information resources and services such as institutional repositories.

     

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.

     

Putting an end to download‐and‐go: The website's role in a content marketing ecosystem

Key points

• Publishers must think of their websites as marketing tools as well as content delivery systems.
• The five major strategies of content marketing are promotion, personalization, targeting, consumerization, and analysis and optimization.
• Publishers must treat readers as customers, not simply as end users.
• Content marketing is about the environment in which content exists, as well as the form that it takes.
• To compete with pirate sites, publishers need to provide a richer user experience.
• Content marketing benefits authors and readers as well as publishers.
• Readers want the same enjoyable user experience and tailored content on all sites they visit.
• Content marketing can increase site traffic, lengthen visits, boost revenues, thwart piracy, and heighten brand impact.

     

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.

     

Developing and using a rubric for evaluating evidence-based medicine point-of-care tools

Objective:

The research sought to establish a rubric for evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM) point-of-care tools in a health sciences library.

Methods:

The authors searched the literature for EBM tool evaluations and found that most previous reviews were designed to evaluate the ability of an EBM tool to answer a clinical question. The researchers'' goal was to develop and complete rubrics for assessing these tools based on criteria for a general evaluation of tools (reviewing content, search options, quality control, and grading) and criteria for an evaluation of clinical summaries (searching tools for treatments of common diagnoses and evaluating summaries for quality control).

Results:

Differences between EBM tools'' options, content coverage, and usability were minimal. However, the products'' methods for locating and grading evidence varied widely in transparency and process.

Conclusions:

As EBM tools are constantly updating and evolving, evaluation of these tools needs to be conducted frequently. Standards for evaluating EBM tools need to be established, with one method being the use of objective rubrics. In addition, EBM tools need to provide more information about authorship, reviewers, methods for evidence collection, and grading system employed.

Highlights

• Eleven of the fourteen previous evidence-based medicine (EBM) tool evaluations were based on clinicians evaluating tools based on their perception of the products'' ability to answer a clinical question.
• EBM tools'' evidence summaries are not updated as often as products claim.
• Although many EBM tools claim to be evidence based, only 74% of the 70 evaluated treatment summaries included graded evidence.

Implications

• To offer the best tools for users, medical libraries should evaluate EBM resources regularly, including the quality of the evidence provided.
• Medical librarians have a role to play in evaluating the quality of EBM products and can develop assessment tools to aid in this evaluation.

     

Combining human input with machine learning: A case study

Key points

• Publishers increasingly wish to create subject collections but need automated systems to carry this out in a cost‐effective fashion.
• The capabilities of unsupervised machine‐based tools to create subject collections have improved dramatically.
• Experts are still likely to find errors and exceptions in automated unsupervised content extractions and need ways to interact with semantic tools.
• Many semi‐automated content solutions require highly skilled and expensive technical staff to develop and maintain them.
• Karger's use of UNSILO's Package Manager appears to have improved efficiency and also fed back to UNSILO to help improve the product.