Information industry vectors: review of Ingenta's UK Publisher Forum
Back in November, we held our annual Publisher Forum which, as usual, was timed to tie-in with London's Online Information show. The event, which moves around interesting locations in London each year, was held on the HMS President - a venue which offered fabulous views across and along the River Thames on a bright autumnal day ... but which proved a little unsettling as the tide rose. We promise to be back on dry land in future!
Notwithstanding the rolling motion, the presentations were universally deemed to be of an "excellent standard". Fiona Bennett (Oxford University Press) provided a compelling opening with her report on OUP's experiences with Open Access (OA), which include full OA publishing (Nucleic Acids Research is the popularly-cited example) and author-pays options (incorporating immediate self-archiving provision) under the Oxford Open model. OUP has also participated in the SHERPA programme and, in consultation with the societies on behalf of which it publishes, established self-archiving policies for all its journals. The Press has worked with LISU and CIBER to critically evaluate the Open Access model in comparison to the traditional subscription publishing model. The key findings of this research include:
- while authors perceive Open Access to be important to their content, 79% of contributing authors to Nucleic Acids Research indicated that they would publish in the journal regardless of its access model - indicating that OA is but one factor when choosing journals to which to submit articles for publication
- whilst there is growth in self-archiving, this is still primarily to author's own websites or those of their departments - not to institutional or subject repositories
- it is too early to establish the effect of OA on citations, although initial data shows (as you'd expect) that downloads of OA articles are higher than subscription-only articles
- search engine traffic remains key to usage, and brings new users to journals
Fiona's slides, including the quantitative data which led to the conclusions above, can be viewed here (PowerPoint show - .pps).
Next on the podium was consultant Melinda Kenneway (TBI Communications) who also had delegates in the palm of her hand as she presented ways in which publishers could leverage their online content to generate new revenue streams and increase market share and penetration. She advised a combination of strategies including:
- gap analysis - publishers should assess their subscription patterns in relation to the breadth of market opportunity in order to identify gaps in subscriptions to which marketing strategies can be targetted
- Melinda noted the value of a database auditing service provided by Ringgold, whose institutional registry is reviewed elsewhere in this issue
- selling advertising space around electronic content - with online advertising spend still undergoing rapid growth, publishers should look to monetise traffic to their e-content
- during 2006, Ingenta launched a service to help publishers capitalise on online advertising opportunities
- digitising your backfiles to create an online archive
- developing new markets for your content - for example, embracing the emerging market in China or repurposing and packaging content to appeal to different types of user
- market intelligently, to build your brand creatively and develop strong relationships with your customers
Melinda also identified key trends in the publishing industry, including social software, and the rise of personalised computing. Her slides, expanding on these topics and covering many more, can be viewed here (.pps).
Ingenta's Business Development Director, Paul Napoli, followed Melinda with an apposite overview of our Information Commerce Software, now in release to its launch customer. Paul focussed on the marketing opportunities offered by the software, for example its intuitive interface allowing non-technical staff to quickly and easily create new content bundles to meet time-critical user needs, and its ability to respond to and support unlimited business models (view Paul's slides - .pps). Louise Tutton, Ingenta's Head of Client Management, then took the floor to provide an update on activities in the IngentaConnect division, providing demonstrations of recent work with Google and a progress report on our expansion in China. She also showed screenshot examples to an audience keen to learn more about IngentaConnect's implementation of online advertising and its integration with social bookmarking software (view Louise's slides - .pps).
Senior Information Architect Lucy Power's presentation introduced the discipline of Information Architecture, a concept which Ingenta has applied to its website design for many years but which is still relatively unknown, and lamentably little practised. Lucy emphasised that the way content is organised, labelled and structured determines its useability and findability, and thus directly affects the amount of usage it will receive. She highlighted some of the techniques used by Information Architects, and featured some good and some laughably bad examples of the ways in which information can be structured. Lucy's slides can be viewed here (.pps).
Our closing speaker, Laura Cohen, is a librarian with experience of using IngentaConnect in her position as Web Support Librarian at the University of Albany. Laura is currently on sabbatical researching the impact of "Library 2.0" from an academic perspective, and keeps a blog on the subject which is well-read and discussed in the library sphere. She shared with us her vision of ways in which libraries and publishers can take advantage of new technologies to create interactive, customisable and open services, draw in users and, ultimately, maximise the value of a subscribing institution's investment in resources. For the uninitiated, she defined some Web 2.0 concepts and provided some example applications, before explaining how these have been applied within libraries (dubbed "Library 2.0") and demonstrating some examples. She defined the "ideal 2.0 scholarly portal" and detailed some of the features this might contain. Laura's presentation solicited high praise from delegate publishers who were "fascinated" to hear her ideas, and to gain the perspective of those who actually use IngentaConnect. View Laura's slides here (.pps).
Our thanks to all the speakers who delivered such a high calibre of presentations on the day. We look forward to welcoming more of our publishers to an equally stimulating session this year - be sure to save the date of 3rd December 2007 , and don't say we didn't give you adequate advanced warning!