Cadmore media player playing video The Transformation of Publishing Platforms: Trends & Predictions
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
The Transformation of Publishing Platforms: Trends & Predictions
Description:
The Transformation of Publishing Platforms: Trends & Predictions
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/31e10992-381b-406a-8ae7-d3dc607c583b/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T00H30M52S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/31e10992-381b-406a-8ae7-d3dc607c583b
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/31e10992-381b-406a-8ae7-d3dc607c583b/industry_breakout__silverchair (1080p).mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=EXJGWvX8ae25R37HyBTfzacSFsEmi7PgxBbVx7NzQUM%3D&st=2025-04-29T20%3A41%3A19Z&se=2025-04-29T22%3A46%3A19Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-12-03T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
All right. Hi, everybody. It's officially one. It's actually 215, but this clock says 115. So we will go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for joining the Silverchair team today as we talk about the transformation of publishing platforms in this session, we are going to share some of our insights on the future of publishing platforms informed by conversations over the years with different stakeholders across the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
We do have a poll loaded into this session in the Whova app, so feel free to answer it now at any point during the conversation or at the end when we get to it. So without further ado. Well, maybe. All right. Without further ado, we will introduce ourselves. I'm Samantha green. I'm the director of product marketing at Silverchair.
I'm Will Schweitzer. I'm Silverchair CEO. And I'm Betsy Donahue, the senior vice president of business development at Silverchair. So I am going to the slides. Not changing. Here we go. Resume slideshow.
Let's see. Anybody know where the tech person went. That's so weird. About talent show. You going to do some soft shoe. Yeah OK, we'll just. We'll just riff.
It's fine. Well, Thank you. Very kind. Yes we just pretend to be a technology company. There you are.
You're going now. Yep all right. Here we go. Back there. Just all right. So this is us again. OK So I am going to kick us off with a little bit of scene setting. So publishing platforms today are obviously an incredibly critical part of your publishing infrastructure.
But one thing that we hear a lot is the sense of worry when it comes to platforms. Are they going to continue to be this critical in the future. Are they going to continue to be so central to our strategies. Maybe AI enhanced search and discovery is putting platform traffic at risk, or maybe the lack of innovation might threaten the platforms ability to evolve or to keep up with other research tools. Maybe there's even some complacency happening.
Maybe we're not as willing to invest in publishing platforms and infrastructure or. Is away making platforms obsolete with business models that are kind of struggling. To support such infrastructure. There's a lot of changing market forces at play here. And we. Hear every day from publishers that we work with and publishers just across the industry.
Who are struggling to strategize with so many unknowns. But to answer our original question, our platforms, the future. We think that they can be with the right strategy and with the right tools. The platform of the future might look different, function differently, or even serve additional strategic goals, but a core focus on partnership, flexibility and strategy to build on the right trends and mitigate the most risk can help secure a sustainable publishing program.
We're going to talk briefly about three trends that we've been hearing from the market turn to some predictions for the future and then hopefully have plenty of time at the end for questions and discussion. So I will hand it over to Will. The first trend we want to talk about was independence without isolation. And really, simply put, none of us have one product, one platform that is going to serve all the needs of our stakeholders.
And when think of a typical Silverchair publisher, we probably support dozens of integrations with other service providers, whether it's Cadmore as a video player or upstream, kind of in your manuscript submission space, maybe research integrity tools and think that emphasizes the need to have a few things. One is open architecture partners that are willing to work together and integrate together and then strong cross industry relationships.
We know at Silverchair that we're a really, really good hosting platform, lots of other stuff that we could do, but we know we aren't going to be the best. So we think very carefully about who we partner with, how we help enable our publishers product strategies and their vision. And that's really important to us. And I think it's really important for the future for a lot of publishers.
In the Betty trying to and. I'm really going to try hard not to mess this word up. Interoperability it's a must have. So here's a bit on why. Similar to the strategic partnerships we're seeing across the industry at large, we're seeing the drive for more and more integration collaboration in the technology space. So infrastructure that's very interoperable is flexible, provides a supremely unique advantage for publishers, specifically to incorporate new content features to surface very powerful data for a number of use cases.
And then finally, to ensure the best in class experience for that variety of stakeholders, from authors to readers and funders. Et cetera. And the how here is about partnerships will touch on that in his previous slide. But vendors and service providers create these proactive partnerships to ensure easier adoption and seamless processes for our mutual publisher clients.
And in this process and partnership, all parties win, which is critical. So this allows our shared publisher clients to quickly adapt to market changes. And we all know how quickly our market is changing these days to experiment and pilot in places where they normally wouldn't before and to basically proceed with no barriers to innovation. These are very powerful abilities in these partnerships, and we feel really strongly that this is critical in this trend that's developing.
And the example that's nearest and dearest to our hearts is, of course, the Silverchair universe program. If you're not familiar with the Silverchair universe, it's a framework of complementary products and services to integrate on the Silverchair platform. And universe partners are what we call pre-integrated, and there are best in class vendor partners that provide everything from content and data structuring, video hosting, open science solution, et cetera.
These technologies are proactively incorporated into standard page templates and site configuration tools. Silver chair and this allows Silverchair to really streamline the activation for standard integrations and thus eliminating that often hurdle for doing more on your platform. So really to sum it up, this slide is a trend. We're expecting to stick around for a while.
And our third trend. So building on that need that Betsy just talked about for interoperability to make sure that your unique audience has the tools that it needs and can evolve and grow. Our last trend is really about strategic risk taking more generally. So I think we're at a point where with platforms today, risk is a requirement for survival.
You need to take chances, you need to try new things, you need to experiment. But as we've discussed, that risk taking can't happen without partnerships across different stakeholders in this industry. And it can't happen without relying on technology and various types of various pieces of publishing infrastructure to take responsibility for things like security, accessibility, privacy, things like GDPR standards or the Accessibility Act.
Those sort of internet wide standards and practices are very complex to comply with and allowing shared infrastructure to take that load frees up publisher time. And with that time. And with that space, there's no room for risk taking and experimentation, exploring new ways to drive revenue or offer valuable tools to members, readers and authors.
From Silverchair's perspective, we want to create space for those experiments and ideas to thrive in as many ways as we can. And in as many ways as our publishers can dream up our platform. Tools like composer extend Omni format content content capabilities, creating a space for content like blogs, commercial content, journalistic content, marketing, whitepapers you name it.
And publishers can promote that content to drive traffic to their site or publish sponsored content to drive revenue from different areas. And the last example of how relying on shared infrastructure frees up space for strategic risk taking is Silverchair's AI lab as I'm sure we'll talk about extensively over the next few days, moves so quickly that I think it's really hard to strategize for it in a long term sense.
So our approach is really to collaborate and build together with our publishing partners. And together we can harness the potential of AI to accelerate pretty much everything and improve and enhance publishing platforms in ways we maybe haven't even thought of yet. And right now what we're doing is working with publishers on our AI playground, and this is a tool that helps them to analyze different LLMs, different search parameters and identify what works and what is necessary from a cost perspective, as well as an accuracy perspective when it comes to chats and queries on scholarly research.
And critically, I think a lot of the conversations around AI are how we can use these tools to drive users back to the platform for an enhanced experience. And that's the kind of risk taking that is informed by partnership, supported by shared infrastructure and flexible enough for a variety of publishing strategies. So that brings us through our three trends that we wanted to talk about.
And I'm going to turn it back to Will to outline some possible predictions for the future. It'll be fun to see how many of these will be wrong in five years. So we spent a lot of time talking with our community, talking with other technology and service providers in the space, and there are kind of three predictions that I think are worth discussion.
One is that there is utility beyond the hype of AI. There are legitimate use cases for these technologies to enhance search, to help users understand content, help doctors find relevant material faster. And we're all on this learning curve at the moment with things like the AI lab we're starting to publishers are starting to define use cases and we are figuring out how to ensure quality and predictability in developing features.
So AI is here to stay and right now we're all exploring, but we need to think about some of the negative consequences of AI. So initial data from Google's generative search experience showed that it could reduce organic search traffic by 20% to 60% depending on the publisher. And this will come back in when we talk about the trend in over three years about a headless platform, that there is a possibility that publishers become increasingly disintermediated, that content is not consumed on platforms like Silverchair or on the publishers website, but it's delivered to an end user in an open app or their research app or whatever their workflow tool of choice is.
And we see that in a lot of advanced kind of information spaces already. So if you are a aerospace engineer, you're having valuable information delivered straight into your product lifecycle management system and the future could look more like that than someone starting a search in Google or starting a search in MEDLINE or Scopus or opening up an alert and clicking through to the journals platform.
And publishers need to think about that and what it means for their audience and how they build connections. We expect publishing to speed up some of this will be enabled by AI, but we know that there is a broad acceleration of science. Many people have been talking for years now about new research outputs. We certainly see that with content coming into the social platform.
And then many publishers are focused on author experience. All of that, I think, means speed and publishing, speeding up, which means we're going to need different tools, different ways to help curate content for audiences, help them find the most relevant, most high quality information. A whole set of solutions that aren't in place now, but this community can certainly come together and build. And then last, it's kind of a risky thing for us to say, but we think there's a potential for headless platforms.
That platforms become content management systems and the most pure sense and that what a platform. Wow Wow. It got dark. Really, really dark. Ominous is there a light switch over. There we go. Thank you.
Thank you. It took a dark turn. A really dark turn. But if you think about what platforms do right. Platforms are all about making content accessible, and there's a lot. Serves distribute, indicate their content in lots of places.
Publishers have always done this right. Publishers have always licensed their content to companies like EBSCO or with their content in store or work with partners like to resell their content to different markets. That isn't going to change. But what we could see is the value in having a journal website as a home where you're driving a majority of your traffic may become antiquated in a world where you want to make sure you get your content to your audience where they want to read it.
So maybe that content is in OpenAI. Maybe that content is in the Researcher app or a mobile first application. There is a world where the journal home and the journal home page probably aren't that important, and that means very different things for our business models, for how we market and how we build relationships with authors and readers.
Great, great. Thanks so this is going to bring us to the interactive portion of the session. So we've got about 15 minutes left. As I said at the start, there is a poll in the app in this session. We already had a bunch of responses actually. So we'll give a couple of minutes for that.
OK, so responses will continue to come into this. But the one that seems to be really taking the cake is new formats beyond the article. So as we get started with questions, I wonder if either of you want to talk at all about what new formats might look like on a platform or what that kind of means for the future of a publishing platform.
Yeah, I can take that one. So when I think of New formats for an article, I think about the variety of different ways that publishers have described. What is the war on the PDF, the notion that folks come and download the PDF, and that's that there are interactive levels and layers that you can put on those PDFs to actually learn how long a reader is spending in that paper, which sections of the paper they're spending time on, how often they visit and go save it.
There is a wealth of data, of course, you can collect in that interactive version. So I think that building on that and creating layers to that as well is a potential path for content. You don't know if we have any friends from Kardashian in the room, but they've been talking forever that science is. See are. Publishers, transforming their contents, repackaging and repurposing it into multimedia content, into policy papers into less structured content types than something that would fit in Jackson a journal article to make their content accessible and connect with different audiences.
So we'll see more code publication. I think we'll see more standalone kind of multimedia objects, whether it's podcasts or infographics or videos or even chat agents that are just there for you to talk with. Many things are possible here in the future. Great So I'm going to open it up to questions from the room. Steph's going to come around with a mic.
OK my question is for Will. Actually, with the future predictions. You mentioned the headless platform as the possibility for a couple years down the road. And I wondering what you guys are doing at Silverchair to future proof how we can at least still track and monitor usage of the content if it's being distributed over all these other different types of platforms. Great question.
There's two ways to think about usage. One is where are you sending content. So when we think about our platform roadmap and how we are investing some of our development hours, it's in building stronger tooling and APIs with reporting on top of it to say, we sent this content there. And then there are a number of broader industry initiatives like distributed usage logging.
I'm sure it's changed names about eight times now. That's all about aggregating usage data from other platforms like ResearchGate and then consolidating that into your counter usage report. This is also a space where I think publishers can make use of more sophisticated marketing technology. Cross-domain tracking analytics products are out there that can help publishers understand their content and how it is used in many different ways.
So a lot to be done. There's a lot of things that need to be solved. One of those is getting down to what are the standards and normative conventions for all of us to start sharing and sending usage data places. Any other questions. I saw a couple of hands go up.
If not, I have some. So I'll keep. I'll keep asking them. All right. So one of the things that I think as we were pulling these trends together that I got to thinking about was scale. I think we talk a lot about how technology can enable scale and things like that, but I wonder if there are any specific ways in which smaller organizations can benefit from the scale of a wider technology or how to get the most out of those smaller organizational budgets.
Now I can take that one. I think that this goes back to a point that you made, Sam right. So speaking with a variety of different types of publishers over my years in the industry, for sure. One of the struggles for smaller publishers is staff time folks wearing multiple hats and especially now the focus on author as customer, what that means for extra work for those folks. So editorial person has now become a marketing person and vice versa.
So I would go back to your point that you made earlier, Sam, about freeing up time. And with that time, what can be done when folks really have one job instead of 2. Absolutely and I think this is another recommendation for partnerships. There are still a lot of smaller publishers, particularly nonprofit ones, that are running their own technology, maybe their own submission system or maybe their own content hosting platform.
It is increasingly difficult to do. I know what we have to do within Silverchair to keep up with SEO best practices, to meet accessibility standards, to meet new security standards, or even to help our publishers answer all the security questionnaires they get from their institutional customers these days. And we get essentially spread that cost and that expertise across 38 publishers on the Silverchair platform.
And I can't imagine doing that alone. That means you have to be able to attract and retain talent. You have to be able to continually reinvest in your technology. You can't just let code sit still. You can, but it's not going to work that well for very long. All of those things take scale and it takes dollars and it takes resource. So if you're in that position, I recommend finding the right partners.
There are great technology companies in this industry that can help. Other questions from the room. Yep Hi. Thanks I had a question about AI, which is everywhere. And this meeting and potentially less than a year away from dominating search on platforms. And I'm curious as to learn how Silverchair and Silverchair labs is going to improve search functions.
If we can have conversational search on the platform beyond just the typical old school way of googling that I know. Any comments on that. Thanks certainly. So as part of our AI lab, we're looking at leveraging RAG models or retrieval augmented generation. Gosh, just got the and RAG2 model wrong. This is what happens when you have the CEO and not a technologist sitting up here.
But we're looking at how we can leverage RAG models to allow publishers to control their content, leverage all the deep intelligence that is in it, and create great utility for end users in a lot of ways. Many of our publishers are interested in conversational search. If you think about the learner as the user, understanding scholarly or scientific content is a lot easier if you can just ask a question in plain English rather than in Boolean operators.
So we see that being really important. What we're focusing on now is the very core aspect of information retrieval. Comes at a pretty appreciable cost. We know that there are going to be high kind of user expectation bars for what is a quality response. I'm sure lots of us have played around with Google or ChatGPT it a question and got some absolutely ludicrous result back and it makes you distrust what you're reading or what the response was.
That would be the worst possible thing, I think, for scientific or scholarly publishers. Our entire world is about brands and trust. So what we are focusing on is quality. How do we get the right information, the right articles, the right references out of a publishers content store and provide essentially reasonable levels of quality responses back to end users. So we're focusing on that now.
We see a world where conversational search is enabled, where I can enable suggested reading, where I can provide linking to other types of content that may be helpful for the end user. So early days. We're just doing our initial pilots now. We're seeing some decent results, but we have to learn how to fine tune kind of all the systems that link together to do this.
Big question here, and I just want to add one thing on there. Come to our booth and we'll show you what we call the playground. Yeah so I is a really big topic of conversation. But there's so much nuance within like AI. Are we talking about Jen. Are we talking about machine learning. LLMs and I want to understand a little bit more about how you're educating your customers about AI and bringing AI to them because it is so large and it's such a big concept.
So we'd love to hear some thoughts on that. Yes so cheap and fast plug for going to our website silverchair.com and finding our Resource Center. So we have a whole series of webinars that start with primers. I think we have an A to Z term glossary that can help folks understand what is an LLM. What do we mean when we talk about generative AI, lots of resources there.
And more kind of webinars to come. Was a publisher for a really, really long time. And then when I started working at Silverchair, I felt like I had to go apologize to every technology partner I ever worked with because there's one thing that I now know for certain, which is there are very few publishers who understand and appreciate technology and how complex it is.
I was a journalism major before I started in publishing. I still haven't written a line of code despite what I do for a living. But I know this. We have to encourage our publishers to begin experimenting, to use a chat agent to look at what happens when you ask grok a question versus Claude, which are two kind of big LLMs out there and from providers in the market.
And we also have to encourage publishers to then go talk to their stakeholders. So talk with their learners, their readers, their editors about how these technologies can be used because there are so many ways they can potentially be misused. So our commitment with the AI lab and all the programming that we do is we're going to be as candid and transparent as we possibly can with lessons learned.
We will get things wrong. We will figure out eight stupid ways of doing things before we find the one or two ways that actually work. And we think there's lots of value in this community learning and exploring together. And largely talking about generative AI and just remember, the inherent in a lot of technology solutions in our space are really simple forms of machine learning that have been around for a very long time.
Whether that's content, tagging solutions, things that may help you with taxonomy. Even the basics of search on your site are largely relying on machine learning and some pretty fancy math. So publishers have been engaging with these technologies for a long time. They just come with a nice shiny new wrapper now. I think we have time for just one more question, if there is one.
If not, I do have a second great trend towards modern media. Yes can you talk a little about what Silverchair is doing to accommodate any kind of big shift towards more multimedia? Sure Yeah. So the question was shift to multimedia. What is Silverchair doing. So the first thing in one of the strengths of our platform has always been treating every content object as a first class thing, right that the platform can handle.
A journal article just as well as a book chapter as well as a monograph or a conference proceeding. And what we've started to do is build tools and ways of presenting that content that are much, much more flexible. So we have new ways of getting content into the platform that doesn't require highly structured XML or jats. We have things that look like WordPress. We call it Silverchair composer, which is all about helping publishers create that content, whether it's a short blog post or if they want to create a video library or if they want to have podcasts kind of embedded in a journal or as a standalone product itself.
So we've been working a lot at enabling the easy flow of new content types onto the platform and then treating those as standalone first class objects. One of the key aspects of our architecture is that you don't have to call something a journal and give it an n to sell it. So you can quickly create products by pulling a sampling of content across multiple product types. So books or journals or conference proceedings or gray literature in a composer page and assign it your entitlement or your commerce rules.
So putting that product layer around it. And that's another way that we're helping publishers with this journey. We're no longer just selling books or databases of journals. We're increasingly selling curated collections of a lot of different content types. Great that brings us to time. Thank you so much. We will be around this week all over the place, but come by our booth at any point to continue to talk about our lab or anything else.
Thanks Thank you all very much.
Segment:0 .
All right. Hi, everybody. It's officially one. It's actually 215, but this clock says 115. So we will go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for joining the Silverchair team today as we talk about the transformation of publishing platforms in this session, we are going to share some of our insights on the future of publishing platforms informed by conversations over the years with different stakeholders across the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
We do have a poll loaded into this session in the Whova app, so feel free to answer it now at any point during the conversation or at the end when we get to it. So without further ado. Well, maybe. All right. Without further ado, we will introduce ourselves. I'm Samantha green. I'm the director of product marketing at Silverchair.
I'm Will Schweitzer. I'm Silverchair CEO. And I'm Betsy Donahue, the senior vice president of business development at Silverchair. So I am going to the slides. Not changing. Here we go. Resume slideshow.
Let's see. Anybody know where the tech person went. That's so weird. About talent show. You going to do some soft shoe. Yeah OK, we'll just. We'll just riff.
It's fine. Well, Thank you. Very kind. Yes we just pretend to be a technology company. There you are.
You're going now. Yep all right. Here we go. Back there. Just all right. So this is us again. OK So I am going to kick us off with a little bit of scene setting. So publishing platforms today are obviously an incredibly critical part of your publishing infrastructure.
But one thing that we hear a lot is the sense of worry when it comes to platforms. Are they going to continue to be this critical in the future. Are they going to continue to be so central to our strategies. Maybe AI enhanced search and discovery is putting platform traffic at risk, or maybe the lack of innovation might threaten the platforms ability to evolve or to keep up with other research tools. Maybe there's even some complacency happening.
Maybe we're not as willing to invest in publishing platforms and infrastructure or. Is away making platforms obsolete with business models that are kind of struggling. To support such infrastructure. There's a lot of changing market forces at play here. And we. Hear every day from publishers that we work with and publishers just across the industry.
Who are struggling to strategize with so many unknowns. But to answer our original question, our platforms, the future. We think that they can be with the right strategy and with the right tools. The platform of the future might look different, function differently, or even serve additional strategic goals, but a core focus on partnership, flexibility and strategy to build on the right trends and mitigate the most risk can help secure a sustainable publishing program.
We're going to talk briefly about three trends that we've been hearing from the market turn to some predictions for the future and then hopefully have plenty of time at the end for questions and discussion. So I will hand it over to Will. The first trend we want to talk about was independence without isolation. And really, simply put, none of us have one product, one platform that is going to serve all the needs of our stakeholders.
And when think of a typical Silverchair publisher, we probably support dozens of integrations with other service providers, whether it's Cadmore as a video player or upstream, kind of in your manuscript submission space, maybe research integrity tools and think that emphasizes the need to have a few things. One is open architecture partners that are willing to work together and integrate together and then strong cross industry relationships.
We know at Silverchair that we're a really, really good hosting platform, lots of other stuff that we could do, but we know we aren't going to be the best. So we think very carefully about who we partner with, how we help enable our publishers product strategies and their vision. And that's really important to us. And I think it's really important for the future for a lot of publishers.
In the Betty trying to and. I'm really going to try hard not to mess this word up. Interoperability it's a must have. So here's a bit on why. Similar to the strategic partnerships we're seeing across the industry at large, we're seeing the drive for more and more integration collaboration in the technology space. So infrastructure that's very interoperable is flexible, provides a supremely unique advantage for publishers, specifically to incorporate new content features to surface very powerful data for a number of use cases.
And then finally, to ensure the best in class experience for that variety of stakeholders, from authors to readers and funders. Et cetera. And the how here is about partnerships will touch on that in his previous slide. But vendors and service providers create these proactive partnerships to ensure easier adoption and seamless processes for our mutual publisher clients.
And in this process and partnership, all parties win, which is critical. So this allows our shared publisher clients to quickly adapt to market changes. And we all know how quickly our market is changing these days to experiment and pilot in places where they normally wouldn't before and to basically proceed with no barriers to innovation. These are very powerful abilities in these partnerships, and we feel really strongly that this is critical in this trend that's developing.
And the example that's nearest and dearest to our hearts is, of course, the Silverchair universe program. If you're not familiar with the Silverchair universe, it's a framework of complementary products and services to integrate on the Silverchair platform. And universe partners are what we call pre-integrated, and there are best in class vendor partners that provide everything from content and data structuring, video hosting, open science solution, et cetera.
These technologies are proactively incorporated into standard page templates and site configuration tools. Silver chair and this allows Silverchair to really streamline the activation for standard integrations and thus eliminating that often hurdle for doing more on your platform. So really to sum it up, this slide is a trend. We're expecting to stick around for a while.
And our third trend. So building on that need that Betsy just talked about for interoperability to make sure that your unique audience has the tools that it needs and can evolve and grow. Our last trend is really about strategic risk taking more generally. So I think we're at a point where with platforms today, risk is a requirement for survival.
You need to take chances, you need to try new things, you need to experiment. But as we've discussed, that risk taking can't happen without partnerships across different stakeholders in this industry. And it can't happen without relying on technology and various types of various pieces of publishing infrastructure to take responsibility for things like security, accessibility, privacy, things like GDPR standards or the Accessibility Act.
Those sort of internet wide standards and practices are very complex to comply with and allowing shared infrastructure to take that load frees up publisher time. And with that time. And with that space, there's no room for risk taking and experimentation, exploring new ways to drive revenue or offer valuable tools to members, readers and authors.
From Silverchair's perspective, we want to create space for those experiments and ideas to thrive in as many ways as we can. And in as many ways as our publishers can dream up our platform. Tools like composer extend Omni format content content capabilities, creating a space for content like blogs, commercial content, journalistic content, marketing, whitepapers you name it.
And publishers can promote that content to drive traffic to their site or publish sponsored content to drive revenue from different areas. And the last example of how relying on shared infrastructure frees up space for strategic risk taking is Silverchair's AI lab as I'm sure we'll talk about extensively over the next few days, moves so quickly that I think it's really hard to strategize for it in a long term sense.
So our approach is really to collaborate and build together with our publishing partners. And together we can harness the potential of AI to accelerate pretty much everything and improve and enhance publishing platforms in ways we maybe haven't even thought of yet. And right now what we're doing is working with publishers on our AI playground, and this is a tool that helps them to analyze different LLMs, different search parameters and identify what works and what is necessary from a cost perspective, as well as an accuracy perspective when it comes to chats and queries on scholarly research.
And critically, I think a lot of the conversations around AI are how we can use these tools to drive users back to the platform for an enhanced experience. And that's the kind of risk taking that is informed by partnership, supported by shared infrastructure and flexible enough for a variety of publishing strategies. So that brings us through our three trends that we wanted to talk about.
And I'm going to turn it back to Will to outline some possible predictions for the future. It'll be fun to see how many of these will be wrong in five years. So we spent a lot of time talking with our community, talking with other technology and service providers in the space, and there are kind of three predictions that I think are worth discussion.
One is that there is utility beyond the hype of AI. There are legitimate use cases for these technologies to enhance search, to help users understand content, help doctors find relevant material faster. And we're all on this learning curve at the moment with things like the AI lab we're starting to publishers are starting to define use cases and we are figuring out how to ensure quality and predictability in developing features.
So AI is here to stay and right now we're all exploring, but we need to think about some of the negative consequences of AI. So initial data from Google's generative search experience showed that it could reduce organic search traffic by 20% to 60% depending on the publisher. And this will come back in when we talk about the trend in over three years about a headless platform, that there is a possibility that publishers become increasingly disintermediated, that content is not consumed on platforms like Silverchair or on the publishers website, but it's delivered to an end user in an open app or their research app or whatever their workflow tool of choice is.
And we see that in a lot of advanced kind of information spaces already. So if you are a aerospace engineer, you're having valuable information delivered straight into your product lifecycle management system and the future could look more like that than someone starting a search in Google or starting a search in MEDLINE or Scopus or opening up an alert and clicking through to the journals platform.
And publishers need to think about that and what it means for their audience and how they build connections. We expect publishing to speed up some of this will be enabled by AI, but we know that there is a broad acceleration of science. Many people have been talking for years now about new research outputs. We certainly see that with content coming into the social platform.
And then many publishers are focused on author experience. All of that, I think, means speed and publishing, speeding up, which means we're going to need different tools, different ways to help curate content for audiences, help them find the most relevant, most high quality information. A whole set of solutions that aren't in place now, but this community can certainly come together and build. And then last, it's kind of a risky thing for us to say, but we think there's a potential for headless platforms.
That platforms become content management systems and the most pure sense and that what a platform. Wow Wow. It got dark. Really, really dark. Ominous is there a light switch over. There we go. Thank you.
Thank you. It took a dark turn. A really dark turn. But if you think about what platforms do right. Platforms are all about making content accessible, and there's a lot. Serves distribute, indicate their content in lots of places.
Publishers have always done this right. Publishers have always licensed their content to companies like EBSCO or with their content in store or work with partners like to resell their content to different markets. That isn't going to change. But what we could see is the value in having a journal website as a home where you're driving a majority of your traffic may become antiquated in a world where you want to make sure you get your content to your audience where they want to read it.
So maybe that content is in OpenAI. Maybe that content is in the Researcher app or a mobile first application. There is a world where the journal home and the journal home page probably aren't that important, and that means very different things for our business models, for how we market and how we build relationships with authors and readers.
Great, great. Thanks so this is going to bring us to the interactive portion of the session. So we've got about 15 minutes left. As I said at the start, there is a poll in the app in this session. We already had a bunch of responses actually. So we'll give a couple of minutes for that.
OK, so responses will continue to come into this. But the one that seems to be really taking the cake is new formats beyond the article. So as we get started with questions, I wonder if either of you want to talk at all about what new formats might look like on a platform or what that kind of means for the future of a publishing platform.
Yeah, I can take that one. So when I think of New formats for an article, I think about the variety of different ways that publishers have described. What is the war on the PDF, the notion that folks come and download the PDF, and that's that there are interactive levels and layers that you can put on those PDFs to actually learn how long a reader is spending in that paper, which sections of the paper they're spending time on, how often they visit and go save it.
There is a wealth of data, of course, you can collect in that interactive version. So I think that building on that and creating layers to that as well is a potential path for content. You don't know if we have any friends from Kardashian in the room, but they've been talking forever that science is. See are. Publishers, transforming their contents, repackaging and repurposing it into multimedia content, into policy papers into less structured content types than something that would fit in Jackson a journal article to make their content accessible and connect with different audiences.
So we'll see more code publication. I think we'll see more standalone kind of multimedia objects, whether it's podcasts or infographics or videos or even chat agents that are just there for you to talk with. Many things are possible here in the future. Great So I'm going to open it up to questions from the room. Steph's going to come around with a mic.
OK my question is for Will. Actually, with the future predictions. You mentioned the headless platform as the possibility for a couple years down the road. And I wondering what you guys are doing at Silverchair to future proof how we can at least still track and monitor usage of the content if it's being distributed over all these other different types of platforms. Great question.
There's two ways to think about usage. One is where are you sending content. So when we think about our platform roadmap and how we are investing some of our development hours, it's in building stronger tooling and APIs with reporting on top of it to say, we sent this content there. And then there are a number of broader industry initiatives like distributed usage logging.
I'm sure it's changed names about eight times now. That's all about aggregating usage data from other platforms like ResearchGate and then consolidating that into your counter usage report. This is also a space where I think publishers can make use of more sophisticated marketing technology. Cross-domain tracking analytics products are out there that can help publishers understand their content and how it is used in many different ways.
So a lot to be done. There's a lot of things that need to be solved. One of those is getting down to what are the standards and normative conventions for all of us to start sharing and sending usage data places. Any other questions. I saw a couple of hands go up.
If not, I have some. So I'll keep. I'll keep asking them. All right. So one of the things that I think as we were pulling these trends together that I got to thinking about was scale. I think we talk a lot about how technology can enable scale and things like that, but I wonder if there are any specific ways in which smaller organizations can benefit from the scale of a wider technology or how to get the most out of those smaller organizational budgets.
Now I can take that one. I think that this goes back to a point that you made, Sam right. So speaking with a variety of different types of publishers over my years in the industry, for sure. One of the struggles for smaller publishers is staff time folks wearing multiple hats and especially now the focus on author as customer, what that means for extra work for those folks. So editorial person has now become a marketing person and vice versa.
So I would go back to your point that you made earlier, Sam, about freeing up time. And with that time, what can be done when folks really have one job instead of 2. Absolutely and I think this is another recommendation for partnerships. There are still a lot of smaller publishers, particularly nonprofit ones, that are running their own technology, maybe their own submission system or maybe their own content hosting platform.
It is increasingly difficult to do. I know what we have to do within Silverchair to keep up with SEO best practices, to meet accessibility standards, to meet new security standards, or even to help our publishers answer all the security questionnaires they get from their institutional customers these days. And we get essentially spread that cost and that expertise across 38 publishers on the Silverchair platform.
And I can't imagine doing that alone. That means you have to be able to attract and retain talent. You have to be able to continually reinvest in your technology. You can't just let code sit still. You can, but it's not going to work that well for very long. All of those things take scale and it takes dollars and it takes resource. So if you're in that position, I recommend finding the right partners.
There are great technology companies in this industry that can help. Other questions from the room. Yep Hi. Thanks I had a question about AI, which is everywhere. And this meeting and potentially less than a year away from dominating search on platforms. And I'm curious as to learn how Silverchair and Silverchair labs is going to improve search functions.
If we can have conversational search on the platform beyond just the typical old school way of googling that I know. Any comments on that. Thanks certainly. So as part of our AI lab, we're looking at leveraging RAG models or retrieval augmented generation. Gosh, just got the and RAG2 model wrong. This is what happens when you have the CEO and not a technologist sitting up here.
But we're looking at how we can leverage RAG models to allow publishers to control their content, leverage all the deep intelligence that is in it, and create great utility for end users in a lot of ways. Many of our publishers are interested in conversational search. If you think about the learner as the user, understanding scholarly or scientific content is a lot easier if you can just ask a question in plain English rather than in Boolean operators.
So we see that being really important. What we're focusing on now is the very core aspect of information retrieval. Comes at a pretty appreciable cost. We know that there are going to be high kind of user expectation bars for what is a quality response. I'm sure lots of us have played around with Google or ChatGPT it a question and got some absolutely ludicrous result back and it makes you distrust what you're reading or what the response was.
That would be the worst possible thing, I think, for scientific or scholarly publishers. Our entire world is about brands and trust. So what we are focusing on is quality. How do we get the right information, the right articles, the right references out of a publishers content store and provide essentially reasonable levels of quality responses back to end users. So we're focusing on that now.
We see a world where conversational search is enabled, where I can enable suggested reading, where I can provide linking to other types of content that may be helpful for the end user. So early days. We're just doing our initial pilots now. We're seeing some decent results, but we have to learn how to fine tune kind of all the systems that link together to do this.
Big question here, and I just want to add one thing on there. Come to our booth and we'll show you what we call the playground. Yeah so I is a really big topic of conversation. But there's so much nuance within like AI. Are we talking about Jen. Are we talking about machine learning. LLMs and I want to understand a little bit more about how you're educating your customers about AI and bringing AI to them because it is so large and it's such a big concept.
So we'd love to hear some thoughts on that. Yes so cheap and fast plug for going to our website silverchair.com and finding our Resource Center. So we have a whole series of webinars that start with primers. I think we have an A to Z term glossary that can help folks understand what is an LLM. What do we mean when we talk about generative AI, lots of resources there.
And more kind of webinars to come. Was a publisher for a really, really long time. And then when I started working at Silverchair, I felt like I had to go apologize to every technology partner I ever worked with because there's one thing that I now know for certain, which is there are very few publishers who understand and appreciate technology and how complex it is.
I was a journalism major before I started in publishing. I still haven't written a line of code despite what I do for a living. But I know this. We have to encourage our publishers to begin experimenting, to use a chat agent to look at what happens when you ask grok a question versus Claude, which are two kind of big LLMs out there and from providers in the market.
And we also have to encourage publishers to then go talk to their stakeholders. So talk with their learners, their readers, their editors about how these technologies can be used because there are so many ways they can potentially be misused. So our commitment with the AI lab and all the programming that we do is we're going to be as candid and transparent as we possibly can with lessons learned.
We will get things wrong. We will figure out eight stupid ways of doing things before we find the one or two ways that actually work. And we think there's lots of value in this community learning and exploring together. And largely talking about generative AI and just remember, the inherent in a lot of technology solutions in our space are really simple forms of machine learning that have been around for a very long time.
Whether that's content, tagging solutions, things that may help you with taxonomy. Even the basics of search on your site are largely relying on machine learning and some pretty fancy math. So publishers have been engaging with these technologies for a long time. They just come with a nice shiny new wrapper now. I think we have time for just one more question, if there is one.
If not, I do have a second great trend towards modern media. Yes can you talk a little about what Silverchair is doing to accommodate any kind of big shift towards more multimedia? Sure Yeah. So the question was shift to multimedia. What is Silverchair doing. So the first thing in one of the strengths of our platform has always been treating every content object as a first class thing, right that the platform can handle.
A journal article just as well as a book chapter as well as a monograph or a conference proceeding. And what we've started to do is build tools and ways of presenting that content that are much, much more flexible. So we have new ways of getting content into the platform that doesn't require highly structured XML or jats. We have things that look like WordPress. We call it Silverchair composer, which is all about helping publishers create that content, whether it's a short blog post or if they want to create a video library or if they want to have podcasts kind of embedded in a journal or as a standalone product itself.
So we've been working a lot at enabling the easy flow of new content types onto the platform and then treating those as standalone first class objects. One of the key aspects of our architecture is that you don't have to call something a journal and give it an n to sell it. So you can quickly create products by pulling a sampling of content across multiple product types. So books or journals or conference proceedings or gray literature in a composer page and assign it your entitlement or your commerce rules.
So putting that product layer around it. And that's another way that we're helping publishers with this journey. We're no longer just selling books or databases of journals. We're increasingly selling curated collections of a lot of different content types. Great that brings us to time. Thank you so much. We will be around this week all over the place, but come by our booth at any point to continue to talk about our lab or anything else.
Thanks Thank you all very much.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode