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Building services around open discovery-NISO Plus
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Building services around open discovery-NISO Plus
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Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Hey welcome to Building services around Open Discovery. Just a quick glance through the schedule for NISO Plus 22 makes it clear that discoverability, distribution and metrics are central issues for academic publishers. Even for publishers with subscription journal content, open access has raised the stakes in terms of visibility, user engagement, and article level metrics. While abstracting and indexing services have a long standing tradition among academic publishers and librarians supporting discoverability, open discovery is still developing and creating both disruptions and opportunities.
SPEAKER 1: The new discovery landscape can be challenging to navigate for academic publishers who are shifting increasing resources toward open scholarship principles for both journals and books. I am excited to be moderating the session today that brings together three innovative companies building up services in the open discovery space. Knowledge Unlatched, ResearchGate, and ScienceOpen.
SPEAKER 1: Knowledge Unlatched has been a leader in exploring new funding models for open access and has built an extensive open research library for OA books. ResearchGate is the leading researcher networking platform, and has recently been working with publishers on content syndication. ScienceOpen is developing hosting and publishing services embedded in an Open Discovery environment. We'll kick off this session with a short recorded presentation by each speaker, and then move to an open panel discussion.
SPEAKER 1: We explicitly plan to leave more time for the panel to answer questions and discuss issues around user engagement, business intelligence, content syndication, metadata, and business models around Open Discovery. You can submit questions during the screening, or in the Q&A during the panel session. A sustainable Open Discovery infrastructure will depend on constructive collaboration within the community, joint standards, and successful business models.
SPEAKER 1: And that means we're all involved here and your input is very valuable. So I'm happy to introduce our first speaker. Philip Hess is the head of publisher relations at Knowlege Unlatched, a leading marketplace for open access content. In that role he is creating and establishing business models, helping creators of openly-accessible academic content to sustainably fund their operations.
SPEAKER 1: Prior to that, he was working for Kiron, a platform that offers higher education to refugees. He received a master's degree from the University of St. Gallen and the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin with a focus on leadership and digital communication, after studying engineering and industrial design in the Netherlands and Japan. His goal is to make knowledge accessible to everyone and everywhere, and to help shape the future dissemination of scholarly content.
SPEAKER 1: Our second speaker is Soren Hofmayer is co-founder and chief strategy officer at ResearchGate. Soren began his career in medicine, completing a PhD in virology alongside co-founder, Ijad Madish. In 2008, Ijad and Soren teamed up with computer scientists, Horst Fickenscher, and founded ResearchGate. Soren initially focused on increasing member growth and activity, and in 2013 began building the commercial side of the business.
SPEAKER 1: Over the last few years. He has focused on the company's position within the broader research ecosystem, and expanded ResearchGate's offering by partnering with publishers, bringing more content to the platform and value to researchers. Our final speaker is Stephanie Dawson who is originally from California and studied at Yale and the University of Washington, but has been based in Berlin, Germany for the past 20 years.
SPEAKER 1: After over 10 years in a variety of roles in STEM book and journal publishing at De Gruyter, she joined the startup venture of ScienceOpen in 2013 to take a more digital approach to research communication dissemination. Today, Stephanie will be talking about some of the services ScienceOpen has built up around their Open Discovery platform. And now, I'd like to turn it over to our speakers.
PHILIPP HESS: Thank you very much. Going first, hello. Again, my name is Philipp Hess. I'm working at Knowledge Unlatched, and today I would like to tell you just briefly a little bit about what we do in general, but more focusing on how do we distribute and disseminate the content that we help to make open. With that being said, I want to tell you a little bit where do we come from, and what the kind of status is where all of our content that we distribute is being acquired, and what the business model behind it is.
PHILIPP HESS: And where we are going to take it into the future. And at the end of the day, maybe a couple of points that we would like to take into the discussion as well, so that you can also see a little bit where we see problems or-- problems but prospects of what we can do going forward. First of all, Knowledge Unlatched is a infrastructure, a marketplace that helps libraries and publishers being connected and making as much content as possible open access.
PHILIPP HESS: May be monographs or journals, or in some cases, even other forms of publications such as blog formats or videos, et cetera. We have so far helped fund more than 3,000 books and a couple more than 50 journals that we helped become available for free for everyone, everywhere. That's the goal. And how do we usually do that? Normally, we have publishers that submit their suggested content to us.
PHILIPP HESS: We then have a library committee that looks at all the content and says, this is good, this is also good, but not as good. And then we have library community that funds these titles in a pledging round that is usually happening from May until December. So that by the end of the year, we know which of the suggested content items we can fund. And then we go ahead make them available through our various channels that I'm going to be talking about in a second.
PHILIPP HESS: And then we, of course, pay the publisher. And this we do on a yearly basis. So then every year we have a new pledging round distributing more content. The first time we did that in 2013, so we are now in our ninth pledging around. What do we do once we have funded the content? Of course, this is a presentation about our hosting platform as well.
PHILIPP HESS: So I want to mention the Open Research Library, which is a hosting platform that we have established three years ago. And we basically did that because we had the need that all the titles, all the content items that we had as a more or less structured manner, because the publishers already submitted the metadata-- but then, once it was open, we needed to distribute it and before that we have sent it to several other hosting platforms, but they all required a different hosting standard, or they require different metadata standards.
PHILIPP HESS: And then, it has been uploaded the one instance first, and the other took a little longer, et cetera. And so then the libraries were asking us, hey, when is the content going to be open? And the publisher says, OK, why do I need to send it differently? So we, at one point, just created this Open Research Library to say, hey, this is one platform here. We can host everything that we have.
PHILIPP HESS: And then from there we can distribute it. But basically, to have the first harbor for the content to definitely be available, and then distribute it from there. That is more or less solely the only need that we had for the Open Research Library. Of course, we also want the content to be available there. And researchers, everybody else that's interested can look at it. But our main goal with what we do when we talk about distribution is really to spread it as wide as possible.
PHILIPP HESS: So we always want to send it to different hosting platforms, just such as JSTOR, OAPEN, Project MUSE and basically, everyone who wants to have it. It's really also on the publisher websites, every repository of every institution-- we really want that. But what we do with that is that we send out mark records for our partnering institutions that help fund it.
PHILIPP HESS: So that they can catalog it into their systems. We do, of course, have additional promotional material, such as social media, or in other systems. And what we then do from there is we gather as much usage of the platform to send it to as possible. So it's not only the Open Research Library that we try to catch, but also then, as I mentioned-- or even JSTOR and the other platforms-- we tell them, hey, please send us all the usage that you have together with the IP registry, and together with every kind of information that you have on the usage that you gather.
PHILIPP HESS: Of course, most of it will be counterfeit compliant. I don't think that anybody in the audience doesn't know what counter is, so I'm not going to go into detail here. If you have questions on that we can do that discussion later as well. And what we do with all the usage that is being captured through these different platforms is then, we start analyzing it, or we start visualizing it in different analytics dashboards.
PHILIPP HESS: We have three different dashboards that we want to visualize these in. That is on the one hand, the title usage dashboard, the country usage dashboard, and the institutional usage dashboard. So that whatever kind of data you want to see as a publisher or institution, you can really see what the users do with the content that you make available open.
PHILIPP HESS: So if we look at the title usage dashboard, for instance. This is now a very general overview of all different titles that we have. And you will see here it's called Title Interactions. Of course, I can explain that later. It's basically everything from an investigation, somebody reading it online, somebody downloading it because it's-- there are so many different forms of it, as we all know, that we basically say, these are all kind of interactions.
PHILIPP HESS: And there you can see, or we can see which titles that we made available open have the highest usage. So that in the future, we can also say we want to do different products for the institutions to acquire, or we can also implement publishers into these products and tell them these sort of titles, these topics, go particularly well. Right now, we can, for instance, see gender, economics, sustainable development goals, et cetera.
PHILIPP HESS: All of these titles that are on very timely topics, of course, receive a lot higher usage than maybe also a very qualitative title on medieval history because it's just not as up to date. So we can really always see a little bit of what's the nature of content being used at the moment, and from there, we'll set up our products or we'll give recommendations to publishers on how to do that. Same at the end of the day with the country usage board, so that we can see which countries are actually using it.
PHILIPP HESS: So that we can also look into the future and see for the next pledging round, who are we going to approach. Which institutions we can basically see in which countries, what kind of topics go particularly well in which areas in the world. So that we can also have maybe specific focus collection for a Spanish language mark, and on environmental issues, or you name it.
PHILIPP HESS: That was just an example, but we can really use this data to analyze this. And the same, of course, with the institutional usage. That is not only good for the institutions that work with us to see what their researchers actually do, but that we can also see what is being used there. How can they access the content that is most valuable for what the institution wants to provide to the researchers.
PHILIPP HESS: Now, just as a information. I can give you more information that in the discussion later. We do this with the IP registry, so that we have a database of the IPs from these institutions, so that we can allocate it directly to them. Even though that's nice, there are a couple of points that we really want to grow into the future, or want to also to find the right partners that might be able to help us with on these topics.
PHILIPP HESS: And they are basically divided into, of course, two major points-- publishers and institutions, and then there's a third very large point that I'm going to talk about a little bit in a second. The first one is the business intelligence for publishers. So what can they actually learn from it. And this is the-- I talked a little bit about it showing the country and the title usage reports.
PHILIPP HESS: The publishers can really see, OK, I have these 10 titles that are open access now. So without any restrictions, without any paywall whatsoever, people are looking at these kind of content items. So what can they learn from that. I'm going to do more of these books because I know that my audience wants to hear that. My audience wants to read that. And that's the same for the kind of readership that they know.
PHILIPP HESS: I have usage, or I know that there seems to be a faculty in that country, and they are reading my books like crazy. So I can know that maybe I'm going to that institution and try to acquire my next authors from that institution. And this is really just a click away to have this kind of business intelligence for them at hand. And the aim for institutions that they can say, great, I know now that the content that I help fund is being read.
PHILIPP HESS: Or this portion of what I have helped funding, is being read by my researchers at my institution, et cetera. And throughout all sorts of different platforms. So it's not just on the repository or on the single platform, but we really try to capture as many platforms as possible, which brings us to a third very, very large point. And that is the non-institutional usage allocation.
PHILIPP HESS: So I showed you the institutional usage and the country usage. And we can only capture the IP addresses from institutions, but we always see this large chunk within a city, for instance like Berlin, where I live. We have a couple of very high level institutions here with a lot of students. But the usage is five times higher than we capture from the IP ranges of these institutions.
PHILIPP HESS: So how do we know if this is being read by researchers, and the usage is funny enough always higher within the whole area where it also is higher within an institution. So right now, we are all working somewhat remotely. So people, of course, access the stuff at home as well. They read that. They work from home, so it's not always true-- that IP range. And this is a very interesting point where we will need to find certainly a point as to when we can capture that to the right institution, or to an acquisition pattern.
PHILIPP HESS: When can we identify? When can we say, this is a researcher of an institution? This is something that we certainly want to learn. But maybe that is also a good segue into Soren Hofmayer's presentation about ResearchGate. We'll have quite a knowledge on researchers and what they're working on. And with that, I would like to hand it over to our second speaker.
PHILIPP HESS: Thank you very much.
SOREN HOFMAYER: Thank you, Philipp. Very interesting. Yeah. My name is Soren. I'm one of the founders of ResearchGate and thanks again for the opportunity to speak here today, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion later on as well. We, at ResearchGate, have always had a very big vision and over the last 14 years I think we have been able to contribute significantly to a more open and connected world of research.
SOREN HOFMAYER: Our primary focus has always been the individual scientists, and building a platform for researchers to present themselves, connect with colleagues, and collaborate. And for many scientists, the research profile became their scholarly online identity. And some of the main use cases on our platform for these scientists is to build a presence to connect with colleagues, to also then increase the visibility of one's research.
SOREN HOFMAYER: But at the same time, of course, also discover research, access research, and discuss the research with colleagues on the platform. Today we have more than 22 million registered members and to create a profile on ResearchGate and actively contribute, you need to be a scientific professional. And over the last year, we saw more than 4 billion page views on our platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And many of these page views are happening in the context of Open Discovery. So at the center of every user's experience is the personal profile. The home of the professional identity. And it showcases the work, expertise, interests, but also illustrates scholarly impact based on different activities, research outputs, and a variety of statistics and metrics on the platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: All user profiles, the connections between these profiles, all the research content, all interactions, and signals that express interest or expertise are elements of a unique and well-curated graph that we call the social research graph. This graph is invisible to the users of the platform, but it powers the majority of the applications on the website.
SOREN HOFMAYER: So let's look at one example. Managing the flood of information. And in this context, please think of the graph as a filter on the long tail of all research output that is out there. And this filter only makes the most relevant pieces of information surface to the individual user when they are logged into their ResearchGate account. The first thing a user sees when they log in is the personal home feed.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And this feed provides notifications and updates, for example, new publications, presentations, conference, updates about new projects, or contributions to discussions. All these things that people are sharing on the platform. The signals that we are using are including, of course, my direct network on the platform, researchers I'm following, but also the extended network of colleagues, for example my co-author networks, or the network of people who have cited my work or I have cited.
SOREN HOFMAYER: But of course, we also make recommendations based on interest, expertise, or previous interactions with content on the platform. When a user clicks through, for example, to a publication detail page on ResearchGate-- you can not only read and engage with the content, but also discover projects or labs the paper is linked to. You can see personalized recommendations, similar work. You can see the people who cited or recommended this work, and also how your social network on the platform is connected to the piece of content.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And of course, you can directly reach out to the authors, message with them, start following them to keep further updates about their work. Traditionally, the content on the platform has either been uploaded by the users themselves, or ResearchGate has pooled it into the system. But the interesting news, and also one of the reasons I'm here today, is that we are now enabling publishers to actively participate and leverage this social research graph on the ResearchGate platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And to illustrate how this looks like in numbers-- this is an example of 38,000 publications that were syndicated onto the platform. Of these 38,000 publications, more than 180,000 authors have an RG account, are active users of the network. This is around 60% of all the authors. 5 million people are following these researchers on the platform, and 7.2 million coauthors are on the network.
SOREN HOFMAYER: The authors themselves, they will have the paper listed in their RG profile, and they will have access to usage and engagement statistics. And the followers of the authors of the extended network will see a notification, or an update in the feed I just shared as soon as new content is being added. But also, on the right hand side, you can see that more than 1.6 million RG members have a publication in their profile that was cited in one of these articles.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And they would also get a notification. And as we all know, a citation is a very high-value moment for researchers and something they like to be informed about. So I think this illustrates how powerful the network, or the networks on ResearchGate can be for researchers and publishers at the same time. And we have now turned this into a specific offering for publishers that we have officially launched in early 2022, so this month.
SOREN HOFMAYER: On the left hand side, there are the two products that are aimed at driving readership and engagement, the version of record hosting, entitled Access Syndication. This is also what the content syndication solution is made of, but we are not only looking at content dissemination, but rather trying to understand how can we use all these signals and data points that are created on the platform to build additional services to help publishers with other objectives.
SOREN HOFMAYER: For example, on the marketing side of things, to strengthen the awareness of the journal amongst a certain audience, or even more specifically, drive certain actions. Like acquiring new submissions, finding editors, or peer reviewers in our network. Thank you, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Thanks Philipp and Soren for the insights into your activities around encouraging and tracking user engagement. I think you're touching on some of the central challenges for publishers everywhere. I'm really excited to have this opportunity to talk about ScienceOpen's discovery environment, and the kinds of services that we've been developing to serve the information community, and sustainably run the technology.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So first an introduction of ScienceOpen. At our core, we are a discovery environment. We have around 75 million articles records on the platform. How we've built ScienceOpen-- we aggregate content from a few big open access sources. So the PubMed Central Open Access data subset, SciELO, Archive, and directly from our publisher customers. Whenever an article is ingested we analyze the references, we do a lookup in our own database.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: If we've seen that article before, we increase the citation index. If not, we go to PubMed, Crossref, Datasite, and pull in the publicly available metadata, and create a new record for that article. That allows us to grow the database iteratively around those topics that are particularly interesting for our customers. For example, we've added a lot of HSS content to the platform over the past two years as we work increasingly with University presses and adding books to the platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: On top of the database we have an interactive overlay researchers can register with their ORCID, promote their research. They can recommend, comment, share, review at a lay summary to their content, curate collections, and really with the goal to unlock the context around each article to reach a wider interdisciplinary audience.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And then I think what's unique about ScienceOpen. And what I want to talk about today are the services that we've developed that are embedded in that discovery environment. And those range from discovery and promotion, metadata support, open access hosting, and publishing solutions. We really started our journey with journal content, and that does make up the biggest part of the platform, but we are increasingly working with books and book metadata, and we do some work around conferences.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So to start with discovery and the collection infrastructure that we've built to promote journals, articles, and to build community. The discovery interface looks like this. You can type in your search term. You can apply a whole range of filters-- show me only open access, show me preprints, affiliation.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And you have the ability to sort those search results by altmetric score, date, citation, usage and more. And I think that allows you to answer really interesting questions about the search results. And then, in the left hand menu we have the narrow by collection, shortcuts that really highlight the feature collections that we create for our customers.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: If there's even just one article overlap with the search results. The article page we tried to create an interactive contextualized environment with a whole range of statistic, metric, and discovery features. We link to the full text version via the green publisher button.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So we really are trying for most of the content on our site, except for those hosted content, we really are sending that full text readers to the publisher website. So all of that usage tracking can also help on the publisher's website. And then we promote on every article page related collections using the keyword cloud the content in each collection, matching that to title, abstract, keywords of every article page.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: With our flexible collection infrastructure, we can pull together a range of contents, articles, books, chapters, data sets into a single searchable collection landing page that we promote throughout the platform. This can provide publishers with the technology to promote their brands while reacting quickly to the next big topic. I'm sure that all of you publishers were involved in creating and sharing collections of content around the novel coronavirus over the past two years.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: A topical collection can also be used to promote a selection of related journals on a single topic, or a single journal, or even pull together article book and chapters from all journals and publishers, such as this collection we created for UCL Press to promote their work on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Researchers can apply to be a collection editor and share their expertise, and their best-of reading lists on the platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Some of those are even really comprehensive bibliographies for the community where those search and discovery tools really come into play in this collection with almost 15,000 articles on ticks and tick-borne pathogens. Our metadata services have been built up around the support that we were providing for our customers any ways to get the best metadata into the ScienceOpen platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And to really provide better discoverability both within ScienceOpen and beyond. Most of our metadata support has been around book metadata. For Michigan Publishing and for Amsterdam University Press, for example, we deposit and/or enrich Crossref metadata records to ensure that those have abstracts which are used then by a lot of aggregators out there, like ScienceOpen.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: For smaller publishers we provide an interface to create and edit metadata for books, and chapters, and articles, including support in assigning a Doi that we then deposit at Crossref. So this whole step can be very challenging for some smaller book publishers, and we're really providing excellent support for that. The next step is really full open access hosting on the ScienceOpen platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So the journal fully embedded in our discovery environment, the version of record leading to the ScienceOpen URL. Just a few numbers from this morning-- 11,433 hosted open access articles. We at the moment have around 70 open access journals and preprint servers that are either live or under contract that we're building right now.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So it's really a place where we've seen a huge amount of growth over the past few years. Hosted journals on ScienceOpen profit from all of the search and sort filters and the context of a discovery database. From our roots in discovery, we naturally focus on each individual article. One of the challenges that we face, though, is to integrate aspects of volume, and issue, and pagination structure that was so essential for search on paper.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And still shapes the structure and expectations of many journals and editors and even aggregators. We added volume and issue as filters and an interactive table of contents on each article page to meet some of those expectations. We also have a static journal landing page, our collection detail page, that provides journals and editors easily editable space for editorial content.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: A submit manuscript button, journal statistics, Twitter feed, and more. So publishers can really use this platform as a home for their journal. Beyond that, we provide further tools for journal publishing, so a manuscript submission, peer review management, copyediting workflows, and more. So it's really possible to start and manage a new journal on ScienceOpen.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Either with open peer review, like this project together with UCL, or with a traditional blinded peer review. We have a simple configurable manuscript submission form. Editors can invite peer reviewers from the ScienceOpen user base, or by email from their own mail client. And we have a peer review management dashboard copy edit workflow.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: For open peer review, we've been working with preprints and article versioning together with University College London with the University of South Africa. We have a couple of other universities that we're talking to about this kind of preprint open peer review, and then move that to a journal publication. So that's some of really the core technology on the science open platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: To date we have created over 350 feature collections for over 50 customers. That's just really a whirlwind tour of the services that we've developed out of our Open Discovery technology and 8 years of experience. There are, of course, many more aspects that I could touch on, but we want to keep our recording short, so that we have more time to discuss the ways in which these different platforms and products are trying to meet the needs and demands for Open Discovery tools.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: I think as a community, we're not yet ready to say, Google is the only Open Discovery tool you'll ever need. So the kinds of services that we are developing among all of these platforms presented today, as well as many others out there are being conceived to provide that kind of discovery services to the public. And looking now at some of the services that are being developed to sustainably run this technology.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So I'm really excited to have a discussion with you all now at this NISO Plus conference. So thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Hey welcome to Building services around Open Discovery. Just a quick glance through the schedule for NISO Plus 22 makes it clear that discoverability, distribution and metrics are central issues for academic publishers. Even for publishers with subscription journal content, open access has raised the stakes in terms of visibility, user engagement, and article level metrics. While abstracting and indexing services have a long standing tradition among academic publishers and librarians supporting discoverability, open discovery is still developing and creating both disruptions and opportunities.
SPEAKER 1: The new discovery landscape can be challenging to navigate for academic publishers who are shifting increasing resources toward open scholarship principles for both journals and books. I am excited to be moderating the session today that brings together three innovative companies building up services in the open discovery space. Knowledge Unlatched, ResearchGate, and ScienceOpen.
SPEAKER 1: Knowledge Unlatched has been a leader in exploring new funding models for open access and has built an extensive open research library for OA books. ResearchGate is the leading researcher networking platform, and has recently been working with publishers on content syndication. ScienceOpen is developing hosting and publishing services embedded in an Open Discovery environment. We'll kick off this session with a short recorded presentation by each speaker, and then move to an open panel discussion.
SPEAKER 1: We explicitly plan to leave more time for the panel to answer questions and discuss issues around user engagement, business intelligence, content syndication, metadata, and business models around Open Discovery. You can submit questions during the screening, or in the Q&A during the panel session. A sustainable Open Discovery infrastructure will depend on constructive collaboration within the community, joint standards, and successful business models.
SPEAKER 1: And that means we're all involved here and your input is very valuable. So I'm happy to introduce our first speaker. Philip Hess is the head of publisher relations at Knowlege Unlatched, a leading marketplace for open access content. In that role he is creating and establishing business models, helping creators of openly-accessible academic content to sustainably fund their operations.
SPEAKER 1: Prior to that, he was working for Kiron, a platform that offers higher education to refugees. He received a master's degree from the University of St. Gallen and the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin with a focus on leadership and digital communication, after studying engineering and industrial design in the Netherlands and Japan. His goal is to make knowledge accessible to everyone and everywhere, and to help shape the future dissemination of scholarly content.
SPEAKER 1: Our second speaker is Soren Hofmayer is co-founder and chief strategy officer at ResearchGate. Soren began his career in medicine, completing a PhD in virology alongside co-founder, Ijad Madish. In 2008, Ijad and Soren teamed up with computer scientists, Horst Fickenscher, and founded ResearchGate. Soren initially focused on increasing member growth and activity, and in 2013 began building the commercial side of the business.
SPEAKER 1: Over the last few years. He has focused on the company's position within the broader research ecosystem, and expanded ResearchGate's offering by partnering with publishers, bringing more content to the platform and value to researchers. Our final speaker is Stephanie Dawson who is originally from California and studied at Yale and the University of Washington, but has been based in Berlin, Germany for the past 20 years.
SPEAKER 1: After over 10 years in a variety of roles in STEM book and journal publishing at De Gruyter, she joined the startup venture of ScienceOpen in 2013 to take a more digital approach to research communication dissemination. Today, Stephanie will be talking about some of the services ScienceOpen has built up around their Open Discovery platform. And now, I'd like to turn it over to our speakers.
PHILIPP HESS: Thank you very much. Going first, hello. Again, my name is Philipp Hess. I'm working at Knowledge Unlatched, and today I would like to tell you just briefly a little bit about what we do in general, but more focusing on how do we distribute and disseminate the content that we help to make open. With that being said, I want to tell you a little bit where do we come from, and what the kind of status is where all of our content that we distribute is being acquired, and what the business model behind it is.
PHILIPP HESS: And where we are going to take it into the future. And at the end of the day, maybe a couple of points that we would like to take into the discussion as well, so that you can also see a little bit where we see problems or-- problems but prospects of what we can do going forward. First of all, Knowledge Unlatched is a infrastructure, a marketplace that helps libraries and publishers being connected and making as much content as possible open access.
PHILIPP HESS: May be monographs or journals, or in some cases, even other forms of publications such as blog formats or videos, et cetera. We have so far helped fund more than 3,000 books and a couple more than 50 journals that we helped become available for free for everyone, everywhere. That's the goal. And how do we usually do that? Normally, we have publishers that submit their suggested content to us.
PHILIPP HESS: We then have a library committee that looks at all the content and says, this is good, this is also good, but not as good. And then we have library community that funds these titles in a pledging round that is usually happening from May until December. So that by the end of the year, we know which of the suggested content items we can fund. And then we go ahead make them available through our various channels that I'm going to be talking about in a second.
PHILIPP HESS: And then we, of course, pay the publisher. And this we do on a yearly basis. So then every year we have a new pledging round distributing more content. The first time we did that in 2013, so we are now in our ninth pledging around. What do we do once we have funded the content? Of course, this is a presentation about our hosting platform as well.
PHILIPP HESS: So I want to mention the Open Research Library, which is a hosting platform that we have established three years ago. And we basically did that because we had the need that all the titles, all the content items that we had as a more or less structured manner, because the publishers already submitted the metadata-- but then, once it was open, we needed to distribute it and before that we have sent it to several other hosting platforms, but they all required a different hosting standard, or they require different metadata standards.
PHILIPP HESS: And then, it has been uploaded the one instance first, and the other took a little longer, et cetera. And so then the libraries were asking us, hey, when is the content going to be open? And the publisher says, OK, why do I need to send it differently? So we, at one point, just created this Open Research Library to say, hey, this is one platform here. We can host everything that we have.
PHILIPP HESS: And then from there we can distribute it. But basically, to have the first harbor for the content to definitely be available, and then distribute it from there. That is more or less solely the only need that we had for the Open Research Library. Of course, we also want the content to be available there. And researchers, everybody else that's interested can look at it. But our main goal with what we do when we talk about distribution is really to spread it as wide as possible.
PHILIPP HESS: So we always want to send it to different hosting platforms, just such as JSTOR, OAPEN, Project MUSE and basically, everyone who wants to have it. It's really also on the publisher websites, every repository of every institution-- we really want that. But what we do with that is that we send out mark records for our partnering institutions that help fund it.
PHILIPP HESS: So that they can catalog it into their systems. We do, of course, have additional promotional material, such as social media, or in other systems. And what we then do from there is we gather as much usage of the platform to send it to as possible. So it's not only the Open Research Library that we try to catch, but also then, as I mentioned-- or even JSTOR and the other platforms-- we tell them, hey, please send us all the usage that you have together with the IP registry, and together with every kind of information that you have on the usage that you gather.
PHILIPP HESS: Of course, most of it will be counterfeit compliant. I don't think that anybody in the audience doesn't know what counter is, so I'm not going to go into detail here. If you have questions on that we can do that discussion later as well. And what we do with all the usage that is being captured through these different platforms is then, we start analyzing it, or we start visualizing it in different analytics dashboards.
PHILIPP HESS: We have three different dashboards that we want to visualize these in. That is on the one hand, the title usage dashboard, the country usage dashboard, and the institutional usage dashboard. So that whatever kind of data you want to see as a publisher or institution, you can really see what the users do with the content that you make available open.
PHILIPP HESS: So if we look at the title usage dashboard, for instance. This is now a very general overview of all different titles that we have. And you will see here it's called Title Interactions. Of course, I can explain that later. It's basically everything from an investigation, somebody reading it online, somebody downloading it because it's-- there are so many different forms of it, as we all know, that we basically say, these are all kind of interactions.
PHILIPP HESS: And there you can see, or we can see which titles that we made available open have the highest usage. So that in the future, we can also say we want to do different products for the institutions to acquire, or we can also implement publishers into these products and tell them these sort of titles, these topics, go particularly well. Right now, we can, for instance, see gender, economics, sustainable development goals, et cetera.
PHILIPP HESS: All of these titles that are on very timely topics, of course, receive a lot higher usage than maybe also a very qualitative title on medieval history because it's just not as up to date. So we can really always see a little bit of what's the nature of content being used at the moment, and from there, we'll set up our products or we'll give recommendations to publishers on how to do that. Same at the end of the day with the country usage board, so that we can see which countries are actually using it.
PHILIPP HESS: So that we can also look into the future and see for the next pledging round, who are we going to approach. Which institutions we can basically see in which countries, what kind of topics go particularly well in which areas in the world. So that we can also have maybe specific focus collection for a Spanish language mark, and on environmental issues, or you name it.
PHILIPP HESS: That was just an example, but we can really use this data to analyze this. And the same, of course, with the institutional usage. That is not only good for the institutions that work with us to see what their researchers actually do, but that we can also see what is being used there. How can they access the content that is most valuable for what the institution wants to provide to the researchers.
PHILIPP HESS: Now, just as a information. I can give you more information that in the discussion later. We do this with the IP registry, so that we have a database of the IPs from these institutions, so that we can allocate it directly to them. Even though that's nice, there are a couple of points that we really want to grow into the future, or want to also to find the right partners that might be able to help us with on these topics.
PHILIPP HESS: And they are basically divided into, of course, two major points-- publishers and institutions, and then there's a third very large point that I'm going to talk about a little bit in a second. The first one is the business intelligence for publishers. So what can they actually learn from it. And this is the-- I talked a little bit about it showing the country and the title usage reports.
PHILIPP HESS: The publishers can really see, OK, I have these 10 titles that are open access now. So without any restrictions, without any paywall whatsoever, people are looking at these kind of content items. So what can they learn from that. I'm going to do more of these books because I know that my audience wants to hear that. My audience wants to read that. And that's the same for the kind of readership that they know.
PHILIPP HESS: I have usage, or I know that there seems to be a faculty in that country, and they are reading my books like crazy. So I can know that maybe I'm going to that institution and try to acquire my next authors from that institution. And this is really just a click away to have this kind of business intelligence for them at hand. And the aim for institutions that they can say, great, I know now that the content that I help fund is being read.
PHILIPP HESS: Or this portion of what I have helped funding, is being read by my researchers at my institution, et cetera. And throughout all sorts of different platforms. So it's not just on the repository or on the single platform, but we really try to capture as many platforms as possible, which brings us to a third very, very large point. And that is the non-institutional usage allocation.
PHILIPP HESS: So I showed you the institutional usage and the country usage. And we can only capture the IP addresses from institutions, but we always see this large chunk within a city, for instance like Berlin, where I live. We have a couple of very high level institutions here with a lot of students. But the usage is five times higher than we capture from the IP ranges of these institutions.
PHILIPP HESS: So how do we know if this is being read by researchers, and the usage is funny enough always higher within the whole area where it also is higher within an institution. So right now, we are all working somewhat remotely. So people, of course, access the stuff at home as well. They read that. They work from home, so it's not always true-- that IP range. And this is a very interesting point where we will need to find certainly a point as to when we can capture that to the right institution, or to an acquisition pattern.
PHILIPP HESS: When can we identify? When can we say, this is a researcher of an institution? This is something that we certainly want to learn. But maybe that is also a good segue into Soren Hofmayer's presentation about ResearchGate. We'll have quite a knowledge on researchers and what they're working on. And with that, I would like to hand it over to our second speaker.
PHILIPP HESS: Thank you very much.
SOREN HOFMAYER: Thank you, Philipp. Very interesting. Yeah. My name is Soren. I'm one of the founders of ResearchGate and thanks again for the opportunity to speak here today, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion later on as well. We, at ResearchGate, have always had a very big vision and over the last 14 years I think we have been able to contribute significantly to a more open and connected world of research.
SOREN HOFMAYER: Our primary focus has always been the individual scientists, and building a platform for researchers to present themselves, connect with colleagues, and collaborate. And for many scientists, the research profile became their scholarly online identity. And some of the main use cases on our platform for these scientists is to build a presence to connect with colleagues, to also then increase the visibility of one's research.
SOREN HOFMAYER: But at the same time, of course, also discover research, access research, and discuss the research with colleagues on the platform. Today we have more than 22 million registered members and to create a profile on ResearchGate and actively contribute, you need to be a scientific professional. And over the last year, we saw more than 4 billion page views on our platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And many of these page views are happening in the context of Open Discovery. So at the center of every user's experience is the personal profile. The home of the professional identity. And it showcases the work, expertise, interests, but also illustrates scholarly impact based on different activities, research outputs, and a variety of statistics and metrics on the platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: All user profiles, the connections between these profiles, all the research content, all interactions, and signals that express interest or expertise are elements of a unique and well-curated graph that we call the social research graph. This graph is invisible to the users of the platform, but it powers the majority of the applications on the website.
SOREN HOFMAYER: So let's look at one example. Managing the flood of information. And in this context, please think of the graph as a filter on the long tail of all research output that is out there. And this filter only makes the most relevant pieces of information surface to the individual user when they are logged into their ResearchGate account. The first thing a user sees when they log in is the personal home feed.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And this feed provides notifications and updates, for example, new publications, presentations, conference, updates about new projects, or contributions to discussions. All these things that people are sharing on the platform. The signals that we are using are including, of course, my direct network on the platform, researchers I'm following, but also the extended network of colleagues, for example my co-author networks, or the network of people who have cited my work or I have cited.
SOREN HOFMAYER: But of course, we also make recommendations based on interest, expertise, or previous interactions with content on the platform. When a user clicks through, for example, to a publication detail page on ResearchGate-- you can not only read and engage with the content, but also discover projects or labs the paper is linked to. You can see personalized recommendations, similar work. You can see the people who cited or recommended this work, and also how your social network on the platform is connected to the piece of content.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And of course, you can directly reach out to the authors, message with them, start following them to keep further updates about their work. Traditionally, the content on the platform has either been uploaded by the users themselves, or ResearchGate has pooled it into the system. But the interesting news, and also one of the reasons I'm here today, is that we are now enabling publishers to actively participate and leverage this social research graph on the ResearchGate platform.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And to illustrate how this looks like in numbers-- this is an example of 38,000 publications that were syndicated onto the platform. Of these 38,000 publications, more than 180,000 authors have an RG account, are active users of the network. This is around 60% of all the authors. 5 million people are following these researchers on the platform, and 7.2 million coauthors are on the network.
SOREN HOFMAYER: The authors themselves, they will have the paper listed in their RG profile, and they will have access to usage and engagement statistics. And the followers of the authors of the extended network will see a notification, or an update in the feed I just shared as soon as new content is being added. But also, on the right hand side, you can see that more than 1.6 million RG members have a publication in their profile that was cited in one of these articles.
SOREN HOFMAYER: And they would also get a notification. And as we all know, a citation is a very high-value moment for researchers and something they like to be informed about. So I think this illustrates how powerful the network, or the networks on ResearchGate can be for researchers and publishers at the same time. And we have now turned this into a specific offering for publishers that we have officially launched in early 2022, so this month.
SOREN HOFMAYER: On the left hand side, there are the two products that are aimed at driving readership and engagement, the version of record hosting, entitled Access Syndication. This is also what the content syndication solution is made of, but we are not only looking at content dissemination, but rather trying to understand how can we use all these signals and data points that are created on the platform to build additional services to help publishers with other objectives.
SOREN HOFMAYER: For example, on the marketing side of things, to strengthen the awareness of the journal amongst a certain audience, or even more specifically, drive certain actions. Like acquiring new submissions, finding editors, or peer reviewers in our network. Thank you, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Thanks Philipp and Soren for the insights into your activities around encouraging and tracking user engagement. I think you're touching on some of the central challenges for publishers everywhere. I'm really excited to have this opportunity to talk about ScienceOpen's discovery environment, and the kinds of services that we've been developing to serve the information community, and sustainably run the technology.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So first an introduction of ScienceOpen. At our core, we are a discovery environment. We have around 75 million articles records on the platform. How we've built ScienceOpen-- we aggregate content from a few big open access sources. So the PubMed Central Open Access data subset, SciELO, Archive, and directly from our publisher customers. Whenever an article is ingested we analyze the references, we do a lookup in our own database.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: If we've seen that article before, we increase the citation index. If not, we go to PubMed, Crossref, Datasite, and pull in the publicly available metadata, and create a new record for that article. That allows us to grow the database iteratively around those topics that are particularly interesting for our customers. For example, we've added a lot of HSS content to the platform over the past two years as we work increasingly with University presses and adding books to the platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: On top of the database we have an interactive overlay researchers can register with their ORCID, promote their research. They can recommend, comment, share, review at a lay summary to their content, curate collections, and really with the goal to unlock the context around each article to reach a wider interdisciplinary audience.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And then I think what's unique about ScienceOpen. And what I want to talk about today are the services that we've developed that are embedded in that discovery environment. And those range from discovery and promotion, metadata support, open access hosting, and publishing solutions. We really started our journey with journal content, and that does make up the biggest part of the platform, but we are increasingly working with books and book metadata, and we do some work around conferences.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So to start with discovery and the collection infrastructure that we've built to promote journals, articles, and to build community. The discovery interface looks like this. You can type in your search term. You can apply a whole range of filters-- show me only open access, show me preprints, affiliation.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And you have the ability to sort those search results by altmetric score, date, citation, usage and more. And I think that allows you to answer really interesting questions about the search results. And then, in the left hand menu we have the narrow by collection, shortcuts that really highlight the feature collections that we create for our customers.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: If there's even just one article overlap with the search results. The article page we tried to create an interactive contextualized environment with a whole range of statistic, metric, and discovery features. We link to the full text version via the green publisher button.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So we really are trying for most of the content on our site, except for those hosted content, we really are sending that full text readers to the publisher website. So all of that usage tracking can also help on the publisher's website. And then we promote on every article page related collections using the keyword cloud the content in each collection, matching that to title, abstract, keywords of every article page.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: With our flexible collection infrastructure, we can pull together a range of contents, articles, books, chapters, data sets into a single searchable collection landing page that we promote throughout the platform. This can provide publishers with the technology to promote their brands while reacting quickly to the next big topic. I'm sure that all of you publishers were involved in creating and sharing collections of content around the novel coronavirus over the past two years.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: A topical collection can also be used to promote a selection of related journals on a single topic, or a single journal, or even pull together article book and chapters from all journals and publishers, such as this collection we created for UCL Press to promote their work on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Researchers can apply to be a collection editor and share their expertise, and their best-of reading lists on the platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Some of those are even really comprehensive bibliographies for the community where those search and discovery tools really come into play in this collection with almost 15,000 articles on ticks and tick-borne pathogens. Our metadata services have been built up around the support that we were providing for our customers any ways to get the best metadata into the ScienceOpen platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And to really provide better discoverability both within ScienceOpen and beyond. Most of our metadata support has been around book metadata. For Michigan Publishing and for Amsterdam University Press, for example, we deposit and/or enrich Crossref metadata records to ensure that those have abstracts which are used then by a lot of aggregators out there, like ScienceOpen.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: For smaller publishers we provide an interface to create and edit metadata for books, and chapters, and articles, including support in assigning a Doi that we then deposit at Crossref. So this whole step can be very challenging for some smaller book publishers, and we're really providing excellent support for that. The next step is really full open access hosting on the ScienceOpen platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So the journal fully embedded in our discovery environment, the version of record leading to the ScienceOpen URL. Just a few numbers from this morning-- 11,433 hosted open access articles. We at the moment have around 70 open access journals and preprint servers that are either live or under contract that we're building right now.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So it's really a place where we've seen a huge amount of growth over the past few years. Hosted journals on ScienceOpen profit from all of the search and sort filters and the context of a discovery database. From our roots in discovery, we naturally focus on each individual article. One of the challenges that we face, though, is to integrate aspects of volume, and issue, and pagination structure that was so essential for search on paper.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: And still shapes the structure and expectations of many journals and editors and even aggregators. We added volume and issue as filters and an interactive table of contents on each article page to meet some of those expectations. We also have a static journal landing page, our collection detail page, that provides journals and editors easily editable space for editorial content.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: A submit manuscript button, journal statistics, Twitter feed, and more. So publishers can really use this platform as a home for their journal. Beyond that, we provide further tools for journal publishing, so a manuscript submission, peer review management, copyediting workflows, and more. So it's really possible to start and manage a new journal on ScienceOpen.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: Either with open peer review, like this project together with UCL, or with a traditional blinded peer review. We have a simple configurable manuscript submission form. Editors can invite peer reviewers from the ScienceOpen user base, or by email from their own mail client. And we have a peer review management dashboard copy edit workflow.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: For open peer review, we've been working with preprints and article versioning together with University College London with the University of South Africa. We have a couple of other universities that we're talking to about this kind of preprint open peer review, and then move that to a journal publication. So that's some of really the core technology on the science open platform.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: To date we have created over 350 feature collections for over 50 customers. That's just really a whirlwind tour of the services that we've developed out of our Open Discovery technology and 8 years of experience. There are, of course, many more aspects that I could touch on, but we want to keep our recording short, so that we have more time to discuss the ways in which these different platforms and products are trying to meet the needs and demands for Open Discovery tools.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: I think as a community, we're not yet ready to say, Google is the only Open Discovery tool you'll ever need. So the kinds of services that we are developing among all of these platforms presented today, as well as many others out there are being conceived to provide that kind of discovery services to the public. And looking now at some of the services that are being developed to sustainably run this technology.
STEPHANIE DAWSON: So I'm really excited to have a discussion with you all now at this NISO Plus conference. So thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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