How to Use Data-Driven Strategies to Increase High-Quality Submissions

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How to Use Data-Driven Strategies to Increase High-Quality Submissions

Last month, customers, friends, and guest speakers from across the globe convened once again for our annual KGL PubFactory Virtual Series. During the course of the three-day event, a packed and topical agenda enabled the scholarly publishing community to share valuable insights, learnings, developments, advice and trends with their peers.

One of the highlights of the Industry Day (day two) program was a fascinating discussion chaired by KGL Senior Consultant, Annette Hager, entitled, Data-Driven Strategies for Increasing High Quality Submissions. This session explored practical ways in which publishers can integrate bibliometric and citation data into their editorial strategies in order to attract both larger volumes of submissions and, perhaps more importantly, higher quality content submissions.

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OSTP and Public Access: One Year Later

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OSTP and Public Access: One Year Later

As part of the 2023 KGL PubFactory Virtual Series, on October 11 we hosted Industry Day, a half-day online seminar of insights, discussion, and practical takeaways for the scholarly publishing community. Headlining the event was an informative discussion with KGL’s Cara Rivera and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library and Chef at The Scholarly Kitchen on the evolving implications of last year’s US policy memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research.

Cara asked Lisa about implications on APCs, data sharing, sustainability of journal business models, and long-term consequences of OA mandates. The recording of the 30-minute interview can be viewed below.

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Tackling Global Social Challenges through Technology

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Tackling Global Social Challenges through Technology

Optimizing Content Delivery to Advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have undoubtedly been among the hottest topics on the scholarly publishing agenda since we’ve come out of the pandemic. Although the 17 goals were established back in 2015, the publishing industry’s response to them has certainly accelerated since 2020, when a raft of publishers signed up to the SDG Publishers Compact, affirming their commitment to its 10-point action plan.

At the most recent Charleston Library Conference, KGL PubFactory’s Platform Services Director, Tom Beyer, hosted a lively panel debate which combined the perspectives of several prestigious social science publishers and an open resources librarian, showcasing how they are each adopting new technologies, implementing new initiatives and adapting their content delivery offerings to advance the SDGs and tackle global social challenges.

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

Looking to the year ahead once again, the KGL experts across book and journal publishing, scholarly and education markets, technology and business development, weigh in to highlight some of the industry trends we expect will be prominent in 2023. 

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The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

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The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

Globalization is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new trend. For decades, our world has steadily become more interconnected and, without doubt, this is a pattern that is set to continue long into the future. In scholarly publishing, this pattern is no different. But journal publishers are increasingly noting that globalization is progressively affecting every facet of the business—from editorial and production right through to financial and sales and marketing.

This is why at this year’s KGL PubFactory Virtual Series we dedicated a special session to the topic. Hosted by Kevin Lomangino, KGL’s Director of Consulting, platform customers were led through a fascinating presentation on how globalization is currently impacting scholarly publishing and how journal publishers can best position themselves to capitalize on this trend. The following highlights some of the most striking takeaways from the session.

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

With all the recent discussion around the US OSTP memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research, we think it’s worthwhile to take a step back to assess the current state of subscription and Open Access business models and review how we got here, before considering how to best navigate this changing landscape. The following article details the history of business model innovation in scholarly journal publishing, from a Trends Talk by KGL Consulting.

For over a hundred years, the business of publishing academic journals has been sustained by the subscription model. It was always an impeccably simple premise: institutions paid, authors authored, publishers published, readers read, institutions renewed, and repeat. The 1970s marked something of a heyday for this model - an era that is often viewed by the industry as some kind of utopia—when the scholarly publishing ecosystem seemed to thrive, with an abundance of journals entering the market, bursting library shelves, institutional agreements aplenty and high renewal rates.

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Publishing Trends: OSTP and Public Access

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Publishing Trends: OSTP and Public Access

As part of the KGL PubFactory Virtual Series, on October 6 we hosted Industry Day, a half-day online seminar of insights, discussion, and practical takeaways for the scholarly publishing community. Headlining the event was an informative discussion with KGL’s Cara Rivera and Howard Ratner of CHORUS on the implications of the recent US OSTP memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research.

Cara starts the session by reviewing what the memo says and doesn’t say, and presents excerpts from key industry stakeholders. Howard then masterfully explains potential impacts and important nuances. The recording of the 30-minute interview can be viewed here.

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

Greater competition to attract high quality authors and new business models to increase published articles have led to a renewed focus on author satisfaction. What are journals doing to address this? KGL Consulting has identified dozens of ways to help organizations succeed. Here are a few simple ideas to get started.

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Smarter Business Intelligence for the Open Access Era

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Smarter Business Intelligence for the Open Access Era

Recap of a poster session from the SSP 2022 Annual Meeting

Recently at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, KGL PubFactory’s Director of Platform Services, Tom Beyer, together with longtime platform partner, Stuart Maxwell, COO of Scholarly iQ, presented a poster on the advanced analytics available to publishers that many are still not using for their editorial, sales, and Plan S strategies. For those that are struggling with analysis paralysis trying to identify Open Access usage or meet reporting requirements for transformative journals, we recap the highlights of the findings and discussion here.

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Top Five Author Pain Points

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Top Five Author Pain Points

“If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it,” wrote Charles Bukowski in his poem “So you want to be a writer?” Being an author isn’t easy. Writers experience challenges in research, struggle with expressing their thesis, and even have writer’s block at times. But even if the ideas, the story, the research, and the writing all come bursting out of a writer, the difficulties don’t end there. Once the work is written, writers must then attempt to get their work published. And, as any writer can tell you, navigating the publishing process may be even more difficult than writing in the first place.

From an author perspective, the lack of development of this process poses significant difficulties during a time when their earnings have declined dramatically—42 percent over the last decade, according to an Authors Guild survey of trade and academic writer associations. The following are some of the more significant pain points for authors that publishers can help them navigate.

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How Are Scholarly Publishers Adapting To Open Access?

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How Are Scholarly Publishers Adapting To Open Access?

Throughout the twentieth century, academic institutions had a mandate to provide full access to the peer-reviewed scholarly literature and budgets that were more or less up to the task. Scholarly societies could count on journal subscription revenues to help fund programs and activities that benefitted their organizations, members, and fields.

Now open access models are gaining attention and growing in popularity, sometimes adding to and other times threatening the steady revenues that journal publishers have counted on for years. How will this and other seismic shifts affect the journal publishing industry moving forward?

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

Global Accessibility, Advanced Analytics, New Content Types, and More

In what has become an annual tradition here at KGL, we take stock at the start of the year, consult our publishing experts, and go out on a limb to try and foretell what the future holds for our industry. After two years of uncertainty in life as we know it, here are nevertheless some of the top predictions for ongoing and emerging trends that we think publishers should bear in mind as we all make our way carefully into 2022.

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Cara Rivera, Co-founder of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company

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Knowledge Sharing: 5 Minutes with Cara Rivera, Co-founder of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company

Recently, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) was very excited to announce the acquisition of Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company (KWF). The addition of sister companies, KWF Consulting and KWF Editorial adds new and expanded capabilities to the KGL portfolio and nearly 100 editorial and publishing business experts to our staff of industry professionals—not the least of whom, of course, is KWF co-founder, Cara (Kaufman) Rivera.

Assuming the new role of Vice President, Consulting and Analysis, Cara joined the KGL leadership team immediately following the November 2021 acquisition where she will continue to manage the business that is known for (among many other things), publishing the annual Journal Editorial Compensation Benchmark Study. With her decades of experience running KWF and working for commercial and society publishers, I wanted to learn more about what competencies she and her team bring to KGL, exactly how they serve journal publishers, and what she sees on the horizon for our industry.

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

Highlights and Reflections from the 2021 KGL PubFactory Virtual Series

Autumn is a busy time for KGL PubFactory. Each year, as industry events start to fill the calendar, our community of customers, partners and staff gather for our user group meeting—held the past two years as the PubFactory Virtual Series. This is a rare and refreshing opportunity to bring together all the inspiring professionals we work with on both sides of the Atlantic, encouraging them to share knowledge, insights and experiences, and to explore how publishers are adopting technology to support their current needs and future goals.

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Innovations in Content Hosting

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Innovations in Content Hosting

A year of advances for the KGL PubFactory platform and the scholarly community

Since the beginning of a very disruptive 2020, scholarly publishers have had to contend with uncertainty in institutional markets, sudden demands for rapid dissemination of critical research, and an ongoing existential crisis due to Open Access (OA) mandates. Fortunately, industry partners have been there to support content providers of all sizes and types with enhanced workflows, integrated services, and advanced solutions that met the moment.

A review of the last year of exciting developments here at KGL PubFactory demonstrates how publishers of academic books and journals can evolve and even thrive with the right technology support—better serving their authors, users, and society at large even during challenging times.

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Open Access Voices and Variations: 4 Innovations from the PubFactory Community

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Open Access Voices and Variations: 4 Innovations from the PubFactory Community

Earlier this month at the KGL PubFactory Virtual Series 2020, we hosted Open Access Voices and Variations, a lively session with a diverse group of book and journal publishers. The panel was made up of traditional academic publishers, a university press, and a society publisher from across the PubFactory community—several notably in the humanities and social sciences (HSS).

We explored their unique perspectives and approaches to Open Access, looking in detail at how they are each responding to challenges, adjusting business models, flipping journal programs, and coping with institutional mandates.

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MUP fields an OA compliance curveball with the support of PubFactory’s SiteGen module

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MUP fields an OA compliance curveball with the support of PubFactory’s SiteGen module

In 2018, we collaborated with Manchester University Press (MUP) on a hosting platform that would bring all of their books and journals online.

Manchester is the largest research university in the UK, and the Press is one of the largest University Presses in the UK, publishing around 200 books and 6 journals a year.

Our emphasis at PubFactory over the last 20 years has been one of combining and hosting different kinds of content on a single web platform. The MUP project was of particular importance to us in 2018 in that it not only dealt with both books and journals, but it also involved hosting both subscription and Open Access (OA) content.

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Social Science Publishing Embraces the Moment

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Social Science Publishing Embraces the Moment

A focus on Black Lives Matter shows that 2020 isn’t just about medical research

This spring has seen tremendous global change—from the COVID19 pandemic to protests around the world decrying systemic racism. With an initial urgent focus on medical studies, scholarly publishers have proven how indispensable they are in advancing and making available potentially life-saving information. Now attention has shifted to the importance of academic work in social justice, civil unrest, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Once again, publishers are in front of the cultural moment, this time demonstrating the essential nature of the social sciences and working with their communities to address and demand change.

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A Look Ahead at Publishing in 2020: AI, AR, Plan S and More

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A Look Ahead at Publishing in 2020: AI, AR, Plan S and More

As 2020 begins, we look at what the year holds for publishers of all kinds, and how technology can help them improve their systems, increase revenue, reach new readers, and more.

#AI #technology #innovation #automation #workflow #AR #PlanS

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