Survey: The Meaningful Work of Publishing

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Survey: The Meaningful Work of Publishing

Often in life and work, we focus on the roadblocks in front of us and how to get over or around those and we forget to take the time to celebrate our wins, even small ones.

In a 2011 piece in The Harvard Business Review, the authors highlight the “progress principle” and note that “of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.” Noting the progress one has made, however small, is significant to helping workers feel motivated, creative, and productive. In a year and a half when many of us are struggling to adjust to an ever-changing crisis mode, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the progress we have made as an industry.

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The Meteoric Rise of Video Content

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The Meteoric Rise of Video Content

Consumer behavior is constantly evolving. Some consumer trends are temporary and relate to the circumstances and conditions du jour, while others take on greater cultural significance, establishing a permanent foothold on society, our habits and customs, and the way we go about our everyday lives.

Our relationship with video content is perhaps one of the most underestimated cultural phenomena of recent years. And global consumption of video as a medium has certainly accelerated since the start of last year. A recent study by video marketing firm Wyzowl revealed that 68 percent of consumers felt the pandemic had impacted the amount of video content they watched online, with 96 percent saying this had increased.

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5 Wins for Science in a Chaotic Year

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5 Wins for Science in a Chaotic Year

The past year has been eventful—to say the least—in the world of scientific research and academic publishing. Near constant crises, from the global pandemic to revelations about climate change to a turbulent presidential election all touched our daily lives and became the subjects of influential, fast-tracked journal articles. While much attention has been paid to an unfortunate proliferation of fake science due to current events, including our own previous blog post; peer-reviewed journals have persisted to make a positive and measurable impact, informing critical decisions about government, education, healthcare, and more. As a key partner in the scholarly information chain, we at KGL want to take a moment to spotlight some of the top (real) science stories since 2020 and how they have made an actual difference in our lives.

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Accessibility Fast Becoming an Essential Pillar of Scholarly Publishing

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Accessibility Fast Becoming an Essential Pillar of Scholarly Publishing

Two years ago, we (as Cenveo at the time) hosted a panel discussion at the SSP Annual Meeting, which brought the subject of accessibility to the center stage and helped shine a spotlight on the importance of making content accessible to readers with disabilities, such as learning difficulties and visual impairments. To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD), we take a look at how this landscape is evolving and how scholarly publishers are now actively improving access to academic research.

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UX Design Strategies for Journal Websites

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UX Design Strategies for Journal Websites

UX design is an integral part of the journal publishing strategy and can lead to increased article usage, longer on-page time and fewer site exits or bounces. Adopting best practices for your journal website is key for attracting and retaining subscribers as well as growing the reach of your journal’s content.

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Content Platform Migrations: 5 Important Lessons

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Content Platform Migrations: 5 Important Lessons

The publishing platform business is constantly evolving, with home-grown technologies and commercial solutions continuously developing new capabilities to better serve authors and researchers. As a result, publishers occasionally migrate journals, books and other content from one delivery platform to another, a process considered by many to be something of a perilous minefield.

In March, KGL PubFactory’s very own Tom Beyer took part in a virtual panel discussion at the Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) Annual Conference 2021 entitled “How We Work Together: Improving the Content Platform Migration Process”, alongside some of our friends and colleagues in the NISO Content Platform Migrations Working Group. The session explored the current state of platform migrations from the viewpoint and experiences of a major university press, an academic library and the content platform provider perspective, while showcasing some of the recommendations and deliverables of the NISO Working Group. Here are five key lessons we gleaned from the session.

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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Marion Morrow, KGL Director of Sales, UK and Europe

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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Marion Morrow, KGL Director of Sales, UK and Europe

Normally at this time of year, we would be meeting and greeting our customers and friends at the London Book Fair. I think it’s fair to say that no one at KGL misses that more than the head of our Sutton, UK office, Marion Morrow. I caught up with Marion virtually in lieu of the pub about being a people-person during the pandemic, her deep experience on both the publisher and provider sides of the business, and how technology-based solutions can help publishers, especially during this time.

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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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Seven Publishing Trends for 2021

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Seven Publishing Trends for 2021

At around the same time last year, publishing industry experts and analysts looked ahead with optimism, hope and excitement as they speculated on what wonders 2020 might bring. As we all know, things didn’t exactly turn out as we expected. But, while many might think that trying to second-guess what the future may hold is a bit like nailing jello to the wall right now, surprisingly there are actually many clear indications of what could be in store for us in 2021. Here are our top seven predictions for what publishers can expect from the year ahead.

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Maintaining Trust in Academic Publishing

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Maintaining Trust in Academic Publishing

In the early part of this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the globe, the international medical community was attempting to disseminate research as quickly as possible to educate an anxious public on an unknown virus and to advance treatments and ultimately, a vaccine. Social and traditional media featured an alarming amount of misinformation from non-scientific sources, which put even more pressure on journals to validate facts and deliver them as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, as the pandemic reached a fever pitch, research was publicized and then retracted when questions arose about inconsistencies where journals and reviewers were not provided with the full set of data against which to conduct independent checks. “The hasty retractions…alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process,” reported the New York 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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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Tom Beyer, Director of Platform Services at KGL PubFactory

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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Tom Beyer, Director of Platform Services at KGL PubFactory

Recently, we were very excited to welcome the PubFactory hosting platform to KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.’s end-to-end portfolio of publisher services. As we wrapped up the PubFactory Virtual Series publisher forum earlier this month, I asked the platform’s technical and creative leader, Tom Beyer what it’s like to join KGL, what makes PubFactory different, and where online hosting technology is taking scholarly publishers and their users.

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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Atul Goel, President of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

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Knowledge Sharing: Five Minutes with Atul Goel, President of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Earlier this month we announced the formation of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL), a new company with a long history as a content services provider, following the acquisition of Cenveo Publisher Services and Cenveo Learning by CJK Group. Today we talk to KGL’s president, Atul Goel, about how and why this acquisition came to fruition, what the implications are for the industry, and what we can expect from the combined company in the future.

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How Journals Can Improve Gender Diversity in Peer Review

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How Journals Can Improve Gender Diversity in Peer Review

Research increasingly shows how gender affects the peer-review process, and how it doesn’t. For example, some studies indicate that editor gender appears to have some influence over gender diversity among peer reviewers, but gender of authors, editors and reviewers may not necessarily influence which papers are accepted or rejected.

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SSP OnDemand: AI Goes From Disruptive to Imperative

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SSP OnDemand: AI Goes From Disruptive to Imperative

For the Society of Scholarly Publishers OnDemand Video Content Library, KGL participated in a panel discussion entitled, AI Goes From Disruptive to Imperative: Publishers overcoming hang-ups and getting real with intelligent automation, where we invited movers and shakers in AI to highlight why researchers and publishers must embrace the technology now in order to remain competitive.

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Confessions of an Accidental Editor

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Confessions of an Accidental Editor

KGL’s Peter Olson blogs how an English major wound up copyediting science journals, what he has learned over his long career, and where to start to become an STEM journal copyeditor.

Copyediting is referred to by some as “the accidental profession,” and this pretty much sums up my own odyssey—and I’m not alone. If you were to survey the legion of copyeditors working today, many of them would reveal their secret identities as English Literature majors who, in sidestepping a career in academia, fell backwards into the vortex of copyediting—only to find that it was their true calling all along.

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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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Tactics for Increasing the Speed of Journal Publication

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Tactics for Increasing the Speed of Journal Publication

In this blog, we have listed several tactics for how to increase the speed of journal publication from clear author instructions, efficient peer-review, effective staffing and more. Though some of the concepts presented here may be familiar, there are intricate layers to publication that are often missed, and result in journal backlog, slow processing, and unhappy authors. We will discuss tactics for increasing the speed of publication, beginning with peer-review, then moving all the way through to journal production.

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More than Words: Why Human Translation is Leagues Ahead

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More than Words: Why Human Translation is Leagues Ahead

The American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky once famously said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.” While these words are revered by many of those who work with languages for a living, decades of attempts to mechanize translation would suggest that the technology industry believes we are not far from finding an automated system which has a deeper understanding of these wider complexities of language.

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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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