Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

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Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

In an article we published on this blog back in 2017, we highlighted some of the challenges, complexities and benefits associated with making digital educational content (K-12 and Higher Ed) more accessible for visually and cognitively impaired readers.

Fast forward several years and the sector’s commitment to digital equality has really been put to the test. As millions of students all over the world switched to remote learning, educational publishers and learning providers had to act quickly to ensure that all the right resources and content were available digitally in order to support students’ rapidly evolving needs.

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4 Questions with Seth Parsons

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4 Questions with Seth Parsons

Seth Parsons, co-senior editor of School University Partnerships, a journal of the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS,) shares what the organization has been doing in recent years to develop more diversity in the area peer review. 

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

The worldwide publishing industry today would not function without the experience, support and technical skills of vast content services operations in India. Publishers, in the Global North especially, rely on the production and technology expertise of an entire support industry in one of the world’s largest emerging markets.

While initiatives to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) among staff, authors, reviewers and other stakeholders have (rightfully) taken center stage in recent years at scholarly, education, and trade publishing houses in North America and Europe, they have largely focused on issues of race and gender. Not nearly as much recognition is paid to geographical inclusion or to our industry colleagues in the Global South who ensure the ultimate delivery of a large quantity of the world’s books, journals and other publications.

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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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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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5 Books for Thwarting Fake News, Deliberate Bias, and Flawed Research

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5 Books for Thwarting Fake News, Deliberate Bias, and Flawed Research

Much has been written in the past year about the phenomenon of fake news and falsified research infiltrating the mainstream and muddying important issues from vaccine effectiveness to voting irregularities to basic trust in science—including advice from the Washington Post just this week. In our sector, there have been attempts to trace the history and help the scholarly community come to grips with the rise in junk science. We at KGL have blogged recently how publishers can rely on industry partners, whether by helping manage the peer review process or streamlining production, to both publish critical research faster in a time of need while maintaining faith in the process.

For clearer understanding of the overall problem, we decided to dig deeper into the literature to uncover several works that can help discern what information can be trusted. Here are five books—from recent backlist to new releases, trade to academic—that can help both content providers and the public at large to be more savvy reporters and consumers of knowledge.

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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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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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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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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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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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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

When designing your publishing platform, there are many factors to consider to deliver an optimal user experience. It’s critical to establish a user-first driven process.

As discussed in parts 1 and 2, it is imperative that your web publishing platform be designed with accessibility, responsiveness, and consistency for all users and devices. Publisher websites are often built using templates and components to help present content in a familiar pattern that users recognize and can easily access. But when designing the “skin” for these experiences, maintain your stylistic uniqueness to strengthen your brand presence. Your brand’s attributes and voice must be visually communicated.

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

Website accessibility is not a new topic. In fact, it’s been a factor since 2010 when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) published standards that digital technology and information must be accessible to all people. At that point, most companies did not think that responsibility for website accessibility applied to them, or that they were required to address it unless they were receiving federal funds/grants. Additionally, the general perception was that creating accessible websites was more costly and entailed a lengthier process to implement. Not surprisingly, the ROI to include accessibility as part of the web design process was not considered valuable enough to be a default priority.

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

Over the last two decades, technology has gained wider acceptance in the classroom. Since the pandemic, when teachers and students have been abruptly forced apart, tech solutions from video calls to virtual classrooms to online learning platforms have leapt into widespread use and become a lifeline for education this term—a topic we wrote about in a previous blog post.

But as we look toward the next school year and beyond, will these advancements remain a stopgap measure for connecting with students and delivering instruction during unusual circumstances; or has the way children learn been changed forever? The following are some key innovations in digital learning that are likely to be part of K-12 education for a long time.

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