Silverchair Adoptions Will Test The Value Of Vertical Platform Specialisation

(republished with permission from Insights, Outsell, Inc. July 19, 2011 https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/index.php)

Silverchair recently announced that eight leading scientific societies had announced plans to migrate their digital publishing operations to Silverchair’s new SCM6 platform. What has Silverchair got that others don’t?

Important Details: One of the big challenges for publishers today is the silo-ization of content. They may publish content in journals, in various types of books, and in an increasing number of ancillary products (e.g. conference proceedings, educational materials, guidelines, news, etc.). They also need to be able to present a unified portfolio, fine-tuned to meet the needs of specific types of end-users, and designed so that the publisher can leverage traffic coming in from a variety of sources, exposing users to a wide set of relevant content from the portfolio. Ultimately, this means having a publishing platform that supports rich, semantically-tagged, XML.

Furthermore, STM publishers want to be able to develop new products, even business models, without the need to spend a lot of money developing their own facilities or wasting a lot of time waiting for a third party vendor to decide that such and such a functionality is worth developing because they can cross-market it to other clients. Cost, agility and innovation are the hallmarks of a winning solution.

But there are several other service and technology providers out there doing similar things. Atypon, EBSCO‘s Dynamed, Highwire Press, and Publishing Technology, for example, are some of the solutions to which publishers have been turning. So what is different about Silverchair?

A clue perhaps comes from the specialities publishers themselves: the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacists Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS), and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain/Pharmaceutical Press.

As the marketing blurb says, “Built using a natively semantic architecture, SCM6 enables rapid product and feature deployment, best-of-breed navigation and utility for all content types including journals, and support for myriad new business models to optimize publishers’ entire content portfolios.” So Silverchair’s deep medical semantic skills may have been an important determining factor.

Silverchair’s semantic enrichment occurs before the content gets to the platform, by way of a largely automated process that needs only a small amount of manual tuning. This makes a lot of manipulations at the platform level far easier, e.g. the rapid creation of specialist collections of content. Content can be tagged at the level of titles, abstracts, sections, figures, images, and chapters using the Silverchair taxonomy, which is based on 60,000 original terms and 300,000 semantic equivalents that have been mapped to other taxonomies such as SNOMED and NLM’s MeSH, allowing content to be pulled from other sources – such as from NCBI’s databases.

Human tuning is required in order to weight tags so that the retrieval process surfaces the correct content according to the intended audience and product use case. This could, for example, be a generalist physician audience, or some type of surgical specialist. Likewise, it is also important to tune the level of semantic granularity so that the content selection matches the needs of bench scientists vs. clinicians. Is the content going to be used in long form for research purposes or for quick reference at the point of care?

Once the tags have been inserted into the XML it becomes possible to find articles with a similar semantic profile based upon 8-16 summary tags that identify the topics that the article is most about. When users interact with content the system stores the semantic tags associated with viewed content and this information can then be used to populate user interest profiles – a similar approach to those employed by popular consumer sites like Amazon, Pandora, or Netflix. In future, this facility might in turn be used to target promotional advertising, create individualized offers, or even create dynamic user affinity groups.

Implications: According to JBJS, one of one of the adopting publishers, their long-term vision is to use Silverchair’s semantic platform to create an integrated product line, and to boost customer experience by linking between different product silos and different sources of related content. The semantic fingerprinting of content ensure that that users will find highly relevant information surfaced across product lines without being inundated by unwanted results and can navigate to an appropriate sub-set of results. These content sets, and subsets, can be rapidly turned into new products and services offerings – combining, for example, continuing medical education, newsletters, case reports, surgical techniques, and primary research from multiple publications into a customized subspecialty product and alerting service.

We recently reported on AIP‘s decision to focus on publishing its own and certain affiliate journals, outsourcing its publishing services operation, in order to focus more closely on the author and reader needs, as well as testing out new business models, specific to its own vertical (see Insights 23 June 2011, AIP Chooses To Focus On Core Business). Faced with flat library budget projections for the foreseeable future, STM publishers are buckling down to the cold reality that future top-line growth will either come from increasing their market share, or by escaping to adjacent market spaces. Many are opting for the former – less risky, at least in the short term – and investing in new platform technologies to attract authors, drive usage, and develop new business models. Not all publishers will be able to go down this focused disciplinary street. Some will continue to provide less-differentiated services across a wide range of STM areas, whilst others may not be able to afford, or resource from a management point of view, such a radical change in strategic direction. Also, there are perhaps clearer synergies here for professional society publishers, who often have built-in audiences and a range of content sets across a given speciality. Let’s hope that as it grows Silverchair retains its agility, at least long enough to demonstrate whether semantically integrated publishing platforms are the future – or not!