Exiting the Information Superhighway: Beware of Dead-Ends!
Saw a great post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog this week. (BTW, all scholarly publishers should subscribe to that blog -- it is timely, thought-provoking, and certainly challenges status quo thinking.) The post was written by Joseph Esposito and titled "Downloads As Failure." Read it here.
The gist of the post was that no publisher should brag about the number of PDF downloads from their site, as it signals that users are leaving a potentially rich, interconnected scholarly environment to experience an isolated one. And that's not good for users OR authors! As Joseph puts it:
The "disconnectedness" problem Joseph highlights aligns with Silverchair's semantic philosophy -- information that is connected (to primary research, guidelines, commentaries, clinical trials, secondary literature, evidence ratings, educational materials, audio/video, etc.) is more valuable than information that is disconnected.
Silverchair connects health content on our platforms to all of the sources above through semantic indexing. We use terminology that is compatible with the UMLS to ensure our content is speaking the lingua franca of connected medicine. We consult with authors and publishers to understand what complementary content would add the most value to their readers and use semantics to target the most contextually relevant sections from those sources. This connectness has greatly increased the number and volume of referrers to content on our platforms -- which makes both publishers and authors happy.
In his final note, Joseph writes about how this connectedness will become a decision point for many authors when they choose publishers for their content. He writes:
Gee, I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's talk!
Jake Zarnegar, CTO
The gist of the post was that no publisher should brag about the number of PDF downloads from their site, as it signals that users are leaving a potentially rich, interconnected scholarly environment to experience an isolated one. And that's not good for users OR authors! As Joseph puts it:
When you say that your PDF downloads are up, you are acknowledging that your Web service facilitates a high degree of offline viewing. This in turn means that your service is not fully, even relentlessly, integrated into the ongoing communications medium that is the Internet today.
The "disconnectedness" problem Joseph highlights aligns with Silverchair's semantic philosophy -- information that is connected (to primary research, guidelines, commentaries, clinical trials, secondary literature, evidence ratings, educational materials, audio/video, etc.) is more valuable than information that is disconnected.
Silverchair connects health content on our platforms to all of the sources above through semantic indexing. We use terminology that is compatible with the UMLS to ensure our content is speaking the lingua franca of connected medicine. We consult with authors and publishers to understand what complementary content would add the most value to their readers and use semantics to target the most contextually relevant sections from those sources. This connectness has greatly increased the number and volume of referrers to content on our platforms -- which makes both publishers and authors happy.
In his final note, Joseph writes about how this connectedness will become a decision point for many authors when they choose publishers for their content. He writes:
Authors, however, will increasingly evaluate publishers by asking, "How many people are in your IT department? What is your overall IT budget? What is your roadmap for technological development? May I speak to your CTO as well as your editor-in-chief?"
Gee, I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's talk!
Jake Zarnegar, CTO
Labels: interconnectedness, publishing strategy, scholarly kitchen, semantics
posted by Silverchair at
3:53 PM
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