It’s been more than a year since we speculated on what Open Access might mean for marketing in publishing. Since then there has been progress on a couple of initiatives we highlighted, and so it’s a good time to reflect again: if the author is king, what practical steps can you take to court them?
Author identity
In the last year there have been encouraging developments in standards and data relating to authors. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), which aims to solve the author/contributor name ambiguity problem, is now up and running with 50 member organisations and more than 121,000 registered users (as of 22 April). ORCID IDs are becoming more and more integrated into the workflows of researchers and publishers, with the first citation with an ORCID ID appearing in Pubmed last month.
Whilst ORCID seeks to help with identity issues in the scholarly field, the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is performing a similar function across a wider range of identities encompassing writers, artists, performers, organisations and more. The two initiatives have different although overlapping approaches and aims. As such they have recently issued a joint statement on how the two will be interoperable.
Funding sources
There has also been an initiative to address one of the other areas we previously highlighted – that of identifying the funding agencies associated with research. FundRef is stepping in to provide a standard way of reporting funding sources for published scholarly research. Administered by CrossRef, FundRef allows publishers to create and submit standard metadata on funder names and grant numbers alongside DOIs. This will benefit all stakeholders in terms of transparency and reporting.
Bringing it all together
So how can publishers make the most of these standards, and what else should they be doing to ensure they maximise the value of author and funder data?
- Integrate these relevant metadata standards into your existing workflows (manuscript submissions, production tracking, contact databases etc.)
- Aggregate submission and author information up to institution and country/region level. Tracking trends in submissions (and funding sources) provides important intelligence.
- Use this information to inform editorial and marketing strategies. Authors really are the lifeblood of publishing, so it’s essential to make the most of all the available data.
MasterVision makes it easy to merge all of this data from multiples sources, and to aggregate author info up to institution or country level to identify high-level trends. Contact us to find out more.
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