At its annual spring conference in Washington last week, the STM Association launched Technology Trends for 2015. Members of STM’s Future Lab Committee earlier had met to identify issues and challenges in scholarly and scientific publishing, then forecast areas of highest concern.
Three areas specifically were cited: The rise of data as first-class research object; the positioning of the journal article at the center of a “hub and spoke” publishing model including video, graphs and tables, and various digital artifacts; and heightened attention by authors and researchers to their professional reputation management.
“More precise reputation management by researchers may lead to the researchers becoming the ‘brand’ and no longer the journal,” noted Eefke Smit, Director of Standards and Technology of STM and coordinator of the Tech Trends process. “Researchers particularly want to get credit for their work, and especially credits where credits are due. Publishers can play a really important role there, as they have always done”.
STM Future Lab committee members shared with CCC’s Chris Kenneally their views on the three focus areas in a lively roundtable discussion.
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Gerry Grenier is currently Director of Publishing Technologies for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in Piscataway, New Jersey. He leads a 40-person electronic publishing team that is responsible for the development and operation of IEEE Xplore — a digital library containing over 3 million journal articles, conference papers, and standards in electrical engineering and computer science.
David Martinsen, who holds a PhD degree in physical chemistry from the University of Minnesota, has been at the American Chemical Society (ACS) for 25 years, working in various capacities in the Publications Division and in IT. In his current role, he is responsible for tracking new technologies and planning for their incorporation into the scholarly publishing environment.
As Senior Director, Product Management, Jennifer Robinson is responsible for all electronic platforms at Wolters Kluwer Medical Research. These include the institutional platforms for aggregated products (OvidSP, Nursing@Ovid,) as well as the journal hosting platform and journal apps.
Jasper Simons is the publisher of PsycINFO at the American Psychological Association. PsycINFO is the world’s largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in the behavioural sciences and mental health. Before joining the American Psychological Association, Simons held senior management and publishing roles at companies such as Thomson Reuters, Elsevier, and SAGE Publications.
Cassidy Sugimoto is Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington, and a prolific author on new metrics used in scholarly assessment, especially those derived from social media. Her most recent compilations have looked at the historical criticism of scholarly metrics (Scholarly Metrics under the Microscope, ITI, 2015) and have explored the proliferation of novel forms of tools for scholarly assessment (Beyond Bibliometrics, MIT Press, 2014). Her empirical work has examined inter alia scholarly tweets, the validity of metrics in 10 different social media services, and science communication in TED videos.
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