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JATS-Con 2019
JATS-Con is a conference about JATS and BITS, its uses, new use cases and upcoming developments. The conference, usually held at the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD, was conducted for the first time ever in the UK at the Wellcome Genome Campus Conference Centre just outside Cambridge. It was a great opportunity for publishers in the UK to attend the conference in person and they did just that with over 130 attendees. Exeter was proud to be a sponsor of this year’s event which had a theme, The Changing Face of Journal Publishing.
There were several interesting papers presented on JATS implementations, enabling reuse, open source tools, and opportunities for publishing in an open world. Some memorable takeaways from the talks were “Trust but verify” by Alexander Schwarzman of OSA and “Focus on the concept rather than trying to create opportunities around new technologies” by Emma Ganley of PLOS. It was wonderful to hear about successes (and failures) and walk away with new insights and ideas on how to develop Kriya further.
This year’s conference was unique in also hosting a poster session to introduce new ideas and applications. Pari, our CTO, presented the alpha version of our new product, Kriya Packager which was very well-received. You can learn more about the product and our reasons for building it on the JATS-Con figshare site. We believe this solution benefits all stakeholders - publishers, third-party entities and service providers.
What are your thoughts? Do let us know. We value your comments and inputs.
SSP Annual Meeting
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) conducted its 41st annual meeting in beautiful San Diego, CA. We particularly enjoy attending this event as it serves as a wonderful forum to understand the challenges faced by publishers and collaborate with them to build better solutions. This year’s meeting had a stated mission of Shaping the New Status Quo by considering Global Perspectives Scholarly Publishing from the publishing community across the globe.
We welcomed the opportunity to share our vision of Production as a Profit Centre at a pre-meeting seminar and an exhibit. The business transaction in publishing is quite unique where the author/researcher who produces the content is more often than not also the consumer of the content. It makes for a very interesting situation where the entire ecosystem (and thousands of jobs) is dependent on the author for the system to run. Therefore, there is a strong case to continuously improve the author’s experience to keep the engine humming. Production being at the centre of the interaction with the author has a huge role to play in making this happen. We strongly believe that establishing production as a profit centre will give it the ability to actively manage the author experience and discover ways to continuously make it better. The goal of Kriya is to enable this vision by delivering Happy Authors!
We presented success stories in publishing that merit a closer look. We also showcased some real-life examples where our customers have realized fantastic results by adopting this vision and using Kriya to make it happen. We hope to engage more publishers in this discussion and help shape a better future.
The annual meeting also features an SSP Previews Session, for New and Noteworthy Product Presentations. This “lightning-round” plenary offers the chance to learn more about the industry’s newest and most innovative products, platforms, and/or content in 5-minute, back-to-back presentations. As per David Myers, the session organizer, “This year we received over 45 submissions for the Previews Session. The committee selected the top 13 proposals to participate in the session at the meeting based on four criteria, each rated on a five-point scale, which ensures that only the most innovative and novel presentations are included.”
Exeter was delighted to be chosen as one of the 13 to present and Ravi had the honour of getting 5 minutes to share our vision for the Kriya Packager. While we did not win the people’s choice award, the product was very well received by the audience. The interest from publishers and aggregators has convinced us to move forward with our roadmap with a plan to release the full version in September 2019.
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