Welcome to the October Ingenta news update – the latest edition of our regular monthly bulletin that is designed to provide a quick-to-read summary of the latest developments here at Ingenta Connect, Ingenta Open and Ingenta CMS. In this month’s edition:
For questions about any aspects of our service to you, or any suggestions for new features or services, please contact your Account Manager or contact me, Head of Ingenta Connect – byron.russell@ingenta.com
As the publishing world recovers from the 70th Frankfurt Book Fair, we take a look back at the week that was. FBF is the world’s largest trade fair for books, based both on the number of publishing companies represented, and the number of visitors. Several thousand exhibitors representing book publishing, multimedia and technology companies, as well as content providers from all over the world, gathered in order to negotiate international publishing rights, sales, partnership agreements and licenses. More than 7,300 exhibitors from over 100 countries and more than 286,000 visitors took part last year. The numbers for this year are not yet available, but overall – and purely subjectively – the Fair felt slightly less busy that in 2017.
FBF is primarily a trade book show, but there were plenty of academic publishers in evidence. There were talks and sessions of interest to scholarly publishers, including Artificial Intelligence in Scholarly Publishing (where is AI already used and with what success? what are possible visions for the future?); Thursday morning kicked off with a panel session on Plan S, which is concentrating the minds of all scholarly publishers right now – but especially those involved in scientific output.
Kevin Carboni, Ingenta Senior Sales Executive, busy on our stand in hall 6
Ingenta ran two stands, in Hall 6 and – for Publishers Communications Group (PCG) – in Hall 4. There were seven Ingenta staff in attendance, all working flat out discussing exciting products such as Ingenta CMS and Ingenta Open with our partners and clients. Ingenta Open had a new look for the Fair, and I’m sure you’ll agree the new design is clean and quite striking:
Daily News was provided by publications such as The Bookseller and Publishers Weekly, which ran an article on how US Libraries are fighting budget cuts (last month the House of Representatives passed a package of 2018 spending bills that included full funding for libraries. Our CEO published an article in Wednesday’s PW on the future of alternative revenue where he concluded that publishers will need to adapt their thinking, establish new relationships with authors and work with vendors who will enable them to take advantage of new opportunities – all very relevant in the era of Plan S and Open Access.
At the Fair we officially launched Aperture, an intuitive new web-based platform which gives publishers the ability to unlock data and information stored within their systems and share it with employees and trusted third parties. The system helps publishers to:
Scott Winner, CEO of Ingenta, stated:
“One of the biggest challenges many publishers face is that data tends to be locked away in disparate systems, and it can often be complicated and time-consuming to share this information with third parties. We are confronting this problem head-on and creating an intuitive platform which allows publishers to use their data throughout their organizations and become more collaborative and transparent with their partners. We are delighted to welcome Aperture to the family of Ingenta solutions, as it meets a very real need in the marketplace across all types of publishing.”
The new-look Ingenta Open brought a lot of attention, especially in light of Plan S. The new open-access only platform is now fully live and already has new clients, plus discovery feeds from aggregators such as OAPEN. Harvard’s DASH repository will participate later this quarter, the first university repository to do so. APC and submission tools, plus print-on-demand, will be added to the growing list of functions and services on offer.
Next year’s FBF is scheduled from 16 to 20 October 2019. We hope to see you there!
In October, Ingenta also made its debut at World Publishing Expo & Digital Content Expo 2018 in Berlin! The new Ingenta software portfolio was showcased, including recent additions: Ingenta Editorial, Ingenta Audience, Truly, Ingenta Self-service portal and Ingenta Advertising. To learn more about these innovative solutions, contact Manish Popat.
What is an Article Processing Charge (APC)? This is a fee that publishers of many open access journals charge in order to publish articles. Such fees are usually levied per article and are usually paid by the institutions or funding bodies that fund the author(s) work, although some authors may find alternative ways of paying.
The reason given by publishers for charging APCs is that APCs are imposed to cover the costs of publishing the material. In the days of paper-based publishing such costs were pretty transparent – everyone accepted that a journal had to be physically printed, and the production of a physical artefact costs money. In a digital publishing world, such costs are not so obvious – until, of course, you try publishing for yourself. Platform fees, peer review administration, hosting costs, indexing feeds to EBSCO inter alia, editorial, XML typesetting – all these “hidden” costs mount up. Sometimes the APCs a publisher charges are obscure; in others they are completely open and transparent. Swiss-based publisher MDPI, for example, publishes a full table of its fees, which range from 350 to 1800 CHF depending on the journal. Some are free, and discounts may be available. Many funding agencies and institutions explicitly allow the use of research grants for the payment of APCs for publishing in open access journals. For more information on APC funding see the following MDPI page.
Needless to say, APCs are not without their critics. Though in many cases criticism concerns the size of the fees, there is also criticism of the concept itself. Of course, fees are often high, especially in the case of “hybrid” journals where the publisher offers open access publishing spaces in a prestigious, high-impact subscription journal, and may be difficult – or even impossible – to fund. Yet pressure to cap such APCs (for example, Plan S) has also faced intense criticism.
Whatever the arguments for and against, Open Access is likely to continue to coexist with subscription-based publishing models beyond the near-mythical deadline of 2020, and for smaller publishers the sheer weight of APC administration is a real headache. A cursory consideration of the management of article processing charges shows all players in the publication system are affected, including the researchers, funding bodies, publishers, libraries and other institutional administration (such as research offices). Here at Ingenta, we’re working to implement a simple to use and relatively low-cost management system to help smaller publishers with the administrative burden of APCs, streamlining and automating the collection of fees from authors, funding agencies, and institutions.
It’s just one of the support services we shall roll out in the coming months in association with our new open access discovery and hosting platform, Ingenta Open. Look out for future editions of your Ingenta Publisher Bulletin for further details!
On the 3rd October, AllrightsOnline presented a webinar on Licensing content. Not dealing with copyright in the right way could be a lost opportunity, or worse the start of a legal conflict, whereas dealing with it in the right way could actually mean revenue growth.
AllrightsOnline is a consultancy specialising in copyright compliancy and risk mitigation and addresses the need for professional, educational and informational support in the area of publishing rights, permissions & Licensing out through third party channels. It also offers legal consultancy in these areas. The presenters of the webinar, Mrs Berendina van Straalen and Mr Chris Kluiters have extensive experience in the field of research, translations, editing, commercial, contracting and licensing including Open Access business models, subsidiary rights, third party licensing, Library Licensing and Text and Data Mining in the academic and corporate industry. The decline in mainstream / primary revenues, Open Access developments and new technologies are some of the pressures on everyday publishing activities, and on Libraries facing similar type of challenges. How can additional revenues be generated? The webinar addressed issues around licensing in and licensing out of all types of information from Journals, Books to Data and very briefly touched upon topics such as cannibalisation, auditing, new business models, new entrants etc., with significant attention on legal and contractual background information.
A publisher’s mission results in products and its associated business models to distribute content. Licensing may be subject to certain terms and conditions. In author contracts, the grant of rights defines the way content will be exposed by the publisher. The contract between a publisher and a third partner reflects how the third party will distribute the content. In addition, in the contract between the third party, the so-called end-user agreement, is highlighted how content can be used. But are these in sync?
Next to business models for sales, strategic abstracting and indexing partners are also required to optimise Discovery. But not all discovery is beneficial. Some of it may actually cannibalise some of your content (e.g. aggregated collections with pro rata royalty).
On top of the practical approach to license out content, it is necessary to take into account the legal aspects that may influence the business models: from national law and associated case law to international agreements and binding regulations and the case law at European level. Memberships to associations like WIPO, along with the Berne Convention have direct effect on the business a publisher drives. Additional issues such as the ePrivacy and GDPR have a big effect on how the chain of data management is taken care of by all parties involved.
For more information visit www.allrightsonline.com
Our new content management solution, Ingenta CMS, lets you unlock the full potential of your publications. The platform offers real user benefits and lets you explore innovative ways of supporting your readers through responsive design, advanced researcher tools, simple ecommerce and the integration of all types of content, such as video and audio.
Ingenta CMS gives you a branded online presence in a cohesive, tailored package and delivers an excellent user experience. Kevin Cerboni, responsible for sales for the CMS platform, had this to say about CMS:
“If I were asked to choose two words that I believe best describe our publishing platform (CMS) I would say simplicity and experience. Simplicity in terms of the user journey but also in terms of the ways in which you can manage your site. The user can indeed get to the content rapidly thanks to optimized discoverability, but also, once on the site, can navigate through the content very efficiently thanks to industry standard formats and tools. And it takes a lot of experience (we have been making software for the publishing industry for 40 years and publishing platforms for 25 years) to come up with a streamlined product that evolves with the industry to ensure that the reader and the community are engaging with it.”
Ingenta CMS is built specifically to help you keep pace with changing user demands while maintaining control over your assets. This allows you to spend your time pursuing new opportunities, free from the concerns of format.
Other benefits of the content management system include:
Collaborative development • Responsive design • User centered design
All types of content covered • Flexible and configurable business models • Membership integration
Relationship management • Advanced discovery and SEO • Semantic enrichment
Ecommerce and sales support • Individually branded site with your look and feel • Access and authentication
Integration with and export to workflow tools • Statistical data and supporting expertise
Scaleable, robust and resilient cloud hosting • Intuitive on website publisher admin tools
If you are looking for a uniquely branded web platform that can help you reach a global audience with your content, please contact Kevin Cerboni to book a demo or to arrange an initial conversation. He will be happy to help you!
Ingenta would like to thank both Berendina van Straalen and Chris Kluiters from AllrightsOnline, for their informative webinar on Licencing. The webinar looked at the legal ins and outs of content licensing, how to avoid common pitfalls and engineer the best possible deals for you as publishers and for your authors. The webinar certainly help simply the licensing process and worth reviewing. The webinar recording is now available on the Ingenta YouTube channel.
On the surface, Open Access should be straightforward. Everything is free and can be used, reused and share – or can it? And if this is the case, how can it be sustainable as a business model? Our guest presenter is one of Europe’s leading experts on the OA ecosystem. An unmissable session for anyone interested in OA publishing, or flipping to an OA model.
Guest Presenter: Eelco Ferwerda, director of OAPEN. He has been active in the area of open access for monographs since 2008, when he started managing OAPEN as EU co-funded project with 6 European university presses. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are special strings of alphanumeric characters that form a persistent link to individual publications. They are issued at the time of publication, much like an ISBN or a serial number. DOIs are bound to metadata about the content object, such as a URL, indicating where it can be found. But what is their real value, and why should you, as a publisher, engage with them?
Guest Presenter: Rachel Lammey, Head of Community Outreach at CrossRef. Rachael worked as publishing manager with Taylor & Francis before joining Crossref in 2012. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
The next Ingenta Publisher Bulletin will be out in late November with further insight into Open Access publishing, How research is conducted and a roundup of all the exciting products provided by Ingenta.
