Charlie Rapple

Getting mobile right: start with who and why, not what and how

Mobile dominance is imminent. Getting mobile wrong means losing market share to disruptors; getting it right gives us an opportunity to rebuild relationships with our audience. It is the audience, therefore, that should direct mobile strategy. This means starting by researching the workflows and challenges of different segments, to understand how to add value (not just bells‐and‐whistles). We must prioritize mobile in our product development and innovation, freeing it from the ‘print + online’ paradigm so that it can fulfil different kinds of information needs and objectives. This article advocates a back‐to‐basics approach that puts audiences (not content, and not technology) at the centre of mobile strategy, and explores market segmentation and research, innovation, business models, development choices, and the wider organizational implications of getting mobile right.

Integrating social media in the marketing mix: the case of Best Practice.

In this case study we examine how Best Practice – a clinical decision support tool from the BMJ Evidence Centre – was successfully launched into a competitive market, with social media tactics at the heart of the campaign, fully integrated with more traditional approaches. Our campaign reached over 60% of the target market and attracted engagement in the order of 4–6% of that market. Usage of the site and time on the site increased greatly (by 33% and 81%, respectively). Clear processes are in place to track awareness (market exposure) through to interest (playing the game), desire (registering for a trial), and action (recommending or taking out a subscription). The campaign has been constructed in a modular manner to enable it to be localized and deployed around the world.

Researching and implementing a new tiered pricing model

Tiered pricing can help to arrest the revenue decline associated with the transition from print to online subscriptions. This case study reviews the objectives, challenges, project phases, impact, and key lessons of a project to research and implement a new tiered pricing model for a society publisher. We analysed current sales and profiled institutional subscribers to define, model, and refine appropriate price tiers. This led to the introduction of fair and transparent pricing that encourages usage, is manageable for supply chain stakeholders and minimizes the need for custom licences. We then planned and implemented a segmented communications strategy to increase current customer awareness of and support for the new pricing, and identified prospective customers and segments for potential sales growth.

After the goldrush - the golden age of reference linking

Reference linking is emerging as a key differentiator in the evaluation of online content. However, many publishers find themselves unfamiliar with the buzzwords, unsure of the technologies and overwhelmed by the concepts involved. This article provides a simple overview of the evolution of linking technology, reviews the current situation and suggests some requirements for continued development. The practical benefits to various groups within the information community, along with their potential responsiblities, are addressed.

Introducing our Editorial Board

Charlie Rapple has worked in publishing since her student days, when she was general dogsbody for a small art publisher. On graduation from the University of Bristol, she entered the scholarly information sector as an electronic publisher at CatchWord – putting content online and creating metadata for journals including Death Studies and the Journal of Genocide Research. Good times. She became an account manager, handling day-to-day digital challenges for publishers of all shapes and sizes, and learning publishing’s arcane secrets along the way (from hacking fonts to calculating ISSNs).

The mobile world: one non-profit publisher’s journey

Many information providers are exploring content delivery via the mobile web and smartphone applications. Objectives include fitting academic content more effectively into user workflows, reaching new audiences, overcoming barriers to access, maximizing value and usage, and satisfying evolving user expectations. This case study explores Annual Reviews’ experience of developing a mobile strategy for its academic research content, from planning around mobile investment and business models, through practical decisions and technical challenges during development and launch, to usage, follow-up research and ongoing experiences. It spans different stakeholder perspectives and is based on telephone and e-mail interviews with marketing, technology, sales, editorial and executive staff, librarians and end users. It aims to capture the decisions, processes and experience for the long-term record, and in the short term, to share insights with the many information providers that are less far along the mobile adoption curve.

Key issue: IESR: promoting use of academic e-resources in the UK

What is IESR? Many valuable collections of academic e-resources are under-utilized simply because potential users are unaware of their existence. The JISC-funded IESR1 based at Mimas2, The University of Manchester, aims to address this by providing a ‘Yellow Pages’ for the academic internet. Its purpose is to capture essential metadata about online publications, resources and research collections in order to encourage greater awareness and use. IESR is a freely accessible source of structured, curated and standardized data about e-resources. It aims to deliver a convenient, central source of information, providing easy access to high-quality learning resources. Data in IESR can be contributed, dis- covered, accessed and re-used in flexible ways by humans or by machines via its machine-readable interfaces.

Online. Indexed. Catalogued. Free. But will users find it

‘If it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist’ seems to be the accepted wisdom in scholarly publishing today. We could debate the validity of this statement; instead, let us agree on a related point: even when it is online, it still does not exist for various users. Most publishers make some effort to address this: engaging with the ready-made audiences of hosting services, full-text aggregators and subscription agent gateways; distributing metadata to subject-specific indexing databases; allowing search engines and document delivery providers to index full-text content; sharing holdings information with libraries and developers of eresource management tools. But even the sum of all these efforts is inadequate as a solution. Problems remain: poor-quality data, infrequent transfer, anomalies between providers, content vagaries (and how one machine can describe them to another), the increasingly customized nature of individual customer packages, the proliferation of open access content, and more. These ongoing issues mean that you can put your content online, you can open up its metadata and you can even make the full text free – but you cannot be sure that it is going to be found and read by your target audience. The development of sophisticated technologies (such as the OpenURL, a standard for linking users to content licensed by their institution) and tools (link resolvers, web-scale discovery indexes) has addressed some of the fundamental problems with online content discovery, but we now need to fine-tune these early solutions to address more granular or newly emerging problems.