One of the ways we collaborate with clients is through Publisher Working Groups - ad hoc committees of clients gathered bimonthly to help Silverchair explore, research, or understand key issues, trends, or functionality affecting the industry and market.
Below are descriptions of our 2023 working groups.
Search + Discoverability Working Group
The Search and Discoverability Working Group aims to improve the discoverability of journals, books, and nontraditional publications for end-users. The group will focus on identifying and addressing challenges and opportunities in the areas of search, navigation, and metadata management for publishers on Silverchair's platform. The group will also share and promote tools, standards, best practices, and perspectives that promote search and discoverability.
Analytics Working Group
Data points drawn from your content and your platform are the keys to telling a story about your users and asserting a publishing organization's value proposition. Publishing platforms serve as hubs for member and subscriber information, content metadata, and platform usage data. As a hub, the platform also has the opportunity to collect outside data to tell the full story behind the data and to fill any gaps for key actions happening off-platform.The Analytics Working Group helps to inform future enhancements to the Silverchair Analytics offering, create a forum for sharing ideas on how to use platform data to answer business questions, and surface other data sources for consideration, both to bring into the Silverchair data warehouse, as well as destinations for platform data to flow. Silverchair will also utilize this group as a focus group for possible cross-publisher activities and industry initiatives.
Aggregators Working Group
Since the advent of digital publishing, there's been a macro-trend of learned societies looking to partnerships to help bring their content and its supporting services online to attain scale, more easily secure and maintain revenue, and insulate from the high costs associated with doing all of these activities in-house. These practices yielded publisher platforms that served as aggregators, providing a varied array of services, from pure online hosting to production, institutional sales, marketing, and submissions and peer review to its constituent publishers.Silverchair has become a home to publishers achieving these economies of scale at many different scales and flavors in recent years. As a platform partner to publishers practicing aggregating, Silverchair aids in maintaining the independence of these arrangements outside of the large commercials, and the platform and its publishers have an opportunity to work together to establish workflows in tooling and reporting to best support these businesses.
The Silverchair Aggregators Publisher Working Group will convene these like-minded publishers to inform future enhancements to the holistic Silverchair offering and create a forum for sharing ideas on how to leverage platform functionality to meet the needs of partner publishers. Silverchair will utilize this group as a focus group for feedback on platform tool enhancements, aggregator-specific reporting needs, and industry initiatives that would affect aggregator publishers differently than others.
University Press Working Group
University Presses sit in a unique and vital place in the scholarly ecosystem. These non-profit organizations publish peer-reviewed books, journals, and other works and are at the forefront of efforts to build sustainable scholarly research infrastructure. Their proximity to the academy and its libraries is intrinsic to their nature and impacts their goals, stakeholders, and resourcing capabilities. This is an incredible benefit in many ways but can also result in some challenges. With a content catalog composed often of more books than journals, and frequently heavier in the humanities and social sciences than science, technology, and medical fields, their subject taxonomies, content loading, usage reporting, and discovery processes can differ vastly from those of other publishers. Further, their technical staff are often few in number and stretched across many domains. Finally, their integration into the university ecosystem means that these presses are, in many cases, subject to budget and funding decisions made at the university level.University presses are a foundational customer segment for Silverchair, a company that prides itself on creating a platform that allows users to grow and thrive with the help of our self-serve tools and our client engagement model. By assembling this group, we seek to generate opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and information-sharing among our university press customers to create platform features that best support university presses in delivering on their mission and remaining financially viable.
Learn about last year's Publisher Working Groups here. Want to learn more about Silverchair’s community and platform? Explore recent case studies, or get in touch for a demo.