The Silverchair Platform: Flexible & Open

The Open Access movement has transformed publishing over the last 22 years since the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative, even more markedly so in the last 6 years since Plan S.

From changes in business models and workflows to new funding mandates and expanded metadata, the shifting OA landscape has meant that publishers need to remain both nimble and expansive in the strategies they adopt to serve their communities and fulfill their missions. 

As publishers adapt to these changes, so too has the Silverchair Platform, which supports open access publishing by providing tools, services, and frameworks that enhance the discoverability, usability, and impact of OA content.  

How Platforms Support Open Access

Hosting, submission, and discovery platforms support open access in the scholarly publishing industry in a variety of ways. These include: 

  1. Infrastructure: Platforms provide the necessary digital infrastructure for the storage, dissemination, and preservation of open access content. In managing the submission, peer review, and publication processes, platforms are responsible for hosting and transferring the metadata that fuels the discovery and compliance of OA research. 
  2. Interoperability: By ensuring that the content we host plays well with other systems (e.g. by following industry best practices regarding xml tagging, metadata adoption, and leveraging SFTP and API methods of data transfer), we provide crucial support for indexing services and for integrating with libraries and other repositories. Our interoperable approach also makes it easy to integrate with various third parties that support OA needs.  
  3. Compliance: Platforms help publishers comply with open access policies set by funding agencies and institutions by providing mechanisms for reporting and tracking compliance. This includes OA indicators and display of funder information on the version of record, supporting the deposit of articles in required repositories or complying with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, machine-readable) data principles. Silverchair is also a proud member of CHORUS since its founding and supports the needs of publishers who also leverage this group’s infrastructure to demonstrate their compliance with funder mandates. 
  4. Discoverability: Hosting platforms enhance the visibility and discoverability of open access content through SEO, robust deposit services, and building connections to upstream / downstream and secondary / tertiary publication objects. These efforts help researchers and the public find and access scholarly work more readily.  
  5. Analytics: Many OA models also rely on granular reporting to convey value and sustain funding. Analytics also help authors and publishers understand the reach and impact of their OA content. This can include download counts, citations, alternative metrics, and user insights. 
  6. Additional Revenue Streams: Platforms also provide opportunities for new revenue streams (such as advertising) as subscription revenue lags. Diversifying revenue streams helps publishers remain agile and enables them to experiment and innovate. 
The Silverchair Platform is home to hundreds of open access books and journals. We are intentional about approaching all publisher solutions in a business-model-agnostic manner. This strategy ensures that Silverchair is able to satisfy the needs of publishers who are on the leading edge of open access innovation, those who rely on traditional subscription revenue and protective paywalls around their content, and those who manage publications with access models spanning the spectrum.

The Silverchair Platform currently hosts the full range of OA models, including Subscribe to Open, Direct to Open, and Gold / Green / Bronze OA, and is flexible enough to support emerging models like Commit to Open out of the box. 

“The Silverchair Platform provides us with ample flexibility for the wide variety of journals published by UC Press." —Erich van Rijn, Director of Journals & Open Access, UC Press  

The Silverchair Platform offers robust solutions to navigate this complex landscape. The platform supports hybrid models that combine open access and subscription-based content, allowing publishers to maximize their reach while maintaining revenue streams. Tiered access models enable publishers to offer different levels of content accessibility, from free abstracts to premium full-text articles, catering to diverse user needs and willingness to pay. Additionally, value-added services such as enhanced metadata, advanced search capabilities, and personalized user experiences provide further incentives for users to subscribe. 

Features of the Silverchair Platform that support OA strategy

  • Auto-filtered search, recommendation widgets, and topic collections to ensure that users accessing OA content are only presented with other OA content (eliminating the disruption of paywalls to a seamless OA user experience)  
  • Accommodation of various and custom OA license types in the metadata 
  • Robust deposit services to meet OA indexing needs  
  • Personalized content widgets presenting users with exclusively OA content from across a publisher’s catalog  
  • Powerful and flexible advertising options to support additional revenue needs on OA content  
  • Additional features and tools for engaging OA users and directing traffic toward other revenue-generating avenues  
  • More granular author and funding data provided upstream following emerging best practices/standards. This includes multiple layers of institutional affiliation, Ringgold, ROR, or GRID identifiers, FundRef, ALIs, data availability statements, etc.   
  • Additionally, the Silverchair Universe framework allows publishers to integrate third-party tools and services, which can further support the needs of open access publishing. For example: Scite badges representing article reproducibility and the FigShare Viewer widget for supplemental data 
Beyond the core platform, Silverchair also collaborated with Oxford University Press and a community of practice of 30+ publishers and industry leaders to launch Sensus Impact earlier this year. Sensus Impact is a new initiative to enhance reporting and demonstrate the impact of research supported by funders. Funders are more frequently mandating various levels of OA publishing, embargo periods, and open data deposits, and Sensus Impact helps publishers demonstrate their value by following, and sometimes exceeding, compliance needs tied to author funding. 

By continually developing and maintaining a flexible platform informed by publisher requests, market trends, and industry initiatives that can plug into best-in-class software partners when necessary, Silverchair is committed to being a strategic partner that will meet publishers’ current and future open access and open science needs.   

 

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