Highlights
- In 2022, we highlighted 59 platform feature releases in the Platform Release Notes
- Those items fell into the following release categories:
- Autodeploy: 27 (these upgrades are applied automatically)
- Requires Action / Configuration: 20 (these items require an action by the publisher to configure / implement the functionality)
- Optional Extension: 12 (these are added features publishers may select to add to their sites)
- These upgrades include:
- On-site e-reader: Built out support to load and download ePub files, along with the creation of an on-Site EPUB and PDF reader.
- Improved functionality for books. Support for print-only books, search within full-text books, enhanced search result display, new book publication statuses, and display of chapter-specific publication dates.
- Product sales and access. Support for institutional tokens, the ability to include toll-free links in content alerts, support for DeepDyve rental links, support for print product sales, new shipping cost and tax functionality, improvements to the Special Offers Manager, and improved e-commerce reporting.
- ROR IDs. Added the ability for publishers to include ROR IDs in author affiliations, add ROR IDs to institutions in SiteManager, and include ROR IDs in Subscriber Links for Google Scholar. This work brings an important persistent identifier to content, as well as subscriber data, to help publishers report on business-critical stats.
- Collection and Collection Browse pages. Added the ability to create new collection types, new ordering capabilities, the ability to "pin" a Featured Collection, and expanded blurb lengths.
- Alerts. Upgraded our alerts program to consolidate back-end processes to increase impact of future improvements and overall systems efficiency and lay the ground work for future efforts to provide a better publisher and end-user experience
- New and improved integrations. Support for the Cadmore player, integrating with OneTrust's CookiePro service, and upgrading social sharing capabilities for Facebook and email.
- Personalization Support: Rolled out support for collecting first-party affinities to drive content recommendations, functionality that clients have previously had to pay third parties to provide.
Process improvements
Silverchair also released a new process within our client tools that empowers clients to share platform feature ideas with the Product team directly. Clients can see the progress of their ideas, add suggestions to weight ideas from other publishers, and have more visibility into product development themes and progress.Publisher Working Groups
- Analytics. Highlights included Open Access reporting needs, how to capture insights such as trending topics, challenges with analytics literacy, and potential ways to aggregate usage across platforms.
- User Experience. This group covered a wide range of ground, spanning traffic and the overall user journey, personalization of the user experience, and possible search improvements. Discussions notably yielded a new Publisher Working Group in 2023 that will focus on Search and Discoverability.
- Gray Literature. Discussions focused on interactive content, uses for multimedia, and uses for Composer as a solution for publishing discoverable gray literature.