In this series of blog posts, the Silverchair team will give you a preview of Platform Strategies’ program, a look behind the scenes at our planning and preparations, and share what we’re looking forward to. You can find out more about Platform Strategies here and register for the conference here.
We’re roughly 45 days from this year’s Platform Strategies. Nearly 150 individuals have registered and we’re nearing capacity for our venue, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) in lower Manhattan.
We’ve promised attendees a day and a half of programming focused on business strategy, platforms, and technology. With our agenda nearly set, I’m confident we’ll deliver. We have a phenomenal roster of industry experts, innovators, and veterans covering some of the biggest issues in scholarly publishing today.
We’ll start day one with a technology leader roundtable. Joining Stuart Leitch, Silverchair’s COO, will be John Shaw, CTO, SAGE, Ann Michael, CDO, PLOS, and potentially another one or two leaders. At the roundtable, the group will discuss the merits of open source relative to proprietary technology, the benefits and risks of community-owned applications or infrastructure, how to weigh ownership challenges versus partnership risk, and whatever else may come up in their free-flowing conversation.
Following the roundtable, Daniel Hook, CEO, Digital Science will give a plenary address. We’ll then have a panel with Colleen Scollans, a leading marketing and digital strategy expert and Paul Gee, VP, Digital Product Management and Development, JAMA Network, on next generation marketing, product and data strategies.
We’ll close out day one by interviewing Ned May, VP, Analytic Operations, Outsell and Lauren Kane, CEO, Delta Think, on data strategies for independent and society publishers. In Silverchair fashion, we’ll have a cocktail reception for attendees at the Conrad hotel, just down the street from the NYAS.
Day two will begin with a researcher panel led in discussion by Dustin Smith, Director, Innovation and New Product Development, Silverchair. Offering a “view from the front lines,” researchers such as Will Fortin from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University will give us a view into how our content and products are actually used and perceived.
We’ll then have our keynote. Ian Bremmer, Editor-at-large, Time Magazine, President, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, will talk about sovereign internets and other geo-political risks for scholarly publishers. This isn’t a session to be missed, particularly as many of us are looking to Asia for market expansion.
In a more pragmatic session, industry experts Tracy Gardner, Renew Consultants, and John Inglis, ED and Publisher, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Co-founder, bioRxiv, alongside innovator and start-up leader Sami Benchekroun, Co-founder and CEO, Morressier, will give a panel talk on how publishers can capture more of the research lifecycle to create value for their businesses, membership, or community.
We’ll round out day two with discussions on open access and networked economies and the increasing importance of product managers in publishing houses. The closing plenary from Oren Beit-Arie, CSO, ProQuest, will be on content aggregation, syndication, and enabling technologies.
When we started planning this year’s meeting, we wanted to gather some of the best minds to talk about the most important issues in the industry. As I said earlier, I think we’re on track to do just that, and I hope to announce more speakers and topics as we finalize our agenda in the coming weeks.
If you haven’t registered for Platform Strategies, you can do so here. I hope you’ll join our community in New York to learn from the experts we’ve assembled on stage and to network with your peers.
Will Schweitzer is Silverchair’s SVP for product management. He guides the development and management of the Silverchair Platform and develops new products and services for the scholarly and professional market.