Platform Features

To more fully support the full array of content created by our publisher partners, Silverchair has long taken an omni-format approach to content. Silverchair has adopted a subset of the NLM Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS) and Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) for content specs. We display a wide variety of content types, including video and audio content hosted by third-parties. Among the content types supported on the platform are:

• Journal articles
• Conference proceedings
• Books
• PDFs
• Video (mpg, mpeg, mov, avi, wmv)
• Audio (mp3, wav, mp4, au, wma)
• HTML (htm, html)
• Excel (xls, xlsx)
• PowerPoint
• Documents (xml, txt, doc, docx)
• Images (PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP)

We also support the authoring and first-class publication of semi-structured content via Silverchair Composer.

Finally, we support the display of a variety of other content types via integrations with numerous third-party providers, many of whom are part of our Silverchair Universe program.

Clients of all sizes benefit from our robust suite of self-serve site management tools allowing publisher staff to manage all facets of their sites, including subscription and access management, content uploading, production and publication management, web page editing and layout, collection creation, e-commerce management, and reporting and analytics.

These tools empower publishers to manage all relevant activities on their own, in real time, so that their organization can respond and adapt to business and mission needs.

Read more about our suite of tools here.

The Silverchair Platform has a flexible e-commerce module that supports a variety of product types which can be assigned to an individual or institution. Within these types, a product can be allotted to specific content so that users with a subscription to that product only get access to the content tied to it. Product types include Pay-Per-View, Token Packs, Redeemable Products, Entitlements, and Print.

The Silverchair store integrates with the client’s payment provider to ensure a secure transaction. No purchases are conducted directly on Silverchair sites, rather, the user is sent to a 3rd party such as PayPal or Cybersource to enter in their payment details and then are returned to the site following a successful transaction. Frequently, publishers will have an existing e-commerce solution that handles a wide range of products outside the scope of the content hosted on the Silverchair Platform. In a desire to maintain a single e-commerce solution across a range of platforms, the Silverchair Platform supports the ability to integrate with external e-commerce solutions via API or web service.

In an increasingly networked world, with an explosion of information and limitless paths to (and from) content, discoverability becomes crucial to the success of the publisher.  Search engine optimization is one of the primary techniques to enhance discoverability. Adherence to SEO best practices is a priority at Silverchair. We have developed a comprehensive playbook of best practices for SEO that ensure state of the art techniques are being followed for every new client. Our staff receive regular training and are focused on ensuring that our platform stays ahead of changes in the SEO world.

Google Scholar is a powerful force in the discoverability of content across the world of scholarly publishing, and Silverchair has developed a close relationship with the GS team. We have regular meetings on the state of current sites, upcoming launches, and proposed innovations. We have a strong understanding of how to approach migration redirects to ensure content will not be de-indexed. We also have a direct line of communication with Google Scholar who notifies us if their algorithms detect any dip in overall indexing of content for a site. We have many safeguards in place to ensure content is not delisted, such as making the entire XML for a given article available for crawling by Google Scholar.

Mobile delivery of professional and scholarly information is standard today. The Silverchair Platform’s fully responsive front-end architecture bolsters best-in-class experiences for users on modern devices.

Products on the Silverchair Platform are developed with Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques that are optimized for the growing array of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets of various dimensions. RWD will provide the flexibility to accommodate the myriad mobile use cases, form factors, and operating systems in use today without expensive device-native programming. Given how fast the mobile space changes, RWD also builds in the flexibility to adapt quickly and inexpensively to new technologies as they emerge.

Security protocols for web applications are increasingly becoming more important. Silverchair maintains an ISO 27001:2022 Certified Information Security Management System (ISMS) that governs all use and storage of client data within our internal systems and platform. The policies encompass Organizational Security, Asset Classification, Personnel Security, Communications and Operations Management, Access Control, Systems Development and Maintenance, Information Security Incident Management, Compliance, and Security Warranty.

It is also standard in Silverchair agreements to fully support developing EU/UK data policies. We do so by providing cookie policy acknowledgment, opt-in alerts and authentication, and one-click unsubscribe. In addition, in the My Profile section we allow users to see and edit any personal information they have voluntarily provided to the platform (such as name, email address, address, etc.). Further, the Silverchair Platform is intentionally architected to eliminate or minimize collection, storage, and transmission of Personally Identifiable or Cardholder Data.

Modern users have come to expect personalized online experiences, which is why Silverchair has developed numerous ways to deliver tailored interactions to users. Among these:

• Personal Account Registration: Giving users incentives to create profiles, consisting of basic information such as name, email address and location, and log in to your website is a key strategic consideration. Personal Account Registration allows users to create personal accounts so that they can sign up for alerts and utilize other Personalization features.
• User Affinity Groups: A powerful feature of the Silverchair Platform is the ability to create User Affinity Groups, whereby users’ reading habits are semantically analyzed and collated according to shared topical interests, as shown below. User Affinity Groups allow for targeted recommendations along the lines of “You May Also Like.”
• Geo-Identification: As well as tracking the content being accessed by a user, the Silverchair Platform tracks the approximate location of every user on the site. While this functionary primarily drives the targeting of job advertisements, it can also identify geographic and institutional User Affinity Groups.

The Silverchair Platform’s reporting and analytics offering is not merely a collection of pre-compiled usage reports delivered via the web—it is a multi-layered solution designed for both basic and advanced users. While we provide and recognize the importance of traditional publication reports, our primary strategy is focused on unlocking the Silverchair Platform usage data and surfacing it quantitatively and visually to publishers via a sophisticated analytics platform.

Silverchair’s standard reports offer granular information on time (i.e., day/hour), the user (e.g., IP Address), and content (e.g., article), enabling publishers to employ big data analysis techniques to better segment their audience, understand information usage patterns, and predict which content and services will provide the highest level of user engagement.

Abuse monitoring, suspension, and reinstatement  (called “abuse monitoring” for short) is a Silverchair Platform feature that can be easily configured by all clients. The purpose of abuse monitoring is to track usage of an IP address and then suspend access to a site if the usage exceeds a predefined threshold (which is configurable and can be adjusted). Once the threshold has been exceeded, users coming from that IP address will either not be able to access the site or be restricted from accessing secure content.  The institutional administrator, publisher, and/or Silverchair staff may review and reinstate users at any time. Abuse logs are also reportable in the publisher tools.

The platform includes a sophisticated subscription and account management module that allows publisher staff (and/or designated agents) to control real-time subscription/account management, problem solving, and institutional account setup and maintenance. The Silverchair Platform supports a wide range of access/authentication control options, including:

• Institutional Authentication Options: IP authentication, country-wide access, global username/password, referrer URLs, OpenAthens/Shibboleth
• Individual Authentication: Username/password, single sign on (SSO)
• Subscription Models: Standard entitlements, perpetual subscriptions, concurrency limits, tokens, pay-per-view, membership discounts, consortia
• Plus: Toll-free links, guest email access, off-campus access, code redemption, & more!

Silverchair integrates with a number of third-party ad servers to display advertising blocks across the site’s front end. Our UX team creates integrated ad placements as part of the interface design and can map content and user metadata to categories that allow targeted advertising and delivery, if desired. Silverchair can likewise ensure that advertisements do not appear adjacent to highly related content, in order to prevent conflict of interest issues. Where no ads are served by the ad vendor to fill the ad spaces available to a page, the ad space will collapse. Ads are mobile-friendly on the Silverchair Platform and reconfigure based on device view size. Ad placement & personalization are highly configurable by the publisher.

The Silverchair Platform provides myriad ways for publishers to group their content along product lines, search terms, business models, and society affiliations. Collections allow publishers to assemble landing pages on an umbrella, book, or journal site highlighting a dynamic, publisher-defined list of articles, books, chapters, proceedings, or Composer content.

Each collection page features an image (if desired), an introductory blurb describing the collection, and a curated list of content. Lengthy collection lists are paginated to allow users to explore the full breadth of the content in the collection. Content may be hand-picked using DOIs or pulled dynamically using parameters such as subject category, keyword, or other metadata.

Silverchair architected the platform to be able to efficiently configure functionality and interfaces based on client business needs.  While the majority of use cases are covered by standard platform features, there are cases where the end user experience or business integrations demand customization. By separating the data, business rule, and display layers, the architecture of the platform allows customizations to be confined to the layer required, minimizing cost of ownership. Virtually all of our clients have some level of customization from display items through to complex integrations, and Silverchair implementation teams are adept at providing the discovery, design, and delivery of product enhancements.

The Silverchair Platform is deeply integrated with j2 Cloud Service’s Campaigner® alert system, which enables customers to send customized, automated, and relevant email alerts to a targeted audience, automatically triggered by a wide selection of content publishing events. Additionally, Campaigner® provides a powerful suite of email alert management capabilities and robust reporting tools that allow publishers to manage and optimize a broad range of alert-related marketing and advertising activities.

Relying solely on full-text for searching is problematic when it comes to STM and scholarly information resources because authors often use different terms for the same concept and relevant related concepts may not appear. Silverchair’s search engine executes a full-text search in tandem with relevancy rankings based on the normalized concept vocabulary and equivalents which are used in conjunction with a full-text search algorithm to return accurate search results.

A standard search engine deployment includes the following features:

• Query expansion that allows robust support for searches using jargon, abbreviations, and/or synonymic terminology so that searchers can be confident of finding complete and accurate results regardless of how the content has been written or how they search for a concept.
• Faceting of results on multiple concepts to provide topical narrowing and customization of results.
• Scoping to a single content type or topic collection (for full-text searching).
• Results organized by content type (e.g., special papers, monographs, handbooks, field guides, etc.)
• Screening for invalid queries.
• Stemming. User input phrases are extended using the stemming technique. This technique handles multiple suffixes and finds all instances with any relevant suffix. For example, a user input of “aorta” will also search for “aortas” and “aortic structures”.
• Autosuggest proposes terms to users as they type into a search box (optional add-on).
• Disambiguation of queries that can have more than one meaning.

In designing the Silverchair Platform search engine, our approach is to strike a balance between the end-user expectations and practice that have been influenced by the simplicity and effectiveness of Google, and traditional expectations for information retrieval in the institutional market. Therefore, we offer a ‘simple’ search box with complex sorting and filtering options on the results page. These filters can be applied for any metadata element and include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Date ranges
• Resource types (e.g., specific publications or publication types)
• Content types (e.g. textbooks, journals, news magazines, databases, meeting abstracts, images, etc.)
• Topics (all tags applied to the content in the results)
• Best match
• Most read

Taxonomy and semantic tagging have long been strengths of Silverchair.  The Silverchair Platform comes with Semedica®, a suite of tools and services that include the Silverchair Taxonomy Manager and Silverchair Content Tagger, an automated tagging system that enriches all content upon ingestion. Semedica enables applied semantic strategies for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) information. Based on Silverchair’s extensive experience in the practical application of semantic XML, the Semedica portfolio of products and services drives context-based connections, personalized content delivery, enhanced discoverability, content repurposing, workflow integration, and unified semantic indexing. Semedica tools are employed by publishers for creating and managing taxonomies, applying taxonomy concepts to high-value content, and delivering high-value search through query enhancement, concept suggestions, and hierarchical topical browsing.

We also support loading for proprietary publisher taxonomies to support discoverability along publisher-defined terms.

The Silverchair Platform employs a variety of modular and movable widgets that serve many purposes including: to surface related content from other titles by the same publisher, to gather related content from external sources, to highlight most-read content, to assist the end user in finding citation information, and much more. If Silverchair does not have a widget that meets the needs of the publisher, another one can be created to meet the business requirements as a customization.

Standard widgets include:

• Email Alerts Widget
• Article-Level Metrics Widget
• Cited By Widget
• Current Issue Widget
• Related Content via Solr Widget
• Latest / Most Read / Most Cited
• Self-Serve boxes / carousel
• Advertising
• TrendMD
• Selectable Content List (aka the “magic widget”)
• User Affinities (optional add-on)