What potential impact could revolutionary technology have on scholarly publishing?
That’s a big question to start with. I’ve been in the scholarly publishing world for a long time, and I think there are many examples of innovative technologies. What’s really interesting to me is to consider what drives the big shifts we’ve seen in technology from digitizing research to Open Access and open science to the amazingly quick pivot to virtual conferences and collaboration during COVID. Each of these transformations has many drivers, but there’s a common thread of removing barriers for authors and empowering them to produce higher quality research, faster.
We have the opportunity now, as an industry, to take that driver further. There are so many challenges to being a researcher today: securing funding, managing the complexities of Open Access, showing impact in one’s field in new ways, navigating the peer review process. There are never enough hours in the day. To me, that’s a core problem that technology can solve. We can make it easier, whether that’s with increased automation for parts of the peer review workflow, or by making it easier for authors to submit and get articles accepted by running preflight submission checks.
What holds scholarly publishing back from agile product development?
Agility is always a challenge in a complex ecosystem. Scholarly publishing has long traditions that ensure quality, but with that comes workflows that are incredibly complicated to build and to navigate.
There’s the classic saying, “move fast and break things,” but what if scientific publishing is too important to our world to risk breaking it!
I think the scholarly publishing ecosystem needs to build closer relationships with technology organizations and use those strategic partnerships to improve how quickly we can move. We need to build a more interoperable infrastructure, that is less bogged down with customizations. One of the unique perspectives that technology organizations bring to the world of publishing is a laser focus on user experience in the way we develop technology, which I think aligns perfectly with the industry’s shift to be more author- or researcher- centric.
What’s the most exciting thing about Morressier’s product development right now?
I find myself incredibly energized by the passion and creativity of our product teams. We’re in an exciting, experimental stage of our strategic development, focused on rapid experimentation and listening to our users and clients to see what works best for them. That feedback loop is so incredibly important. Our work to embed research integrity throughout the publishing workflow is especially exciting to me - I think this can be a tool to empower individual authors, or to enhance existing publishing workflows.
But speaking of workflows, I am truly proud and inspired by the work we’ve been doing through our partnership with IOP Publishing. I’ve been hearing about the challenges to submission and peer review workflows for my entire career in this industry, and the opportunity to analyze our existing systems and see what’s working and what isn’t from a product development standpoint is an exciting challenge.
Any sneak peeks you can share for what’s coming up on the product roadmap?
You’ll just have to wait and see…
I’m kidding. We have lots of exciting things we’re working on in our sprints right now, to add new integrations to our integrity offerings, and to improve the planning experience in our events. But I think what I’d like to call out is our commitment to improving accessibility: we’re adding in transcripts and closed captions to our Research Libraries, making research accessible to all communities.
Conclusion
A big thanks to Jennifer Goodrich for sharing some thoughts on how our industry relates to technology, and what we’re focusing on at Morressier. Keep following along to see how we develop our publishing workflows, research integrity offering, and more to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
