Open Password – Friday, October 29, 2021
#992
Outsell – Research Seminars – Julia Kostova – Cassyni – Andrew Preston – Publons – Ben Kaube – Newsflo – Peter Vincent – Kopernio – Freddie Witherden – Jan Reichelt – Research Lectures – COVID-19 – Machine Learning – DOIs – CrossRef – Workflow Tools – Publishers – Partnerships with Societies – Global Research Community – Scholarly Communication – Academia.edu – Research Square – Events Management Tool – Zoom Fatigue – Delta Variant – Shift to Video – Video Content.
Herbert von Halem – Stephan Russ-Mohl – Christian Peter Hoffmann – Public discourse – Liberalism and liberality – Media reporting – De Gruyter – German-speaking Judaism – Facts account – PR blogs – Media meltdown – PR doctor – Relevance index
I. Cover story
Founders of Mendeley, Publons, and Kopernio Now Targeting Research Seminars –
By Julia Kostova
II.
Newly published: To save public discourse
III.
De Gruyter: German-speaking Judaism online
IV.
PR blogs: Team Lewis before a media meltdown and a PR doctor
Outsell’s October Contribution
Founders of Mendeley, Publons, and Kopernio
Now Targeting Research Seminars
By Julia Kostova – VP & Lead Analyst
Yulia Kostova
Cassyni taps into the hitherto ignored territory of the research seminar, bringing networked services to unrecognized — yet critical — venues for the exchange of knowledge.
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What to Know and Why It Matters
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A group of veteran entrepreneurs in scholarly communications technology acting as a first angel investor — Andrew Preston (Publons), Ben Kaube (Newsflo and Kopernio), Peter Vincent (Kopernio), Freddie Witherden (Newsflo and Kopernio) and Jan Reichelt (Mendeley and Kopernio ) — recently announced the launch of Cassyni. Cassyni is a platform designed to organize and discover academic seminars and to facilitate the exchange of research through them.
The rationale for Cassyni is compelling: Academic seminars and research lectures — distinct from small conferences — are a critical forum for disseminating ideas and fostering research collaboration. In the past, these largely existed as in-person events. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many of them to migrate to video-conferencing platforms that didn’t always lend themselves to the bespoke needs of the research community.
Cassyni proposes to formalize and centralize the seminar space with a multi-pronged platform solution:
• It provides a suite of integrated workflow tools to seminar organizers, from scheduling tools to invitations to attendance management and licensing agreements.
• It applies machine learning to automatically extract useful keywords to tag content, and, in the future, transcribe questions and discussions.
• It includes features like the ability to join communities of interest, discussion sessions, in-depth research profiles, and synchronous and asynchronous seminar viewing.
• It creates a lasting record by assigning DOIs to each seminar and depositing them in CrossRef to make them discoverable.
Cassyni seminars are free for attendees and speakers; organizers pay a fee and can choose from several individual and group subscription plans based on the volume of seminars. Pricing is transparent and relatively inexpensive in the context of seminar travel budgets, ranging from $30 to $130 a month.
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Analyst Rating: Positive
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Cassyni’s real value-add lies in offering incremental gains through an aggregation of well targeted and integrated features — like attendance management, scheduling tools, and social networking — that have until now been scattered across different platforms. The value of such a workflow tool can hardly be overstated against the backdrop of the ballooning admin and tech burden on the research community.
To a large degree, scholarly communications tech projects are only as good as their platforms. In this respect, Cassyni hits the nail on the head: It is genuinely intuitive and automated in logical places and provides often-elusive seamlessness. Using technology efficiently is key to Cassyni’s scalability. The platform has a pronounced social dimension to it, intentionally designed to foster virtual scientific communities. Importantly, Cassyni provides a way to organize the seminar space, which, the founders estimate, likely consists of millions of seminars annually. Cassyni also allows seminars to be listed on the platform even if they are not run through Cassyni.
Seminars and lectures are largely funded by departments and/or institutions, and Cassyni taps into these existing budgets, which will encourage uptake. Its flexible and relatively affordable package plans also support broader uptake.
Cassyni is a platform that will lend itself nicely to a variety of applications, and that’s where we see strong potential. Institutions looking to amplify their brands by showcasing research are already taking advantage, as are journals and publishers eager to attract new readers and authors.
Similarly, publishers large and small looking to increase engagement with their publications, in all content and format types, can benefit from incorporating this tool into their publishing, educational, and membership programs. We also see potential in partnerships with societies that are eager to bolster their member communities and maintain engagement in a remote landscape, helping them to address the decline in perception of the value of society membership.
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Winners and Losers
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One clear winner is the global research community, whose needs Cassyni has considered in creating its platform. Cassyni is mining an area of scholarly communications that has been largely ignored until now, so it doesn’t so much disrupt the existing landscape as open up new possibilities for services around the scholarly seminar.
However, it potentially challenges players in different corners of the field who may offer similar services, albeit applied to different contexts. For instance, Cassyni’s community focus could encroach on academic networking companies like Academia.edu. It also enters an increasingly dense space of services aiming to increase the impact of research, like Kudos or Research Square, the latter of which integrates video into its service offerings.
It’s also interesting to consider Cassyni as an events management tool in the continuously disrupted conference circuit. While it doesn’t directly compete with companies providing virtual conference workflow solutions (eg, Underline Science, Open Water, and Morressier), it may do so in the future. That’s particularly the case if large virtual events are supplanted by smaller, focused series of presentations, as we’ve seen many scale down to fight Zoom fatigue and maintain delegate engagement.
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What’s Next
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With the Delta variant continuing to hinder in-person meetings and instruction, a dedicated, organized platform for recording and publishing seminars can help solve real-life challenges for researchers. Like other companies and projects that have sprung up to capture, legitimize, and monetize ancillary scholarly communication materials and events, Cassyni also highlights the fact that much of research communication happens outside haloed venues like journals and major conferences and provides an accessible platform for the exchange of scholarly ideas. We also see considerable potential for Cassyni to amplify the shift to video as a vehicle for communication within scholarly communications.
In the short term, success for Cassyni will come from scale, not necessarily from additional features in its already intuitive platform. Even with the hope for a “return” to in-person meetings, we believe that the virtual component for meetings will outlast the pandemic. In the case of seminars, like that of meetings, organizers are keen to keep the new audiences they can reach virtually, and Cassyni provides a good solution.
Monetizing the workflow tool is likely to be easily achievable, first, because of the value it adds, and second, because it taps into existing departmental budgets. In the long term, to augment its product, Cassyni would benefit from exploring new use cases and partnerships with academic institutions, learned societies, and publishers as well as the advanced scientific pedagogical potential of the platform.
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Essential Actions
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We expect that new digital networked solutions will continue to emerge to meet the unmet needs of the researcher. Outsell’s essential actions for providers addressing these markets include the following.
Focus on Researchers’ Needs. Stakeholders in the scholarly communications field should continue to explore new ways of supporting solutions that underpin research communication, augmenting them with time- and labor-saving technological tools and workflows as well as networking features. Given the glut of solutions and tools available, the holy grail is moving beyond disjointed tools to platforms with seamless integration across the research journey. The need is maturing for platforms supporting scientific collaboration.
Explore Video . With the shift to virtual in 2020, the research community suddenly created an enormous amount of video content that is ripe for structuring. As research moves to a multimodal model, opportunities for integrating video in the research journey are ripe.
Newly published
To save public discourse
Stephan Russ-Mohl/Christian Pieter Hoffmann (eds.), Tear Tests. Leading media, liberalism and liberality – writings to save public discourse, 2021, ISBN (print) 978-3-86962-535-5, ISBN (PDF) 978-3-86962-538-6.
(Herbert von Halem) What about liberalism and liberality in public discourse? Liberal values are publicly celebrated – and vehemently opposed. They are under pressure and are subjected to severe tests: keywords include neoliberalism, identity politics, and the Corona crisis. What do we know about the relationship between leading media, liberalism and liberality? How are liberal causes or parties reported? How do journalists see and feel their relationship to liberalism – and the liberality of the professional field?
The authors clarify whether journalism could and should take sides for more freedom, and why liberalism and “neoliberalism” have such a difficult time in editorial offices.
De Gruyter
German-speaking Judaism online
(De Gruyter) With a view to this year’s anniversary “1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany”, we recommend De Gruyter database archive Bibliographia Judaica – German-speaking Judaism Online ( ABJ Online ).
Once founded to give German-speaking Jews back their voice after National Socialism, the Bibliographia Judaica archive documents the biographical details of currently around 15,000 Jewish-German personalities from 200 years of literature, politics, science and art; another 5,000 entries will follow in 2022. 250,000 linked scans present the original index cards of their works.
PR blogs
Team Lewis before a media meltdown and a PR doctor
(Faktenkontor) Press spokespersons, brand experts and PR consultants also like to use blogs to find out about the latest news from the world of marketing and media. Many people in particular use the blog of the global agency Team Lewis. It’s about social media, authentically communicated sustainability and advertising in video games. The LEWIS blog takes first place in the blogger relevance index compiled by the communications consultancy Aktuellkontor, which provides an overview of the relevance of 1,600 blogs in German-speaking countries. In this case, PR blogs were checked for their online visibility, number of links, social media activity and interactions with the community.
In second place is the “mediengau” of the crisis PR expert and managing partner of Aktuellkontor GmbH, Jörg Forthmann. This is about communication mistakes made by companies and who comes off well or badly in the media. The so-called “PR doctor” Kerstin Hoffmann made it to third place with her blog. She writes about corporate communications and marketing in digital change with practical tips on time management and legal pitfalls. The top 25 PR blogs contain numerous different aspects for communications professionals – from tourism PR to the experiences of trainees in corporate communications to tips for data-based performance marketing.
More at www.Blogger-Relevanzindex.de .
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