This year the Frankfurt Book Fair began with a very thought provoking conference organised by the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) on October 7. Cathy Wolfe President & CEO, Medical Research, Wolters Kluwer, keynote speech began with an active programme on discussing the ways clinicians, nurses and other health professionals access and consume content on their various devices. Cathy showed statistics on how access to content via different devices has changed and increased over the years and how publishers can learn from this activity. What more needs to be done with content to facilitate a better experience and how publishers should adapt.
Ruth Francis, Head of Communications, Open Access and UK, Springer, moderated a session about how the use of social media can impact communication between academics and publishers. This was followed by three presentations from Jacob Molyneux, Senior Editor, American Journal of Nursing; Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport Business Strategy and Marketing, Coventry University UK; and Joachim Müller-Jung, Science Editor, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, followed with a provocative and inspiring session about whether or not a rationale discussion about open access is possible. Like any other system of dissemination, Open Access (in its various forms) carries with it both benefits and costs. The OA advocacy community is very receptive to discussion of its benefits, but tends to respond negatively -even aggressively - to any attempt to address its costs and downsides. This tendency makes rational discussion of OA unnecessarily difficult. Ricks presentation demonstrated the scope of this problem and proposed some strategies for mitigating it.
The conference ended with presentations from 3 post doc researchers talking about the challenges they face to advance their careers through the system and what publishers can do to help them with the process of publishing papers on their research within relevant journals.
In the CONTEC session ‘Big Data's Crystal Ball: Industry Predictions from a Data Guru,’ speaker Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University, talked about how the value in data is using and reusing it over and over again. Big Data may give us the keys that unlock the mysteries of what consumers do and when, but he warns us to approach Big Data with humility and leave space for creative, irrational human behaviour that flies in the face of data.
Samsung, the 2014 Frankfurt Innovation Partner, is searching for collaborators to help them showcase their cutting-edge products. Samsung will work with its partners to engage and support both publishers and consumers through a series of events.
On the first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Rich Kobel from Scope e-Knowledge kicked off a very dynamic Hotspot session discussing the role of descriptive metadata & Controlled vocabularies in improving semantic linkages. In smart content discovery architecture, descriptive metadata discovers and describes content and semantic linkages. This session discussed the challenges publishers face in improving the relevance of semantic linkages and how descriptive metadata coupled with controlled vocabularies and expert human curation can be the right solution.
