Recently in EPS Insight, a
daily email update produced and distributed by Electronic
Publishing Services, Ltd, Steve Sieck
described two new Science, Technical, and Medical (STM) publishing products
that caught my eye. The products were
presented at last week’s annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly
Publishing.
Here are excerpts of what
Steve had to say:
“Kent Anderson of
Massachusetts Medical Society’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) provided
a case study of that organization’s push into interactive video on the web … to
provide high quality, interactive demonstrations of complex medical procedures
on the NEJM web site…Initial reaction to the four…video titles has been
encouraging: 100,000 streams and 25,000 downloads in the first month, generally
positive reactions from ‘the critics’, and the discovery of significant
merchandising possibilities…”
“Joy Moore of Nature
Publishing Group [described]… The
latest Nature initiative…, a ‘mashup’ of multiple new social and participative
models … a geographically-defined online community for scientists: Nature
Network Boston. The site, presently in
beta, combines the ability for users to build MySpace-like profiles and
networks, meet and chat with fellow researchers, create or join user groups,
establish and post to discussions, and create community blogs (the first time
external contributors have been able to write for a Nature product)…The
business model is relatively simple: the service is free to users, with
revenues from sponsorship and advertising…[Nature expects there will be] real
value in using services of this sort to drive traffic to other (paid-for) NPG
sites and products.”
“…the session showed that
navigating to the future of STM publishing (in which online video content and
social networks will be a fundamental requirement – even, and probably
especially, for specialized society publishers) will require a good deal of
sailing into the unknown by organizations in an industry not noted for its
experimental fervor.”
I couldn’t agree with
Steve more. This is not an area of
publishing known for its eagerness to move into uncharted territory. I find these steps very encouraging.