Scientific insights from online communities

NETHERLANDS-- Scientific journal publisher Elsevier made its first foray into the brave new world of online research communities late last year in an attempt to open up a new channel of communication with its global audience of research scientists and university librarians.

In an interview with Research, vice president of product marketing Yukun Harsono takes us through the genesis of the project, its work with community builder Communispace, and how this new platform has evolved the role of research within the business.

When did the company decide to launch an online community and what was the rationale behind it?

The discussion started in the middle of last year after we took on a different product strategy. We needed to move away from just providing content to our customers. Content is increasingly commoditised in our industry, so we had to look at ways to tie intelligence to that product.

When you look at how researchers have viewed journal publishers traditionally, we're akin to a grocery store. They come to us, find the ingredients they need and then go away to do their work. We wanted to become a kitchen for the researcher. We wanted them to stay within our environment and use our tools, but to get to that point we had to understand the challenges they face in their daily work lives.

Now, none of us within our division are scientists or librarians. Also, we're serving a global audience but are based in Amsterdam, so it was difficult to stay close to the customer without having people flying around the world all of the time. One of the things that came out in our discussions was, ‘Why don't we bring the customers to the company instead?'

You launched two separate communities late last year, both called Innovation Explorers – one made up of 300 researchers and the other consisting of 150 librarians. Spaces were limited, so how did you decide who you wanted to recruit?

We wanted influentials, people who often talk about solutions and products to their peers, as we wanted to generate word-of-mouth marketing through the communities. We did provide a small incentive, a gift certificate. However, the most important thing – and this was a revelation on our part – was that a lot of our customers were dying to have interactions with us in this way, but didn't really have a channel to do to that before. They also see the platform as an opportunity to network with their peers around the world.

Communities differ from research panels in that you have more of a continuous dialogue with members rather then serving them sporadic surveys. How do you manage that internally?

From a facilitation standpoint, our approach at Elsevier is that we are responsible for creating the questions and challenges that we want to put to the community and Communispace feeds in with the best way of engaging the community, and they then facilitate and moderate that.

What about mining the conversations that naturally occur between members – is that something you do as well as the set activities?

We do monitor the kinds of user-generated discussions that are going on in the community. Those types of conversations help more from an exploration phase – to really understand what problems there are that are out there in the marketplace that we haven't solved yet. On the other end of the spectrum we do validation work. We have a specific problem we know is out there and have developed a product to address that, so we'll ask the community whether the solution works.

For example, at the beginning of this year we launched SciTopics – basically topical summaries in specific disciplines. Scientific research has become increasingly multi-disciplinary, so while you may know a lot about your area, you may need to know about other fields and this is where SciTopics comes in to play. Twenty-four hours after they were released in early January we went in to Innovation Explorers and asked them what they thought. The response was very insightful and speedy. There were questions around whether this was something that you could respond to and provide comments on – some user generated content that could sit on top of the summaries – and this was taken back to the product management folks to refine for the next release.

Is there the same resistance in scientific publishing as there traditionally has been in consumer publishing to the idea of giving readers too much of a say in dictating content?

That's actually one of the discussions in the community at the moment. We have a peer review system in place [whereby experts vet articles before they are submitted to a journal] and they will be the ones who decide whether a paper is ready for publication. But people are now asking why we can't just post an article online and have people comment on it. The question then is, will politics come into play? If you put that article up there, will someone who knows you and doesn't like you put a negative comment about your work on there. Based on what we have observed, I don't think the research community has come to a consensus on the best way to evolve the peer review process yet.

How has the use of communities evolved Elsevier's use of research. Do you do less of the traditional surveys and focus groups, or has it moved your use of research in to new areas?

A little bit of both. In the past when we wanted to do a market validation project, we would put together request for proposals, put it out to bid, get the right research agency on board. It was a long process, often quite frustrating internally and externally. Now with Innovation Explorers our approach is more programmatic, there is a constant stream of bandwidth between us and our customers, and we have actually scaled down the number of ad hoc surveys we do.

Do you not have to be careful in relying on the community too much, though? Is there not a danger that you'll ask too much of people and they'll start to drop out of the community or just stop responding?

There was concern from our end about over-surveying and asking too much from our members, but as long as they feel it is a dialogue – not just a one-way input from them – they feel like they are being heard and being taken seriously. So what we try to do its keep them informed of the progress of product development and they get excited about that.

Author: Brian Tarran