Estafet Insights - Edition 12

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If you want a good perspective on company culture and how to improve company performance is it worth listening to your software developers? Our feature article, "Listening to Your Software Developers Can Improve Company Performance and Culture," sheds light on the unique insights development teams have hidden away and often untapped.?

In "Embracing Open Access with Estafet: Empowering Academic Publishers," we dive into the transformative shift in academic publishing. Open Access (OA) not only broadens the reach of scholarly content but also opens up new revenue opportunities for publishers. At Estafet , we help academic publishers stay competitive in this evolving landscape by providing tailored digital solutions that streamline publishing workflows, improve discoverability, and enhance research impact.

September is a time of re-evaluating and planning for the next quarter. For ideas on how to be in a better place by January, my diary is HERE.

Thanks,

Adrian Wright

CEO and Founder, Estafet

By Adrian Wright, CEO and Founder of Estafet

If you want to truly understand company culture and ways to improve performance a good place to start is with your developers.? I have the privilege of gaining deep insights into our customers’ organisations through the feedback and experiences of our development teams. When our developers and quality engineers integrate with a customer’s team, they engage directly with the company’s culture, processes, and operational efficiency. This unique fresh eyes perspective allows us to offer not just IT solutions but also strategic advice to help our customers improve holistically and outperform their competitors.

The Pulse of Company Culture

Our developers and engineers work closely across most departments within our customers’ organisations. Through this engagement, they gather valuable insights into the company’s culture and operational dynamics. Here are the top 5 points on company culture that I focus on when presenting to our customers’ board on top of stakeholders’ delivery report.?

1. Onboarding Process The onboarding process is often the first interaction new employees and teams have with the company’s culture and operations. Our teams provide insights into how effectively a customer welcomes and integrates new hires. A smooth, comprehensive onboarding process indicates a well-organised, supportive environment, while a chaotic or inadequate process can signal deeper issues. Onboarding inefficiencies are rarely discussed, invested in, or tracked with metrics. For example, bringing on a new team of 8 people with a 4-week onboarding process instead of 2 weeks results in a delay of 16 man-weeks and an increased cost of approximately 6,400 euros, based on a nearshore team. This inefficiency is a costly drag on agility. At Estafet, we commit to delivering into production in 6 weeks, so we cannot afford to linger in an inefficient onboarding process. Where chaos exists, we document as we go and leave the customer in a better place when we leave.
2. Communication and Collaboration Our teams often witness firsthand the level of communication and collaboration within a customer’s organisation. Whether it’s seamless interdepartmental cooperation or noticeable silos, these observations help identify strengths and areas for improvement. Sharing these insights with the customer’s leadership fosters initiatives to bridge gaps and enhance teamwork. For example, in digital transformation projects within large enterprises, we often work with multiple large system integrators who operate in silos. When we facilitate direct communication among these integrators, it’s often the first time they’ve collaborated directly, focusing on the customer’s transformation objectives rather than their own delivery goals. We measure collaboration and work to break down silos, ensuring data flows through the business to where it adds value.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

By Alistair Park , CCO at Estafet in collaboration with Bryan Davies

Understanding Open Access (OA)

Open Access (OA) is transforming academic publishing by providing digital, online, free-to-reader access to scholarly content, removing most copyright and licensing restrictions. The drive towards OA is fuelled by the demand for greater accessibility and dissemination of – often publicly funded – research. The “Gold” OA model holds the final published version of an article (or Version of Record) permanently and freely available online for anyone, anywhere to read. An article publishing charge (APC) is usually applicable to publish Gold OA. “Green” OA – also known as self-archiving – refers to?making an article published within a journal under a publisher’s traditional subscription also available to the public in an institutional or disciplinary open access repository. Green OA is sometimes understood to refer to making such a work available on the author’s personal website.?

There is no difference between format, quality or method of production between comparable OA and traditional subscription-based articles. For example, OA articles are also peer reviewed. Instead, the distinction lies in the business model and the copyright and access rights of each model. Whilst traditional subscription models will remain highly relevant for authors and publishers for the foreseeable future, many are responding by adopting OA models as an alternative to respond to demands from authors and funders and to remain competitive and relevant in a rapidly evolving market. Importantly, OA also provides additional opportunities for authors, funders and publishers through secondary dissemination, access and commercial models.

OA is important to

• Authors: OA increases the visibility and impact of their work, potentially leading to more citations and career advancement. Whilst some authors are motivated to choose OA for ethical reasons, others will make judgements about “impact” and, perhaps, career progression, both of which may be better served with a wider readership. In some cases this is a personal choice, in others it is mandated by their institution.?
• Publishers: OA opens new revenue opportunities and ensures relevance in the rapidly evolving academic landscape New OA journals from university presses, societies and digital platforms can compete effectively in a market previously dominated by commercial publishers. Indeed, the digital-first approach of newer entrants makes them cheaper, faster, and with a potentially wide reach. To maintain their position, traditional academic publishers are having to move quickly to compete.
• Funders: OA ensures that publicly funded research is accessible to all, maximising the return on investment Funders are pushing authors to produce a single high-impact OA paper for a piece of research, rather than paying for multiple (OA or other) papers.?
• : OA facilitates broader and faster access to research, accelerating scientific progress Knowledge often spans different silos of knowledge or journals. With OA, researchers are no longer constrained by which journals their institutions subscribe to and can extend ideas or insights from an adjacent body of literature to their own area of interest.

OA Pillars for Success

OA articles have the same fundamental success criteria as subscription articles, although the importance given to each of the following pillars may vary:

Strategies for Monetizing OA articles?

1. Article Processing Charges (APCs):

Authors or their institutions pay a fee for the article to be made openly accessible. This is the most prevalent model for monetizing OA journals.

2. Institutional Agreements and Memberships:

Establish agreements with institutions or consortia for bulk publishing deals, where institutions pay a lump sum to cover APCs for their researchers.

3. Sponsorship and Grants:

Secure funding from governmental or non-governmental organisations that support open access publishing as part of their mission to promote scientific dissemination.

4. Advertising:

Incorporate advertisements in the journal website or in the articles themselves, targeting audiences relevant to the journal’s focus area.

5. Enhanced Services:

Offer premium services to authors such as expedited peer review, advanced editorial support, or extensive promotional activities for a fee.

6. Data Hosting and Supplementary Material Fees:

Charge for hosting large datasets, multimedia files, or other supplementary materials that accompany the published articles.

7. Commercial Partnerships:

Form partnerships with companies that benefit from the exposure and alignment with the journal’s content, such as software tools for researchers or laboratory equipment suppliers.

8. Institutional Repositories:

Provide OA journal content to institutional repositories for a fee, ensuring that research is accessible through multiple platforms.

9. Freemium Model:

Offer basic access for free while charging for enhanced access or additional features like deep analytics, article metrics, or downloadable content.

10. Crowdfunding:

Engage the academic community and the public in crowdfunding campaigns to support open access publishing, leveraging platforms designed for collective financing.

11. Secondary Rights and Licensing:

Licence the content for reuse in educational materials, professional training courses, or other commercial products, generating revenue through these secondary uses.

12. Conference Partnerships:

Partner with academic conferences to publish proceedings or special issues, with the costs covered by the conference organisers or included in the registration fees.

Technology Implications?

Rapid advance in new technologies

AI is changing the way we manage data and consume information. The current buzz around generative AI (to generate ideas, suggest improvements, or even draft portions of text) can distract from its wider impacts. For example, AI can streamline the publication process, including proof-reading, editing and formatting. It can give us a better understanding of reader behaviour. We are also applying AI to data pipelines to read, interpret and link historical content with new publications to present a corpus of knowledge and generate new insights. All this is possible through both tooling (such as Apache Spark and Databricks) coupled with cloud computing. Done well, this gives a huge competitive advantage, both for OA and traditional publishing models.

Versioning.

The book, journal or article is no longer a single instance. Articles may have different versions depending on their stage in the editorial process (including pre-press stored in green OA) but also according to copyright restrictions across many different geographies, different business models, and include regional and market variations. Being able to manage the release and dissemination of multiple versions of a product means you need to automate both workflows and the implementation of policies.

Business Rules?

As mentioned earlier, OA publication often requires the removal of copyright restrictions, but these need to be managed at a number of different levels. For example, an academic book is split into multiple chapters, often with different sets of authors for each chapter, many will want to re-use or reproduce other published content, such as diagrams. Copyright, royalties and access need to be managed at different levels within the hierarchy of the book. As the content is republished, for example as an audiobook or podcast, these need to be traced back to original access agreements and permissions. Technical solutions make this tracing faster and more accurate at scale.

Workflow Management?

One of the reasons authors give for embracing OA is time-to-publish. Whilst self-archiving pre-publication in green repositories has some benefit, we really need to improve the publication workflow. Earlier we suggested how AI covers tasks such as proof-reading and formatting, but we can also streamline the peer-review process, making it easy for reviewers to be assigned, notified, and briefed, whilst making it simple to submit feedback promptly and be paid for their work. Once ready for publication, automated publication and dissemination, using the business rules described above, cuts time-to-publish.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

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