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The “really terrible” submission process of journal publication must be improved, Timo Hannay (pictured), m.d. of Digital Science, has said.
Four-year-old Digital Science is Macmillan Science & Education’s technology company, which provides software tools and services to scientists and managers. After a raft of investments, it now has a portfolio of eight businesses and nine products (see image, right) covering researchers’ needs, from laboratory work to article publication to research evaluation and funding decisions. “We think of this holistically. It’s not just a collection of products but a coherent whole,” said Hannay.
It has recently invested in London-based start-up WriteLaTex, producer of collaborative writing tool Overleaf, which provides ready-made templates for submitting articles to particular journals and reformatting for another journal if the article is turned down. WriteLaTex also has a partnership with Research Square initiative Rubriq, which offers independent peer review of articles, recommending which journal to pitch it to, based on the assessed quality of the research.
Hannay said: “The challenge is that for the author, the journals experience is really terrible. The guides for submitting to many scientific journals go on for pages. Peer review takes months—it is good but it’s clunky and slow. If your article is rejected you have to go through the same process again. It can easily take a year or two to get published. We’d like to help researchers submit [articles] more effectively, to enable them to just click a button and submit.“ Due to the rise of author-pays Open Access publishing, journals are taking authors more seriously as customers rather than suppliers. Previously they were suppliers and readers were the customer.”
“Great software and great data” will change all elements of the research process, with Digital Science keen to be “the enablers and beneficiaries of that change”, Hannay added. Investing in nascent ventures has been its preferred option. “We have done some internal development, but not the majority,” he said. “It turns out highly motivated entrepreneurs who have self-selected are much more effective at getting the product out there. We get more bang for our buck and it allows us to launch quicker. Most publishing companies tend to buy outright—we don’t, due to investing in early stage businesses. We want founders to be incentivised to grow the business and feel like a start-up.”
Of its eight businesses, four are based in London, two in the US, one in Israel and one in Germany. “That’s manageable,” said Hannay. “Is it a challenge? Absolutely.” He added that further investments were likely: “There is a stream of investment opportunities now that we are better known. I am interested in author services spaces, but I’ll be surprised if there are more than one or two [investments] in the next 12 months.”