This was the second meeting of the Community of Practice, a cross-functional group made up of over 30 individuals in the publishing industry to inform the development and positioning of Sensus Impact.
Sensus Impact was created to provide accountability and answer the question, “What are we getting for the dollars we spend/support that we give?” from the viewpoint of both publishers and funders. The community consists of publishers and industry professionals who can offer feedback on the product’s MVP features and influence future development.
Missed out on the basics? Check out the Sensus Impact website or review the notes from the first Community of Practice meeting.
The purpose of the September meeting was to provide updates on development and engagement, and to begin discussing business models to support this new initiative. The meeting also covered product progress updates and plans for future meetings to discuss business models and review developed functionality.
Here, we share a distillation of what was discussed:
Funder Information Pages
The Silverchair team provided details around the progress of funder information pages and article pages within the Sensus platform.
These funder information pages, powered by Hum, will automatically concatenate usage, attention, and citation data into interactive dashboards for funders to examine the impact and reach that publishers have delivered from their funding. Users will be able to further drill down into the data to examine specific publications, grants or awards, and authors.
The team also shared plans to create 18 funder microsites to represent the impact of funded content. The priority order of funder microsites was formulated from a list of the top 50 funders on OUP’s platform, with a strategic focus on highlighting U.S. funders.
Successful Outreach
Alison Denby (VP for Journals at Oxford University Press) discussed outreach efforts to various funders, focusing on recent successful meetings. She also highlighted positive reception to presentations introducing Sensus Impact, as well as an upcoming opportunity to share Sensus Impact at CHORUS Forum, speaking on the real world impact of faculty publications.
Metadata and Partnership Discussions
Hannah Heckner Swain (Director of Product Strategy at Silverchair) discussed the definition of funded articles and the need for metadata to identify funding information. She highlighted that some publishers have poor metadata, which limits the transfer of data to the system. However, there are plans to continue the conversation with these publishers to potentially assist with metadata extraction projects.
There are upcoming changes to the open funder registry by Crossref, and there will be a need to stay informed about these developments.
Publisher Implementation and Sustainability Costs
Hannah discussed the implementation of new publishers and the associated growth of the program, which would increase hosting and maintenance costs. She emphasized the need for sustainability, including keeping the product lightweight while also robust.
The group at large discussed several pricing model options: a flat annual membership fee based on revenue or content corpus, one-time implementation fee with pricing tiered by quantity of content, or a “membership plus service” model.
The next Community of Practice will convene in November to discuss updates on the pilot, progress on implementation and business model development, and post launch activities.
For more information about Sensus Impact, you can visit sensusimpact.com or check out this blog post. If you’re interested in joining the next session on November 29, 2023, please reach out to hswain@silverchair.com.