Transition to Digital -- A Brief BIGNY Dialogue with Elsevier's Cynthia Clark

Cynthia Clark

We recently asked Cynthia Clark, Director of Digital Operations and Production at Elsevier, a few questions in advance of her appearance during the Book Industry Guild of New York's (BIGNY) Tuesday, March 8th panel discussion. The topic: "Publishing Technology Update: New Digital Directions."

BIGNY: Can you give some examples of re-purposing content in order to monetize it?

Clark: Enriching articles with semantic tagging allows for the collection of articles into discrete topic-based groupings that can cut across journals. These collections can be monetized as a separate digital subscription product. Or they can enrich the value of an existing journal.

BIGNY: How has data from your digital products affected new book or product creation?

Clark: We have seen the opportunity to pull together various products and integrate those to enrich the researcher’s experience: providing an interactive panel for each article that incorporates this information and provides related article and book content, citation information, grant and funding information, etc.

BIGNY: How has the digital workflow changed people’s jobs? (For example, do designers have to code? Do teams work more closely?)

Clark: There is greater collaboration among different product groups so those services can be leveraged to create new products or enhance existing ones. For example, we have over the past few years brought in experts in informatics and taxonomies to ensure that our proprietary taxonomy continues to grow and evolve to keep pace with changes in science, technology and medicine. And because we have included this semantic tagging across our platforms, we naturally see more cooperation and creative problem solving.

Visit the BIGNY website for more information and tickets for the March 8th "Publishing Technology Update: New Digital Directions" event.