Abstract
Many information providers are exploring content delivery via the mobile web and smartphone applications. Objectives include fitting academic content more effectively into user workflows, reaching new audiences, overcoming barriers to access, maximizing value and usage, and satisfying evolving user expectations. This case study explores Annual Reviews’ experience of developing a mobile strategy for its academic research content, from planning around mobile investment and business models, through practical decisions and technical challenges during development and launch, to usage, follow-up research and ongoing experiences. It spans different stakeholder perspectives and is based on telephone and e-mail interviews with marketing, technology, sales, editorial and executive staff, librarians and end users. It aims to capture the decisions, processes and experience for the long-term record, and in the short term, to share insights with the many information providers that are less far along the mobile adoption curve.
Highlights
Annual Reviews, the non-profit publisher that synthesizes critical research literature, launched its first mobile platform for its 40 journals in October 2010. This represented a key milestone in a journey of innovation and experimentation that had begun some two years earlier
New operating systems and new user expectations create a complex matrix of features and functionality; publishers have to keep up with – or secondguess – which configuration of that matrix will become dominant
“Just a year ago, the highest usage of our mobile content was on iPhones”, explains Paul Calvi, Director of Technology at Annual Reviews
Summary
Annual Reviews, the non-profit publisher that synthesizes critical research literature, launched its first mobile platform for its 40 journals in October 2010. The Annual Reviews mobile website (web app) was accompanied by a separate native app, described as a ‘pairing’ app, which did not contain content; its sole function was to enable institutional authentication, by linking individual devices with institutional access rights to allow offcampus access. The development of a mobile platform is not without challenges These can range from building the business case, securing budget and obtaining executive buy-in ( to more radical ideas), to finding and co-ordinating the right technology partners, integrating or facilitating access to multiple data sets, and updating back-file content to enable delivery via mobile. “There were grey areas”, says Jennifer Jongsma, “where we couldn’t recreate some of the web functionality – for example, the contextual snippets that we provide alongside our web content.” In such cases, “we went back to first principles: what does the user need or want to do in the mobile space? A key challenge has been integrating institutional statistics across different platforms and partners in order to ensure accurate representation of mobile usage in COUNTER statistics
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