User experience matters: join this new publishing community of practice

At OpenAthens we’re supporting a new user experience (UX) initiative for anyone who’s interested in making access to knowledge easy.

Last January, shortly before we announced the 2025 winner of our annual UX Award competition, I arranged a webinar with previous award winners to discuss publishers' work on UX. Both the award program and the webinar are part of OpenAthens’ commitment to working with publishers to improve user journeys, and I’ve been talking with Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter Brill and Sage Publishing ever since. The outcome is a new forum where people right across the scholarly publishing community can work together on common UX issues.

Making the perfect cake

A simple baking analogy underlines how and why a great user experience is essential in scholarly publishing. As a publisher there’s always a desire to make each publication and platform look as appealing as possible – like a beautifully decorated cake, so everyone who sees it wants to eat it.

But unless every step in its production and delivery is well planned and executed no one will find the cake very tasty. A baker who leaves an ingredient out will be left with an uneaten cake and a tarnished reputation; a publisher whose delivery is suboptimal is often left with underused content. Education and research suffer too. Students and researchers are always under pressure to deliver, so when discovery is hard or time-consuming they often decide to search somewhere easier for resources, even if they are lower quality.

UX issues

It is to help publishers, students and researchers avoid unpleasant situations that our discussion group decided to create the new community of practice, which had its first online meeting in November. We polled publishers and vendors across the UK, Europe and the US about what they’d find useful from a forum, and what their current priorities are.

As suspected, knowledge sharing was high on the list. Ninety-four per cent of those who responded said they’d welcome it. Sharing best practice and new ideas can help everyone make better progress with UX by avoiding mistakes in their own organizations that others have already made. Publishers also said they were keen to support cross-industry collaboration.

There was general agreement, too, on the hot topics to focus on first. Over the next few sessions we’re exploring:

• Demonstrating impact
• Strategy
• Processes
• Accessibility
  

A publishing community of practice for all

It’s light-touch (just half an hour, once a month!), and if you’d like to see common UX problems solved you’re welcome to join in, whatever your job role.

Your organization doesn’t have to be a member of the OpenAthens Federation. Like all the other participants we’re involved because we are committed to excellence in user experience and so we’re supporting the community by providing a Zoom infrastructure and Miro boards for collaboration, coordinating sessions and contributing our own perspectives, challenges and ideas. OpenAthens has reserved some of my time, allowing me to advocate for the community of practice and provide support.

I hope it’ll grow and thrive as issues are overcome. There will always be new ones to deal with as technologies develop and end user needs change; accessibility, for example, is an ongoing challenge. It’s an issue not only to meet the needs of those with additional requirements, but also to support every user who expects to discover, access and use resources on their mobile devices.

Get involved!

I hope to see you at the next session. Our first one in November had an encouraging 20 participants from across the UK, Europe and the US and the more people who take part, the more effective the group can be. A community approach will help everyone tackle common industry problems so they can spend more time on innovation to give their organization its unique selling point.

The only stipulation is that you must attend the online sessions in person. Sessions aren’t recorded for sharing later. We felt this is important, to encourage open conversations and allow ideas to be shared.

The community of practice calls are hosted on OpenAthens Events Zoom on the second Monday of each month, conveniently timed for several time zones: 14.30 GMT, 15.30 Central European Time (CET) and 09.30 Eastern Standard Time. We’ve also provided a Slack channel for those who want to collaborate more closely in real time.