Guest post by:
Bert Carelli, Senior Partnerships Advisor to TrendMD
Anne Stone, TBI Communications
Paul Kudlow, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of TrendMD recently attended the AAP Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Meeting, “Adding Value in the Age of Open (PSP 2017).” At the Innovators session, Paul illustrated that by working with publishers, TrendMD has created a large-scale network to help readers discover more relevant articles within a publisher’s platform and across publishers, applying technology similar to Amazon and Netflix. Publishers in the TrendMD Network attract new readers who stay longer to read more. Download presentation.
Researchers want visibility for the articles they write and easier ways for audiences to discover them. They also want easy, reliable access to the articles they need to progress their research. Keeping up with the increasing volume of relevant papers is challenging, which is why researchers value recommendations from their colleagues and use tools like social media and scholarly collaboration networks in addition to search engines.
Large-scale scholarly collaboration networks like SSRN, Mendeley, F1000, and even private groups of researchers on Facebook and DropBox are among the newest ways that researchers recommend and share articles. These platforms also make access easier, but represent a challenge for publishers.
Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus, American Institute of Physics, acknowledged that article sharing on these collaboration platforms has created a tension between researchers and publishers. Article sharing could undermine the sustainability of subscription access, as direct readership may decline. At the same time researchers still want their work published in the most well-regarded journals. Dylla introduced the “Voluntary Principles for article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks,” a result of an open consultation across the scholarly community supported by STM. Many publishers working with TrendMD endorse these voluntary principles.
TrendMD is a different kind of large-scale network. Scholars can discover what similar articles others have read recently across thousands of journals, without diminishing the value of publisher websites. We generate article recommendations that deliver readers directly to publishers’ article pages. Our recommendations use collaborative filtering to match readers to the most relevant research articles across our network of publishers. Our readers stay on publishers' sites longer and read more, which positively influences article metrics including page views, Mendeley readers, Altmetric scores, and citations.
- 3,300 journals participate on the TrendMD network across STEM, Social Sciences, and the Humanities.
- 500 million article recommendations are viewed across the network each month, In a recent study, TrendMD delivered a 77% increase in Mendeley saves vs control (in press).
- Collaborative filtering is three times more effective than semantic similarity in driving click-throughs among scholarly article readers
- TrendMD users read 3.2 pages per visit, compared to only 2 pages from users referred by Google or Google Scholar
TrendMD is an easy-to-implement solution for publishers that
- simplifies how researchers discover and access the articles they need more quickly
- provides authors with more visibility for their article
- attracts growing audiences for open access and subscription content
- targets specific audiences by region, institution, and other demographics