Business intelligence meets scholarly communications

We help publishers and stakeholders in the scholarly communications space to understand their business better and sustainably improve performance. We are experts in strategic analysis and operational analytics, specialising in Open Access publishing and workflow systems. We turn raw data into insight, fast, accurately, and with clarity.

Find out more about our services, explore our blog, and contact us for any inquiries (or just to say hello!).

Services

Open Access Analytics
Open Access
Diagnostic

Assess the performance of your portfolio, and capture weak areas and trends.

Open Access
Planning

Forecast accurately the future performance of your portfolio.

Open Access
Dashboards

Track performance across various dimensions for day-to-day reporting and for executive-level reporting.

Team & Workflow Analytics
Workflow
Diagnostic

Assess the processing speed of your workflow, and identify issues early and with precision.

Team
Planning

Optimise the size of your team according to multiple parameters.

Workflow & Team
Dashboards

Monitor workflow & team performance regularly and address issues early.

Strategic Planning
Target
Assessment

Understand the performance, course, and risk exposure of publishers and other content providers.

Tactical
Response

Assess the impact of disruption -from Plan S to COVID-19- on performance and devise your response.

Long-term
Planning

Devise a long-term strategy in line with a complex and shifting landscape in scholarly communications.

 
 

Testimonials

The work Christos does has real impact. He understands data, he understands academic communications, and he understands business. He has the rare combination of skills of being both obsessive about the numbers and being a great story teller – in short he does analysis that makes a difference, because he understands what the data means AND is able to explain it to you.

Tim Britton

Chief Strategy Officer at Taylor & Francis Group

 

Blog

 

Scientific output in the year of COVID

As 2020 nears its end, a counterintuitive picture is emerging for scientific output. Rather than suffering a COVID-driven slowdown, 2020 delivered extraordinary growth for journal content. To put it simply, journals are expected to grow by about 500k papers from 2019 to 2020, as much as they grew overall in the previous six years. Will a 2020 boom yield a 2021 bust?

 

Early reports of growth

I was inclined to look into the market’s performance after coming across reports of major publishers that claimed unprecedented volumes of journal submissions and published articles. For example, Springer Nature reported that articles grew by 11% in the first half of 2020. Elsevier reported 25% submissions growth for subscription journals in the first nine months of the year. And earlier in summer, Wiley reported 13% submissions growth for the fiscal year 2020, which half-overlaps with the calendar year 2020. While these publishers frequently beat the growth numbers seen for the market overall, they are not typically beating the growth numbers for submissions and articles by this much.

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Assessing market performance with Dimensions
I used the free version of Dimensions to assess the market’s growth this year, and produced two forecasts in order to account for (a) the lag between publication and indexing on Dimensions and (b) the slowdown of publishing operations toward...

November 2020

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