Adaptability and innovation are words that spring to mind with Andrew Smeall. From studying Chinese in Beijing, he was involved in setting up journal production systems at Hindawi and Wiley, before his present tole, as VP of Product Innovation at Sage. The full interview is on the ATG Podcast here.
Andrew’s interest in Chinese began as university, leading him to spend over three years in China, first as a student and then as a teacher. His time at the Center for US-China Relations, organizing research projects, fuelled his interest both in publishing and technology, transforming research projects into digital multimedia content.
His true introduction to publishing came when he joined Hindawi, at that time a technology startup. From working in Cairo, he moved to the newly set up London office, and over the next four or five years, eventually as Chief Digital Officer, was involved in setting up a new publishing platform, taking advantage of a born digital publisher with a highly standardized business – none of the issues of the more traditional legacy publishers, still trying to complete the shift away from paper-based workflows. Clearly, technology played a significant part in the growth of the new open-access publishers, most importantly as open-access publishing enabled a direct-to-researcher business model.
Now at Sage, Andrew’s role involves strategizing technology development, and exploring new platforms. Metadata, rather than workflow, is the key: “the metadata is the Lego that allows you to build coherent workflows”.
Will journals survive?
I think some disruption of the impact factor and of the sort of traditional ways that journals are marketed and sold is probably a good thing for the industry. Change is good; it will drive us to do new things, be able to adopt new technologies, allow new entrants to compete, and I would welcome that. But no, I don’t think that in the short term, at least, you’re going to see journals disappear in the next five, ten years.
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