Jeroen Sondervan

Amsterdam University Press

Age: 33
Interview: 13.2.2013

Profile

Jeroen Sondervan is humanities publisher at Amsterdam University Press. He studied Media and Information Management at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). As well as publishing paper books, he works on digitalization projects, Open Access and e-journals at AUP. For the online Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries he was involved in a long-term project concerning enriched publications in online scientific journals. In addition to working for Amsterdam University Press he is owner of Sondervan Publishing, which is a valued partner for publishers, museums and research institutes that are searching for new ways of getting their information to the right public.

View on enhanced publications

Through his work at AUP Jeroen has got a long experience in digital publishing and reading online material. One of the major projects in which AUP is partnering, is the OAPEN library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks), a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (currently in PDF format). The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.

In addition, AUP publishes also some on-line journals, the International Journal for Interdisciplinary Methodology in the Social Science, the Journal for History, Culture and Modernity  and the Journal for Archaeology in the Low Countries (JALC). A few years ago JALC has been part of a project about user needs concerning enriched publications in archaeology. The main question to be answered was whether there is any support in the archaeological community in the Netherlands and Belgium (JALC’s main target group) for enhanced publications. What kind of possibilities do archaeologists see when it comes to enhanced publications and what kind of drawbacks? This has resulted in a set of enriched publications with interactivity and filtering in various media, such as images, maps and tables.

Jeroen makes a distinction between ‘enhanced publications’ (hyperlinked content and data, with added metadata) and really ‘enriched publications’. The latter type offers much more functionality (preferably inside the digital publication itself), such as visualizations of data, facilities to explore and to analyze data, which provides a better understanding of the data set and the underlying research. E-books are an attractive platform for this sort of enrichment, particularly those based on the recently approved epub3 standard, which allows the addition of multimedia (just like HTML5), although books are much larger and enrichment may be more complicated, just as intellectual property rights and licenses.

Enrichment often consists of an interactive table or a graph of a static data snapshot provided by the author. Such a manual production is very labor-intensive. Ideally, repositories should have an API that allows publishers to obtain data from the archive and to enrich a publication dynamically by processing the extracted data set simultaneously. There is an important rule: enrichments should not be overdone, less is more.

Jeroen has a preference for visualizations particularly those that provide insight into data. Facilities as tagging, metadata and outlining should be standard. Authors need still a lot of support in applying information technology in publications, for example, in delivering their text in XML. The use of (Word) templates is a proven approach; a customized XML editor based on a project specific DTD is an attractive strategy but not suitable for everyone. Differences between disciplines play a decisive role too.

If this development to enrich publications is to be successful in the future, there should be incentives for researchers; they must receive credits for this extra work. Another problem, which also occurs with Open Access is the perception of quality, which is still highly associated with traditional, printed journals. A synergy is required between authors, repositories, publishers and, last but not least, funding agencies.

Top features

1. Data visualization: large amounts of data in a comprehensive and insightful presentation. Experts may not need it so much, but it is particularly useful for the wider public.

2. Enhancing a publication is such way that the core message is not getting lost in the wealth of multimedia.

Audio fragments

Enhanced versus enriched (5:5)

Dynamic enrichment (3:26)

Top features (3:12)