Developing new scholarly analytics tools for Computer Science editors

The OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) has been awarded £100,000 from Springer Nature, a leading academic and educational publisher, to extend their collaboration in the field of scholarly analytics.

Led by Prof Enrico Motta, OU Professor of Knowledge Technologies, and Dr Francesco Osborne, OU Research Fellow in the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the partnership focuses on developing intelligent solutions to improve both the quality and the efficiency of the editorial process at Springer Nature and to allow editors to make informed, evidence-based decisions about their marketing strategy.

The partnership will capitalise on the research work which began in 2014 and has since developed several innovative technologies, including:

Smart Topic Miner

A tool which automatically generates the scholarly metadata for all conference proceedings in Computer Science published by Springer Nature, about 800 volumes a year.

Watch a demo.

A portal

Allowing users to browse, download, and provide feedback about the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), the world’s largest taxonomy of research areas in Computer Science. This is a resource produced by the KMi team, which includes 14K topics and 163K relationships and has been formally adopted by Springer Nature

The CSO Classifier

A new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers with respect to the topics included in the CSO.

Smart Book Recommender (SBR)

An application which assists editors in deciding which editorial products to market at a specific conference venue. SBR takes data about a conference and suggests books, journals, and other conference proceedings which are likely to be relevant to the attendees of the conference in question.

Watch a demo.

Building on this extensive set of innovative technologies, the team plans to further develop its collaboration in the next year by developing both new analytics tools for Computer Science editors, as well as new intelligence capabilities, to support the Marketing department in tailoring their product packages for different organizations.

Professor Motta said: “We are very excited to renew our longstanding strategic partnership with Springer Nature and we are very much looking forward to producing a new generation of intelligent solutions to support their editorial and marketing teams.”

Find out more about KMi’s research into generating value out of scholarly data