Wiley aims to provide our society partners with an excellent service that includes both strategy development and success management. We want to help our partners achieve their goals and, just as importantly, we want to help them track their progress along the way. A meaningful partnership, however, must be built upon trust, and trust requires transparency.

We identified journal analytics as one key area where transparency could be greatly improved. There has always been a high demand for sales, usage and bibliometrics data, and Wiley frequently provides many megabytes of data to our society partners, both in annual publisher reports and on an ad hoc basis. But we had a sneaking suspicion that we weren’t providing the best possible service. Data, of course, is not the same thing as insight, and looking at data infrequently just doesn’t make sense in today’s fast-changing world. Societies own their journals, and the data associated with their journals is their data. But we wanted to go beyond simply providing data and create a tool that gives society executives meaningful insights that could inform their decision-making.

Rather than assuming we understood their needs, we undertook a multi-month discovery phase where we spoke with numerous society executives about the types of decisions they need to make and their vision for an analytics tool that might inform those decisions. These society executives told us that journal performance is a proxy for how well a society is meeting its overall mission. Revenue, usage and bibliometrics data are at the top of the priority list, but for those metrics to be useful, our partners said they need context and visibility into long-term trends. They need data not only at the journal level, but also at the article level. They need to be able to slice by geography, particularly when there’s a strategic imperative to grow in key markets. Seeing the numbers is great, but they also want a graphic interface to facilitate understanding and illuminate insights. Finally, our partners said that they need these insights on demand. They want a tool that’s continually updated and that’s there for them to use when they need it.

Based upon all of that feedback, we developed Wiley Journal Insights, a dashboard and insights tool for the executives of our partner societies. The dashboard provides users with anytime access to their journals’ title and article-level usage and citation metrics, as well as title-level income and article output data. The beta product was rolled out to 20 societies in mid-2016, and then to an additional 60 societies a few months later. We’ve taken their feedback and have improved the product accordingly. We’re now preparing to rollout Wiley Journal Insights to all of our society partners by mid-2017.

Participants in the beta phase told us that this kind of access allowed them to have continual understanding of their journals’ performance, and this in turn allowed for improved decision-making. Similarly, having the tool allowed more time for strategic thinking and strategic collaboration with Wiley.

As we introduce Wiley Journal Insights to all of our partners, we’ll be paying very close attention to our own success metrics and evaluating how well the tool:

• Improves access to and transparency of key data
• Enables better planning and decision-making by our society partners
• Improves journal performance

Impact metrics in scholarly communications are changing rapidly, and we have a pipeline of potential enhancements for Wiley Journal Insights. We’ll continue to be guided by society needs, so please let us know what you think of the tool and what changes or additional features might enhance its role in your decision-making process.

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