The third episode discusses how readers may use STM Content in the future. Our global experts discuss and share their thoughts in a panel debate. 

This podcast has a stellar panel for you, with representatives from all four powerhouses in publishing: Springer Nature, Wiley, Elsevier and SAGE. We have Niels Peter Thomas from Springer Nature, Young Wu from Wiley, Dante Cid from Elsevier and Vivek Mehra from SAGE. We start the discussion with Neils Peter Thomas, who is the Managing Director, responsible for Springer Nature's book portfolio which amounts to an impressive 300,000 academic books. Springer Nature add 13,000 titles every year; Nelis is also responsible for overseeing 600 editorial colleagues worldwide. He also runs the Springer Campus GmbH, which focusses on e-learning and distance learning programs. His is clearly a diverse role. Nelis has been with Springer since 2005, worked in Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, and also in Beijing and has a PhD in Economics.

“Everything is in flux, the way we create content has very much changed in the last one or two years. We published the first book last year that did not have any author. At least not a human author, because it was written entirely by machine intelligence and an AI algorithm and was creating a proper and meaningful scientific book on the chemistry in this particular situation.

Book production is a big topic that is constantly changing. In general, we have a shrinking print market, so we print less, which also triggers the way and how we wanted to print. Print on demand is becoming an essential part of publishing and this podcast dives deep into the pages of the future.“ Niels Peter Thomas.

Young Wu, is the Editorial Director of Wiley in China, responsible for setting up all the content acquisition across the vast country, Young has been working in academic publishing for nearly 10 years; he held a variety of positions across STMJ departments, also spending time abroad researching a borders program in Sierra Leone, amongst other African nations, to support their medical journals.

Young makes the point that there is a huge appetite for content in the Chinese language; especially the need for research content. Many of the needs are really coming from specific ‘life–related’ areas such as health and science.

Dante Cid is now Vice President for Academic Relations for the whole of Latin America. He holds a master's in science for all AI – a real visionary. Dante has been Regional Director in Latin America and he also sits on many different boards – amongst them, as Vice-President for the Brazilian Publishers Association.

Dante speaks about Latin America and the trend of people migrating their reading habits from papers to pre-print, and then to general media, press releases, which is not really under the peer-review process, which is HP’s main pillar for the STM publication. His role is to ensure that all the material out there has at best a serious peer review process, which is the biggest value add by STM publishers in the industry.

Vivek Mehra who was CEO and MD or Sage publications holds an MBA from Columbia University. 

“We don't have to have massive print runs up front, and we can just wait for the orders to come in. The thing that confuses people is they think that print on demand versus stock in house, there is a difference in timing. Whereas actually today, thanks to technology there isn't one. The end customer would not know if it's printed on demand or it was lying in the warehouse and somebody shipped it. So I think that's where the answer lies what goes into a print first and what goes into digital first. I think nobody, no book can be without a digital strategy.” Vivek Mehra.