The American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky once famously said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”
This spring has seen tremendous global change—from the COVID19 pandemic to protests around the world decrying systemic racism. With an initial urgent focus on medical studies, scholarly publishers have proven how indispensable they are in advancing and making available potentially life-saving information.
Website accessibility is not a new topic. In fact, it’s been a factor since 2010 when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) published standards that digital technology and information must be accessible to all people.
It would be an understatement to say that these are challenging times for teachers. Plunged into lockdown with no time to prepare for it, educators are quickly adapting to the new realities of distance instruction while getting up to speed with technology platforms, unfamiliar teaching techniques, and changing district and institutional guidelines.
An association is something that can produce real dynamic change. It’s an exciting, organic, creation. But, at its heart, it is two or more people who share a common interest, belief, or passion, and realize that they’re not the only ones, so they invite others who have that interest to join them; they’ve formed an association.
In October, the United States Supreme Court handed down an order stating that it would not take up a plea from Domino’s pizza chain to reverse a decision in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stating that the company must make its website accessible to people with disabilities.
During the Frankfurt Book Fair, we teamed up with Springer Nature to host a panel debate entitled “AI 2.0: Machine-Generated Content, Intelligent Automation, and the Future of Academic Publishing” in which speakers from KGL (Cenveo at the time), HighWire Press, and Springer Nature explored ways in which publishers are implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Every year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, there is a buzzword or phrase that continues to pop up on panels, in articles, and in conversations and meetings. In the past, we have seen ‘big data’ and ‘blockchain’ dominate the headlines, but this year’s buzz word (or acronym) was ‘AI,’ as publishers, information professionals, service providers, and the media debated how this technology can be used in the industry.
In recent years, publishers have begun to utilize advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to significantly change their businesses for the better. Though some innovations, such as using an algorithm to predict if a book will be a bestseller, have gotten more news coverage, AI and machine learning have been incredibly useful to publishers to help process user data to better understand the marketplace, to improve peer review, to help with workflow, and even to create new products. Here are some of the most notable current trends we have observed:
