Publishers are searching for new ways to differentiate themselves and offer services that academics are interested in, and data visualisation is currently picking up steam as an important feature for modern journals. Back in 2015, F1000 introduced the concept of a living figure which is widely regarded1 as being one of the first big publishers to introduce automatically updating figures into publications. In early 2018, Jeffrey Perkel published a great overview of the current state of play of visualisations in publishing.
OxShef: dataviz has a history of running (and future plans for more) events bringing together publishers, news organisations and academics to discuss their shared interests in dataviz and how they can work more closely together. Our last event in December 2017 can be read about here.
In general, we’ve noted that there are three very different ways that researchers and publishers want to work together on dataviz:
Some publishers support embedding of visualisations developed exclusively by the academic. The clearest example of that is F1000’s integrations with plotly. OxShef: Publishers is actively documenting publishers that support embedded visualisations in the table below.
Publishers and academics sometimes collaborate on the development of interactive visualisations for specific publications. OxShef: Publishers is actively engaging with publishers to better document their support for these arrangements and will populate this page with our findings.
The rise of data journalism requires new collaborations where publishers contact researchers to act as subject matter experts to advise on features conceived of by the journalist. OxShef: Publishers are actively investigating how publishers seek out researchers and will document advice on how researchers can increase their visibility in this page.