Gathering Information on Audience Need

Yesterday, my organization held its yearly editorial meeting. We managed to bring 9 of our 16 associate editors together from around the US and the world, along with our editor-in-chief and our office staff, to discuss in person our journal's progress and future editorial goals. Though the transition to XML is largely a background process that will be confined to the office, I wanted to get some ideas from those present about what formats, aside from the print and online versions in their current forms, would be most useful to them as professors, researchers, and occasional clinicians. In my presentation of the topic, I shied away from too much detail and tried to boil it down to what they would be concerned with as consumers: What device(s) do you use now, or do you plan on using in the future? What formats would be most helpful to you? Would you like a straight translation of the text, or would additional interactivity be appealing?

The discussion—though not long or terribly in depth, given the demographics of the attendees—was a good one that gave me some additional insight into the needs of our specific audience. We came away with the feeling that, for this particular field and group of people, the iPad had the most potential, both in widespread usage and capability to incorporate supplemental material in addition to our articles. There was also a noted interest in applications for mobile devices and tablets, which is obviously secondary to XML, but good to establish as we try to prioritize our efforts in the office.

One part of our audience not represented at that meeting (at least not directly) was students, who would be more (most?) likely to adopt these new modes of delivery for our journal and use them for more than just solitary reading. All of the editorial board teaches on the university level, so they could speak to an extent about what they think their students want, but this meeting reminded me that it would be most helpful to survey actual students to learn more about their views.