Established in 1749, De Gruyter is an independent academic publisher with a long history. While it remains true to its founding principles, they continue to adapt to changing audience needs, embracing digital transformation with an award-winning website that hosts 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles.
In 2018, De Gruyter began working with SciencePOD to write posts for its De Gruyter Conversations blog, as well as features for its website and journal homepages. For the next two years, SciencePOD provided content for this on an ad hoc basis. In 2021, they met with SciencePOD to discuss how SciencePOD might best contribute more consistently to content creation aimed at helping De Gruyter achieve its informational and marketing campaign goals.
De Gruyter’s Challenge
De Gruyter wanted to spotlight the cutting-edge research in its suite of publications, sharing this information with a wider audience in a clear, consistent way. Since their portfolio covers a broad range of disciplines, including the arts and humanities, business and economics, politics and society, and science and technology, they needed a content creation partner versatile enough to do each subject justice.
Such a partner would need the subject matter expertise to cover the variety of topics De Gruyter publishes. They would need to demonstrate the creativity and audience awareness to turn complex, in-depth research into clear, concise, engaging blogs and press releases.
As an international publisher, De Gruyter also needed the option to commission content in different languages. A quick, easy commissioning process was essential for planning regular content, and a press release distribution option would allow them to send out copies as soon as it was approved.
Solution
SciencePOD met with De Gruyter to identify its objectives and determine how best to meet these. They wanted to highlight recently published research with short, impactful press releases and blog posts. These would add value for its readers, and potentially reach wider audiences.
De Gruyter was introduced to the SciencePOD platform, with its content creation workflow system. The platform enables them to take control of its content, commissioning article-level press releases on the platform as soon as a newsworthy article or book is published.
SciencePOD’s network of vetted content creators allows De Gruyter to access journalistic experience, subject expertise and multiple languages. The right creator is assigned to each job and they can relax, knowing the content will be excellent every time.
For added efficiency, SciencePOD worked with De Gruyter to develop a template brief for press releases, saving the publisher time and ensuring content creators deliver consistent, on-brand messaging. The only new information they need to provide is the article to be highlighted.
The SciencePOD platform allows De Gruyter to monitor the content’s progress, and each piece goes through a strict quality-control system of writing, editing and proofreading. The SciencePOD team prides itself on accuracy and liaises directly with the original researchers to confirm quotes and scientific accuracy.
When the press release is completed, the SciencePOD platform sends De Gruyter an automated alert. De Gruyter can then disseminate the release directly from the SciencePOD platform to hundreds of industry journalists worldwide, thanks to SciencePOD’s distribution partnership with AlphaGalileo.
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Results
With the help of SciencePOD, visits to the De Gruyter Conversations Blog have climbed steadily. Press releases about research published in De Gruyter journals are seeing phenomenal success.
In 2020, for instance, De Gruyter issued a press release about a Short Note published in the journal Mammalia titled “Biofluorescence in the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus)”. As the article suggests, a group of US-American biologists found the fur of three museum specimens to fluoresce green and blue under ultraviolet (UV) light.
The news was picked up quickly. More than 1,000 Tweets were sent and numerous newspapers, magazines, blogs and TV programs worldwide picked up on the news, e.g. the New York Times, The Guardian, Vice, Spektrum (German), Gizmodo, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, The Tonight Show and The Daily Show – just to name a few. Over 70 news outlets reported about the research article in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Indonesian and other languages.
In the week following the release, the original manuscript on degruyter.com was viewed more than 20,000 times. Meanwhile, the article’s Altmetric score rocketed to over 1,000, thus making it their second “most discussed” scholarly article ever.
De Gruyter publishes first-class scholarship and has done so for more than 270 years. An international, independent publisher headquartered in Berlin – with offices in Boston, Beijing, Basel, Vienna, Warsaw, and Munich – it publishes more than 1,300 new book titles each year and more than 900 journals in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Medicine, Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Law. The publishing house also offers a wide range of digital media, including Open Access journals and books. The group includes the imprints De Gruyter Akademie Forschung, Birkhäuser, De Gruyter Mouton, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, De Gruyter Saur, Düsseldorf University Press, Deutscher Kunstverlag (DKV), and Jovis Verlag, as well as the publishing services provider Sciendo. For more information, visit www.degruyter.com
“Translating scientific discoveries and academic ideas into a language non-experts understand is a core task of science communications. This task has become ever more important in a world where the validity of scientific facts is under increasing attack. We are glad to be partnering with SciencePOD to raise the impact of our
authors’ exciting academic work”.