Author Engagement Specialist

The Author Engagement Specialist will be based in the Society’s Publishing Section that publishes the Royal Society’s portfolio of journals. As we transition to a greater level of open access output, our traditional route to market is shifting from libraries being our main customers to authors who will become our main source of revenue in the future. There is a need to augment our marketing and editorial activities in preparation for this change.

In the highly competitive open access world, it is business critical to attract more high-quality authors. Recommendation by satisfied authors is the most common reason for submission to our journals. We already successfully attract submissions through targeted marketing and journal level author service. This new Author Engagement Specialist role will work across our Marketing and Editorial teams to supplement our current activities by focusing on researcher/author engagement across the business

Reports to: Marketing Manager

Location: Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG. Hybrid working available, however 2 days in the office per week as a guide

Hours: full time, 35 hours per week

Salary: £35,931-£40k depending on experience

Pay band: D

Contract type: Fixed term (12 month)

• Co-ordinate a systematic and effective author outreach programme. Including pre-event planning, working with marketing to promote events and post-meeting follow up.
• Improve the author experience of our publishing process including training, website, editorial, production and payment options.
• Monitor and act on author feedback e.g. publishing inbox, surveys, events.
• Co-ordinate early career researcher author panel.
• Work with other researcher-focussed departments in the Royal Society to encourage submissions e.g. grants, scientific programmes, UK Young Academy, Fellows.
• Support authors in understanding their open access options, and possible funding covered by Transformative Agreements.
• Monitor author services offered by competitor (OA) publishers.
• Liaise with other societies and conferences on mutually beneficial plans.

Aims

• Assess our current author services offering including outreach.
• Establish what main competitors are doing in this space.
• Liaise with other RS departments to understand what they do for outreach and engagement, e.g. Grants, UK Young Academy, Industry, International.
• Liaise with UK Young Academy, other societies and conferences about outreach opportunities and develop mutually beneficial plans.
• Work with Editorial and Marketing to produce content and material for a programme of events (in person / virtual).
• All pre-event planning, and post event follow up.
• Create a pack for Editorial Board members to use for any outreach they are doing, and coordinate feedback.
• Complement our current marketing activities.
• Reduce time spent on outreach for Marketing and Editorial to allow them to carry out main roles.
• Increase our author engagement and author services activities.
• Monthly report to section on outreach and author facing activities and results.

Focus markets

• Non-Transformative Agreement markets: China, Japan, India, Reasearch4Life
• All Transformative Agreement markets

Outputs/deliverables/KPIs

• Deliver and/or arrange over 30 events over the year (enabling speakers to ‘turn up and present’)
• Author satisfaction
• Increase % of repeat submissions
• Event attendance (from appropriate audience i.e. potential authors)
• Create content for different audiences:
• Early career researchers
• Mid-level career researchers
• Create content for:
• Open Science initiatives
• Transformative Agreement training for librarians and authors (prospecting/ embedding)

‍

Essential

• Research and author experience
• Understanding of researcher publishing needs
• Excellent communicator
• Strong organisational skills

Desirable

• Other languages (German, Spanish, French, Mandarin)
• Experienced trainer
• Experience of organising events in different geographical regions
• Experience of budgeting and forecasting

‍