A few ideas to increase the readership of an academic journal

In order to increase the readership of an academic journal, it helps to get started asking the following question:

Which valuable papers is nobody reading?

The simplest answer is that scientists & scholars don't read an article because they don't know is there. The breath of knowledge contained in journal archives must be unlocked and made readily available by means of modern technology for scientists & scholars to search, download, and read.

For instance, when making a keyword search at any journal's website, a long list of papers spanning several pages is displayed, prompting me to scroll down the page to see the content. This specially annoying when I have to scroll down my way into more than 1,500 articles containing 'selection' as my keyword of interest.

There is the immediate need to display my search results in a way that I can visualize all articles containing my keyword of interest at once, and download them all together for later reading. Technology must be implemented for all this knowledge to be queried and visualized in a much more intuitive manner. When I conceptualized and co-implemented a software to do this (named QiWord) I had this notion in mind. At the time, we were able to visualize the knowledge contained in 4,000 articles at once, and hundreds of articles could be downloaded in parallel from several open access journals at the same time.

When a particular field of knowledge can be visualized in its entirety by means of technology, the likelihood of 're-discovering' valuable articles increases and with it, the readership of academic journals.

We are living a period in which innovation, for most of its part, is in the form of combinatorial innovation. This means that when creating, we take discoveries and knowledge from different sources and put them together in different combination to address different questions. The internet provides unparalleled access to knowledge and makes this possible.

Furthermore, the use of technology and data analytics allows journals to evaluate the 'life cycle' of their published articles in terms of (a) number of downloads over time, and (b) number of citations over time. Why is this important? Because it allows for the discovery of the Pareto Principle and thus the identification of those 20% of published articles that produced 80% of the downloads, or 80% of the total citations.

Real time measurement of article's life cycles will shed light on many important aspects and at the same time, provide a method to quantify novel approaches within the journal.

Certainly, there is plenty of room for the integration of technology into digital publishing.