The world of scientific publishing has undergone a metamorphosis in recent times. The key ingredients here are “authentication” and “piracy” in scholarly communications. Many people have come up with “inclusiveness of scholarly communications,” for disabled people. There seems to be a lacuna in the world of scientific publications, given the “professional” and “educational” spheres of education. In a highly connected world, knowledge must be disseminated through “journals,” “books,” and “databases.”
At one end, most academicians are of the view that
knowledge must grow with highly authoritative communications being accessible to readers. At the other end, publishers argue about “copyright infringement” with new challenges towards tackling piracy and digital infringement. Accessibility is still an issue for scholarly communications.
According to the National Institute of Health, there are more than 285 million people with some form of physical, cognitive, and educational challenge in the USA. Nevertheless, the enrollment of disabled masses is just 10–20% across colleges in the USA. People with disabilities are a sizeable population if we take into consideration that they can be perennial customers of scholarly communications.
“Accessibility” is still an issue here for most publishers. Publishers are concerned about “return on investment” while catering to such people. Accessible publishing is not really avenue for making great revenues. However, people with disabilities are now being considered for inclusiveness and diversity. They are provided with “navigable, feature-rich content” through various innovative publishers: DAISY and ReadSpeaker.
Accessible publishing is far superior given the fact that it can improve the “quality” and “interoperability” of metadata. With proliferation of machine learning and search engine optimization (SEO), general discoverability of such innovative publications is improved significantly. Publishers and technological evangelists provide deciphering workflow with maximum accessibility to all stages of publications, right from manuscript selection, improvement, and publications. Right from increasing submissions to improving usage, measurable benefits can be availed through “accessible publishing.”
Accessible publishing is much easier today thanks to developments in technology although it does require some efforts out here. Technologies such as HTML, EPUB, etc., would be leveraged to provide the best practices in accessible publishing. Industry-standard workflow formats of publishing are now accessible to all readers. The mission of academic publishing would be to disseminate knowledge through “accessible publishing.” They can envision the horizon of many accessible publishers.