Director, Business & Content Intelligence

The Optical Society (OSA) is recruiting for a Director of Business & Content Intelligence in our Publishing Department to lead and coordinate the publishing team’s efforts to obtain, analyze, and report on content and data and to then provide actionable recommendations that help us to better understand our business and drive business development and/or portfolio growth. The Director draws on his/her experience within the scholarly publishing industry and on appropriate technologies to interrogate the content and provide credible analysis on aspects such as topical gap analysis, author–citation networks, and content usage and/or abuse to help OSA Publishing better understand its market share, author behavior, topical and/or funding penetration, content download patterns (including download abuse), and other factors. The Director uses both internal and external data sources (such as MarkLogic, OSA’s peer review system, and the Web of Science) along with techniques such as semantic enrichment and data visualization to provide insights.  The Director maintains a thorough knowledge of the publishing department policies, strategy, and data practices to represent OSA Publishing information accurately and contextually to external parties or to other OSA departments.

Primary responsibilities

• Fulfill ongoing and ad hoc requests from senior OSA Publishing team members for reports on topic area penetration, funding, downloads, and other key content and/or data points.

• Query and aggregate content and data from internal publishing databases and external sources (such as the Web of Science) and provide analysis in the form of written narratives, spreadsheets and data visualizations.

• Coordinate efforts among Pubs, IT, and external vendors to develop and maintain critical reporting mechanisms, such as COUNTER and Web of Science reports.

• Participate in ongoing initiatives for using semantic enrichment and other AI approaches (such as natural language processing) to improve reporting and to provide new avenues for audience identification and targeting as well as product development.

• Play a lead role in instituting effective measures to identify and combat content download abuse. Coordinate with senior Publishing and IT staff to develop increasingly automated ways to identify, report on, and segregate suspected abusive activity.

• Assist other OSA departments on an ad hoc basis with business-intelligent needs that require journal and conference paper data.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: 

• Master’s Degree or Bachelor's degree and equivalent experience in relevant areas, such as Information Science and physics and/or engineering.
• Minimum 7 years work experience with an STM publisher or information services provider, preferably in the scholarly publishing space and with a non-profit publisher.

SKILLS AND ABILITIES: 

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with relational and nontraditional (e.g., “NoSQL”) databases to query, retrieve, and aggregate data from disparate sources.
• Analytical and strategic approach to problem solving.
• Working knowledge of Python, R, or other programming language suitable for data-analysis tasks; familiarity with semantic approaches to enriching and classifying content.
• Experience with COUNTER, Crossref, Web of Knowledge, or other core resources used by researchers, libraries, and content providers.
• Demonstrated ability to provide insightful written analysis and appropriate data visualizations for different audiences.

OSA offers a competitive salary and benefits. Please send your resume and cover letter with salary requirements to resumes@osa.org.