Jul
16
UK Bids for Olympic Gold OA
Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
“OA was always going to be a marathon, but we seem to be waiting for a very long time indeed for any of the national runners to enter the stadium…. but now there is a rustle of academic papers in the crowd, as “Two Brains” Willetts, the UK Minister for Precocious Intelligence in the Department of Obfuscation and Reduced Expenditure, is first to arrive through the gates and begin the last round of the track. And, my goodness, how he is going… his face is a mask of determination as he seeks the Gold OA for the UK… Dame Janet Finch, his trainer, is fanning his face with a White Paper as he turns for home… looks scarcely legal to me… PLoS , the early front-runner, now has nothing left and has been overtaken by the Hughes/Wellcome/Planck entry, who plainly thought it was a three legged race… and Two Brains now reaches out for the tape, a press release already in his hand, and that’s it, viewers, the games have not yet even begun and already the Brits have their hands on Gold!”
And it is a great day for British publishing as well. Clearly the three publisher members of the Finch Working Group worked their advocacy socks off, and as a result we have a conclusion embedded in today’s announcement (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research?newsfeed=true) that is as favourable to journal publishing interests as any that could be contrived. The Minister has his obligatory cost-saving (£50m), the publishers get their APCs – fees for publishing OA articles (1% of science funding, which is £4.6 bn), the academics get Open Access and the free distribution of the results, Britain beats the US and the EU to the punch and sets a precedent they may have to follow: surely this is a golden dawn and the greatest good for the greatest number has been miraculously accomplished?
Before we join in with the celebrations lets just go back over the interests checklist and see how this announcement affects the longer term perspective:
Academics Will this announcement mollify the 12000 who signed the petition against Elsevier? Some but not all would seem to be the answer. Judging from the blogs so far some scientists have started to complain that the government will give their work away for free (send for Dr Harnad to attend this sick man’s bedside!). Others will be pleased to see a principle acknowledged, even if it is 2014 before the results appear. For many, I suspect, the feeling will be like seeing a banker resign or give up a bonus – the protest was not against the act of banking or publishing but against some bankers or publishers perceived to have gone too far. And it takes about a decade for these things to brew up – I suspect that many scientists were protesting against Elsevier’s pricing policies of the mid-nineties, and not against the Elsevier of elegant technology solutions today, some of which they hardly associate with the journal publisher.
Librarians This is a further step in the long term marginalization of librarians in their traditional roles. But now it is really clear that librarians and their skills base are urgently needed in repository development, research and evidential database availability and institutional self-publishing, this will only hasten a process already well underway.
Publishers Many publishers will be relieved and happy at this outcome. Peer review as administered by them and paid for by government remains in their control. However, they need to add a grain of caution to their celebrations. True, if UK plc goes Gold OA on this basis, then the revenue base of STM publishing will not suffer grievous harm. However, margins will suffer more, and within a publishing economy that has APC revenue as part of the mix, journal publishing Ebitda must begin to fall. This in turn will have an effect upon the ability to finance new developments at a time of critical change for the whole industry.
The real sufferers here will be the scholarly society publishers. Caught in the middle ground and dependent upon the margins from subscription publishing to run a service-based professional body, some will move from leasing out the rights to publish their journals to selling their journals in whole or in part in order to create a financial cushion and an investment base, probably while retaining a quality control interest in the journal brand. Likely result: big publishers get bigger. And big publishers get more diversified as well. Already Elsevier and Macmillan’s Nature set the pace in building workflow solutions for scientists and other researchers. Migrating the business away from sole reliance on the journal never seemed a more sensible strategy. The research article may be the “unit of currency” in scientific research, as I am perpetually assured by publishers, but it is undergoing a process of devaluation. Where a research programme is of vital significance to a whole sector, scholarly communication via blogs, conference proceedings, posters etc will have lit up the track already and scientists do not have to wait two years after programmes are completed to read the findings for the first time. And of course much current use of articles is about researching experimental technique, not outcomes. Some researchers have claimed that over 70% of enquiries are about good or best practice in experiment set-up. Others point to the need for validating reports – those which repeat and confirm previously known findings – and these, not being “new” science, seldom get reported. And then there is Good Dr Harnad and Green OA to contend with as well… though publishers will be heartened to hear him quoted as saying that this decision sets Open Access “back by at least a decade”.
And in a decade? The highest figure that I have heard for current open access publishing as offered by all major publishers is that it accounts for some 7% of articles published, and has taken 5 years to get there. Judging from the tepid enthusiasm of academics, my guess is that we shall top out at around 15%, by which time the major players will have done a great deal of consolidation in a slowly contracting journals market, and commoditization of the article through casual re-use will be a greater perceived threat, and diversification into workflow using all of the publishing skills base to maintain knowledge systems (ontologies) across communities so that everything relevant can be found and injected into the research process will be deeply entrenched. Everything about STM will change – and in ten years we shall wonder what all the Open Access fuss was about, apart from gaining a political point for the present UK government and playing the publishers back onside again.
Jul
5
Making Progress – Modestly
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Lets avert our eyes. The world of media tycoons, which lasted from the inexorable rise of Northcliffe (or Hearst and Pulitzer if you are on the other Side) to the Fall of Murdoch, seems increasingly like a bizarre episode in the long history of evolving information communications. And the current process of corporate mitosis could go on forever, as the former newspaper enterprizes (DMGT today, the press say!), on the whim of their brokers, seek to divide and sub-divide in a desperate effort to find the bit that had the value in it. Meanwhile a 15 year old in a garage in Derby or Des Moines is hitting the keys tonight to create again in a born digital world the service activity which represents in the cyber world fresh values which equate to things that might have intrigued a newsletter reader in those cities in the 1820s. Lets leave them to it, and creep away to look at what is already well-fashioned in terms of the future of eCommerce in the network, and alongside that reflect on the increasingly fascinating remodelling of the world of search.
I am driven down this route by the idea of what is happening at AutoTrader (UK). This Apax/GMG asset is just on the edge of the inevitable – abandoning print altogether. Although in austerity-riven budget Britain, sales gains have been modest at 1%, internet growth is still double digit at 11%, and while margins are very depressed, the partners (looking ruefully no doubt at the EMAP write-down) took a further £210m dividend. But what caught my eye was the idea that the way to restore margins was fairly obvious: cease print over the next 12 months. All of which took me back to a time in the 1990s when, as non-executive chairman of Fish4, the regional newspapers classifieds consortium, we sought to fight off the primacy of AutoTrader (AKA Trader Media Group). But they won, and for good reasons. They put software for classifieds inventory in used cars into the dealerships: they helped the dealer improve his business while helping him to upload stock to their databases more effectively. They started in primitive ways to improve the minisites and sales support – using video, owner interviews, and the beginnings, in conjunction with dealers, of inspection systems, accreditation and even warranty. And they worked effectively with the financial services players involved in the transactions because their focus was not just joining buyer to seller, but the whole deal and all of the margins created by it.
All of this came to mind a few weeks ago in a New York taxi as I listened to Darwin Melnyk talking about where he was taking his IRON Solutions (http://www.ironsolutions.com/) business. Backed by StarVest, IRON is a new generation version of old UK AutoTrader. Its focus is not used cars, but heavy equipment. Plant, crawlers, earth movers, caterpillars – and now onto massive tractors and combine harvesters. This is a lease/hire market, and in North America one where the user may be thousands of miles away from the owner, and the dealer, and the bank, and the big beast of a machine itself. It becomes imperative that a trust network is created, that users are able to see the trading records of dealers, that banks can lend against known and reliable valuations in a market, that inspections and the data arising from them are accurate, that videos are validated… because it is no longer possible to fly from Vancouver to Galveston to get the right tool at the right price, because the time/cost of doing the transaction that way just does not add up anymore.
So doing business this way adds up to exceptional value, reflected for the service operator by the value of his network directories, and the tightening grip of successful services of this type on niche markets. Do we really want two or three of these, if we have one, high trust, full market operator? And do we want all of our old support/risk management systems once networks like this have built credibility? You mean, less place for the commercial credit raters, or for the bank’s expensive processing and validation, or the credit insurer’s role in risk management? Yes, I mean that one day the knowledge in these B2B trading networks will be so strong that they will be able to certify their own trades, earning extra margins for themselves while reducing the cost if trading to the network participants. And that is Progress.
As these networks of traders become communities of course they share greater and greater amounts of user generated content. And as that happens they raise the investment that all users feel they have made in the system. So these people will not be going to Google to capture a wide range of offers – those offers could be toxic. However, we will see search evolve in specialised ways, and I was delighted this week to find myself talking to a team that had really appreciated this and taken a unique cut at search. So go to www.zanran.com and think about it. All my consultancy life I was always looking for the latest set of figures on newsprint sales in Belarus, or the growth pattern for smartphone use in Nigeria. So here is a search engine dedicated to data search and extraction, tuned and tailored to getting that graph or this piechart or those tables. Still in beta, it is a supremely sensible development and should be in a lot of industry toolsets in market research and science and engineering and elsewhere. One day, tools like this will be standard components of all of our workflow interfaces, but just at this moment it clearly demonstrates how the world of keyword search and page ranking is receding, to be replaced by more subtle and intelligent instruments. I see information service providers licencing in attributes of this type very rapidly as they race to add value in line with user expectations.
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