Oct
11
The Road to Dogpatch Labs
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
This week is Frankfurt, and thus the pleasure of interviewing Annette Thomas, Macmillan CEO on the STM conference agenda, traditional forerunner of the Frankfurt Book Fair. And I find a hint of nostalgia in the conference programme which precedes our event. It has a traditional flavour. For whenever STM publishers sit down to discuss the twin evils of Open Access and Peer Review (or those who slight it) they do so with a lip-smacking relish which is more akin to tucking into Christmas turkey than a logical discussion of the issues facing scholarly communication. Indeed I sometimes wonder if “science publishing” has gone off on its own, leaving “scholarly communication” to the scholars.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean. The looming crisis in STM, in my warped view, is the data crisis. In every other sector it is rapidly becoming clear that increasingly sophisticated data mining and extraction techniques will come into play as users seek to extract new meaning from existing files, and further discovery as they cross search those files with currently unstructured content held elsewhere. STM, it seems to me, is peculiarly susceptible to this Big Data syndrome, for behind the proprietory content stores of perfectly preserved published research articles “owned” by publishers lies the terra incognito of research data and findings held in labs and on research networks. Future scholars will want to search everything together, and will be impatient with barriers which prevent this. Once the tools and utilities which comprise research workflow become generally available and the techniques and value of semantic searching locks into this, the urge becomes irresistible, and scholarly article data gets versioned, commoditized, “outed “. It does not really matter if it is located on the open web, the closed web, or in the cloud or in a university repository.
The implications of this are vast. Scholars want to be published by prestigious branded journals as a way of being noted: they also want to be searched in the bloodstream of science. They will make sure they are everywhere, and that their data is where it needs to be as well. The metadata may note that this article was Gold OA and that one was published by Science, but this may be of most interest to the filtering interface in the workflow environment, which uses the information to rank or value results. And there is a finding from 25 years ago which continues to haunt me in STM, which alleges that most searches are performed not to find claims or results, but to discover, check and compare experimental methodologies and techniques. In a world where regulation and compliance grew ever more powerful, this is unlikely to diminish.
So I have come to feel that Open Access (one participant asked me what market share it would eventually have, and was appalled when I said 15% – before it becomes wholly irrelevant) and Peer Review (increasingly all research validation exercises will be multi-metric, so even the traditional argument collapses) are more about the preservation of publishers than the future of scholarly communication. Not that I object to that preservation, but I really did sit up as Annette Thomas, in her interview, began to describe some of the game changing activity that Digital Science, child of Nature, is doing as an investor in a variety of workflow-enhancing technologies built by bench researchers for themselves (http://digital-science.com/products).
And in particular the announcement, made during the session, that Labtiva, a Digital Science investment at Harvard (sited in Dogpatch Labs) was launching ReadCube as an App (http://www.readCube.com). If anything bespeaks workflow then it is the App. And what does this one do? It allows researchers to order their current world of articles as a personal content library, free and Cloud-based, with features like a filing system for PDFs, fast download from a university or institutional login, the ability to save and re-read annotations, cite and create references and a personalised recommendation services. In other words, a smart App, worthy of the world of iPad, which solves the distressing everyday issues of finding what you once downloaded and recalling what you once thought about it, and finding more of the same. What could be more simple? But in simplicity like this there is a form of beauty. An App is definable as a workload tool which takes clumsy pieces of multi-stage routine out daily interactions with work – and makes sure you do not have to remember next time the cumbersome process you had to perform to do that.
So, whatever the introspective mood in the room, here is one publisher setting off on the migration to new values, determinedly seeking the pain points in the researchers’ working life and seeking to solve them. And indeed, other publishers (including Elsevier with their SciVerse and SciVal developments) are heading in the same direction. Yet the contrast between this and the generality of players in the sector is profound. At one point in the meeting I found myself in a discussion about what was going right with STM in a difficult marketplace dependent on government finance. Well, said one very knowledgeable source, we are doing a great deal with eBooks, selling them into places we never thought we would reach. Enhanced with video or audio? No, just reversioning of text. And library subscriptions are holding up really quite well, said another, and the market seems to have been able to absorb some limited price increases. And so I took away a picture of a sector holding its breath and hoping that things would revert to normal, and traditional business models would prevail. But we all knew in our hearts that when “normal” came back it would be different. Postponing the trek down the road to Dogpatch Labs only loses first mover advantage, the experience born of re-iteration, and ensures that it will be more difficult to change successfully in the long term.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Insightful comments, David. Just how innovative a “child of Nature” is going to be allowed to be remains to be seen, but here’s hoping that it will be more successful than Connotea, 2collab, Nature Network, etc.
[…] A recent post by David Worlock, reporting in from the Frankfurt Book Fair, also underscores the impo…. Worlock rightly notes that “big data” is a big trend in science publishing, but meanwhile, publishers are arguing about how to maintain their version of the status quo, whether it’s open access, traditional subscription, or some hybrid: I took away a picture of a sector holding its breath and hoping that things would revert to normal, and traditional business models would prevail. But we all knew in our hearts that when “normal” came back it would be different. Postponing the trek down the road to Dogpatch Labs only loses first mover advantage, the experience born of re-iteration, and ensures that it will be more difficult to change successfully in the long term. […]