Jul

17

Hectic Diversions

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

These are meant to be the dog days of summer. Lazy interludes when half the media-eating world was so distracted by sun, sand and sea that a prime minister could assassinate a few long-serving colleagues or a presidential hopeful could explore prospects in autumn primaries without the full flood of critical commentary that you might expect in the hard light of western winter. But this is the Digital Age. It is remorseless and quite without shadow or shade. And having spent this week in bed throwing off a minor illness I am now as full of news and commentary as I am of medicine. The effect is overwhelming. Because I now know everything I realise I know nothing at all. I can’t wait to get back to normal-half-informed but deeply opinionated!

But from the ashes of the week I draw out three stories that seem to me at least to express some of what we are about at present. Rupert Murdoch’s attempt on Time Warner must clearly be one. The Elsevier deal with DCL to add value to the Scopus archive was another. And the court case in which Reed as Lexis and Thomson Reuters as Westlaw claimed that their appropriation of legal briefs filed by US litigators constituted “fair use” was the third. And what is the picture drawn here? It shows, in my view, a still content-dominated world where major players still think that the more you have the more powerful you are, where grabbing and re-using third party data can help to bolster failing content positions (even if you have to use the tools of the enemy to do so!), and where upgrading value becomes a necessity in a world where metadata is the currency of users who cannot afford the time to view content. Just like me with all this News.

So what do I think is really going on? Investors and Big Players are now deeply confused. The old maxim – “if in doubt make it bigger” – still seems to make sense, but can you trust Mr M, who seems to have dumped his slow growth media assets into Bad Bank (aka News) and is now readying another wonderful adventure in consolidation in which banks, analysts and advisors will earn prodigiously as well. But the game is not about Archive alone, surely? It’s about distribution and it’s about innovation and it’s about funding, and, step forward Netflix, most of the evidence seems to show that smaller, aggressively competitive players do these things better than media giants. Perhaps the best argument for Twentieth Century Time Warner may be that you will have to be that big to buy Netflix in an OK Corral shoot out with Google.

So then transfer the “commoditization of archive” argument over to Elsevier’s Scopus. In my view, developing Scopus was one of the bravest publishing decisions in STM in the last half century. It is a benchmark for quality and consistency, but as the abstracting pushed back prior to the 1996 start date, so citations were not broken up and separately tagged as they would be today. Redressing the past with a current standard approach using a DCL automated solution seems to be what the current deal accomplishes, and pretty vital it is too if today’s researchers are not to miss something through assuming that tags would be in place to show them. In the age when Scopus was built we had begun to assume that not all researchers would need the full text of articles all the time: we are beginning to see now that researchers do not always have time to check the abstract. This means that the metadata must be as high quality and consistent as possible. One day archive will not be for full text or abstract reading purposes but for audit and authentication purposes. Has anyone in Mr Murdoch’s team run an analysis of the valuations available on a video archive where the revenue model is “by the drink” but you have to keep updating the metadata to maintain the access expectations of users? Especially those who normally use illegal streamed content anyway!

I once had a client, havering about the costs and implications of going XML, who asked me to stop pestering him and come back when the ultimate value add had taken place, so he could adopt that. Sadly we will never reach that point, but in the Age of Data a very significant value has been added by associating third party data with our own. And we now have the platforms like MarkLogic and the semantic analysis to make this work. Law has always been a front runner, having text susceptible to taxonomic treatment and a superfluity of documentation to be searched. Fortunes were made here in the 1990s. Until the 2007 recession it looked as if this would always be a litigator research led market. We now know that law can decline in recession. And, ironically, we also know that those who have zealously protected their “ownership” of public documentation in the past are having to defend their right to use it in the present. West, before Thomson, famously sued Lexis for reproducing punctuation in state law reports added by West editors. Now we have the delightful picture of both companies defending themselves against lawyers by resort to fair use, long regarding as the librarian’s defence against them. But the point is not the irony: it is that no archive is ever quite big enough or quite tagged enough to satisfy users whose expectations, created by us, are simple. Answers and Solutions. Are you ready for this, Mr Murdoch? Delivered to my smartphone, please!

Jun

25

Every Man His Own Platform

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

I have enjoyed reading an Outsell Market Update today entitled “STM Platform Providers”. It reminds me of the speed of change in a very forceful way, and Deni Auclair’s expert analysis brings out the differences between the various publishing and distribution offerings in the market place. But it also reminds me that the words we use to describe things are more rapidly eroded than we imagine, and that this can lead to imprecision if we are not careful. Thus in recent years I have begun to reserve “platform” for infrastructure. So I would reserve the word in this context for something like MarkLogic, a way of organizing and searching your total content, applying analytics to it (semantic in this instance) and developing new products through adding value to existing content or recombining it with third party content. By comparison, I would see Highwire as essentially a delivery system, Semantico as a systems integrator now developing its own tools, and IXXUS as a brilliant systems integrator using mostly MarkLogic and Alfresco to build platforms upon which publishing and distribution tools can sit.

This search for distinctions may just be pedantry, so please feel free to ignore it. Or it could be that there is something stirring out there which relates to wider changes. The worrying part, to me, of the work of the Atypons or the Publishing Technologys analysed here is that they tend to reflect the publisher’s need/desire to control and distribute content in its existing packages. Yet, as Deni wisely points out, eBook publishers commonly sell “by the drink” – typically in chapter-sized portions though if their metadata were better they could go smaller. This points me to the thought that these publishing and distribution technologies are often a barrier to change, locking publishers into format driven responses to markets that now want something different. New product development that starts with end-user requirements must begin on format neutral platforms, where content-as-data has to be the rule, where third party data can be absorbed and integrated with existing data and where analytics are semantic from the very start, and not added later.

So I am going to continue for a bit to define “platform” my way, and whenever I meet a publisher who says he is “re-platforming” I will ask the same question: “do you have your customer data and your sales data on the same platform as your content?” If they say “No” then I know they are buying bandages, not addressing the problems of rapid, iterative new product development, where those data sets are vital to the process. But then again, we may all be wrong.We may all be dancing in an emptying ballroom. For this was the week when writeLaTex partnered with Rubriq (www.rubriq.com). Or let me put it another way: this was the week when a prominent (and free) self-publishing service for scholarly research authors joined up with a developing service for pre-submission peer review (standard cost $600, well below any publisher). Or think of it this way: they do not need us for authoring and they do not need us for peer review, so how do you re-insert the value in the publishing sandwich?

And this was a week when the great things STM publishers do just got greater. I was delighted to see that IOPP had decided to make a further 5 physics journals wholly digital and I expect that in the next three years print will yield entirely in this marketplace. I was even happier to see that the brilliant men and women who built Elsevier’s Scopus have just launched the first Chinese language search interface to the service. I think this is a first anywhere and much to be welcomed: what an anomaly if the world’s largest science research source nation continued to function only in English. And then, yesterday, IMS Health (www.imshealth.com) announced that they had bought a group of data-intensive businesses from Cegedim. Bringing these data sets onto the IMS Health platform is clearly seen as a huge boost to the latter’s ability to derive new products and services. The revenue earned by this data at Cegedim last year was approx. $573m with Ebitda of $86m. IMS Health paid $520m in cash. As a result they add to their platform, amongst other things, a database of analytical comparisons covering 13.7 million healthcare professionals around the world and a range of information solutions that use primary research data. This deal may not be widely reported, but in the sense that building data into platforms for new product development purposes is important, this could be very significant.

This is the age of self-publishing. We know that the consumer fiction genre market now sells a greater volume of self-published digital fiction than all of the traditional publishers put together. We shall soon see similarly large proportions of STM markets devoted to self publishing. When that happens, the battle will not be around how effectively we deliver traditional products in familiar formats. The winners will be between those who can leverage their own, and third party/Open Web content, to produce the tools, the viewers, the analytics needed to support end-user researchers in their workflow-related tasks. Our data revolution has scarcely even started!

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