Feb

6

Sharing: More News

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Don’t you hate those tacky moments in presentations when the speaker says something like “Hands up who used a deodorant this morning?” and we all squirm a bit and try to think of the right answer – are we meant to smell good, or not to use aerosols for environmental reasons, or rely on pure products like water to do the trick, or regard smelling bad as a badge of democracy? Somehow they always end up by putting you in a false position. So if these are the enemy tactics, then I plan to use them in a presentation I am due to make this afternoon.

Who owns an automobile? I plan to ask, fairly confident of a full house here in Washington DC. But who shares an auto? I seek users of ZipCar, or WhizzGo. And who shares a ride in an auto? Looking here for subscribers to NuRide, ZimRide, GoLoco. And who uses P2P car rental to avoid high rental costs? (see DriveMyCar.com, WhipCar and RelayRides). The point of this annoying catechism is simple. In the land where a man’s car is his castle, the last three years has seen an unprecedented rise in collaborative car investment sharing start-ups. It takes a recession to remind us that the aging, rusting hulk in the drive way costs us depreciation every year, apart from financing costs and running costs. Car ownership used to be a life style given: now its a conscious use of resources decision – and there are clearly other options. And those options rely on networked collaborative relationships to work.

So do my friends in the information markets think that people who shared a car to work will not share content collaboratively with third parties? On one side they acknowledge sharing cultures, and complain bitterly when they see breaches of intellectual property ownership. On the other side they shy away from service sharing with other source suppliers to create service solutions which would help, through ease and completeness of access, in avoiding such breaches. In doing so they force markets into other channels, and as the water finds its way round the rock they may find themselves in mortal danger.

While these thoughts reflect the ideas that I raised yesterday, they were also prompted by an announcement by the Macmillan Digital Science service, figshare, last week. In it figshare announced a new deal with the Public Library of Science in which figshare undertakes to load all of the experimental, evidential data associated with articles published by PLoS. This gives two big collaborative pluses for PLos; in the first place they are able to satisfy the strong demand for the publishing of evidential data without a huge technology investment, and they can point out to users that being enabled to view supplemental data in a browser alongside the article offers major advantages in discover-ability for datasets, videos, graphs, figures and images. All of these factors will draw more article traffic to PLoS. For figshare this collaboration moves them into the mainstream for open access data publishing, and since articles can be sourced from the researcher’s figshare repository prior to technical review by PLoS One, for example, it makes figshare a more sensible collaborator in the sharing that matters – between researcher/author and service supplier.

These collaborations become important and indicative of the future of the industry. For example, poll results (GP Bullhound 2013) this week indicated that over 60% of current games users would want, globally, to buy into the Xbox 720 technology rather than the Sony PS4. It may be that Sony have moved too slowly to turn the PS range into both a consumer and an educational platform. Microsoft, however, have been clear on the educational drive, using SharePoint (whats in a name?) to associate all sorts of content and service environments (think only of copyright cleared content resources like Global Grid for Learning). Walking around BETT in London last week I felt the forming of an answer to the question “Who shares this market with Pearson, if the duopoly idea holds true?” The answer at the moment would be Microsoft, with a sharing attitude towards technology and content collaboration which is serving them well.

Not that they won’t have a struggle in local markets. I was pleased to see at BETT how much revived the service lines of RM appeared to be, compared to a year ago. RM Unify, a system for creating single sign – on in the Cloud to the whole range of Cloud Apps and services that a school may use is obviously a great step forward. And I really liked the idea, in the RM eBooks library, that a teacher could create a research library around a topic for a class, and r3ent access to the books required for the duration of the project. Then let teachers review each others listings, I thought (perhaps via TES Resources?) and the collaborative loop is joined up. The question then remains, in this consolidating world, of who buys TES – or even RM?

Jan

14

PPPR: A Black View

Filed Under data protection, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, in “Scraps and Jottings” I tried to reflect, while talking about the newly-launched journal Cureus, an increasing feeling that both traditional publishers and the mujahaddeen of the Open Access world (yes, that good Mullah Harnad and his ilk) are both being overtaken by events. The real democratization which will change this world is popular peer review. Since the Mujahadeen got in and named the routes to Open Access Paradise as Green and Gold, and publishers seem quite happy to work within these definitions, especially if they are gold, I have no choice but to name the Post Publication Peer Review process as the Black Route to Open Access. You read it here first.

This thought is underlined by the announcement, since I wrote my previous piece, that the Faculty of 1000 (F1000Research) service has emerged from its six month beta and can now be considered fully launched. Here we have a fully developed service, dedicated to immediate “publication”, inclusive of all data, totally open and unrestricted in access and enabling thorough and innovative refereeing as soon as the article is available. And the refereeing is open – no secrets of the editorial board here, since all of the reports and commentaries are published in full with the names and affiliations of referees. The F1000Research team report that in the last six months they have covered major research work from very prominent funders – Wellcome, NIH etc – and that they now have 200 leading medical and biological science researchers on their International Advisory panel and more than 1000 experts on the Editorial Board (see http://f1000research.com). And since they have a strategic alliance with figshare, the Macmillan Digital Science company, “publishing” in this instance could be as simple as placing the article in the researcher’s own repository and opening it up within F1000Research. And since othe partners include Dryad and biosharing, the data can also be co-located within specialized data availability services. Saves all those long waits – as soon as it is there, with its data as well, the article is ready to be referenced alongside the academic’s next grant application. The fact that all current publishing has been accompanied by the relevant data release (for which read genomes, spreadsheets, videos, images, software, questionnaires etc) indicates that this too is not the barrier that conventional article publishing made it out to be.

Ah, you will say, the problem here is that the article will not get properly into the referencing system and without a “journal” brand attached to it there will be a tendency to lose it. Well, some months ago Elsevier agreed that Scopus and Embase would carry abstracts of these articles, and, as as I write PubMed has agreed to inclusion once post-publication review has taken place. But then, you will say, these articles will not have the editorial benefits of orthodox journal publishing, or appear in enhanced article formats. Well, nothing prevents a research project or a library licensing Utopia Docs, and nothing inhibits a freelance market of sub-editors selling in services if F1000Research cannot provide them – this is one labour market which is dismally well staffed at present.

Now that F1000Research has reached this point it is hard to see it not move on and begin to influence the stake which conventional publishing has already established in conventional Open Access publishing. And F1000 obviously has interesting development plans of its own: its F1000Trials service is already in place to cover this critical part of bio-medical scholarly communication, and, to my great joy, it has launched F1000Posters, covering a hugely neglected area for those trying to navigate and annotate change and track developments. Alongside Mendeley and the trackability of usage, post-publication review seems to me a further vital step towards deep, long term change in the pattern of making research available. My new year recommendation to heads of STM publishing houses is thus simple: dust off those credit cards, book a table at Pied de Terre, and invite Vitek round for lunch. He has not sold an STM company since BMC, but it looks as if he has done the magic once again.

But, now, I must end on a sad note. The suicide this week of Aaron Swartz, at the age of 26, is a tragic loss. I understand that he will be known as one of the inventors of RSS – and of Reddit – and he had been inventing and hacking since he was 13. PACER/RECAP controversially “liberated” US Common Law to common use. He was known to suffer from severe depression and it appears that he ended his life in a very depressed state. But here is what Cory Doctorow (http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html) had to say about what might have been a contributory factor:

“Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.”

Well, one thing we can be quite certain about. Protecting intellectual property or liberating it cannot ever be worth a single human life.

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