Jan
8
Acquisition + Collaboration = Complete?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Sit down to read this with the mind of a research engineer in the public or the private sector. On the screen in front of you there are links to the foremost research resources that you are likely to use in everyday life. Behind them are other links to a host of services that you may use. Above all, you want to be able to search this corpus of knowledge as an entity, and you want the alerts and intelligence services that you use to reflect updates and developments across the entire waterfront of engineering knowledge. And the data types are pretty different. Some is classic data, and may occur in the evidential material that underlies academic research, or in reports and findings on performance or failure of materials. Other information exists as design specifications, or patents, or standards or as structured academic articles or ebooks. Some exists in index entries and as citations or references. Still more is available online in newspaper files, video archives, blogs, tweets and magazine morgues. Engineering research was never easier, but is still not easy. And few subjects are as fragmented as engineering – or have a more important task than ensuring that knowledge is shared across those fragmentations when necessary, for the sake of progress, and the health and safety of everyone. Here is a classic Big data argument waiting to be made.
Yet as it came to the Web few areas were more diverse than engineering. Despite the early attempts of Engineering Village (later bought by Elsevier), it was not until Warburg Pincus funded GlobalSpec that real vertical search arrived, and with it the focus on a huge user-contributed library of specifications. This service is now owned by IHS, who are able to align with it their equally vast collections of patents and standards. So is this the staring place for all enquiry, given that GlobalSpec also indexes the content of vastly authoritative sources like IEEE. Well, almost – but the academic articles remain in the locked service environments of journal publishers like Elsevier, the leading player in this field. So we still have to sign up for all those journals wherever they are published? Well, yes, until yesterday, that is, when Elsevier announced the acquisition of Knovel (http://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-acquires-knovel,-provider-of-web-based-productivity-application-for-the-engineering-community). Knovel indexes all of the 100 professional and scholarly journal publishers in this sector, including IET. It is a fast expanding online source which claims to have added 20% more data in the past year. So what we now need on our engineer’s dashboard now?
Well, we certainly need GlobalSpec/IHS, with links to IEEE, and we certainly need Elsevier/Knovel, with links to ScienceDirect, but wouldn’t it be better to have a single access and complete cross-search in a Big Data context? Just a minute, though. Way back in 2006 a really good database visionary called Scott Virkler, then VP Business Development at GlobalSpec, helped to put in place a strategic collaboration with Elsevier, and after that became Elsevier’s VP of search strategy. So are those links still in place? And can you easily cross search all of these files from one place as Scott undoubtedly intended? I ask because it seems to me that consolidation and collaboration is the name of the game, and the game need have no losers. Alexander van Boetzelaer, who runs the corporate markets sector of Elsevier, has a fine record in collaboration. He and his team created GeoFacets, for the oil and gas industry, and IHS was one of their partners in doing that. But in order for collaboration to work partners have to be determined to make it work, creating interfaces with shared ownership, developing ways of exchanging user-derived data, and sharing marketing efforts and knowledge where necessary. There is still a tendency for collaboration to develop a market of two – and then end in a situation which is just one step away from what users really want.
All these takes time, and since it is over a decade since Elsevier invested in Engineering Village we appear to have plenty of that. Knovel was not even founded then, but it now amounts to a very considerable step forward in Elsevier’s further work with corporate markets. It claims 700 corporate customers and will add real muscle to the corporate markets drive at Elsevier, but we need to bear in mind that acquisition is no longer what it once was in the major market players in information. Thankfully we have matured from the 1990s, when it was about corporate ego and machismo when it was not driven by a desire to hoover up all the proprietory content in the sector. Now we know that content is not king, we can buy securely in the search to create more marketing connections while developing premium vale added services designed, whether collaboratively or not, towards the complete satisfaction of the customer service need. And all that Knovel data and all that GlobalSpec data will not do that in separate containers unless they can be combined and intermixed in the user’s workflow. The next chapter here is the next level of service development, and, given the differentiation of their resources and the fragmentation of the market, it seems to me unlikely that either Elsevier or IHS can do this alone in engineering. There was never a better moment, as in many markets, for talking to the apparent, but unreal, competitor.
Dec
28
Scraps and Jottings
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment
We had a wonderful Christmas, thanks, – and I hope that you, Dear Reader, did likewise. Immediately afterwards (dawn on Boxing Day) we departed for Nova Scotia to bring greetings to my Canadian mother-in-law – and drove into a violent snowstorm on the Halifax-Lunenburg road which completely wiped my mental tapes of what I was going to do by way of a year end communication. I only recall that I had promised one reader that I would try not to be so apocalyptic in 2013. Well, here then is a first attempt at a lulling, measured message to that individual: “Have no fears for the future – the disruptions that you might have countered are now fully in play, and the only thing we now await is the full effect!”
As I dashed from the Hut on Boxing Day, I picked up two clippings that curiously underline this theme. The first, and Cureus (pronounced Curious) is its name, refers to the announcement of a new Open Source medical journal launched by a Stanford neurosurgeon (http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/12/19). We could, if we wished, take Cureus as an example of the imminent demise of journal publishing in the sciences. Dr John Adler, its progenitor, appears to have at least two issues with current publishing procedures. On the one hand he complains that research results need to be made available immediately: “allowing researchers to publish their findings at no cost within days, rather than the months or even years that it typically takes for research to be made public”. And on the other hand he is an opponent of traditional peer review who wants to crowd source opinion on an article from both expert and non-expert readers. “Nowadays you wouldn’t go to a restaurant without Yelping it first. You wouldn’t go to see a movie without seeing what Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. But medical journals are stuck in this 200-year-old paradigm.”
So in fact the delightful thing about Cureus is that it ignores both Open Access as practised by PloS and by commercial publishers, or even by the technical evaluation favoured by PloS One, and demands a further level of democratization of access at the same time. “The average Joe has little or no access to the medical literature today. Its a right. Its a human right”. This would delight the early Open Access campaigners in the US, but the crowd source idea is more valuable than the access by non-academic users. We now have a raft of innovations, some of them going back to the Dotcom Boom, which, if fully applied to current publishing processes, would have a hugely disruptive effect. Are we looking at a time when both conventional Journal publishing and newly “conventional” Open Access publishing are both overtaken by the delayed “boomerang” effect of network publishing procedures now taken for granted elsewhere?
I have the same reaction to a wonderful piece by Bill Rosenblatt, a doyen of internet rights commentators, in a piece on 15 December 2012 (http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/15). Entitled “The Right to Re-Sell: A ticking Time Bomb over Digital Goods”, Bill makes two critical points that will be very important on the 2013 agenda. In the first instance, most music and eBook products are now sold without DRM. DRM files were hated by users and arguably created more customer services issues than they were worth. So while legal embargoes on resale or re-use remain in everyone’s licences, the physical barrier has largely disappeared. File transfer between friends – “I’ll loan you that book when I have finished it” – is allegedly commonplace, though I have seen few attempts at quantification. Bill doesn’t offer any, since he has bigger game in his sights. He has been looking at ReDigi (www.redigi.com), a music resale service. This includes a forward – and – delete function so that the company can protect itself against the whole idea that it is a front for IP theft , but could well become the Chegg of the music industry.
Bill’s other issues concern ORI (the Owners Rights Initiative grouping) whose membership brings libraries and resellers together in unholy alliance to lobby for protection against litigious publishers under the slogan “You bought it, You own it”. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/you-bought-it-you-own-it-owners-rights-initiative-launches-to-protect-consumers-rights-175435921.html) And here lies the fundamental point that I distil from Bill’s piece. As we moved into the networked world we never resolved the fundamental issue about intellectual property ownership. After 500 years of print reproduction, we thought that we could still own the the content and control its re-use. And we are still trying to do that in a network of users who adhere to a completely different view of ownership. They think that a digital object is synonymous with a physical one, and having successfully ignored or evaded the law in the real world of real objects, they will be able to do exactly the same in the virtual world.
Meanwhile, the current world of digital offers just about every variant on lending and resale rights that one might possibly imagine. And the belwether world of journal publishing illustrates yet further variation on the theme of open network publishing. For publishers and those who aspire to recreate publishing, the key remains how you add value to processes that were once your sole domain, but which now can be performed anywhere by anyone with network access. The key to 2013 remains as it has for the last 20 years: understand how users want to behave in the network, and get there before demand chrysalises with appropriate value adding proposals that they will want to pay for. Next year, as in all those years “just publishing” will not be enough.
« go back — keep looking »