Feb
3
Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay)
Filed Under data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I have longed to write that headline for 30 years, and now Twitter and the Scholarly Web have done it for me! Go to https://AcademicsSay and you will see what I mean. Stuff, not that other stuff, you understand (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/the-scholarly-web-30-january-2014/2010843.article explains everything). Appropriately for Twitter, this new service organized something very topical: the Six Word Peer Review. Some items truly representative of academic (and all) our states of mind emerged. I liked “Why didn’t I think of this”, for example, and “Your data contradict my theory Reject” has the right touch to become a classic, while THES observes the accurate truth of an astronomer whose contribution was “Cite Me Cite ME Cite Me”.
Elsewhere the calm waters of academe were less disturbed, though it seems to me to have been another momentous week for STM announcements. As an indicator of change this interview with Duke University about using articles instead of textbooks seems to me to have real resonance (thanks to Adam Hodgkin of Exact Editions):
http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2014/02/03/an-interview-with-david-johnston/#.Uu-yjhoXJFo.twitter:
“Students are asked to read open access journal articles that cover the main aspects taught in the course. In this case we have focused on using PLOS ONE articles that are now all collected into the Marine Megafauna Collection over at PLOS Collections. We have also developed an iPad app that is useful for teaching marine megafauna-based classes called Cachalot. This app, available on the iTunes store for free, incorporates the PLOS ONE articles with other content written by experts around the world and is released under an open access license. We are not using the app directly in the online class this time as it is only available on iOS, not through the android or web-based platforms – yet.”
So whatever we think about the ongoing debate in scholarly communications concerning the limited impact of OA in research, we may be looking at much greater impact in Higher Education. How ironic would it be if the real impact of OA was on textbook publishers and not on journal publishers. And how equally ironic it would be if the journal research publishers, so long the butt of academic malice, were able to flex their business models and go into fresh territory just as pressure mounts on the journal as the first instance, first peer review point of publication. Macmillan, through their Digital Science subsidiary, have long been the laboratory of experimentation in software and services for supporting research workflow, which I would broadly argue is the direction of progress for those who wish to escape the self-publishing, post-publication peer review which is to follow (flood metaphors come easily in the UK this month). Each to his own Ark, say I, but I am very interested that two large and historically traditional players have chosen Macmillan Digital Sciences vessels this week. I was impressed in the first instance by the Taylor and Francis decision to adopt figshare. Putting all of the evidential data, videos, tabular matter, graphs, filesets and datasets for each T&F article onto figshare immediately gives T&F authors a clickable link that they and their readers can use in T&F Online, but it also creates a new route to the online service, and a new source of metrics. Each figshare entry has a Datacite DOI so that the evidential material can be cited in its own right. This is a practical step which puts users first.
This new service went live on 30 January, as Springer were consummating another deal with the Macmillan Digital Science people (http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-6-1453458-0)
“Whereas altmetrics were used in the past at Springer for annual journal reports and editorial board meetings, or to track a journal’s performance, now this information is being gathered and shared widely with authors, SpringerLink users and the general public as well,” commented Martijn Roelandse, Senior Editor at Springer. “Springer is always trying to find new ways that it can make SpringerLink and the research we publish more useful, and partnering with Altmetric to provide this data fits perfectly with that mission.” Altmetric said:
“Providing this information on SpringerLink to readers, researchers and the general public is a great way of showcasing the wider impact and influence of each article, which is increasingly important to scientists everywhere.”
The number of shares for any given article will now be listed alongside citations on articles’ abstract pages on SpringerLink. While the “citations” link will redirect users to springer.com, the “shares” link will send users to Altmetric (altmetric.com)where they can dive into the discussions around any given piece of research.”
So in the space of a few days two major players indicated that they could no longer withstand the pressure to provide data for articles and data about articles. And at the same time the traditional provider of services to researcher/authors and to information about impact also gave notice of changes to come. First Thomson Reuters made a major announcement about the renewal of Web of Science. In its tug of war with Elsevier SciVal, doing nothing at this point clearly spells disaster, so we find the emergence of a next generation strategy that embraces further development of the landmark agreement with Google Scholar, the provision of the Chinese Science Citation Database and of SciELO (citation data from Spanish and Portuguese language sources) will help, with the Korean database to come. Google means going Open Web, and that helps too. Users who have complained about delays in Open Access article coverage will be pleased to see that being addressed as well.
Yet for many watchers the most interesting Thomson Reuters announcement of the year so far came on 31 January, with the launch of Pro-View eReader Platform 1.8. While it feels to me as if ProView has been around a long time, I recognize that this may be because of an in-bred scepticism that the eBook is the answer, rather than a very transitory step towards an answer. But I have never seen a giant publisher do something like this: an eReader, globally available, Windows and Mac, iPad and Android, capable of importing ebook content from any Thomson (law, tax, science, finance etc) source along with the requisite productivity tools. Users can filter and search notes, highlights, bookmarks; they can move those elements into new editions, even where the text changes; and of course they can create and export PDFs of their own. And you can get this app in any/either Appstore. Seems to me like one of those changes where we all scratch our heads and say “Wonder how we got by without doing this already!” (http://thomsonreuters.com/proview)
A long week of many announcements and rather too many publishing press releases. Come to think of it, we might post some of them at “Shit Publishers Say”. Could be wildly popular on Twitter.
Jan
19
There is nothing on TV…
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
“Well” she said “there is nothing on the television. I don’t know why we have one, since its certainly not for what we watch. Well, my husband watches the cricket, of course. He’s cricket crazy, up half the night watching the Ashes from Australia, he was. And I like Crime. Of course, it only takes me 10 minutes to find out who the killer is, and you’ve got to watch all those ads before you can see you were right, so I mostly record them and take out the ads as I watch them…”
This extract from a 2013 survey (this family watched 45 hours of television a week) demonstrates once again that television remains the dominant source of entertainment in many developed societies, even if we do not switch on at 6pm and close with the National Anthem when broadcasting stopped, as British social critics of the 1970s feared we would. Barry Parr, now Outsell’s lead analyst in the sector has started to examine what is happening with a series of very well-argued articles (“TV’s complexity crisis is an opportunity for content owners” 13 January 2014 www.outsellinc.com). He set me thinking about what content owners in the print industry did a decade ago when they went through the parallel process – the traditional delivery format is broken and the traditional delivery mechanisms, with all of their complex supply chain relationships, are beginning to fail. Do the reactions of the print world and the record industry give a clue to the likely reactions of their television peers?
A first reaction in print was disbelief, followed swiftly by denial that the speed or range of change could be anywhere near as severe as commentators reported. So as book publishers were saying that “they will always want narrative and always in book form” so cable operators and channel owners in television are talking about brand loyalty, the high value attached to scheduling, and the importance of holding the line on pricing and packaging. And just as brand does not attach to publishers in entertainment markets but to authors, so brand does not attach to channels but to programming/shows. So as a result both types of middleman – publishers and channel operators – misjudged their users, as almost all intermediaries did in the analogue world, because it was impossible for them to see how content was consumed, and their knowledge of their audiences , despite all the surveys, the focus groups and the market research, was stale by the time it reached them. Only in a digitally networked world do you begin to overcome the problems of knowing audiences, and even then, asking them questions is less informative than watching their behaviour and mapping their reactions (recommendations etc).
Shortly we shall see television distribution, which five years ago in Europe was diminishing its creative efforts and outsourcing everything, beginning to buy back the outsourcers and talk about the value of “content”, as in “content will always be king” (book publishing c.1995). This will be followed by a great wailing and gnashing of teeth around further falls in channel advertising revenues, while every effort is made to seek alternative revenue sources. I quoted Jim Dolan, chairman of Cablevision, last year, when he pointed out that his many children of all ages, now used Netflix on Cablevision. He saw this as a signal to work on Cloud libraries and the ability in the network to download and store up to 10 programmes simultaneously. And surely this is a very proper reaction, but only if the cable players really see their future as utilities, with very well-regulated margins, competitive pressure from telcos in a similar bind and subject to fickle consumers who can change broadband suppliers on a click. So here is the second thing which television will find hard to buy: digitally networked markets increase consumer power immensely, and the contractual tie-in so beloved of cable and satellite is now a very shaky foundation indeed. Alongside Netflix, who can fail to see Google and Amazon as major market players here – and they really do understand about Cloud libraries and downloads.
If Jim Dolan really thinks that the US cable industry is “living in a bubble with its focus on TV packages that people must pay for as offered” (www.hollywoodreporter.com/print/599574) then there is at least a hope that a note of realism may be afoot which was absent in print and music. Yet TV has always been about mass audience and numbers of eyeballs sold to the advertiser. Can it work on a niche interest, subscription model? Spending time last year with Fred Perkins, a survivor of print (ex FT.com, ex McGraw-Hill) at Information Television (http://www.information.tv/?cid=3) in London I saw convincing demonstrations (caravanning and mobile holiday homes formed a classic model for this) which made me wonder why more niches, alongside other B2B or B2C digital content vehicles, do not use niche TV effectively. OK, I know that many magazine publishers invested in studios in the hope of getting into an aligned television market, and this never worked. But that was before the digital broadband network had further blurred and softened the edges between content formats and packages. My conversations with Fred, and stories like the BBC News item (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25457001) last week which profiled, in describing the prospects for internet television broadcasting, NTVE (Nautical TV Europe) based in Magaluf, Mallorca, and financed not by advertising but by sponsorship and product placement. But its distribution model is, well, fairly cheap… or free, if you don’t find that four letter word offensive.
So this may not be an option for Mr Murdoch, who was rather hoping that the satellite/pay TV model would continue to fund him through the next three decades. The signs at the moment are that, under the same digital network stress as print and music, TV programme distribution will change radically to a My network model, still paid by subscription but no longer powerful as an advertising medium. And beyond that? Maybe the subscription will be to a programme guide that enables you to decide what you watch, when and where and in what sort of device, with monthly billing depending on the choices made, the storage used in the Cloud and the deals that you make with programme makers? It is Your Choice!
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