Dec
11
Author! Author! Its all about Author-ity!
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Great week to end a year of tumult. While politics is an aberration, the continued development of the electronic publishing networked world is a continuing delight. In a week I found myself starting the new London Info International meeting in the grey hinterland of London Dockland’s ExCel, and ending it speaking in an auditorium in the National Academy of Sciences Keck Centre in Washington DC. And the uniting theme was not for once despair at the prospects of Trump or Brexit. Instead what brought us all together was the advent of an author driven publishing world where self publishing is now the expected reality, and where the reality of toolkits to make acts of sophisticated self-publishing regularly possible is becoming more apparent daily.
Once again academic and research information leads the way, but what is happening there points as ever to wider societal changes. For me, a deeply prejudiced witness, the unifying thesis here is now clearly apparent. As I said in London and repeated in DC, the breakthrough age of Open Access is now past its zenith. This does not mean that it ends anytime soon or that it does not create new growth points in certain disciplines or geographies. It does mean however that the emerging “new normal” becomes getting an article onto a pre-print server, posting it on a repository or exposing it in services like figshare or F1000. Speed is important as is reputation. We lack good ways of underling authorial reputation, which is why services like Kudos are so important. Whether, in a world of post-publication peer review and networked assessment, we are published in a formal journal, open access or not, is becoming irrelevant. Indeed, the real emerging battleground is whether the article is the best way of communicating results, and I expect to see fragmentation around it continuing to grow. From sectors like cell signalling, where data analysis is cited, given a DOI and communicated to HSS disciplines where it remains a standard for posting results, through the many areas of life and social sciences where it is becoming hard to publish an article credibly without releasing evidential data, this pattern of differentiation is becoming obvious. Yet we still conduct discussions using format, ex-print, terms like journal, book and article as if they meant the same in all instances.
My day at London Info International was called “The Rise of the User”, which was hugely appropriate. But of course, the reason why scholarly communications is the first area always impacted by changes to the dynamics of communications is that it is here that the author and the reader are the same people. This is a world of researchers writing for the people that they themselves read. And, more obviously than elsewhere, writing, publishing and communication is an important part of the workflow of scholarship. As we know from B2B markets in particular, that workflow expression is vital. We can know see how the injection of critical information service organization into decision-making environments can have a profound effect on productivity and risk management. This is what we are squaring up to in research.
As we move to become a self-publishing society, we will automate the ways in which we add metadata and build our publishing into the knowledge structure around us. In the foreseeable future the self-publishing professor will add links which expose all of his previous communications, from blogs to books, and which also expose her experience or ranking or reputational data. It will take time for this to evolve, but as I travelled last week between places it was fascinating to see Wiley announcing a new Author Services deal to help authors get into journals, and Cambridge University Press team with Overleaf to do much the same. This is what we should expect as publishers see how far the barriers to self-publishing are diminishing. I have long watched services like www.wearefutureproofs.com work on smart applications for solving one of the bumpy parts of the road – proofreading – on the road to authorial self-relization. Librarians keep telling me how difficult it is to get researchers to engage in publishing tasks without apparently realising how large a part of librarianship in the future will be engagement in publishing support. And at London info International I was able to get some briefing upon www.authorcafe.com, a really interesting attempt to wrap up the whole package for the research team. These are early stages, but this week I have had a strong feeling of the decks being cleared for action.
And what happens in the longer term. All this week I have been repeating my October mantra from the STM conference at Frankfurt. When APCs get onerous enough Funders become publishers (F1000+ Wellcome). My 2027 market leadership forecast, that the biggest players will be IBM Watson Science, concentrating on experimental repeatability through data analytics (did anyone note the significance of the investment by Digital Science in Transcriptic?) and Gates, concentrating on a service defining reputation and trust in research, which I have nicknamed Guru until they oblige by inventing it!) remains on my slide deck. This week audiences were muted in their reactions: stunned that someone should be so dumb, or shocked at all those publishers getting sold or turned into services and solutions providers, I wonder? Thanks for reading me this year, if you have been and joyous festives before facing all-change 2017.
Jun
24
On Barriers to Entry
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
On the morning after the British electorate performed the largest mass suicide attempt in even our eccentric history, thoughts naturally turn to the future. Will a Europe that envies English as a Lingua Franca and which would like Start-up City Europe to be Berlin or Barcelona instead of London’s Silicon Round-about, find ways, in this messy divorce, to challenge the status quo in European information marketplaces? Like everything else I have heard this morning, it is “too early to tell”, but while thinking about competition and competition rules, it may be worth speculating on something else. Is competition what it used to be, and what has happened to the “barriers to market entry” that seemed so important to us all in pre-digital non-networked marketplaces.
And it may be necessary to remind those under a certain age what those historical barriers to entry were. The greatest of them was Ownership. Primarily the ownership of Intellectual Property. And first and foremost the possession of Copyright in Proprietory Information, Data or Content. For 70 years from the death of the author. This Ownership position was also reflected in Brand, and with luck one could combine the two to create quasi-monopolistic positions. Then add domination of distribution networks, exclusive positions with third party agents in important subsidiary markets. Then look at the Know-how created to run these businesses, and the way it was passed like an inheritance from generation to generation of long-serving staff and one can easily see how intimidating and expensive it was to attempt to compete. As the tyro CEO of the European Law Centre in 1980, I looked at Sweet and Maxwell (late eighteenth century) and Butterworth (late nineteenth century) and wondered, although my online product was a wonderful innovation, how I could possibly compete.
The short answer is that you couldn’t. Thomson bought one and Reed the other, acknowledging that if you wanted market share you had to buy it, or condemn yourself to niche plays in subsidiary markets that these Titans disdained. But now turn your mind to market entry today. Established plays who have put down roots are almost a challenge to disruptive start-ups rather than a threat. I grapple now with the opposite problem of valuation: how do you place value on ex-print – migrating – to digital companies when it is easier for a start-up to enter their markets than it is to rent a garage in London from which to do the disrupting? In an amazingly short time, the Age of Content has collapsed around us in all but entertainment marketplaces. It is not just that content became commoditised. It is also to do with our expectations. As the costs of computing and storage continue to collapse in relative terms, volume is no longer a factor here. I read the suggestion in Ars Technica this week that it will soon be possible to download major data collections like Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and provide them to every user. Which reminded me that you could download major collections (SciHub) a and provide them free in Kazakstan.
While major publishers still own the copyrights, theses ownerships no longer present barriers to entry. As I have so often written here, users want solutions, and preferably ones that slot into workflow. So where do we look now for barriers? In a world where users want a comprehensive view of all of the content/data/information which may be pertinent to solution, we can always simulate the content we do not have even if we cannot acquire it as Open Data or find it on the Open Web. But we can add value to it, both in terms of semantic web treatment, and entity extraction for building taxonomies and ontologies. Our knowledge system is both a differentiator and a barrier if it becomes a market standard. Indeed, much of our software performs barrier roles – even if it is hard to protect and, even if our techniques achieved patent protection, that is a short term gain at best.
But where else can we turn? Well, for some an acquired skills base may be a barrier against raw star-up competition. With many players seriously concerned about price competition from well-funded second stage offerings seeking to buy market share on price, it is also important to inspect the state of the Golden Handcuffs that hold the employed skills base in place. And the same applies to the customer relationships. Since customers are a very likely source of competitive pressure, it becomes important to “value” the customer and his relationship with you – are you so expensive that it will soon be cheaper for him to acquire your technology on the market and do your process internally for himself? What was the cost of acquiring that relationship and how quickly could you build another one? What parts of the relationship are defensible from competitive attack on either price or value?
It now becomes harder to value a company in terms of barriers to entry because many of these elements involve valuing intangibles. In a networked society location is no longer a very important factor, and in a network where brands can be created and built in a remarkably short time there is little sacred about trust and brand authority in the abstract. Yet markets still keep asking about defensible value positions, and none of the old answers work anymore.
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