Nov

22

The Rise of the Funders

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Thomson, Workflow | Leave a Comment

The STM Associations London seminar on Publication Impact last week (19 November 2015) seemed oddly like two events, struggling under a single skin. Not hard perhaps to see why the organizer’s had decided to put both the whole immense subject of new techniques and technologies for measuring the reputation of researchers and the worth of science research into the same skin as the measurement of impact and case studies in new techniques, but since I think these subjects are more important than journal publishing itself, the modest number of attendees had a double bounty. Maybe next year STM will give these subjects the space they deserve. There really is too much going on here that is not only important to science research, but vital to the future of science publishing.

I started this debate by introducing the recent Outsell report, written by Deni Auclair (The Impact of Research Funders on Scholarly Communication; August 2015; www.outsellinc.com). Deni’s hugely informative paper outlines the sea change that has taken place in measurement since altmetrics, and I wanted to add my own feeling that we are about to see another power surge in the unstable structure of publishing as the middleman role in the transfer of knowledge in research-influenced marketplaces. If the Gates Foundation can grant The New Media Corporation of Austin, Texas, $3.2 million to create personalized learning tools, as it did on 12 November 2015, what is to prevent it from creating article publishing software and circulating it to grant-holding researchers, so that they could prepare and upload articles and data to Dryad or figshare or F1000 for a fragment of the APC cost currently charged in conventional publishing houses? The answer, written large in this seminar for me, is that this happens when they realize that the accumulating costs of APCs are unsustainable, and that sufficient mechanisms are now in the marketplace to measure reputation post-publication to ensure a proper scrutiny of their output and its reasonably accurate ranking with its peers.

The meeting did not address the first of those pre-conditions, but it covered the second in very considerable detail. Stephane Bergmans of Elsevier showed how the European Union is moving from a conservative starting point to a more wide-ranging approach. Kevin Dolby of Wellcome Trust convincingly argued the case for the deep interest of funders in reputation. But, as ever, it was Dave Nicholas who plunged us into the unpleasant realities. When it came to loading your H-Index, it really did make a difference on whether you used Google Scholar or Web of Science or Scopus. Different sourcing did matter in a marketplace where he now recognizes 25 different emerging reputation platforms. 13 of those concerned research (and he rightly bemoaned the fact that only 3 were concerned with teaching quality). And he noted the new mystery being born, especially around the use of blogging and social media in altmetrics. Why don’t ResearchGate publish their ranking formula? Because they are afraid that academics seeking to gain a swift promotion will “game” the system? Or because (my thought) they want to preserve the magic until they get an offer from Springer Nature or Wiley?

How do you optimize without cheating? Charlie Rapple and Kudos had the answers to how to explain what the research was about and how it was relevant. Noting time-based correlations between communications and reactions helped you measure whether scholarly peer group communication worked, and Fiona Murphy, who followed her, was able to bang the drum for data deposits as a route to reputation enhancement. It struck me how slow we have been to give data its due: only now are we creating data citation principles (the DC), and using the Resource Identification initiative – and, above all, developing some good practice standards in altmtrics usage and evaluation (NISO). PlosONE showed how they have wobbled (sorry, I mean “developed”) over the years, and how post-publication review and evaluation becomes a critical concern if peer review becomes a simple checklist to technical compliance. But while some publishers in the audience may have sniggered, as I did, we must recognize that this really is the future: a few branded high visibility lead journals, and large databases of articles and data, branded but subsuming the current forest of small second and third level titles, often created to pursue a line of enquiry that nobody followed and inappropriate in times of cross-disciplinary emphasis.

And at the end of the day came a presentation of progressive good sense from Inez van Korlaar, the Director of Product Strategy at Elsevier working in this area. She is managing the soft launch of Mendeley Stats, and she is clearly continuing the line of thinking that has taken her company from Science Direct to SciVal. If publishers are to remain in the game they have to provide value at the point of use to all participants. Moving against the ResearchGates and Academia.edu of the world is one thing: finding a greater utility edge by turning Mendeley Stats into a social network is another. It must be right to look at the economic consequences of research, via patent analysis for instance, just as it must be right to use Elsevier’s Newsflo toolset as well as content from Altmetrics to flesh out a multi-faceted reputation analysis. They have experimented with Elsevier’s citation and usage alerting, via the 65,000 users of MyResearchDashboard. Now Mendeley Stats are two weeks old, and it will be fascinating to see if it provides a way of keeping publishers in position as key intermediaries, or whether the rise of the funders erodes that positioning fatally.

To the indefatigable Anthony Watkinson, who orchestrated and moderated this event should go the last word. He pointed out that the Watson-Crick paper on the Double Helix was never peer reviewed at all: it was simply sent by Sir Lawrence Bragg with a covering note suggesting that Nature should publish it – which they did. Who needs reputation management when that is the role of your head of department?

Nov

15

StartUp and MidTerm investor Heaven

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Yes, it was the sixth Noah show in London on Thursday and Friday last week. The poet may have referred to them as “brokers roaring like beasts on the floor of the borse”, but seeing Europe’s investment bankers, VCs and PE funds filling three floors of Old Billingsgate (surely over 2000 this year) was a joyous sight. These people clearly love Noah, and the way they tolerate two days of constant bombardment is testimony to this: they eat and drink and meet and… roar at each other all day long and go to the Noah party at night, but from 8.30 am to 7.30 pm they absorb some 200 presentations on three stages in a positive orgy of claim, comparison, analysis and counter-argument. Presiding over this like a genial Godfather is Marco Rodzynek, and having attended these shows since the first in 2009 in the Hilton, Park Lane – only 100 or so people but the catering was excellent – I feel, from a TMT perspective, that it was almost worth Lehmann going down to get this show started in the sector.

Of course, much has changed. Huge global volumes of devices and users have altered the meaning of our early definitions of proof of concept and usage as a measure of success. You can now have sector and geography specific plays that command larger audiences than the global marketplace in 2009. NOAH covers Europe, with a strong flavour of the stand-out start-up cities – London, Berlin and Barcelona, as well as a useful input from the influential Israeli industry. There is also a NOAH event now in Berlin and I shall hope to cover that in 2016. These events are simply the best way I know of touching the pulsating heart of innovation in Europe, at all the stages covered from start-up to near-mature businesses looking for the next investor. Because there is always a next investment stage, and NOAH, as leading advisers in the sector, are crucially aware of the work-in-progress aspect.

I could generalize about innovation for the rest of this blog, but it may be best to give you a flavour from some extracts from my notes. Bear in mind that these come from a few hours on one day on one stage: I would hesitate before trying your patience with the full output!

….

Inquisitr Every service vendor now has a news service, from Google to Facebook Notify. This is a response to these new ways of presenting breaking news. Requirements – speed, luck and authority!…..
Mubi Quality -based video streaming. Began on PlayStation in 2007. Now in a JV with Sony delivering quality movies to PlayStation. Founder says it took 149,000 nights to become an overnight success!….
TeamViewer. Fremium model in which private viewers go free and corporate viewers (now integrated into Outlook) pay. Remote support software aimed at remote access, monitoring and sharing services. 1 billion installations, 20 million online at any one time, 200m corporate customers, 300 million accounts, 30 languages. Customer range – from a hospital group sharing images to an artist mounting a global exhibition of his work….
Pipedrive (a NOAH investment) CRM for SMEs. “aimed at the salesman and built for mobile use”. “42% of CRM software is never used” Gartner. Developed for people who never had CRM before. Estonia, and now US….
Scyti Barcelona-based global supplier of election software. 42 countries Online voting platform with 24 solutions ranging from registration to results tallying. Security is key element. Market worth $500m Has done 4 rounds of VC investment, raised $100m last time…
Deezer streaming music 6 m customers. 35 m tracks. Subscription model. Big business in cars. Some ads but subs is future 2007. Collects 240 m data points from customers daily. Sends lyrics. Download is dying, discs are dying…
SimilarWeb. Visitors and performance of every web service. Rank. Like Nielsen for websites .Not downloads but usage. Alexa but better and global. Multi source data…
Statista. Largest market research portal 20 m Rev 35% margin. Market research bigger usage than Nielsen, lpsos. Info graphics is marketing device….
Mall of Africa. ECommerce goods for aspirational markets. Address verification. 300 m middle class internet users on mobile. Amongst 1.2 bn people. Nigeria and Kenya as hubs… MoovIT, 90min. Israel
(soccer, user created)….
Badoo Largest dating social media? 270m registered users generating 40m messages a month. Transition from web to mobile. Founded 2007, profitable 2009…

Just a flavour, but also i hope an indication of why this is so fascinating, and why the wide differences between different styles of venturing , and widely different results in different geographies makes this important, not just for investors, but for everyone of us as creators of network – based services of some sort or another.

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