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
26
…And there is nothing in the Newspapers either…
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Now, I don’t want to sound cynical, though with the waters rising in winter England, it feels like the time to rail at the Gods or start building the Ark. Not that I was at Stonehenge for the winter solstice last week, but from the press coverage the event received you would be forgiven for thinking that the Government had resigned and been replaced by a Druidic theocracy. Then again, would we notice?
Not if we were reading the newspapers, would be one appropriate answer. As the network impact becomes ever clearer, the verdict on Britain’s press – and many other peoples as well, may well be “too little, too late, too irrelevant, too hard to manage”. In other words, they have lost their original position in the cycle of societal reporting, commentary and opinion-forming and failed to find another. Yet every news programme on television and radio has an anachronistic “what the papers say” slot, and our pollsters and politicians still use them as a measure of success or failure. For goodness sake, Why? It is about as useful as consulting the Delphic Oracle and about as relevant. Since 90% of the UK press support the party currently in power, with only the Guardian and the Independent (and the Mirror at elections) outside the Tory huddle, they form an unchosen gallery to whom politicians play, despite the fact that the newspaper reading population has been falling annually for a generation, and now represents less than 5% of the population.
These thoughts are a preamble to what was intended to be a look at where the newspaper industry is on the path to accord with a networked society. It comes from someone who has just changed smartphones – and has loaded the apps for Twitter, LinkedIn, Breaking News, the BBC – but stopped short of a newspaper. I have the FT and the Guardian on the iPad – but increasingly regard them as leisure reading. So I was fascinated to see that Trinity Mirror had withdrawn its daily tablet edition after seven months. When this was launched, initially as a business edition of the Birmingham Post, we were told that it would ” re-invent business journalism within the regional press”. One comment, probably from a staff member, resonated for me on the www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk website. “Enough is enough, Coventry” wrote: “It was a stupid idea from the start. We were told by the powers-that-be that this would be the future and that it was going to be the prototype for new platforms across the whole of Trinity Mirror. But yet again the bosses have proved we have little or no idea of what we are doing in the digital world. Our digital strategy is as old and tired as the people dictating it to us”.
This tirade was still swilling around in my mind when Tony Gallagher got fired or resigned, or just abdicated (its really hard to tell from the press coverage). For those just joining, Mr Gallagher, who seems to be a good journalist, editor of the Daily Telegraph, and an honest and upright soul, fell out with the powers-that-be over digital strategy. He went, without having quarrelled with either his boss or with the Chief Content Officer, Jason Seiken (pronounced Psychen, apparently) who came from saving PBS to save the Telegraph. Mr Seiken, also apparently, sees the future of the Telegraph as a lifestyle video company and reporters (“Telegraphs got Talent!”) are interviewing as presenters. But didn’t the previous Editor-in-Chief, Will Lewis, think video is the future of the Torygraph? That’s right, he is the one who also got fired and has now replaced Lex Fenwick, who resigned, as commander-in-chief of Murdoch’s bewildered Dow Jones division. Somehow British executives who cannot understand market needs here (pace ex-BBC boss, Mark Thomson, now at the New York Times) get even bigger jobs in the US. Could “Enough is Enough, Coventry” be right?
So much is apparent, so much is unreal. Like the Guardian at long last selling its 50.1% stake in AutoTrader. The deal, announced this week, is said to be worth over £600 m, and will provide the Scott Trust, the owners of the Guardian, with further funds to offset the Guardian’s losses. The buyer is Apax, the private equity owner of the balance of the equity. Watch out for an IPO here with a £2 billion price tag. AutoTrader (not to be confused with the US operation of the same name) got it right in terms of digital transformation – they created a new platform replete with things that people who buy cars want to do, and they made it cover the full transaction activity so that it was a solution, not an advertising medium. The man who ran it, Andrew Miller, is now CEO at the Guardian (but could be in line to run the Washington Post, at this rate). But still, despite its apparent success online, the Guardian is not a networked citizen, though it tries harder than most. Mr Miller’s preoccupations will include how on earth he turns EMAP, also co-owned with Apax, into an additional bulwark for the Scott Trust: the Guardian is still losing money.
The beginning of the networked world for the former newspaper people is not simply a matter of a competitive rush to a digital market, throwing everything at experimental services. One can agree that iterative experimentation is vital. But even experiments have to start somewhere. The attractive part of the Seiken story is that the Chief Content Officer is described everywhere as “reclusive”. Maybe that is what we need: some good quality thinking about things that need to happen in our networked lives that concern the way we use “news” or any other content to speak to each other. Could be video, could be Vice, could be Buzzfeed, but it means starting again. Let print hold out as long as owners can afford it, but we really do have to get serious now about inventing the future – or buying it from someone who has done it already.
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