Jun
1
STM: Towards a Service Economy
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
At the splendid Publishers Forum meeting in Berlin last month, I had the pleasure of chairing a panel that included the CEO, Mark van Mierle, of veteran education publisher Cornelsen. Our panel was looking at Virtual and Augmented Reality, so it seemed natural to ask why his company was making a significant investment in these technologies. After reminding me that it was an area in which they thought they could make money, and that it took them away from failed or failing product lines in print textbooks and re-orientated them towards the service economy of education, he refocused us on another truth. Every now and then, he said, we need to rebadge and rebrand, so markets see us differently and the sort of people we want to employ are more likely to be attracted to us. With this valuable lens firmly in place, the two important acquisitions in scholarly communications that have taken place this week take on a new importance. Neither deal moves the graph of market size or share: both have huge significance for the market and the companies concerned.
It is always refreshing and slightly shocking when one’s wishes come true. When I wrote in this blog about Colwiz and Wizdom.ai in February that “As I left their Oxford offices the most frequent thought in my head was “why hasn’t a publisher invested and acquired this yet!” https://www.davidworlock.com/2017/02/, I suppose I was father to a thought that had already crossed the minds of others. But Taylor and Francis have made a really valuable acquisition here, and one that puts them into the forefront of the emerging service economy. A collaborative research platform (Colwiz – collective wizdom) backed by a prototype big data environment for using artificial intelligence and machine learning in discovery and categorisation of results represents a five year forward programme of service derivation and development for T&F, while Colwiz will benefit hugely from the widely differing range of HSS and STM communities within T&F as the experimental base of their work. The usual messages apply of course: start-ups are tender plants, and grow best when managed less. Keeping inventive minds happy in process driven companies can be tough etc etc
But at the moment this is an event to celebrate. Rebadging T&F is long overdue. In former management contexts T&F was the milch cow that went on giving, but as academic research marketplaces change, content as data becomes commoditised, researchers cannot keep pace with the global rate of research reporting, more and more machine reading is needed to keep the map of what is known current and valuable, and companies like T&F have to re-invest and reposition. As a company currently with without a CEO and caught in a swirl of private equity supposition about its own collaborative future, this announcement must be hugely re-assuring to staff and researchers alike: Informa clearly have a plan for asset enhancement and are driving the company towards the future or research marketplaces.
Meanwhile, another staple of the industry is signalling its determination to rebuild and refocus. The Science side of Clarivate Analytics, based around Web of Science, was a famous Thomson Reuters cash cow. When Thomson bought ISI three decades ago, the ideas of Eugene Garfield and the use of the impact factor were already industry standards. While all sorts of evolutionary changes took place along the way (Scholar One, Web of Science etc) no one fundamentally wanted to rethink the model for research in a digital, networked research community, and one where library budgets were under huge pressure. And although many librarians felt that Web of Science was a cornerstone acquisition, as soon as alternative metrics became available and grant-funding bodies became uneasy that the impact factor was too narrow a guage, the pressure began to be felt to develop a response. Yet the attractions of the business model and the thought that they might divest seems to have slowed the thinking , so it is wonderful now to see Clarivate, under new ownership, new management and with a lively board of non-executive thinkers, getting stuck into change with the announcement, today, of the acquisition of Publons.
Peer review, once regarded as the last bastion of publisher control of journal publishing, has itself become a contentious area of activity. Set aside the questioning of pre-publication reviews, the suppression of ground-breaking work by self-interested elites, and the “fake reviews” issues. Think about the huge value of post-publication reviewing, the adherence of both Gates and Wellcome to F1000, and the continued growth of blogging and social media commentary around the scholarly workflow, from idea generation to post publication. Publons is the leading exponent of concentrating the gamut of critical input around scholarly communication and creating a reference environment within which all of this material can be shared. Of course, Publons could not exist if we had not made huge strides – Orcid, Cross-Ref etc – in categorising authors, articles, and contributions within the network. But all of the enablers post-date the impact factor. If Clarivate is to re-establish itself as the value register of record then this is just the type of acquisition it must make. Its neutral position – Thomson sold its journals via Wolters Kluwer to Springer many years ago – is vital here, and a move of this type gives renewed faith that the job can yet be done. Certainly researchers yearn for the certainty that the impact factor once delivered.
And lets conclude where we started. Two important industry players who once appeared to be playing behind their strengths have re-asserted themselves this week.This sends a clear signal to researchers, markets, and above all to the young staff they will need to employ. We still do not know if, as was mooted in the Saale process, Calarivate Analytics will split, withe the patents data business going in a different direction to the Science business. But we do know that the Clarivate Science management, and the T&F management, are in a determined mood to rebuild their positions, which makes this one of the most re-assuring weeks in STM this year.
May
19
When Fiesole comes to Lille
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
…or the capital of civilisation reaches the capital of Flanders. For those of us who have been many times through Lille by train but never stopped to look, this was a very pleasant surprise on many fronts. And if, like me, you were checking into the 19th Fiesole Retreat, a unique conference which brings librarians, academics and publishers together to communicate in a group small enough to allow that to happen and large enough to be representative, there was double pleasure. Vieux Lille is fascinating, and the city has the second great art collection in France, laid out with huge imagination at the Beaux Arts. This edition of Fiesole, as ever meticulously managed by the Casalini team working with the Charleston Conference, was hosted by Julien Roche, director of the brilliant LILLIAD learning centre and innovation on the new university campus, which housed the retreat.
As soon as I arrive at a Fiesole Retreat I wonder why other conferences do not have this feel. During the days of the Retreat this really does feel like peers explaining to peers how all this new digital stuff is working out in academic life. The opening session was named “Linked (Open) data – Big Data” and reminded me at once of why I really enjoy these meetings – whatever the questions raised there is a chance here to develop your own agenda and pursue it in discussion at breaks and lunches with people who are unlikely to share your background and the limitations of your experience with experts from both the French and German national libraries on the roster we were bound to get differences of approach. What i found rather unexpected was the unanimity around the basic concepts of a data driven research world, and the underlying, central importance of text and data mining in sustaining that world. And as the concepts build from the experience in the room, one realises the gulf between the world into which Retreat members are emerging and the one from which they are departing. Between a world where licensing text and data mining is still non-standard, and where the corpus of knowledge can be searched in a single sweep, where barriers of ownership and control and location frustrate at every turn.
I have found this regularly happens to me at Retreat meetings. Once a theme has become apparent to my mind, I find it recurring in every subsequent session. The agenda went on to consider Reshaping Collection Development for 2025, but the issues that grabbed me came from Laurent Romary from Switzerland discussing “How to open up Digital Libraries for Digital Scholars”. Similarly when the session on “The Changing Scholarly Communication Ecosystem” came along, absorbing sessions from Jayne Marks (Sage) and Bas Straub (Konvertus) began to sharpen my view on the sustainability of current academic publishing practice. Anna Lunden from the Swedish National Library, describing the huge effort they have made to accommodate Open Access in one country alone, and then Frank Smith of JStor addressed the comparative poverty of the Open Books effort, despite Knowledge Unlatched, And then Michael Keller, librarian at Stanford, summed up in his crisp and masterful way. If Stanford spend $2.1 million on APCs this year then the argument about Open Access begins to collapse as cheap, effective publishing software turns every researcher and his librarian as the publisher of source. As Charles Watkinson reminded us, the growth of US (and UK, I would add) university presses has been remarkable. While the traditional Journals market players have tried to defend their branded journals, their requirement for copyright, and their control of the market through peer review, the smoke seems to me to be clearing, revealing a very different picture.
So when you can submit an article with reviews, ready for publication on a pre-print server or a university repository or figshare, will we be too concerned about the publisher of record as long as the metadata is in place? As long as the metadata is properly organized by libraries working together will we worry about brand or journal? Will today’s publishers become tomorrow’s organisers of reputation, ranking scholars and reviewers and contributions to the scholarly communication chain in terms of what other researchers did as a result – cited, blogged, downloaded, annotated etc? And will this turn into a rating system that helps to guide investors in governments and the private sector, or universities making appointments? And will the article cease to exist in the new workflow of scholarship, at least as something read only machines, or will it be replaced by conclusions directly annotated on the data and cited? And obviously, while every discipline and geography is different, where will the first movers be?
No one knows, of course, which is why a Retreat, particularly one focussed on what we are going to collect, store and search in the future, is so valuable. I clearly see now that Open Access is not the answer, but part of a journey, and part of the next stage will be the emergence of funders (Gates and Wellcome are there already) as publishers. But I am hooked – and will be at the 20th Fiesole in Barcelona to debate the issues with colleagues I have come to trust.
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