Mar

19

Collaborators Will Not Be Shot

Filed Under Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Thomson, Workflow | 1 Comment

The nature of networks is collaboration. If we spoke of the Networked Society instead of the Digital Age we might begin to understand the implications of this. Although the tools we use are still crude, every day in the life of every office, or every research laboratory, groups of people are getting together to discuss work, and learn from each other. Moving the sharing from a room with a desk to a conference call and then to a screen simply offers process improvement, to which universal internet access adds the ability to exchange content on the fly. In the view of a collaborator in such a process, any request for information which furthers the group work objective should be answered – we do it ourselves and expect it of others. Collaboration has no rulebook except the need to gratify the requirements of the group focus. Who does not know this and practise it their daily lives?

Well, clearly the STM Association has only just found out. I apologize for not commenting earlier on the announcement in February of a consultation (a helpful change since publisher groupings are more usually into pronouncements) by that association on SSNs and SCNs. Are they a threat to scholarly publishing as we know it, the regulation of ownership, or life on earth? Amazing how you need only apply a three letter acronym to something that everyone was doing anyway and you can effectively demonize it. But what we are really talking about here are networks like ResearchGate, or Mendeley, or Academia.edu or ReadCube or FigShare. As a group they could be described as Scholarly Collaboration (or Sharing) Networks. Those who join them share problems and issues – and content – and sometimes do so as public network members and sometimes do so as private groups, with the network hosting the activity of scholars drawn from different places, just as scholars have always met at conferences and just as very many groups of scholars still meet online undignified by having a three letter acronym to describe what they are doing. Sometimes the SCN has attributes which add further value to collaboration – data collections, or indications of who holds which articles – but the collaboration is the essence. They have millions of members (including students and members of the public, who should of course be caught and charged immediately!).

Now there are elements to this consultation which strike me as highly risible. While I know that, under Fred Dylla as chair, the consultation will be conducted impeccably and with total integrity and fairness, the difficulties that this enterprise faces are daunting. Its not just that SCNs are ways of helping researchers do something they will do anyway, regulated or not. Its not just that publisher attempts to regulate what they do have never made the slightest difference in the past and are unlikely to do so in the future. Its not even the sight of STM making the ungainly ascent into the seaside throne of Canute that amuses so much. It is the fact that most of the SCNs who are possibly involved in the widespread transference of copyrighted scholarly materials between researchers who do not always have formal permission for those transfers, are owned and funded by … publisher members of STM.

My sympathies will always lie with the market. Follow the end user can be the only guideline in a networked society. What Elsevier or Digital Science did here with the creation of these SCNs was simple good sense and they deserve the commercial returns that their efforts on behalf of collaborative scholarship should earn them. Those of us who said loudly a decade ago that Open Access was not the real danger to the established hegemony – it was networked publishing that provided the threat, were told that the major STM players were quite capable of taking the paper journal world into the network and preserving its rules and conventions just as long as research funders did not insist on an author pays model. Well, they were wrong, as people always are when they insist that they can move business models to digital networks without change. Just this week in the UK, on the blasted heath that once was newspaper publishing, a group of news publishers banded together to form the Pangaea Collaboration for selling advertising (CNN, Reuters, Economist, Financial Times, spearheaded by the Guardian) which will allow “brands to collectively access a highly influential global audience via the latest programmatic technology”. In other words, erstwhile deadly competitors getting together to offer tech enabled solutions to customers who have the power to make choices.

Which is probably the answer to the STM question. Trying to alter market behaviour by regulation is fruitless, Forming a ring around current SCNs and licensing them collectively to do what they will do anyway must be more sensible. Creating niched SCNs for research specialities and going to where you can add yet more value must be the way forward. Surprizingly many commercial players see this – but scholarly societies, dependent for survival on journal sales and advertising, are very much more conservative. But then again, the scholars using the SCNs are usually members of those societies, whose role is perhaps what is most at stake here – and of course many commercial publishers make a living by the services that they sell to those scholarly societies. When we look back at a train of events (Macmillan setting up Digital Science, Elsevier buying Mendeley, Nature making all articles free to subscribers, Wiley adopting ReadCube etc) we can be confident that this train is not suddenly going into reverse. The answer for STM members may well be collaboration, but it will be fascinating to see how they attain it.

Jan

6

Leaders and Insurgents

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Search, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Lying on my back this last month, recovering from spinal surgery while keyboarding with difficulty, I have had plenty of time to reflect on the industry while not quite having the energy to respond to what I read. Yet amidst the flow of fatuous nonsense that surrounds the interesting and insightful, the faux management guru who pronounced on how hard it was for a leader to be an insurrectionary, and how change could not be expected from businesses that had “transitioned”, got my goat so royally that I am still vibrating with indignation, even now that I am mercifully sitting upright again. And to compound this I missed all the countless award ceremonies and suchlike so I feel out of it. So here come my own awards – For Insurrectionary Leadership of Traditional UK Information Companies in 2014. These awards have not (I hope) been checked for compliance with diversity, gender equality, or any other of the social requirements of modern life. But they do reflect my absolute conviction that the right people in leadership positions can change everything; that from business model to innovation style, everything can be re-invented; that real leadership attracts support, from colleagues and investors, only if it is prepared to question the fundamentals at each phase of our discovery of the challenges and opportunities arising from living in a networked society/economy.

So, without more ado (drumroll), let me introduce my joint winners of this distinctly un-prestigious award. Neither of them work in sharp and shiny Shoreditch start-ups, but in companies which, when last sold by their traditional owners, were seen as commoditised smokestack businesses which had run their course. Today both of these companies are seen as leaders in their respective sectors, reaching global markets with brand enhanced prestige. Significantly, both of these companies were able to recruit senior management in 2014 at a very high level because they were perceived as change agents. Equally impressive, especially for me (having railed at traditional players who did not understand their new users for 30 years), both of these companies are widely seen as being close to users in service value and understanding. Yet, when I first knew these companies in the 1970s, both were subscription based publishers who seldom encountered a user in the flesh, so safely were they protected from reality by library and institutional subscription services. Both had an advertising base which they have had to re-invent. Neither had an automatic access to investment capital and both had to earn their inputs either from private equity or within a corporate ownership where there were other choices.

So as well as a restless questioning of the way business was done, and an ability to get into the place of the end-user and visualize value, both of my winners needed tireless advocacy, and the ability to win hearts and minds and trust. I am sure (omelettes/eggs syndrome) that each has made some mistakes, and that some who got moved on or out – in the disruptive course of change – will feel cause to argue my choices. But at the beginning of 2015 I see no companies that stand higher in the estimation of their users than Macmillan Science and Education, and the newly renamed TES Global. My awards therefore go jointly to Annette Thomas and Louise Rogers.

Of course, there is always more to do. The Education side of Macmillan, for example, remains in transition. But for a company founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, its renaissance in a digital world is remarkable. In 2015 I really appreciated how the use of Macmillan’s Digital Science as a greenhouse for investment in start-ups critical to the future role of researchers was blossoming into the development of investments like ReadCube as hub technologies around which other players, like Wiley in one example, could develop their own access and distribution strategies. In other words, do not compete with your old rivals: work on capturing the new value points. Users will recall 2014 as the year when their subscription value to Nature and its journals reaped additional value through the release of access controls for subscribers. And many of staff will recall the year as their first on an integrated campus site in Kings Cross which brings benefits in communication, and understanding of the whole customer base. Things will continue to change, especially as Digital Education as well as Digital Science, makes a contribution, but for the Holtzbrinck family investors, who bought from the Macmillan family when their nerve failed and whose courage has backed Annette and her talented team, there must be great satisfaction at the value enhancement here, as well as the return.

At TES Global the picture is very different. The Times Educational Supplement and its smaller sister, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, were sold by Murdoch’s News International when he persuaded himself that advertising teaching jobs in the UK would be done on government websites and was thus a dead duck. Two private equity owners have since made real money from this supposed write-off, and a third is shaping up to do the same. Not only have traditional markets been held but taken online and increased. TES Connect, a resource sharing innovation developed to allow teachers to share their own work and lesson plans, commands a global marketplace and has a joint venture with a major US teaching organization. 2014 will be recalled as the year when the new PE owner decided to back management in buying relevant tech companies in Silicon Valley to support this global growth and delver fresh layers of value as a way of getting a leverage on the value added through the resource sharing process. And to widen the market by acquiring agencies in areas of recruitment that the company never previously considered. Here is another company, a child of the great age of late nineteenth century print dominance, which has shown how determined questioning of the status quo can recreate value. As expansion opportunities now appear, 2014 saw several high level managers with new skill sets arrive to take up the challenges. And it was the year when it changed its name – to better reflect the TES brand it has so completely rebuilt.

My two award winners are very different, but share much in common. One has a background as a science researcher, the other as a B2B magazine publisher. Yet both understand the culture of users online in a way that has evaded many of their contempories. Both understand the workflow of their users and how their services must add critical value. Both have been prepared to take historic business models and shake them until they worked, or new ones were ready for adoption. But for me, the award goes to them because they were both prepared to lead change from the CEO position. They have demonstrated that they are prepared to dare to be wrong. This quality is called courage, and there is less of it about in the information industry than we need at a time when the speed of change is ever quickening.

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