Jun
30
When Culture eats Strategy…
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
The wise man at the head of the table in a meeting last week reminded me of this old saw. And quite rightly we were discussing academic publishing at the time. And the words came back to me when I saw last week that Springer had acquired the Max Planck Living Review journals and that Maney, with its considerable position in the important Materials Science sector, had sold out to Taylor and Francis. The pressure to consolidate drives both these deals. Both of these large acquirers can use their scale in terms of production and distribution to improve margins here, and manifestly there are not that many interesting acquisition opportunities around. Yet both of these deals display very different characteristics. In my view, it is hugely encouraging to see Taylor and Francis, enjoying the confidence of their new management at the Informa level, investing again in content that they have probably been eyeing for a decade. Cash cows need to be fed and watered like other assets. Yet the age of the quick add-on acquisition are drawing to a close. The major players must look to organic growth, to developing the service cultures that will give them prime sectoral positions with researchers, rather than seeking ever greater volume to thrust into diminishing library budgets.
Viewed from this angle, the Springer deal is the more innovative. Maney was descended from a printer who had moved logically into intellectual property ownership. Living Reviews is based on a research institute making the same move. But there the similarities end, because Living Reviews signals yet another move away from the traditional formats of publishing. The whole idea of having a review article which can be perpetually update and change to reflect changing trends, and always be up to date when you view it, represents a data challenge and an editorial challenge. For Springer to even think of it demands a data environment that allows for rapid new development – an agile publishing environment. The major step taken by Springer to revitalize SpringerLink by recreating it on a MarkLogic platform, is critical to the organic growth strategy because it allows all of the data to be available all of the time for new product development.
We do not know yet whether the Max Planck philosophy of continually evolving review articles will succeed in other disciplines outside of physics, but if it does it will provide a dynamic growth point, and one capable of very high impact factors as theses present “living” reviews have demonstrated in their 15 year history. But what does this imply for the researcher/author – publisher relationship? And what for the idea of the Article and the Journal? In a discussion recently I was very struck by my interlocutor referring to the “Plos 1 journal”. In any sensible world we would by now have cast out the word “journal” and referred to Plos 1 as a database. The only likeness shared by these data elements is that they passed a test of competence in scientific method and procedure. Not only are they not a journal but very many of our never-printed, never-shelved so-called journals should not be referred to using that term. And when, almost two decades ago, I wrote that the Article and not the journal was the true unit of currency in scholarly communication, I was trying to express then the need to re-invent as we move away from any sense of being rooted in a prior print world. So Living Review articles are not articles as print would know them, bounded by time. They are articles as Wikipedia would know them, and we cannot afford to let our old print culture devour our new researcher-facing strategies. But the small sample of interested parties I spoke to last week were less impressed that the Springer acquisition is Open Access and much more interested in talking about speed of update and publication. Funny, that, after all the outrage of the 1990s at slothful publishing producing the goods too slowly, publishing is now much quicker – but, in a network age, still too slow.
So to me the lesson is clear. When we get into the room we use to plan the future, we need to leave the heritage terminology outside of the door. Lets concentrate on researchers and their workflow, and then on how we can improve performance. Mendeley and ReadCube (which notched up another useful win last week) have probably done more in the past five years to make the world of science findable and manageable than anything else. If the future lies in self-publishing with institutional repositories then where is your figshare? Or its successor? The future is not a game that everyone can play, and being Big, while it helps, is not the decisive advantage that it once was. You do really need to have the right culture in order to get into the strategy room in the right frame of mind, and get out with the two vital components – a component of tomorrow and a glimpse of the horizon.
May
12
The Deniability of the Blog
Filed Under Blog, eLearning, healthcare, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Back in Germany after a weekend, I find that everything has changed. I am in Gendarmenmarkt and not in Ku’damm, and we are celebrating an end to war on all sides. And I am at the wonderful Fiesole Retreat, out in full strength to once more bring STM publishers, librarians and academics together in a conference small enough for meaningful dialogue, and sufficiently heterodox to throw up thinking that skews the accepted beliefs. In its fifteenth year, it remains a huge credit to its founders, Casalini Libri, to whose bosom it returns next year in Fiesole, and the Charleston conference. This year, in Berlin with the support of the Humboldt University, Walter de Gruyter and Springer, was well up to the high standards of the series.
The speaker of the event, for me, was Anya Smit, the challenging university librarian from Utrecht. Designing a library which will soon be an entirely digital concept, she and her colleagues set aside the format limitations of “book”, or rather reconstruct them so that a blog becomes a “book”. I loved the openness of her approach and her disdain for limitations as to what a library might contain and how it’s knowledge exploration might be bounded. We had, after all, started the meeting quite conventionally with Michael Mabe, in non-confrontational mode, giving a fascinating account of the history of the journal and the article from Henry Oldenburg onwards to celebrate the foundation of the Royal Society Transactions in 1665. In many ways this made an admirable book-end to Anya Smit’s talk, illustrating how completely we have removed ourselves from the age of format and how completely the chain of scholarly communication in a digitally networked world values contributions by impact and timing, and not by process and format.
In many ways Deni Auclair of Outsell hammered this home when she gave a complete analysis of how the STM marketplace is behaving. I am still slightly alarmed by the fact that there is a $10 billion gap between Outsell’s estimated market sizing and the $25 billion revenue base claimed by the STM association of publishers. There is of course bound to be a difference between a measurement of publishing revenues and the information actually bought by customers, given that data sales are so important to research and will arguably become more important. Will we see the journal market continue to grow but diminish in overall terms as a proportion of what it’s market actually buys? And will this be exacerbated by the impact of Open Access? Deni pointed to the relative lack of impact of OA on publisher revenues, less than 1% of which were derived from author publication fees. Given that publishers were the recipients of prophecies of doom and extinction from OA fundamentalists like Professor Stevan Harnad some years back , I had the temerity to tweet this at #fiesoleretreat15, wondering if that great warrior was prepared to acknowledge predictions unmet. I had the reply immediately: “umm, where did I predict OA by (any date)?-Did say it could be provided overnight, was greatly overdue, optimal, and inevitable”. Which demonstrates both the glories of the global conferencing of Twitter and my need to apologise to the Professor. I clearly misunderstood him to mean that it was coming before it was overtaken by other inevitabilities like the death of the journal, the end of the article and the decay of peer review!
The polar opposite of the feisty Professor might well be Derk Haank, now CEO of Springer, who gave the evening session at the conference. Bursting with energy and confidence after launching the new name of the merged company earlier in the day (apparently it could not have been Nature-Springer since the resulting initials would have been unacceptable in Germany!), he roundly declared that the tasks ahead were nothing for a team which had made Elsevier likeable to the academic community. And even more gratifying was his promise, addressed directly to this blogger over the heads of his audience, that he was not going to retire any time soon, and certainly not when the IPO of Springer-Nature takes place.
Now did I ever say that? Or is it subject to the retrospective Harnad rules of recall? For all I know I wrote a blog on the Bush-Blair initiative in Iraq as a humanitarian gesture, or one on How Labour really won the 2015 UK election. Historians in the archives of the Utrecht university library will have to sort it out. My hope is that neither Professor Harnad or Derk Haank retire. They are far too entertaining in a grey world to be spared but if they could be persuaded to do an Open Access start-up together….
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