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.
Mar
9
“RELX, not Relicts!”
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
It was a simple enough mistake to make. As I read my screen and saw the announcement two weeks ago I passed on the news to an American friend on the other side of the room. The response prompted the correction from me at the top of this page: Reed Elsevier have renamed themselves after their new stock exchange identity, and are not actually inviting us to call them also-rans. Everyone will appreciate the logic of removing the dual identity and the double quote and the difficult accounting exercise to keep these two trading identities in the market together. But I am left wondering if there is not another, almost subliminal, market message being left here, one to which perhaps even the senior management of RELX are oblivious. Coming a month after the death of Ian Irvine, one of the architects of the deal that brought Reed and Elsevier together, it made me wonder whether the real meaning here is a totally different orientation for the new group, one which would have invited the snarling displeasure of Dr Pierre Vinken, at whose insistence the Dual Monarchy was originally created and launched in January 1993.
Whatever else it is, an “Elsevier” is a book, and indeed in the nineteenth century became the term of use for a pocket book, the contemporary version of a paperback. Reed was a nineteenth century paper company. In some ways therefore these resonances should definitely go, especially since underlying brands like LexisNexis or Elsevier Science remain in place. Perhaps then we are being told that RELX is a bundle of brands invested by a quoted umbrella organization. That would be consistent enough with practice in recent years, and one can imagine that the new structure, the single quote, and the name are designed purely as a play to investors, and have been sold to employees on that basis. After all, one of the lamentations of successive generations of Reed Elsevier management over the years since 1993 has been that the European markets have consistently under-rated the company. After a couple of years of share buy backs and consistent dividend policy, now is the time, one can almost hear them saying, to move away from Reed Elsevier as the sluggish market benchmark in Europe, and re-align RELX as a more dynamic growth vehicle with a much improved rating. And all those with bonus scheme equity holdings not yet vested should cheer that relaunch!
And yet… there are some real risks. The views of investors are always short term and their analysts are as often wrong as right. Does Claudio Aspesi* know more than the professional management of Elsevier Science about what happens next in Open Access? I doubt it, but his views, from his influential desk at Sanford Bernstein, have certainly driven the share price of old Reed Elsevier more than many management announcements in recent years. Further, if you are a bundle of brands represented by a stock market ticker symbol, it is open to everyone in the market to rate you on that brand composition for short term interests. Thus it is now possible to read RELX critics who find the stock “unbuyable” until Lexis Law is divested, or who think Elsevier Health Science is too small in market share terms and should be merged with WK Health and then “IPO-ed”. I wonder who would profit most immediately from that, if not the market-makers themselves? I am not here concerned with whether either of these moves is feasible or desirable: just with the idea that if your focus is unbalanced in the direction of the market, you tend to be driven to appease market sentiment. And market sentiment is a quicksand.
Will it matter to lawyers or scientists that they now buy, ultimately, from RELX? Probably not at all. So what then is the issue? Really one of short versus long term. RELX has a history in science and law and some key business sectors that gives them two advantages. They have experienced management who have shown themselves close enough to ultimate users of information to allow them to judge likely outcomes. Timing is everything. When to press the button is just as important as all the other decisions in new product development. And new product development is going faster in these sectors than ever before. Is that a good time to swap areas of expertise within the portfolio, bringing in areas to which senior management have not been previously exposed and forsaking areas of traditional strength? Or is it a time for long term investment, active acquisition and development programmes, such as the ones that built Elsevier Science, which reposition the brand in the forefront of the marketplace but which take correspondingly long periods to pay back? Whatever choices are made, they surely begin in the market place and end by being packaged for potential investors. It is hard to believe that successful schemes can be created that begin with assessing what investors will swallow, and end with creating market interventions that fit that paradigm.
Fortunately I can end with a suggestion which will please all parties. In 1997-8 RELX attempted to merge with Wolters Kluwer. Why not bring it on again? WK is said to be selling its transport B2B division at the moment, just another of the long list of market exits since the European Commission made its competition opposition clear in 1998. There are now no education or STM assets at WK to get in the way. In the US there would be Health sector competition issues (though there are now other very large content players), but with Bloomberg BNA swarming into the tax market alongside Thomson, combining WK and Lexis on the tax side would make sense. In Europe, Lexis-WK would be powerful in France, though Lexis left Germany to WK, so no competition issues there. Long term bets on the Eurozone would not make the analysts happy, but lawyers in France and Germany are likely to be busy whichever direction the currency takes. And above all, for all of those investors who have boosted the WK share price for 17 years in the hopes of just such a denouement – a payoff!
RELX is not the only player to feel these tensions. Every quoted company is subject to them in one way or another. It is what management do to make these tensions creative and not negative that makes the difference. RELX? RELaX, not RELICTS!
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