Nov
1
Members of the House of Peers
Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Not another note on Open Access, surely? Well, I am sitting here on 31 October reading an article published on 1 November (how up to date can a blogger be?) in the Educause Review Online (www.educause.edu/ero/article/peerj-open-access-experiment) and I really want to convey my respect for people like Peter Binfield, who wrote it, for their huge energy and ingenuity in trying to make Open Access work. Peter’s note, “PeerJ: An Open-Access Experiment” describes the efforts that he and his PeerJ colleagues have put into the business of creating fresh business models around Open Access, which was borne without one and has always seemed to its adherents to need to be cloaked in one. Open Access has proved a far from lusty infant in many ways, but those who continue to adhere to the cause seem to feel, in their admirable and unfailing optimism, that some small tweak will suddenly create economic salvation and thus a take off into sustainable business growth.
In the case of PeerJ, the take-off vehicle is going to be a membership model. Peter Binfield co-founded the outfit in June 2012 with Jason Hoyt, former Chief Scientist at Mendeley, but the model that they feel will work owes nothing to smart algorythms. Instead, they simply launch themselves at the Author Processing Charge (APC), the way in which Gold OA has been sustained so far, and replace it by – a subscription. Now this is admittedly a personal subscription, levied on all article contributors (that is where the volume lies – in multi-authoring) and subscribers – or members as they would wish to describe them – can then continue to publish without further charges as long as they keep up their membership fees. Of course, if they join with new teams who have not previously been members then I presume we go back to zero, until those contributors are also members with a publishing history. Each contributor who pays a membership fee of $299 can publish as often as he likes: a nominal $99 contribution allows you one shot a year.
PeerJ have assembled a peer review panel of 700 “world class academics” for peer review purposes and intend to open for submissions by the end of the year. In a really interesting variation on the norm, they have put a PrePrint server alongside the service, so submissions will be visible immediately they are considered. It is not clear how much editorial treatment is involved in these processes, or indeed what “publishing” now means in this context, or indeed when a submission appears on the pre-print server. But one thing is very clear: this is not going to be peer review as it once was, but simply technical testing of the type pioneered by PloS One. Once it is established that the article conforms to current experimental good practice, then it gets “published”.
It is around this point in ventures of this type that I want to shout “Hold on a moment – do we really know what we are doing here?” I am sure that I will be corrected, but what I can currently see is a huge dilution of the concepts of “journals” and “publishing”. PeerJ starts with no brand impact. It is not conferring status by its selectivity, like Nature or Cell, or even some brand resonance like PloS. And its 700 experts, including Nobel Laureates, are being asked if the enquiry methodology was sound, not whether the result was good science or impacted the knowledge base of the discipline. PeerJ should be commended for allowing reviews by named reviewers to be presented alongside the article, but, fundamentally, this seems to me like another ratcheting downwards of the value of the review process.
Soon we shall hit bottom. At that point there will be available a toolset which searches all relevant articles against the submitted article, and awards points for fidelity to good practice or for permissable advances on established procedures. Articles where authors feel they have been misjudged can re-submit with amended input. The device will be adopted by those funding research, and once the device has issued a certificate of compliance, the article, wherever it is stored, will be deemed to have been “published”. There will be no fees and no memberships. Everything will be available to everyone. And this will introduce the Second Great Age of Publishing Journals, as the major branded journals exercise real peer review and apply real editorial services.
But something has changed now. The Editors of the Lancet or Nature or Cell have decided, in my projection, not to entertain submissions any longer. Instead they will select the articles that seem to them and their reviewers most likely to have real impact. These they will mark up to a high level of discoverability, using entity extraction and advanced metadata to make them effectively searchable at every level and section and expression within the article. Authors will have a choice when they are selected – they can either pay for the services up front or surrender their ownership of the enhanced version of the article. Since the article will be available and technically assessed already, spending more on it will seem fruitless. So we shall return to a (much smaller but equally profitable) commercial journals marketplace. Based once again on selectivity and real, expensive peer review.
Experienced readers will have already spotted the flaw. With wonderful technologies around like Utopia Documents and other new article development activities (Elsevier’s Article of the Future) surely the new age of the article can only exist until these technologies are generalized to every institutional and research programme repository. That is true – but it will take years, and by that time the publishers will be adding even higher value features to allow the researcher’s ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook) full visibility of the current state of knowledge on a topic. Beyond that, we shall consider articles themselves too slow, and inadequate for purpose, but that is a discussion for another day.
Oct
26
Wider Still, and Wider, Shall Thy Bounds be Set
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Today’s announcement of talks on a merger between Penguin and Random House has provoked a storm of pseudo-analysis of the “well, the big players must get bigger because they have to fight bigger battles with ever more powerful device manufacturers or online suppliers etc etc…” variety. I find this fairly unsatisfactory, and since the shrunken corpse of the UK retail book trade will undoubtedly seek to have this deal referred to the Office of Fair Trading on the grounds that the new combine will have a 25% market share it may be a good thing to think if there are better arguments for defending size other than negotiating power with Amazon or Apple. Here are a few:
* Most of the books published by both of these companies are agented. There is therefore no question about author access to markets here. The selectivity question comes down to who can pay the level of advances demanded and still market enough bestsellers to stay in business.
* The new driver in terms of author development is likely to be self-publishing, a remarkably democratic development in which huge progress is being made by start ups like Eileen Gittin’s amazing www.blurb.com, and by Amazon, but where neither of these players have much market share at all.
* The trend in media marketplaces seems to be towards size, clustered around the old market model, supported by shoals of start-ups, of which only a small percentage survive. If the key to survival for the old market model is cost-cutting and making infrastructure services work better and more cost effectively, then size is vital. And compared to the size of Apple, all of the so-called Big 6 consumer publishers would still seem fairly puny even if they were all lumped together.
* There is no brand loss here. Random House has little by way of consumer-recognizable brand, and Penguin, though it has a distinctive resonance for an ageing demographic who, like me, recall it as our Adult Education Institute, has little of that left in bestseller markets, where the real money is made.
* Other information and communication markets have survived consolidation. Law is the domain of West (Thomson Reuters) and Lexis (Reed Elsevier), yet a determined venturer like Michael Bloomberg has been able, via BNA, to get into the magic circle. And there is no real indicator that consolidation or the expansion to admit more major players has been good or bad for users, except that law has become a very advanced marketplace in terms of user technology and changing working practices.
* If this merger goes ahead it is likely to be followed by others. If this one is blocked in the UK does that mean that, for example (purely fictitious thought) the future merger/purchase of Hachette by Harper Collins/News as News Corp seeks to make sense of the media businesses that it has now cut adrift from the film/TV/music mothership is also impossible? I doubt it.
* What is the alternative to merging these weakened businesses whose margins are in decline and who seek to blame the new world for being unfaithful to the practices of the old? They will decline further, there will be fire sales, redundancies and eventually closures. Pearson know all about this. Their focus is education, where they have a pre-eminent global position. Behind them trail the three remnants of the former Big 4 of the textbook world of 1990. Harcourt are now with Houghton Mifflin, just moving out of Chapter 11 protection and still with no answer for the future, and McGraw-Hill Education, despite some good initiatives, is cast adrift by its owners into a separate company so that its margins do not pollute perceptions of McGraw’s bid for survival via financial services. Do Pearson bid for these ageing relics? Certainly not – no one has seen them buy a textbook for many a year. They buy cutting edge, tech progressive companies in growing markets with expanding margins. And they are very good at it indeed.
Here then are some of the arguments which I would present to the regulator, albeit in a rather less direct format. Then, during the coffee break, I would take him aside and remind him that book readers are a small proportion of human kind, though hugely vocal and opinionated (I, for example, am an avid book reader). This does not mean however that their marketplace should be immune from the pressures being felt elsewhere. Why, I would ask him, were these players not experimenters in the early days of digital change? Penguin bought Dorling Kindersley, the only publisher who could have been said to have followed the clues to multimedia in pre-internet days but threw away the learning experience. Both are now Johnny-come-latelys to the digital marketplace which they point to as a disruptor. Please, Regulator, let them have their way. Unless they discover Plan B they will deflate, separately or together. Do not stand in the way of market forces in very small markets.
And should this be a merger? Pearson should not neglect, obviously, the huge power of consumers as buyers of self education or of educational materials for children. But I doubt if this merged venture is a vehicle for that. Pearson may have a residual feeling of responsibility for the Penguin brand, which is the best there is outside of OUP in the sector. But sentiment should not stand in the way of liberating capital which can be used in further global educational developments. That is something for the Brits , who have few global brands as resonant as Pearson is in education, to relish, and could be worth a shaky chorus of Land of Hope and Glory…!
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