Oct

9

Horizontally Searching the Vertical

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

No, I did not go to STM in Frankfurt. Or ToC for that matter. I spent the day in bed, instead, trying to clear an infection and raging at hotels and their procedures. Big American chain hotels. Run by Germans. “We cannot check you in without you paying for all of the room occupancy in advance”. “But I am a long-standing member of your loyalty scheme…” “It doesn’t matter – the new rule is cash in advance before you get a key…” “Now my key has stopped working…”. “You can get a new one if you show me photo ID…”  “But it is locked into the room… .” “No excuse, all Germans are expected to carry photo ID at all times…” “Mr Manager, I want to be catered for as an individual with a good credit record in your hotels…” “Sir, I am simply following our rules and policies.” The sooner this man is replaced by some workflow software the better, in my view – since he cannot vary any procedure then this would be a logical step. In the meanwhile I vent my spleen on TripAdvisor and ponder the wonder of Elsevier and the Article of the Future.

Yesterday Elsevier Science Direct unveiled a new web HTML version of the articles held in Science Direct. And having once played a tiny role as a judge in the unfolding Article of the Future story I have a sympathy for what they are about, and a conviction that they are as close to the money as anyone in taking scholarly communication in science to the next step. Here is what they say their new article format will achieve:

Now please read back through that again carefully. The first is a no brainer. Good market research companies like Euromonitor have been facilitating re-use in this way for some time, and I saw a great application in a different discipline only last week. We should be asking why only now and why Elsevier are the first. The second is more specific, and removes a long-standing annoyance. But it is the third and fourth items which really get me going. Searching horizontally across articles in several different disciplines and moving seamlessly between references and citations is becoming key to the dream of a rational discovery system for science. Science will have its Big Data solutions alright (though very few current publishers will be participants, it seems). But the survival hope for the so-called “journal publishers” is sure that the article will come to be seen as a viewer, or a vorspeisen as we would say in this hotel room. In this vision the article becomes the way of entering the enquiry at one point and then moving horizontally, using references, citations and contextual information, across sub-disciplines and into fields of conjectural interest. Yes, we shall have more effectiveness from the semantic search, and, yes, our advanced taxonomies and ontological structures will do much of the back-breaking stuff. But where the quirky human mind of the researcher is the search engine, we shall want the article to be linked to the relevant evidential data, to the blogs and the posters and the proceedings and the powerpoints and the minutiae of scholarly research, just as we shall want the invaluable navigational aid of A&I to stop us from wasting time with what does not merit attention, and review articles to help us see what others have seen before us.

So we need the Article of the Future. And as the article adds more diverse content by way of embedded video, more images, manipulable graphs, links to evidential data or attached programming, we need it urgently. But it is an emerging standard, so how many do we need? Well, only one. As Elsevier remark, this is and always will be work in progress. But it is work in everyone’s progress. If I have subscriptions with Springer, Sage, Wiley Blackwell and Elsevier, to name but a few, will I not want all articles to be manipulable and cross-searchable in every way, not just cross-referenced in Google? So is this not a point where industry collaboration in the face of overwhelming user dissonance might for once pay dividends?

I have just reread that sentence with a sinking feeling. This industry seldom collaborates. What could happen as a result is, if Elsevier are strategically adroit and make their Article format Open, that users adopt it for their own repositories, loaded onto vehicles like Digital Science Figstore. Then users can launch a search from Science Direct and get everything. Of course, as long as “publishing” equals “tenure and research rating” people will still seek journal publication, but those links are fragile and may collapse under their own weight. Research through searching threatens to become another matter, divorced from the publication cycle. If that happens there will be few survivors in current publishing, but Elsevier at least should be one. Everyone else needs to think hard about collaboration, or plan for business diversification for all they are worth.

My quote of the week? “The solutions will come when science goes mobile in research terms – then someone will have to step in to configure the device and all these publishers will simply be rewarded with royalties for their content contribution to a solution they did not make and cannot control.”

Sounds a bit like Apple meets STM!

Sep

4

The Way Lawyers Work Now

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Comments Off on The Way Lawyers Work Now

I can remember my excitement on first encountering PLC (Practical Law Company, http://uk.practicallaw.com). My five years as a law publisher had taught me two things. The way lawyers described their work was very different from the work they did and from which they derived the bulk of their fees. And the stalwart group of excellent lawyers working as editors in my own office were of little use to me if I wanted to find out what lawyers did for a living, since their backgrounds were academic and their interests were in the law itself, not the far less interesting dreary practice of the same. So PLC was a shocking revelation: built by practitioners for practitioners, almost merciless in its attention to practical detail, it provided the safety net that ensured that the right forms had been completed in the right way, and that just enough legal expertise was available to steer practitioners whose nightmare was coming face to face with the naked words of a statute without being told what they meant. While the great players at Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) and Lexis (Reed Elsevier) concentrated on the lucrative pastures of legal research for litigation, PLC built its niche, and did so in a country where the avoidance of litigation was a primary legal objective. Then they exported the concept of process by process guidance to the US, where they have had a very considerable success despite a slow start. Now the upstart competitor is a mature and profitable player, and an acquisition target for its larger peers and many others besides.

Yet this is still a competitive game. Markets like more than one player in each niche, even if they do not want three. In the first decade of PLC, Lexis and WestLaw have busied themselves with almost everything else – law practice marketing, practice management systems etc, etc – almost as if they knew the difficulties of taking PCL on directly and shied away from the challenge. But the workflow processes of legal practitioners – the junk of forms, procedures, due diligence, compliance, precedent – that attends any legal process is still the high ground. Litigation is important, and being able to research online is vital, but it is not the oil that legal wheels need in the everyday world. And as the downturn moves the focus to cost and time, law practices seek to hold price levels and even reduce them by ensuring that more and more process is done by less expensive, newly qualified, even paralegal staff members.

So market conditions are fairly good for an attack on PLC and a new look at law practice workflow. And the new competitor entering its UK market has a tried and tested look. LexisPSL (www.trialpsl.com) is a completely new take  on Professional Support, and to create and maintain it Lexis have recruited a team of over 100 practitioner lawyers. I had the privilege of an up close demo last week, and found myself looking at a service that certainly emulates all the qualities that I associate with PLC – and something more. Lexis has long had some clever software in-house (remember VisualFiles, which we all heralded as the tool for jobs like this?) but it never before moved its concentration from law as research and authoritative commentary for long enough to see the workflow woods from the research trees. Now, looking at LexisPSL, you can see how  all of that authoritative material can act as a support to the workflow interface. 25 LexisPSL practice areas are launched (including key areas like Banking and Finance, IP and IT, Corporate, Dispute Resolution, Employment, and Property). We can now see the shape of what is emerging here. The strategy has been to match PLC up front with service elements that perform similar functions, and to back everything with the potential deeper dig implied by LexisLibrary. So here are over 2000 high value precedents, here are the practice module quick tips and here are the workflow models which show you how to create seamless process to complete, for example, a sale and purchase agreement that complies with the regulations and with best practice. The bits that go beyond PLC at present are also clear; you can move seamlessly through to All Englands, to Halsbury, to Tolley’s tax guides or anything else from the Lexis publication cycle  if you want or need to do so. And the process automation is beginning to heat up nicely – over 300 of the precedents have automated features. Complete a one-time questionnaire and its data will be automatically seeded  from it into any of a multiplicity of documents that you may have to produce in the Share Purchase Agreement or Asset Purchase Agreement suites. Use the Companies House link and draw down formal company descriptors into your forms as you compile them. LexisPSL claim that some 80% of the time of compiling standard documents can be saved in ways like this.

So where do we go from here? My guess is that workflow in law markets, as elsewhere, will become ever more collaborative. As competition between PLC and LexisPSL heats up, we shall see further third party data sources contributing. Lawyers use more non-legal information than law content, so I expect to see client status checking, PEP compliance, money-laundering checks, credit referencing and other data brought into play. And those forms will get more automated and compliance checking software will be used to validate them. And the junction between this work and the firm’s own precedents and data resources will need to be developed. And beyond that? Well, this market will go tablet/mobile and, given its dictation background, voice service driven. And CPD needs to be built into these services so that practitioners can learn on the job, using webinars (largely in place) and video tutorials,  and the results audited.

It is now possible to see a framework for a competitive future here. LexisPSL have a market to win, and are addressing it with commendable vigour. PLC will benefit from the competition. Thomson Reuters may reflect that they have much of the third party data which PLC may need, which may in turn make the high asking price which PLC’s owners have traditionally maintained easier to consider. Whatever happens, LexisPSL is a very worthy product to join a long history of innovation in law markets.

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