Apr

24

Spring in the Ku’damm

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an ebook and the German Government’s technical advisors indicating that government-funded research must be Open Access, it was clearly time to be there for the 10th annual Publishers’ Forum. Developed by Helmut von Berg and his colleagues at Klopotek, this has now clearly emerged as one of the leading places in Europe to talk about the future of what we are increasingly calling “networked publishing”. The meeting has moved from the Brandenburg Gate and the Pariserplatz back to the regenerating West Berlin of the Kurfurstendamm, but the urge to get to the roots of progressive development in what we once called the book business has not diminished.

By design and accident (loss of a keynoter) I played to more halls in this meeting than in any of the previous five that I have attended. Leave that to one side: my slideset is available under downloads on this site and on the conference site at www.publishersforum.de you will find slides, summaries, images, videos and references (including a very interesting tweetstream at #publishersforum) as these meetings get increasingly blanket-documented with linked description, comment and commentary. Data, in fact. An audience of 350 people at work with speakers, organizers, and media to discuss and share. Collaboration. And that was the theme of the meeting – Collaboration in the Age of Data adds up to Networked Publishing.

And from these sessions it is now clear where we are headed This Spring is definitive in ways that other Springs have not quite been. In every previous year you could be sure, here in thoughtful, conservative Germany, that someone would say that we wee jumping the gun, that format would survive fragmentation, that the “book would never die”. No such voices this week. In an audience that loves books and lives by them, I felt an absolute certainty that while “book as comforting metaphor” would survive, my friends and colleagues in the body of the hall knew that they had entered the Age of Data. We described network publishing as allusive, particulate, and above all, linked. We talked about workflow: our customer’s workflow as well as our own. This was the age of Metadata as well as the Age of Data. Speaker after speaker spoke of the potential to release new value from content as data, and the need for systems and services to support that monetization potential.

And the feedback loop was everywhere in evidence. The user and the networked power of users has completely shifted the balance from the editorial selectivity of gatekeeper producers to the individualized requirements of users. We once Pushed where now the increasingly Pull. But loyalty was not sacrificed on the way: if you provide solutions that fit user needs exactly then you can experience what Jan Reicert of Mendeley described in a private session as “amazing user love”. On the main agenda, Brian O’Leary spoke, with his usual lucid intelligence, on the disaggregation of supply, and amongst publishers Dan Pollock (formerly Nature, now Jordans) effectively defined the network publishing challenge, (replete like the auto industry with lack of standards) while Fionnuala Duggan of Coursesmart tracked the way in which the textbook in digital form becomes a change agent in conservative teaching societies while enabling the development of new learning tools. Kim Sienkiewicz of IIl demonstrated the semantic web at work in educational metadata. And Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany updated us on the continued development of the Jurion project, a landmark in semantic web publishing for lawyers.

Alongside the publishers stood the Enablers. Publishing seldom realises the value that it gets from its suppliers. Indeed, one of my current mantras is that the importance of software in the industry is now so great that few content players are not also software developers, and that the relationships they enter into with third parties are often no longer supplier agreements, but really partnership and often strategic alliance agreements, and need to be recognized as such. They not only add value, but they materially affect the valuation of the content players themselves. It is no accident that it was Uli von Klopotek who opened this event for his company, and it was gratifying to see on the platform a range of services that are symptomatic of the re-birth described here. Hugh McGuire from Pressbooks in Canada exemplifies that enablement, as does Martin Kaltenbock of Austria’s Semantic Web Company. Jack Freivald of Information Builders, Adam DuVander of Progammable Web, and Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks of ValoBox were each able to demonstrate further value additionality through an elaboration of networked publishing. The result was a rich gulasch suppe of networked expedients ( far more nutritional than the prevalent currywurst of this city!).

The conference agenda spoke of momentum. Laura Dawson (Bowker), a prescient commentator, noted how far we had gone in her Open Book presentation. And if we still lack standards, we have people like BISG and Editeur on this agenda struggling towards them. One of the most attractive features of the old book business was its anarchic and “cottage industry” flavour. I think it will retain many anarchic and small business qualities in the network, but it will be increasing bounded by standards of networked communication.

Apr

11

The Play’s the Thing…

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

…by which to test the seriousness of the industry. (Yes, I went to the new Hamlet production at Stratford last week). And this week’s play, acted out to a packed house of industry watchers and market analysts, has been the seduction and vanquishment of the fair Mendeley by all-powerful Elsevier, so rudely forced. Or, if you prefer, the seduction of barbarous Elsevier by maidenly Mendeley. Whatever, here was a deal done for a company with negligible revenues at a price , with earn-outs, of something up to $100 m, according to those ever-present “people familiar with the deal”. And since I have seldom had more requests to explain, here is my take: Mendeley represents the greatest leap forward since Eugene Garfield in representing the worth of a science research article. If it went to Thomson Reuters it would put them back into a game where Elsevier have spent a huge amount, culminating in SciVal, in competitive efforts to diminish them. As in days of yore (who remembers BioMedNet?) the competitive threat potentially posed by Mendeley proved greater than the price misgivings. If it went to Macmillan, who already have an investment in ReadCube, Mendeley’s competitor, it would create another axis of competition which would be unwelcome, given the strides that Macmillan Digital Science made by investing in Altmetric, as well as figstore. Since every article is unique and not a competitor with other articles, the true point of competition in science research publishing now lies in workflow tools which make researchers more productive – and help them to decide what to actually read, and what to reference and visualize. So, continuing my Danish theme, this is a pre-emptive strike, like Nelson destroying the fleet at Copenhagen. Do we know whether Mendeley is the ultimate social tool for tracking who buys and reads what? No, any more than we know whether FaceBook is the player in place for life in social networking. But we do know that more than 2 million active researchers value it immensely, and so it posed a question – and one that for 20 years Elsevier have been adroit in answering.

This begs a few questions. Will Elsevier be able to run it independently enough to re-assure those critics who regard it as more like Caliban than Caesar? And are we being distracted by watching the wrong part of the game with too much intensity? I am a strong supporter of what the Mendeley team have done, but they were let into the marketplace by a chronic publishing failure: the inability of producers to sell to researchers adequately identified PDFs that obeyed agreed industry standards and which would allow a researcher to auto-index his hard disk and find what he had bought. As ever, publishers were complacent about the downstream problems they caused their users. But the real question here is about metadata, and it is a timely reminder of other problems we have never fully solved. When we adopted DOI/Handle technology the publishing community worked, as always, at the lowest common denominator of agreement. The result is a world in which articles are effectively numbered, and CrossRef express that industry cohesion, but we still cannot offer researchers the ability to search consistently over the full range of articles for which they have permissions cleared using their own or even semi-standardized taxonomies. Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/the-future-of-publishing-a-new-page-1.12665) has done sterling work in the last month on the future of publishing, but simply illustrates to me how inadquately we tackle the last steps – the ones that lead to collaboration and to each player moving forward to create knowledge stores which reflect the real research needs of their users.

I do not mean to say that publishers do not collaborate. They increasingly do, and recent press coverage of Springer and CAS, or the case study of Wiley’s work with the AGU demonstrate this. I have been involved with the TEMIS work on collaboration and have learnt a lot from it. And publicly industry leaders do point to data-led strategies, which I was interested to hear acknowledged in a talk by Steve Smith (CEO, John Wiley) to the AAP/PSP in February, which I moderated. So I was very interested indeed to spend some time with Jason Markos, Director of Knowledge Management and Planning at Wiley, and get a current view on the enrichment picture. The contrast over the past five years is, to someone used to the sometimes somnolent complacency of publishing, quite startling. Now you can have conversations about content enrichment that do begin to embrace both the narrow/deep and the broad/shallow needs of users. If the capacity now available in publishing – coming it must be said from people who entered from outside and have a real technical grasp of knowledge engineering which was not prefaced by life in linear publishing workflow processes – to think about the need to turn away from content architectures predicated by the structure of the article and towards creating entity stores or “knowledge” stores which allow data items from article databases to be searched in conjunction with data drawn from other sources like evidential data then we may indeed be on the way towards a user-driven networked vision of the future of publishing. Learning how to work with knowledge models as a way of expressing the taxonomic values of all of this shows me that we are on a route march that follows the track that has been obvious for a little while now, and which involves adopting the RDF as a basis, and creating triples to anchor our texts in semantically searchable environments. So our new Knowledge engineers will be able to spin out new service environments for increasingly demanding users, and the publishing game will not peter out with the commoditization of the article…

…I left Wiley the other day full of hope, and I still am. But this context is necessary to see that the Mendeley deal, lovely though it is, remains symptomatic of the need to scratch yesterday’s itch. I suspect that the real struggle, already underway, is to persuade researchers that publishers really can add value to data, and that they really do know how to analyse it, structure it, create smart research tools around it and extract real value from users as a reward for this investment and effort. This will need smart industry suppliers as well, and I have learnt a lot from working with MarkLogic and TEMIS in the past year. And most of all it needs the support of CEOs who see beyond maximizing PDF downloads to the strategic crossroads this part of the industry now faces – and beyond.

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