Jun
1
STM: Towards a Service Economy
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
At the splendid Publishers Forum meeting in Berlin last month, I had the pleasure of chairing a panel that included the CEO, Mark van Mierle, of veteran education publisher Cornelsen. Our panel was looking at Virtual and Augmented Reality, so it seemed natural to ask why his company was making a significant investment in these technologies. After reminding me that it was an area in which they thought they could make money, and that it took them away from failed or failing product lines in print textbooks and re-orientated them towards the service economy of education, he refocused us on another truth. Every now and then, he said, we need to rebadge and rebrand, so markets see us differently and the sort of people we want to employ are more likely to be attracted to us. With this valuable lens firmly in place, the two important acquisitions in scholarly communications that have taken place this week take on a new importance. Neither deal moves the graph of market size or share: both have huge significance for the market and the companies concerned.
It is always refreshing and slightly shocking when one’s wishes come true. When I wrote in this blog about Colwiz and Wizdom.ai in February that “As I left their Oxford offices the most frequent thought in my head was “why hasn’t a publisher invested and acquired this yet!” https://www.davidworlock.com/2017/02/, I suppose I was father to a thought that had already crossed the minds of others. But Taylor and Francis have made a really valuable acquisition here, and one that puts them into the forefront of the emerging service economy. A collaborative research platform (Colwiz – collective wizdom) backed by a prototype big data environment for using artificial intelligence and machine learning in discovery and categorisation of results represents a five year forward programme of service derivation and development for T&F, while Colwiz will benefit hugely from the widely differing range of HSS and STM communities within T&F as the experimental base of their work. The usual messages apply of course: start-ups are tender plants, and grow best when managed less. Keeping inventive minds happy in process driven companies can be tough etc etc
But at the moment this is an event to celebrate. Rebadging T&F is long overdue. In former management contexts T&F was the milch cow that went on giving, but as academic research marketplaces change, content as data becomes commoditised, researchers cannot keep pace with the global rate of research reporting, more and more machine reading is needed to keep the map of what is known current and valuable, and companies like T&F have to re-invest and reposition. As a company currently with without a CEO and caught in a swirl of private equity supposition about its own collaborative future, this announcement must be hugely re-assuring to staff and researchers alike: Informa clearly have a plan for asset enhancement and are driving the company towards the future or research marketplaces.
Meanwhile, another staple of the industry is signalling its determination to rebuild and refocus. The Science side of Clarivate Analytics, based around Web of Science, was a famous Thomson Reuters cash cow. When Thomson bought ISI three decades ago, the ideas of Eugene Garfield and the use of the impact factor were already industry standards. While all sorts of evolutionary changes took place along the way (Scholar One, Web of Science etc) no one fundamentally wanted to rethink the model for research in a digital, networked research community, and one where library budgets were under huge pressure. And although many librarians felt that Web of Science was a cornerstone acquisition, as soon as alternative metrics became available and grant-funding bodies became uneasy that the impact factor was too narrow a guage, the pressure began to be felt to develop a response. Yet the attractions of the business model and the thought that they might divest seems to have slowed the thinking , so it is wonderful now to see Clarivate, under new ownership, new management and with a lively board of non-executive thinkers, getting stuck into change with the announcement, today, of the acquisition of Publons.
Peer review, once regarded as the last bastion of publisher control of journal publishing, has itself become a contentious area of activity. Set aside the questioning of pre-publication reviews, the suppression of ground-breaking work by self-interested elites, and the “fake reviews” issues. Think about the huge value of post-publication reviewing, the adherence of both Gates and Wellcome to F1000, and the continued growth of blogging and social media commentary around the scholarly workflow, from idea generation to post publication. Publons is the leading exponent of concentrating the gamut of critical input around scholarly communication and creating a reference environment within which all of this material can be shared. Of course, Publons could not exist if we had not made huge strides – Orcid, Cross-Ref etc – in categorising authors, articles, and contributions within the network. But all of the enablers post-date the impact factor. If Clarivate is to re-establish itself as the value register of record then this is just the type of acquisition it must make. Its neutral position – Thomson sold its journals via Wolters Kluwer to Springer many years ago – is vital here, and a move of this type gives renewed faith that the job can yet be done. Certainly researchers yearn for the certainty that the impact factor once delivered.
And lets conclude where we started. Two important industry players who once appeared to be playing behind their strengths have re-asserted themselves this week.This sends a clear signal to researchers, markets, and above all to the young staff they will need to employ. We still do not know if, as was mooted in the Saale process, Calarivate Analytics will split, withe the patents data business going in a different direction to the Science business. But we do know that the Clarivate Science management, and the T&F management, are in a determined mood to rebuild their positions, which makes this one of the most re-assuring weeks in STM this year.
Apr
13
UKSG 40: The Temple of Change
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
The sunny but sometimes chill air of Harrogate this week was a good metaphor for the scholarly communications marketplace. Once the worshippers at the shrine of the Big Deal, the librarians and information managers who form the majority of the 950 or so attendees now march to a different tune. From the form of the article to the nature of collaboration this was a confident organization talking about the future of the sector. And at no point was this a discussion about more of the same. Three sunny days, but for publishers present there was an occasional chill in the wind.
I started the week with a particular purpose in mind, which was all about the current state of collaboration. I was impressed by the Hypothes.is announcement with Highwire (www.highwire.org). There are now some 3000 journals using open source annotation platforms like the not-for-profit Hypothes.is to encourage discoverable (and private) annotation. Not since Copernicus, when scholars toured monasteries to read and record annotations of observations of the galaxies in copies of his texts, have we had the ability to track scholarly commentary on recent work and work in progress so completely. And no sooner had I begun talking about collaboration as annotation than I met people willing to take the ideas further, into the basis of real community-building activity.
It seems to me that as soon as the journal publisher has imported an annotation interface then he is inviting scholars and researchers into a new relationship with his publishing activity. And for anyone who seeks a defence against the perceived threat of ResearchGate or Academia.edu the answer must lie in building patterns of collaborative annotation into the articles themselves, and becoming the intermediary in the creation of the community dialogue at the level of issues in the scholarly workflow. So it seemed natural that my next conversation was with the ever-inventive Kent Anderson of Redlink, who was able to show me Remarq, in its beta version and due to be formally launched on 1 May. Here discoverable annotations lie in the base of layers of service environments which enable any publisher to create community around annotated discussion and turn it into scholarly exchange and collaboration. We have talked for many years about the publishing role moving beyond selecting, editing, issuing and archiving – increasingly, I suspect, the roles of librarians – and moving towards the active support of scholarly communication. And this, as Remaeq makes clear, includes tweets, blogs, posters, theses, books and slide sets as well as articles. Services like Hypothes.is and Remarq are real harbingers of the future of publishing when articles appear on preprint servers and in repositories or from funder Open Access outlets, where the subject classification of the research is less important than who put up the research investment.
And, of course, the other change factor here is the evolution of the article (often ignored – for some reason we seem to like talking about change but are reluctant to grip the simple truth that when one thing changes – in this case the networked connectivity of researchers – then all the forms around it change as well, and that includes the print heritage research article). Already challenged by digital inclusivity – does it have room for the lab video, the data, the analytics software, the adjustable graphs and replayable modelling? – it now becomes the public and private annotation scratchpad. Can it be read efficiently by a computer and discussed between computers? We heard reports of good progress on machine readability using Open Science Jupiter Notebooks, but can we do all we want to fork or copy papers and manipulate them while still preserving the trust and integrity in the system derived from being able to identify what the original was and being always able to revert to it. We have to be able to use machine analysis to protect ourselves from the global flood of fresh research – if the huge agenda was light anywhere then it was on how we absorb what is happening in India, China, Brazil and Russia into the scholarly corpus effectively. But how good it was to hear from John Hammersley of Overleaf, now leading the charge in connecting up the disconnected and providing the vital enabling factor to some 600,000 users via F1000 and thus in future the funder-publisher mills of Wellcome and Gates, as well as seeing Martin Roelandse of Springer Nature demonstrating that publishers can potentially join up dots too with their SciGraph applicationfor relating snippets, video, animations sources and data.
Of course, connectivity has to be based on common referencing, so at every moment we were reminded of the huge importance of CrossRef and Orcid Incontrovertible identity is everything, I was left hoping that Orcid can fully integrate with the new CrossRef Events data service, using triples in classical mode to relate references to relationships to mentions. Here again, in tracking 2.7 million events since service inception last month, they are already demonstrating the efficacy of the New Publishing – the business of joining up the dots.
So I wish UKSG a happy 40th birthday – they are obviously in rude health. And I thank Charlotte Rouchie, closing speaker, for reminding me of Robert Estienne, who I have long revered as the first master of metadata. In 1551 he divide the bible into verses – and to better compare Greek with Latin, he numbered them. Always good to recall revolutionaries of the past!
PS. In my last three blogs I have avoided, I hope, use of the word Platform. Since I no longer know what it means, I have decided to ignore it until usage clarifies it again!
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